The blogspot version of this blog is HERE. The Blogroll. My Home Page. Email John Ray here. Other sites viewable in China: Political Correctness Watch, Dissecting Leftism, Greenie Watch, Australian Politics, Socialized Medicine, Tongue Tied, Food & Health Skeptic and Gun Watch. For a list of second backups, see here. (Click "Refresh" on your browser if background colour is missing). The archive for this mirror site is here or here.
****************************************************************************************



31 March, 2007

"Pedophile" hysteria

Men are being scared away from joining the teaching profession by a wave of "paedophile hysteria", a leading Tory has warned. Boris Johnson said school staffrooms are increasingly dominated by female teachers because men are afraid of attracting false child abuse allegations. He spoke out after figures revealed women now outnumber men by 13 to one in primary schools - which have been worst-hit by the male recruitment slump.

Mr Johnson, Conservative higher education spokesman, declared that young boys needed male role models to aid their intellectual development but "potentially brilliant" teachers were deterred from entering the profession because they feared being branded paedophiles. Even bumping into a child could cause them to run into difficulties, he warned.

Mr Johnson, speaking at a conference of the Independent Schools Council in London, insisted he "did not want to go into bat for paedophiles". But he claimed society may now be over-egging the problem as he recounted his own experience on a recent British Airways flight. He said a flight attendant had directed him to sit away from his children, apparently without realising they were his own. When she did, she apologised but said the airline did not allow lone men to sit next to children they were unrelated to. "I do think one problem we have got is that we do have a kind of paedophile hysteria in this country and I find it very worrying," he said. "I think the whole thing has been ever so slightly over-egged. I don't want to attack BA unnecessarily but I think it's pretty bonkers that a grown man can be asked to move away from his children. "I do think we are over-doing the whole thing and the result is that a lot of brilliant potential male teachers think 'do I want to go through all of that malarky about what I can and can't do'. "What happens if you bump into someone?

"The result is you have got a ratio of female to male teachers in state primary schools of 13 to 1 now. "That is a huge social change and the effects of that are very damaging, or potentially very damaging on young male minds. "Young male minds do need the intellectual inspiration of a male teacher, not because males are any better than females, but it may help them if there's a male model who can help them with their intellectual development." He added: "I don't want to go into bat for paedophiles but it is a factor in deterring male teachers from thinking about this brilliant profession."

The Mail revealed last year that fewer that 10 per cent of primary teachers are men in some parts of the country. Meanwhile, in the space of a generation, the proportion of secondary school male teachers has dropped from 55 per cent to 41 per cent. The figures prompted concern that the lack of male role models is having serious consequences for boys' performance in exams. Boys now lag behind girls in every major school examination. However teachers' leaders claim that studies show boys do just as well [at what?] when taught by women.

Source



DC rediscovers standards

Earning a D.C. high school diploma is going to become more challenging. Superintendent Clifford B. Janey announced yesterday that the school system has adopted a new graduation policy that requires all students to take four years of math, science, social studies and English, an attempt to increase academic rigor and give a high school diploma more meaning.

The policy also says elementary and middle school students must master a new set of skills, known as "learning standards," before they move to the next grade. The old promotion policy did not tie student advancement to the mastery of grade-level material.

The graduation policy will begin with students who will be in ninth grade next school year and will apply to all high school students by 2010. High school students take four years of English, three years of math and science and 3 1/2 years of social studies. In addition to mandating four years of study in each of those core subjects, the revised high school policy will require students to take more science labs and will reduce the number of elective classes.

Maryland requires four years of English and three years of social studies, math and science. Virginia students can earn a standard diploma by taking four years of English and history and three years of math and a laboratory science.

The District's new graduation policy matches those used by Texas and Alabama, which also require four years of courses in those four subjects. But experts noted that the District's emphasis on insisting that high school students take higher-level math and more science classes that have a lab component will make its policy one of the most rigorous in the nation. "For an urban district to raise a standard to this level is notable," said Matthew Gandal, executive vice president at Achieve Inc., a nonprofit group that tracks graduation requirements across the country. D.C. officials are "putting themselves in a position with some of the leading states in terms of raising the expectations. So that's a positive," he said.

The policy also applies to the 19,733 students enrolled in the city's 55 charter schools. D.C. Public Charter School Board spokeswoman Nona Mitchell Richardson said yesterday that its schools had set graduation requirements that exceeded the school system's old policy. The promotion policy will be phased in for elementary and middle school students, requiring them to acquire a core set of skills in the areas of reading, math, science and social studies.

The administration of Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), which is looking to take direct control of the schools, praised the new policy yesterday while noting that it should focus on how to improve learning in the classroom. "An end to social promotion is long overdue," Deputy Mayor for Education Victor Reinoso said through a spokeswoman. The requirements were approved by the school board last week and presented by Janey yesterday during a news conference at Strong John Thomson Elementary School in downtown Washington.

Lyndsay Pinkus of the Alliance for Excellent Education praised the move but said it takes more than a new set of rules to bring academic improvements. Officials have to make certain "that what's being taught is more rigorous . . . and that teachers have what they need to teach that rigor, and that students have the basic supports to receive it," Pinkus said. "If you're not doing all those things along with raising the requirements then that's not real education reform," she added.

The school system's old policy allowed students to take more elective courses, a practice that allowed some students to put off taking challenging courses. For example, some high school students could take Algebra I as late as their senior year. Under the revised policy, students must take that course as freshmen.

Source



THE SPINELESSNESS OF LEEDS UNIVERSITY MADE CLEAR

For Jewish students, Leeds university has for some time been a source of growing concern. Such students have been forced to run a gauntlet of anti-Jewish prejudice dressed in the familiar camouflage of anti-Israel sentiment, as in the notorious (and now beaten off) attempt to gag the Jewish society. Last week, a more significant controversy erupted there. A non-Jewish German academic, Dr Matthias Kuentzel, was shocked when his planned lecture, `Hitler's Legacy: Islamic Antisemitism in the Middle East', was abruptly cancelled by the university along with two smaller scheduled seminars.

The university insisted its decision had nothing to do with freedom of speech; nor was it bowing to threats or protests from interest groups. The meeting had been cancelled on safety grounds alone, and because `contrary to our rules, no assessment of risk to people or property has been carried out, no stewarding arrangements are in place and we were not given sufficient notice to ensure safety and public order.' But there was no security risk. No threats had been received. The only ripple was a couple of protests from Muslim students, who claimed the lectures would increase hatred and threaten their `security and well-being' on campus. The university's excuse was absurd.

Indeed, Kuentzel delivered his speech outside the university twice without security problems. Although the university secretary Roger Gair claimed in a letter to the Times that these were the two seminars that were going ahead `as planned', Kuentzel says that, on the contrary, after the cancellation they were hastily convened by private initiative off campus, in Hillel and at a hotel.

Now, fresh information has reached me which reinforces the view that the cancellation was indeed designed to suppress Kuentzel's views. After meeting the university authorities the head of the German department, Professor Stuart Taberner, told his staff that, although he didn't think censorship was the issue, if Kuentzel were to be re-invited the university would have to `look closely' at the subject of his talk. `Having now found the text of what I take to be his talk on the web,' he said, `I'm convinced that the university would want to be reassured that it was striking the correct balance between free speech - the expression of ideas - and its obligation to be mindful of the language in which these ideas are framed'.

The real reason for the cancellation was thus laid bare. It was because of what Kuentzel was saying. The implication was that his language was somehow inflammatory. But his lecture - which he previously delivered in January at Yale - is merely a scholarly and factual account of the links between Nazism and Islamic antisemitism. He argues that the alliance between the Nazis and the Arabs of Palestine infected the wider Muslim world, not least through the influence of the Nazi wireless station Radio Zeesen which broadcast in Arabic, Persian and Turkish and inflamed the Muslim masses with Nazi blood libels laced with Arabic music and quotes from the Koran. Subsequently, this Nazified Muslim antisemitism was given renewed life by both the Egyptian President Nasser and the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the intellectual inspiration for both Hamas and much of the current jihad against the west.

So what exactly is the `correct balance' that this account fails to strike? Indeed, Kuentzel makes the eminently balanced claim that this history shows there is nothing inevitable about Muslim antisemitism, which is merely Nazism in new garb. The link he makes is no more than the demonstrable truth. But clearly, it is not possible to speak this truth at Leeds university. And the reason for this is surely that it draws a straight line between today's Islamic world and Hitler's Germany.

Indeed, Kuentzel sees a seamless connection between Nazism and the jihad against the west. Hitler, he says, fantasised about the toppling of the skyscrapers of New York, the symbol of Jewish power. And the Hamburg trial of terrorists associated with 9/11 heard evidence that New York had been selected for the atrocity because it was a `Jewish city'.

For Islamists, however, such a connection threatens the image they have so assiduously cultivated for themselves as the victims of prejudice. For their appeasers, it destroys the illusion that Islamist extremism arises from rational grievances such as the war in Iraq or `Islamophobia'. Worse still, those on the left who march shoulder to shoulder with radical Islamists are thus exposed as the allies of Nazism.

The result is that Leeds has now joined the growing list of universities which have spinelessly given up the defence of free speech, and thus, in the great battle for civilisation against barbarism, run up the campus white flag.

Source

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

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

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

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 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.

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



30 March, 2007

California rediscovers equality

It's only tokenism, though

When it comes to setting academic expectations, California will no longer cut any slack for students who traditionally score low on standardized tests -- those who are poor, non-native English speakers, African American or Latino.

Since the state initiated the Academic Performance Index in 1999, there have been differences in test scores between students from various backgrounds: poor and affluent, black and white, Latino and Asian. And each spring, when the state determines how much students' scores should improve, it has set the bar lower for ethnic groups than for a school as a whole.

Not anymore. Tuesday, when the state spelled out how much kids should improve their scores, it said the same will be expected of everyone. "It's going to be more challenging for schools to meet their growth targets," said state superintendent Jack O'Connell. "But it's designed with the intention of maximizing every opportunity to close the achievement gap." During a phone call with reporters, he lauded the new method for setting test score goals as "aggressive and ambitious."

But others said it won't make a shred of difference because the new system, like the old one, lacks teeth. Under the state's system, consequences are minimal for schools and students that don't meet improvement goals.

The state Department of Education has long set different API targets for each ethnic group. For years, ethnic groups were expected to make 80 percent of the progress that was expected of the school as a whole: If a school's target was to raise its API 10 points, for example, the African American students had to raise theirs 8 points. That system drew criticism and was seen as racist. It set lower expectations for some groups than for others, critics said. State education leaders responded by changing the way they set growth targets. Now lower-scoring groups have to grow at the same rate as the whole school -- so those students have to gain more points to catch up to the state's goal of 800. "What it means is having equal expectations for all kids," said Greg Purcell, principal of Sutter Middle School in Sacramento.

The new system will not prompt big changes on his campus because teachers judge students by their performance, not by their ethnicity, Purcell said. "It's not hard to figure out which kids need the support, looking at them individually, regardless of subgroup." Purcell's school is so high-performing that it doesn't have a growth target: the student body scored 856, above the state's goal. But performance varied hugely among racial groups. To encourage African American and Latino students to catch up, the state set their target at 5 points, but said white and Asian students don't have to increase their scores at all.

How does the state calculate the new targets? All schools and student groups who have not made the 800 goal must increase their scores by the same rate -- 5 percent of the difference between their score and 800.....

But Jim Lanich, a longtime critic of the state's API system, said the new method for setting targets won't make a difference because there aren't enough consequences for schools that don't meet their goals. "We applaud a focus on minority kids and their achievement levels," said Lanich, president of California Business for Education Excellence. "But zero accountability at a lower target is the same as zero accountability at a higher target."

Schools see consequences for not meeting their targets only if they opt in to a state improvement program. Fewer than 17 percent of schools participate in such programs, according to state education officials. O'Connell countered that the state holds schools responsible by publicly reporting their test scores and goals. "A lot of the accountability and the consequences are from peer pressure in the community and the fact that you want your schools to do well," he said. "It's peer pressure, it's community pride we're talking about here. That's a key component."

Source



A quiet homeschooling revolt

The Australian State of Queensland seems to have laws about homeschooling that are similar to Germany's. The relaxed approach to enforcement is however very different. At least since Hegel, Germany has been much more Leftist than the Anglo-Saxon countries and Australia has never had a Gestapo or any inclination towards one

An attempt by the State Government to overhaul home-schooling registration requirements appears to have failed. A new system was introduced in January to make it easier for parents teaching their children at home to legally report to the state without fear of being forced to send them to school. But Eleanor Sparks of Education Choices Magazine for home-schoolers said thousands of parents were reluctant to register with the Government "There is still a lot of distrust there. A lot of parents don't want to sign up and then have the department try to change the way they choose to educate their children," she said.

An Education Queensland report estimates up to 10,500 children are being home-schooled, but just 260 of them are officially registered with the State Government. Education Minister Rod Welford does not accept the figure though it comes from his own department's Home Schooling Review. He said he believed parents who have registered under the department's distance education scheme (4800 students) and the 260 students under the new system represented the "overwhelming majority". "There may be one or two hundred who we still haven't captured because we don't know precisely the number of children who are not in school," he said.

He said he believed the "home-school industry" had an interest in exaggerating its numbers. "I want to spread the message that it is against the law not to be registered, and secondly that it is in their interests to do that," he said. "It is not a question of bludgeoning parents into some sort of Big Brother control system. "By registering those students we can give them support such as advice on teaching text and give them some assistance through nearby schools if they want to access that."

Parents who reject the school system say they do so for many reasons. There are financial benefits to home schooling as parents do not have to worry about fees. uniforms, text books or trips. But parents say the decision to home-school also means financial sacrifices, as at least one parent must spend all their time with their children.

Amanda from Ipswich told The Sunday Mail she opted out of schools because she feared exposing her children to peer groups there. "I know that a lot of people out there think that people like us are weirdos who want to live outside society but we're not. We just don't believe that schools are the best place to put your children." Amanda, who asked that her full name not be revealed, has not registered any of her children with Education Queensland and has never followed a structured learning system.

Her eldest child, Gabby, 15, did not start reading until she was nine but is studying for a bachelor of arts at the Open University (an online higher education service that does not require any entry grades). "I enjoyed it. It was a fun way to learn and now that I am at university I don't find the work too hard. I am able to handle it," Gabby said.

Parents must send their children to school unless they receive special dispensation from Education Queensland. But Ms Sparks says governments have turned a blind eye to thousands of parents who choose to school their children ast home.

The article above by Edmund Burke appeared in the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" on March 25, 2007



Road to university widens

A good idea. General knowledge is so indicative that it has been used as a proxy for an IQ test

THOUSANDS of VCE students could get an extra shot at university under a plan to use general knowledge tests in course selection. Under the radical proposal, the General Achievement Test would be used for the first time alongside ENTER and VCE scores for selection in some uni courses. The GAT would be used to help choose "middle band" students -- whose results fell just below ENTER cut-off scores for courses. The proposal by Monash University and the Victorian Tertiary Admissions Centre could be implemented by the middle of this year if schools support it.

A joint discussion paper outlining the plan says that, although the ENTER provides a "good outcome" for most students, there is a need to improve the selection process for some university applicants. "For some students, the ENTER score may not fully reflect their ability to succeed at tertiary study," the paper states.

About half of all university courses -- up to 1500 of them -- use "middle band" selection along with the ENTER score. This means that some universities look at individual subject scores when deciding whether to take middle-band applicants. But under the proposed plan the GAT -- which tests English, maths and science skills -- would be taken into account for the first time.

Every VCE student currently sits the GAT in the middle of the academic year but it has been used only to check student work and exams. The GAT could also be used as a supplementary tool to select students who have suffered disadvantage during year 12. "It is proposed that applicants' GAT scores . . . be available for use as an additional tool to increase the reliability of middle-band selection," the report states.

VTAC director Elaine Wenn said the proposal would be implemented by June if supported by schools and universities. She said Monash University had advanced the proposal but other universities could take it up if it were approved. Ms Wenn denied the plan amounted to a move away from the ENTER score as the main selection tool for university. "The ENTER score is still the best predictor of academic performance," she said. Monash University pro-vice chancellor Prof Merran Edwards said the university was trying to improve middle-band selection.

The president of the Victorian Association of State Secondary Principals, Brian Burgess, said the ENTER score was not a particularly effective way of selecting students. "That one third of students fail their first year says something about how universities are selecting their students," he said. Australian Education Union Victorian branch president Mary Bluett welcomed the plan. "We think the idea of broadening out the entry criteria is a good thing," she said. "Too much depends on the ENTER score."

Source



Australia: Students' results just get worse

SHOCKING student test results revealed thousands of children were getting lower scores in literacy and numeracy the longer they stayed at school. The disturbing trend has emerged in a national analysis of results provided to Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop. Figures showed the 6 per cent of Year 3 students who failed to reach the numeracy benchmark grew to 9 per cent by Year 5 and 18 per cent in the first year of high school. Despite millions of dollars poured into classroom programs, 25 per cent of Year 7 students in NSW did not meet benchmark standards for numeracy and 12 per cent for reading.

The number of students meeting an acceptable standard in numeracy plummeted between primary school - where it reached the mid-90s - and high school. Ms Bishop said yesterday she was worried about the results showing the decline in student performance after Year 3. "It concerns me that too many students are still failing to meet these minimum standards," she said. "Reading, writing and mathematics are fundamental life skills that every person needs for further education, employment and participation in society."

The data, based on 2005 exam results in all the states and territories, had taken the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs almost two years to process. In NSW, females outscored males by up to 6 per cent - particularly in reading and writing. Students in Years 3 and 5 performed better than the national average but slipped below it once they reached high school. Students living in cities did slightly better than those in regional and remote areas.

Source

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

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

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

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 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.

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



29 March, 2007

WASHINGTON STATE DOWNGRADING MATH AND SCIENCE

Not enough students passing? Dump it! That Math and science are not as well taught as some other subjects is the obvious message but that must be covered up! Appearance always matters more than reality to Leftists



State lawmakers appear on the verge of dumping the math and science sections of the 10th-grade Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL), and replacing them with a very different kind of test. The idea is to do something about the fact that so few students pass the math and science sections. But the proposed remedy is generating a lot of concern because it could mean big changes in what students are expected to learn, and how they're tested. "We need to make sure that the cure is not worse than the ailment," said Marc Frazer, vice president of the Washington Roundtable, a nonprofit group of business executives.

If the math and science portions of the WASL are eliminated, it would be the second time the state has dropped part of the exam. A "listening" section, designed to measure communication skills, was removed without controversy three years ago. Two bills under consideration - one passed by the House, a similar version by the Senate - would phase out math and science on the 10th-grade WASL. The state Board of Education then would select new tests in algebra, geometry and biology to be given right after students finish courses in those subjects. The algebra test would become a graduation requirement starting in 2013, geometry in 2014, and biology in 2013; under the Senate bill or 2014 in the House version.

HIGHLIGHTS OF BILLS to eliminate the math and science sections of the WASL:

* The math and science sections of the WASL would be replaced with end-of-course exams in algebra, geometry and biology.
* Passing the end-of-course exams would become graduation requirements in - and -, depending on the test.
* Until that time, students still would take the math WASL or an approved alternative. If they failed, however, they could still graduate until 2010 (under the House bill) or - (in the Senate bill) if they continued to pass math classes.

Both bills would narrow the field of what's tested. The math WASL now includes probability and other topics in addition to algebra and geometry. The science WASL covers more than biology. The House bill also says the new exams "must rely" on multiple-choice questions, which the WASL doesn't. It has some fill-in-the-bubble items, but among its hallmarks are short-answer and "extended response" items that require students to solve problems, apply what they've learned, or explain how they arrived at an answer.

Many not passing

End-of-course exams emerged this year as one of many ideas for solving the state's math and science problem. Students in the class of 2008 - the first class that must pass reading, writing and math on the WASL (or an approved alternative) to graduate - have a long way to go in those subjects. Nearly 85 percent of the students in that class who've taken the exam have passed reading and writing. But it's a different story in math and science, with just 56 percent passing math and 38 percent passing science. And that doesn't include about 3,500 students who've yet to take the exam.

Even before the Legislature convened in January, Gov. Christine Gregoire and Superintendent of Public Instruction Terry Bergeson asked for a three-year delay in requiring passing scores in math and science for graduation. (In the meantime, they want students failing the WASL to have to pass math classes to graduate.) The Legislature is considering the delay and a number of other bills that would provide more teacher training, add new math programs and bring a thorough review of the test. The state Board of Education recently hired an outside consultant to review the state's math-learning standards.

Some argue those are more important than changing the test, because the underlying problem is that students lack strong math skills. Advocates of end-of-course exams don't dispute that. "Obviously we need to have a better curriculum, better standards and better-prepared teachers," said state Rep. Pat Sullivan, D-Covington.

More here



MORE OF THE SAME FAILED TEACHING METHODS IS A GOOD THING?

Getting the kids to sit up, shut up and listen would teach them a lot more in more ways than one and it would also be cheaper

States and school districts nationwide are moving to lengthen the day at struggling schools, spurred by grim test results suggesting that more than 10,000 schools are likely to be declared failing under federal law next year. In Massachusetts, in the forefront of the movement, Gov. Deval L. Patrick is allocating $6.5 million this year for longer days and can barely keep pace with demand: 84 schools have expressed interest. Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York has proposed an extended day as one of five options for his state's troubled schools, part of a $7 billion increase in spending on education over the next four years - apart from the 37 minutes of extra tutoring that children in some city schools already receive four times a week. And Gov. M. Jodi Rell of Connecticut is proposing to lengthen the day at persistently failing schools as part of a push to raise state spending on education by $1 billion.

"In 15 years, I'd be very surprised if the old school calendar still dominates in urban settings," said Mark Roosevelt, superintendent of schools in Pittsburgh, which has added 45 minutes a day at eight of its lowest-performing schools and 10 more days to their academic year.

But the movement, which has expanded the day in some schools by as little as 30 minutes or as much as two hours, has many critics: among administrators, who worry about the cost; among teachers, whose unions say they work hard enough as it is, and have sought more pay and renegotiation of contracts; and among parents, who say their children spend enough time in school already. Still others question the equity of moving toward a system where students at low-performing, often urban, schools get more teaching than students at other schools. And of all the steps school districts take to try to improve student achievement, lengthening the day is generally the costliest - an extra $1,300 a student annually here in Massachusetts - and difficult to sustain.

The idea of a longer day was first promoted in charter schools - public schools that are tax-supported but independently run. But the surge of interest has been spurred largely by the federal No Child Left Behind law, which requires annual testing of students, with increasingly dire consequences for schools that fall short each year, including possible closing.

Pressed by the demands of the law, school officials who support longer days say that much of the regular day must concentrate on test preparation. With extra hours, they say, they can devote more time to test readiness, if needed, and teach subjects that have increasingly been dropped from the curriculum, like history, art, drama. "Whether it's No Child Left Behind or local standards, when you start realizing that we're really having a hard time raising kids to standards, you see you need more time," said Christopher Gabrieli of Massachusetts 2020, a nonprofit education advocacy group that supports a longer school day. "As people are starting to really sweat, they've increasingly started to think really hard about `are we giving them enough time?' "

Still, some educators question whether keeping children in school longer will improve their performance. A recent report by the Education Sector, a centrist nonprofit research group, found that unless the time students are engaged in active learning - mastering academic subjects - is increased, adding hours alone may not do much.

Money also has proved a big obstacle. Murfreesboro, Tenn., experimented with a longer day, but abandoned the plan when the financing ran out, said An-Me Chung, a program officer at the C. S. Mott Foundation, which does education research. Typically, she said, lengthening the school day can add about 30 percent to a state's per-pupil spending on education. Given that expense, New Mexico is acting surgically. The state is spending $2.3 million to extend the day for about 2,100 children in four districts who failed state achievement tests. The money, $1,000 a student, goes for an extra hour of school a day for those children, time they spend on tutorials tailored to their weaknesses in math or reading.

Source



Love of terrorists in U.S. academe

Post below lifted from Phi Beta Cons

Ah, the depths of compassion that are sometimes shown by academics for their down-and-out colleagues!

Susan O’Malley, a former head of the University Faculty Senate of the City University of New York and current English professor at Kingsborough Community College, is just such a stand-up lady. Last fall she went to this governing body to plead for a job for Mohammed Yousry, the convicted co-conspirator of Maoist lawyer Lynn Stewart, for whom he worked and who supports armed revolution.

In 2005 Yousry was convicted of supporting terrorism, specifically, for translating a letter for, and reading letters to, blind Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman. These letters concerned communication between Rahman and his jihadist supporters, relating to his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

As recorded in the minutes of that UFS meeting, the influential O’Malley put out the following feelers:

Do you think CUNY could hire Mohammed Yousry? What do you think? I have his phone number.  I could find out if he wants to be hired and if anyone would like to try to hire him. I’m just throwing it out; I don’t know. I know that it’s on appeal but it’s becoming increasingly clear that he really did just about nothing. 

To which one of her more level-headed colleagues responded:

I don’t think I have an answer to that question. Others may. As you may or may not know he’s been sentenced to 20 months and that is under appeal at the present time.

CUNY Professor Emeritus Sharad Karkhanis, who intrepidly reports, in The Patriot Returns (here and here), the machinations of leftist academics in the system, comments:

It's almost unbelievable…Queen O'Malley was…obsessed…Yes, yes, Mohammed was on her mind and she was not going to rest until she got this convicted terrorist a job. We do not know how many people she buttonholed, or telephoned, or e-mailed for him. But we sure do know that she used her position as a former Chair of the UFS to be recognized at the plenary and sneak in this "Job Wanted for the terrorist" ad. She even made sure to notify the delegates that she had his telephone number and could contact him.

Karkhanis presses on:

1) Has Queen O'Malley ever made a "Job Wanted" announcement like this for a non-convicted, non-violent, peace loving American educator for a job in CUNY? There are hundreds of qualified people looking for teaching jobs. Why does she prefer convicted terrorists who are bent on harming our people and our nation…?

2) During her six year tenure as the Chair of the UFS, did she ever give UFS delegates an opportunity to make announcements of this nature? If not, why not?

3) Being on the PSC's Executive Committee [the Professional Staff Congress is CUNY's educational workers' union], she knew that Yousry, fired from his adjunct position at York in April 2002, was provided with all legal and contractual protection…up to arbitration…, which cost thousand of dollars, money which came from dues paying members…

Many of us know peace loving, law abiding, never-even-convicted-for-littering citizens who need work. How many law-abiding adjunct faculty have to worry about getting their two courses in order to hold onto medical benefits!? She does not worry about the "ordinary" adjunct — but she is worried about convicted terrorists! She will take these precious courses away and give them to terrorists and terrorist sympathizers!

We at the Patriot take the liberty of asking you, our readers, a question:

How many of you know, or have friends who know, a convicted terrorist and [have] his or her home telephone number?

We sure don't and believe that you don't either. But, watch out — Queen O'Malley does!

Brooklyn College (CUNY) Professor Mitchell Langbert, who brought the O’Malley’s job-plea to my attention, adds another exclamation to this intriguing testimony to the bottomless pit of leftist zealotry: “…rather than going for a Ph.D., students interested in academic jobs might just as well commit terrorist acts and be handed jobs by sympathetic left-wing academics!”

That O’Malley would publicly, without reticence or shame, beat the bushes for a felon convicted of abetting the most hateful enemies of this nation — enemies who would not hesitate to eliminate useful idiots like her in the name of establishing worldwide Islamist tyranny — illustrates once again the perverse and destructive bent of campus radicals.

When David Horowitz’s book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America was published, hostile reviewers ridiculed the idea that a professor might be “dangerous.” But Horowitz demonstrated that all too many of the nation’s professoriate negatively affect America’s war on terror.

Would that O’Malley were one of a kind — a small, sad aberration. But such is not the case.  Her championing of Youssef, with no significant opposition from her colleagues, exemplifies a deep and suicidal pattern within academe.

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

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 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.

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



28 March, 2007

A strange Catholic university

Catholic University of San Francisco Promotes Abortion, Same Sex Marriage and Contraception

The University of San Francisco (USF), a Catholic college, features on the front page of its website a festival that includes at least two films that promote abortion and same sex marriage, and a report by four USF nursing students that includes recommendations for contraceptive use. The 2007 Human Rights Film Festival (March 19th - 21st) is sponsored by USF's Office of the Provost, College of Arts & Sciences, Gender & Sexuality Department, University Ministry, and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning (LGBTQ) Caucus among others.

One of the films presented, "Rosita," tells the story of a nine year old Nicaraguan girl who becomes pregnant after being raped. The girl's parents are determined to obtain an abortion for her, even though abortion is illegal in their country. According to the description of the movie, "[the] parents move forward only to be forced into battle with two governments, the medical establishment, and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church." "One Wedding and a Revolution" is a sympathetic look at San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's 2004 decision to grant "marriage" licenses to same sex couples. The film is billed as containing "historic footage of the tearful exchange of vows between long-time lesbian activists."

Meanwhile, USF touts "as an impressive example of students assisting the community" a birth spacing study by four nursing students which was adopted by the Contra Costa Department of Public Health. Unfortunately, the study promotes contraceptives. "If there is a legitimate need for some mothers in Contra Costa County to delay subsequent pregnancies, Catholic teaching on marriage, chastity and natural family planning would have provided the nursing students with an opportunity to promote authentic, Catholic solutions," said Patrick Reilly, President of the Cardinal Newman Society.

"As a Catholic institution, if the University of San Francisco will not support the Catholic position on issues, at the very least it has an obligation to not promote issues that directly contradict Catholic teachings on some of the most pressing moral issues of the day. "The Church is very clear that abortion is intrinsically evil, that marriage can only be between one man and one woman, and that contraception use is a sin. It is a scandal that USF, an institution that is not shy about touting its Jesuit heritage in marketing materials, would actively work against these fundamental Catholic truths."

Source



BIASED BRITISH UNIVERSITY ADMISSIONS CHALLENGED

UCAS challenged over proposed new application form

A civil liberties group has asked the Commission for Racial Equality [CRE] to intervene over the University and Colleges Admissions Service’s [UCAS] proposal to provide data about potential students’ ethnicity to Admissions Officers before rather than after the selection process is complete.

Liberty and Law director Gerald Hartup has written to CRE chair Professor Kay Hampton complaining about the proposal on the grounds that it would be in blatant breach of good equal opportunities practice propounded by the CRE over many years.

Monitoring forms the CRE has always argued should be anonymous, kept separate from any application form and from the entire selection process.

Where they are not this can and does allow ruthless discrimination at the selection process. This was evidenced notoriously by the use of equal opportunities data about their race being used last year to reject 289 white male applicants from consideration with Avon and Somerset and Gloucestershire Police Services.

Mr Hartup stated: “We must learn our lesson. We cannot trust Chief Constables with confidential information but they were at least breaking the law. How can we possibly allow the careers of students to depend upon the self denying integrity of Admissions Officers under pressure to come up with the results necessary to achieve maximum funding.”

“Should UCAS go ahead with their misguided policy they must expect legal action by students who can never be sure that the reason for their failure to obtain a place at their preferred institution was because their race did not fit the Education Secretary’s matrix.”

Liberty and law has written to UCAS Chief Executive Anthony McClaren urging him to drop the scheme. It has also written to OFFA [Office for fair Access] that has “a role in identifying and disseminating good practice and advice connected with access to higher education.”

More here



Australia: Literacy suffers as teachers take on propaganda roles

PRIMARY schools are swamped by a cluttered curriculum that places equal importance on issues traditionally taught by parents, such as awareness of dog attacks and nutrition, rather than the core skills of literacy and numeracy. The Australian Primary Principals Association, representing more than 7000 government and non-government primary schools, will today release a position paper calling for a charter to redefine the role of primary schools and cull the curriculum to focus on education rather than social welfare.

APPA president Leonie Trimper called on the nation's education ministers to discuss the issue at their meeting next month and form an independent group of primary educators to draft a charter. Ms Trimper said it was time to reassess the curriculum and the importance placed on different aspects of traditional subjects like literacy. "Are there things in literacy that should be of lesser importance: for example, is viewing as important as listening, speaking, reading and writing?" Ms Trimper said. "We would rather do less and do it well and make sure it's well resourced."

Ms Trimper said rather than schools supplementing parental responsibilities, the pendulum had swung too far. Schools were now forced to offer breakfast programs, values education, nutrition, personal finance, road safety, and even awareness of dog-biting and parenting programs. A joint report by the APPA and the federal education department in 2004 found that primary schools were also under-funded; for every $100 spent on a high school student, only $73 was spent on a primary school student. Ms Trimper said the needs of primary schools rarely featured in public debate or government policy.

The policy paper prepared by Greg Robson, from Edith Cowan University, says the pressures placed on primary schools "may well be undermining their capacity to deliver continuing success". "The pressures are significant, the expectations unrealistic, the appreciation of what is needed underdeveloped and the phase has lost its pre-eminence as a point of focus in education," the paper says. Professor Robson, who oversaw the introduction of highly criticised year 11 and 12 courses as head of the Curriculum Council in Western Australia, said a charter should reposition primary schools as the key phase of schooling.

The national umbrella group of parents and citizens organisations, the Australian Council of State School Organisations, yesterday supported a charter that refocused primary schools on the traditional core tasks of literacy, numeracy and socialisation. ACSSO executive officer Terry Aulich said primary schools were overloaded with excessively detailed curriculum and were forced to deal with social problems without adequate resources.

Source

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

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

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

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 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.

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



27 March, 2007

Hitler clone welcome on U.S. campuses

Recently Norman Finkelstein has been making the rounds of American college campuses-Stanford, Brandeis, Harvard, Bryn Mawr, Northwestern and more-having been invited by various departments, groups and individuals.

Many of the people extending the invitations are unaware that by inviting this person on their behalf, they are becoming complicit with neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, and anti-Semites. Some of the invitees were all too aware of what kind of person they were inviting.Finkelstein willingly collaborates with neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites. Just watch him on YouTube.com, where a clip is posted of his appearance on a Holocaust denial program on Lebanese TV, where he claimed that Holocaust survivors are liars and that Swiss banks-which have agreed to pay back millions of dollars belonging to deceased Jewish depositors and their heirs-never withheld any money from Jews. Neo-Nazis also love Finkelstein, and for good reason. Listen to Ernst Zundel, the notorious Hitler lover and Holocaust denier who is now in prison in Germany:

Finkelstein's exceedingly useful to us and to the Revisionist cause. He is making three-fourths of our argument - and making it effectively. Never fret - the rest of the argument is being made by us, and will topple the lie within our lifetime. We would not be making vast inroads in Europe with our outreach program, were it not for his courageous little booklet, "The Holocaust Industry."

Zundel's wife and fellow Neo-Nazi, Ingrid Rimland, referred to Finkelstein admiringly as the "Jewish David Irving"-a reference to the well known Holocaust denier and admirer of Hitler. Finkelstein himself admires Irving's "historical" research.

Finkelstein also loves Hizbullah, the terror organization whose leader said, "If Jews all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide."[1] Finkelstein has praised the group, saying: "The honorable thing now is to show solidarity with Hizbullah as the United States and Israel target it for liquidation. Indeed, looking back my chief regret is that I wasn't even more forceful in publicly defending Hizbullah against terrorist intimidation and attack."[2] Finkelstein is not "world-renowned," as some of his invitees claim, except among Holocaust deniers, neo-Nazis, radical supporters of terrorism and other assorted anti-Semites, who constitute his primary readership and audience. He recently commissioned a cartoon-showing me masturbating in ecstatic joy to television pictures of dead Lebanese-by a neo-Nazi cartoonist and friend of his who won second place in the Iranian Holocaust denial cartoon contest. He has refused to confirm or deny that he commissioned the cartoon, even when asked to do so by colleagues at DePaul University, where he is up for tenure, on the grounds that no one will believe him. The evidence that he commissioned the cartoon is overwhelming.

It is not surprising therefore that when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his henchmen created a list of the most virulent Holocaust deniers in the world to invite to their notorious Holocaust denier hate-fest in Teheran, high among those on the list were the neo-Nazi and klansman David Duke and the Holocaust justice denier Norman Finkelstein. Finkelstein's name appeared on the schedule alongside Duke's, though apparently Finkelstein, at the last minute, decided not to appear. The reason Finkelstein has given for eventually declining the invitation had nothing to do with any principled opposition at being a speaker at such an anti-Semitic hate-fest. Instead, he claimed that negotiations with the Iranians broke down over details. He says that he wanted "at least 45 minutes to speak"- apparently because he needs at least that much time to spew his hatred- but they wouldn't agree to his conditions.

He has refused to disclose his communications with the Iranians regarding his invitation. What does he have to hide? Who is he protecting; the Iranian hate mongers or himself? He should be urged to disclose his communication, both with the Iranian Holocaust deniers and his neo-Nazi cartoonist friend.The real reason he did not attend is that he was too busy trying to testify on behalf of Hamas in a Chicago criminal trial. After listening to his proposed testimony and learning of his lack of credentials -he has never even visited Israel- the federal judge concluded that he did not have any expertise, essentially characterizing him as a crackpot. This was consistent with other, similar characterizations. A New York Times review by a leading expert of Finkelstein's book The Holocaust Industry called it:

... a novel variation on the anti-Semitic forgery, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" [It] verges on paranoia and would serve anti-Semites around the world.

Marc Fisher of the WashingtonPost correctly described Finkelstein as "a writer celebrated by neo-Nazi groups for his Holocaust revisionism and comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany." Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic wrote: "You don't know who Finkelstein is. He's poison, he's a disgusting self-hating Jew, he's something you find under a rock." Others describe Finkelstein's theories as "crackpot ideas, some of them mirrored almost verbatim in the propaganda put out by neo-Nazis all over the world." One eminent scholar added:

No facts alleged by Finkelstein should be assumed to be really facts, no quotations in his book should be assumed to be accurate, without taking the time to carefully compare his claims with the sources he cites... Such an examination reveals that many of those assertions are pure invention.

This is the bigot who is being invited to speak on college campuses. No college should prevent him from speaking. He can get a soapbox and fulminate the way other bigots do. That is his free speech right. But no university or group that would not invite David Duke should lend its imprimatur to Finkelstein's poison. Duke and Finkelstein are opposite sides of the same hateful coin. Everyone should be free to invite the Dukes and Finkelsteins of the world to their campus, as the president of Iran did to his hate fest, but people should be judged by the bigots they invite.

Source



British kids sentenced to rot in their failed schools

`An education ought to be very good, to justify depriving a child of its liberty." I copied this down as an angry schoolgirl, when I was reading John Stuart Mill, though I am no longer sure it was he who wrote it. In any case, it is true. There can be no justification for sentencing children to long hours in schools that are no good to 11 years of compulsory boredom, mismanagement and bad influences. There can be no justification for spending billions on this long incarceration only to let the prisoners out, having blighted their best years, unfit to deal with the world. Yet that, in this rich country, is precisely what we do.

All too many children leave school at 16 - and later - barely literate and numerate. Employers complain about school-leavers' "skills gap", meaning the wretched young things are so ignorant, incompetent and ill-disciplined that they are useless in a job, and need basic remedial training.

Colleges and universities complain that students arrive unable to construct a sentence, let alone write an essay. The brightest of undergraduates - the cream of our education system - need remedial teaching at university. Meanwhile the number of Neets - young people not in education, employment or training - has risen by a quarter since Labour came to power. Surely the disgraceful failure of education in this country is now an established fact?

Yet what is the response of the education secretary to this astonishing failure? It is to make it compulsory for all children to stay in our abysmal education system until the age of 18. Alan Johnson announced plans last week to raise the school-leaving age from 16 to 18. Children must choose between school, college, apprenticeships or work-based training. Teenagers who refuse to do so will face on-the-spot fines, Asbos and even jail. Employers who do not comply with work-based learning schemes will face sanctions, as will parents who put their children between 16 and 18 to work, without offering them training.

It beggars belief. Of course in an ideal world, all children should receive education until at least 18. Tertiary education or training ought to be available to everybody, according to his or her interests and abilities, and I firmly believe the taxpayer should pay for that. However, in the real world of British education, it makes little to sense to impose, by compulsion, the tedium and misery of British schooling for two more long years on those whom it has already failed and humiliated.

If the Department for Education and Skills cannot now make people literate and numerate by 16, if our schools cannot avoid producing disorderly children who wreck classes or play truant, how does it expect to change anything by enforcing two more benighted years of the same damn thing?

Bright schoolchildren and their teachers often talk of the relief they feel when the Asbo set leaves school at 16, so they can get on with their A-level classes in relative peace and quiet. Forcing class-wreckers to stay around would damage still further the chances of those children who want to study. The same applies to sending unwilling teenagers to colleges; they will undermine them. As for workplace training, the government has been making ambitious promises about apprenticeships for 10 years; why does it expect, suddenly, to be able to fulfil them now?

It is hardly fair to anyone to impose angry and unwilling 17 and 18-year-olds on schools and colleges they don't want to go to. School is simply all wrong for some children. It is economically unsound to impose them and their needs on employers who would rather not hire them. Though these teenagers need help and attention, forcing them to stay in education against their will is not the answer.

The real answer, which seems beyond this government or its predecessors, is to make early education work. What all children need is basic literacy, numeracy, good manners and self-discipline. Everything can follow from that, in or out of school, whatever the child's abilities. Since, however, we must despair of schools producing children who are educated in this fundamental sense, we are I suppose looking at damage limitation.

What do you do with problem teenagers of 16 to 18? Clearly it is a good idea to give them something constructive to do, and keep them off the streets. I often think it would be a good idea to offer them something that was fun, along the lines of what privileged children do. I mean extreme sports or adventure holidays. People usually harrumph with indignation at delinquents being taken by social services on expensive rock-climbing and whitewater rafting adventures, like rich kids. But these things develop character and confidence. They teach cooperation (which is why rich parents pay for them).

It is particularly good for children who have been neglected on sink estates to have some good clean fun - something more interesting than drugs and gangs. If I were education secretary I would be funding activity clubs for the Asbo set, like the Rugby Portobello Trust near me in central London, which would be so much fun that Neets would go to them willingly, and maybe get a little education by stealth. The Rugby Portobello offers sessions in music, IT, cooking and even mentorship for young people in running a charity.

Above all, as education secretary, I would consider why so many children, particularly boys, come to hate school. I do agree with the suggestion that the model of schoolroom teaching is unsuitable, after a certain age, for some children, many of them boys, and many of them the least bright or the most bright.

Mixed ability teaching is of course a nonsense, and so I suspect for many children is the feminised, politically correct conventionality and Gradgrind tedium of what passes for liberal education. So are the national curriculum and the mark-grubbing GCSE and A-level. I wouldn't blame any child of mine for opting out.

The education secretary, clearly a fairly able man, ought to understand this. He opted out of school at 15, without any qualifications. Forcing teenagers into this nonsense for still longer, until 18, is an unjustified assault on their freedom.

Source



Fast forward on literacy IS possible

A PERTH trial of a program aimed at helping children with learning delays has achieved dramatic gains in literacy in just 10 weeks. But the principal of Fremantle-based Samson Primary School, Barry Hancock, said he was struggling to get other schools and the Education Department to look at the results. Four Perth schools took part in the trial last year of the computer-based program Fast ForWord to test claims it could boost learning in children struggling with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia and other learning delays. A total of 144 students aged 5-14 took part in the trial, and were found to have made significantly better gains in language and literacy tests than a comparison group who received the standard WA curriculum alone.

On average, students who completed the 10-week program improved from being in the bottom 12 per cent of age literacy to the bottom 25 per cent. Their receptive language skills jumped from the bottom 12 per cent to bottom 21 per cent, while their expressive language improved from the lower 10 per cent to lower 18 per cent.

Mr Hancock said the program should be made part of the WA school curriculum because it was the only one that worked on the pathways in the brain to allow children to become better learners. "It's the greatest thing I've found in 40 years of teaching,'' he said. ``It teaches kids how to concentrate and to learn. "It doesn't matter how good teachers are, some kids are going to slip through the net because what you're telling them goes in one ear and out the other.'' Mr Hancock trialled the program on 36 of his students with special needs and found that all improved. Some made gains equivalent to two years of learning after just 10 weeks.

Quinns Rocks mother Amanda Cope said the program had improved her daughter Leticia, 13, who had repeated a year at school, but whose reading and writing skills were now above average. The Education Department said use of the program in schools was at the discretion of individual principals.

Source

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

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

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

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 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.

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



26 March, 2007

THE NAZI MENTALITY IS ALIVE AND WELL IN GERMANY

A new case of legal intervention to stop homeschooling

Five "well-educated" children have been ordered into state custody by a court that applied to a second family a ruling taking a 15-year-old homeschooler from her family and sending her to a psychiatric ward. The action fulfills a dire forecast from a human rights group that the government's success in the first case would encourage officials to act against other families in Germany. The newest ruling comes from a court in Saxony and affects five members of the Brause family, according to officials with the International Human Rights Group.

Its president, Joel Thornton, earlier had told WND that, "There is an increased fear among homeschoolers about whether their children are next," after Melissa Busekros, 15, was removed from her home and ordered first to a psychiatric ward, then a foster home, because of her "school phobia." Thornton told WND the ruling in Saxony means that while the government officials have not yet taken the five children from the family home, they have permission to do so at any time. "Apparently, Germany has decided that it can determine when and where the children go to school; and where they live while doing so," noted Thornton. "The youth welfare, supported by the police force, can take the children out of the home at any time with or without notice."

The decision, according to the IHRG, said the well-being of the children "can only be achieved by their attendance in the public schools." [Hegel would agree]

According to a CBN report, the legal custody of Rosine, Jotham, Kurt-Simon, Lovis and Ernst Brause was taken away from parents Bert and Kathrin and given to the local youth welfare office. The parents reportedly can regain custody of their children only by placing them in public school. In the order, which was based solely on the parents' decision against sending their children to public school, the family also was told to pay court costs estimated at $4,000.

The judge had concluded that the children were well-educated, but accused the parents of failing to provide their children with an education in a public school. The court noted that one of the daughters expressed the same opinions as her father, showing they have not had the chance to develop "independent" personalities.

That circumstance and others echo the case involving Melissa Busekros, a case on which IHRG has been working for several weeks. "We are gearing up to continue the fight in Germany for the right of parents to control the education of their children in accordance with their sincerely-held religious beliefs. This will be an expensive battle, and we ask you to pray about helping us fight the good fight," the IHRG said. "Our efforts must be bathed in prayer, so we ask you to please continue praying for Melissa and the Busekros family, as well as the Brauses. No parent should have to watch their children being forcibly removed from their home because of their religious beliefs," the group said.

The newest decision came even though a United Nations report included some new criticism of the German school system. ".it should be noted that education may not be reduced to mere school attendance and that educational processes should be strengthened to ensure that they always and primarily serve the best interests of the child," the UN report said. "Distance learning methods and homeschooling represent valid options which could be developed in certain circumstances, bearing in mind that parents have the right to choose the appropriate type of education for their children, as stipulated in article 13 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights," it continued.

A separate report out of Berlin also noted that in the German school system, children from poor families and immigrant backgrounds are at a disadvantage, and the system does not provide equal opportunities.

The IHRG reported that the work on Melissa's case continues. As WND has reported, the 15-year-old recently released a letter through which she pleaded for permission to return to her home and parents. "I want to ask you for help, to get my right to go back to my family, as I wish," Melissa Busekros wrote in an English letter hand-delivered to the IHRG.

It was more than six weeks ago she was taken by youth welfare officials accompanied by police officers from her home first to a psychiatric hospital in Nuremberg, and then later to a foster home. "I am not sick as the doctor said and my family is the best place for me to live," she said in her letter.

The removal order in Melissa's case has been affirmed at the appellate level, where a judge also ordered her parents, Hubert and Gudrun Busekros, to be given state-sponsored psychiatric tests, raising fears that the results of those tests will be used by the government to remove the family's other five children.

Thornton said even those German families who already have fled to other countries because of Germany's homeschool ban are moving into hiding because of the possibility they could be returned to face German fines or jail time for homeschooling.

The IHRG reported it is working on several fronts to try to help Melissa and her family, with several German lawyers evaluating their options for an appeal, all the way to the European Court of Human Rights if needed. The case has gotten the attention of the German community already. "Christian activists say the case is an assault on religious liberties and the right of a Christian family to homeschool their daughter," said Speigel Online International's English-language edition. "The case has been widely reported in Christian and conservative media in the United States, with some commentators comparing the authorities to Nazis. Activists are being encouraged to pray for the girl and petition German Chancellor Angela Merkel, while one Web site is even calling for a boycott on German goods," the report continued.

Wolfgang Drautz, consul general for the Federal Republic of Germany, has commented on the issue on a blog, noting the government "has a legitimate interest in countering the rise of parallel societies that are based on religion or motivated by different world views and in integrating minorities into the population as a whole."

Melissa had fallen behind in math and Latin, and was being tutored at home. When school officials in Germany, where homeschooling was banned during Adolf Hitler's reign of power, found out, she was expelled. School officials then took her to court, obtaining a court order requiring she be committed to a psychiatric ward because of her "school phobia."

Drautz said homeschool students' test results may be as good as for those in school, but "school teaches not only knowledge but also social conduct, encourages dialogue among people of different beliefs and cultures, and helps students to become responsible citizens." Just last year the Human Rights Court for the European Union ruled in another similar case that any parental "wish" to have children grow up without the public school's anti-Christian influences "could not take priority over compulsory school attendance."

The German government's defense of its "social" teachings and mandatory public school attendance was clarified during an earlier dispute on which WND reported, when a German family wrote to officials objecting to police officers picking their child up at home and delivering him to a public school.

"The Minister of Education does not share your attitudes toward so-called homeschooling.," said a government letter in response. "You complain about the forced school escort of primary school children by the responsible local police officers. In order to avoid this in future, the education authority is in conversation with the affected family in order to look for possibilities to bring the religious convictions of the family into line with the unalterable school attendance requirement."

In Melissa's case, the local Youth Welfare Office arrived at the family home with about 15 uniformed police officers to take her into custody. They had in hand a court order allowing them to take her into custody, "if necessary by force."

The Home School Legal Defense Association, the largest homeschool organization in the U.S. with more than 80,000 member families, said the case is an "outrage."

Practical Homeschool Magazine noted one of the first acts by Hitler when he moved into power was to create the governmental Ministry of Education and give it control of all schools, and school-related issues. In 1937, the dictator said, "This Reich stands, and it is building itself up for the future, upon its youth. And this new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing."

Source



Australia: "Outcomes-based" education shown the door

The widely criticised model of outcomes-based education introduced in West Australian schools was effectively dismantled yesterday when the Government announced the return of syllabuses specifying what students should be taught and a return to traditional marking methods.

Education Minister Mark McGowan has commissioned a detailed action plan addressing problems with the curriculum for kindergarten to Year 10 after an independent evaluation concluded the changes introduced over the past decade "cannot be regarded as a success". Mr McGowan described the evaluation report as a "cold shower" and announced that syllabuses detailing the content of courses would be reintroduced next year. The changes also include providing clear reports to parents based on grades linked to common standards, providing resources for teachers for planning and assessing students, and reintroducing traditional methods of marking, such as percentages.

Under the curriculum framework introduced in 1998, marks were replaced by "levels" at which students were working, based on the idea that students travel along at their own pace. The curriculum adopted an outcomes approach to learning that focused on what students should achieve and assessed what they learn rather than traditional syllabuses that focus on content and how and when it is taught. The state Government has faced widespread criticism over its changes to school education, particularly over the introduction of levels, and the new courses of study for Years 11 and 12, which are claimed to be of poor academic standard.

A group of teachers formed to fight the changes, People Lobbying Against Teaching Outcomes, welcomed the announcement as a step in the right direction. PLATO president Marko Vojkovic said the syllabuses and levels were two key pieces of the outcomes-based education jigsaw but there was still a way to go. Teachers will be able to choose the type of assessment they use, marks or levels, which Mr Vojkovic said was unacceptable. "Levels should be abandoned altogether," he said. "There shouldn't be a choice between a valid and invalid method; if it's invalid it should be thrown out." He said the draft syllabuses did not contain enough specific content but their reintroduction was a philosophical move away from outcomes-based education.

In a letter sent to teachers yesterday, the department said syllabuses would contain explicit descriptions of core elements to be taught. In kindergarten to Year 3, the emphasis would be on literacy, numeracy, social, emotional and physical development. In Years 4-7, syllabuses will expand to include science, civics and citizenship, and information and communication technologies. Syllabuses for Years 8-10 will cover all learning areas. The evaluation of the curriculum changes found almost 60percent of teachers did not agree the changes had improved teaching and learning or student assessment in recent years.

Source

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

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

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

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 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.

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



25 March, 2007

Terror Supporter and Antisemitic Conspiracy Theorist Teaches at Dalton State College, Georgia

Post below lifted from Jawa Report

This is not "news" in the sense that its neither "new" nor "surprising". Imagine my, er, shock when reader Mike e-mailed me about yet another antisemitic conspiracy theorists and terror supporter in academia. Given that this is Georgia, though, I would have imagined that the good people of the state would have demanded the firing of Dr. Hassan A. El-Najjar. He teaches Sociology at Dalton State College.

Dr. El-Najjar runs the website Aljazeerah.info, which is not associated with Arabic satellite television station from Qatar, which is the al Jazeera, or with aljazeera.com, a British Islamists website. No, Dr. El-Najjar's al Jazeerah is an antisemetic conspiracy website---much worse than the al Jazeera, if that is imaginable. Needless to say, they are pro-terrorism. Oh, they claim they are against "terrorism", but, like so many Muslims in the world, define "terrorism" in such a way as to exclude, you know, real terrorists.

So, who are the 'terrorists' according to Dr. Hassan A. El-Najjar? The Israelis, of course! Israeli occupation terrorist forces kill youngman

While Shaikh Ahamed Yassin, a man who was the head of an officially listed terrorist organization Hamas, is called a "martyr". Similarly, Abu Ali Mustafa, the dead leader of another group specially designated by the State Department as foreign terror orgainzation, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palesitne (PFLP), is also labelled a "martyr".

IDF soldier trying to find terrorists = terrorist.
Leaders of officially listed terror organization = heroes.

But Dr. El-Najjar does not simply single out those that kill Jews as "not terrorists". He also includes those that kill Americans, Iraqi police and soldiers, and Iraqi women and children in the "not terrorists" camp. From one of his stories he published today: "5 Iraqi resistance fighters were killed in north Baghdad".

Dr. El-Najjar, who supports officially designated terrorist organizations, also has the audacity to call his website the "Aljazeerah Peace Information Center". He also solicits contributions.

So, we've established that Dr. El-Najjar is pro-terrorism, but what about conspiracy theories? My case will begin this editorial: How Israel Lobby Controls US Policies: The Arab Bank Case then move to the fact that his website used to link to a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (source--no longer linked).

And then end with this, from the same news story, linked above, written by Dr. El-Najjar, and published today:

It is inaccurate to describe the war in Iraq as if it is fought between Muslim Shi'is and Muslim Sunnis...It is more accurate to describe it as fought between US-led forces and Iraqi resistance fighters. Even killing civilians is part of the war, as the evidence earlier demonstrated that Interior Ministry death squads and British soldiers were caught either targeting or attempting to target civilians to make the war appear as if it is between Shi'is and Sunnis....

Moreover, on September 19, 2005, two British soldiers were arrested by Iraqi police for driving a car bomb in a Basra street. They were freed by British forces before being interrogated by Iraqi police. This incident sheds some light on who might be behind car bomb explosions in Iraq.

In other words, all those deaths we hear about? A U.S. & British plot to make it look like civil war!! This is exactly the kind of stuff you read in the radical Islamist press. The pro-al Qaeda propaganda outlets. The only thing missing is an allusion to a Zionist plot!

Wow, that's what we call in academia "scholarship". As for El-Najjar's other "scholarship", this includes a self-published book called The Gulf War : Overreaction & Excessiveness. One of the two reviews of the book is by fellow Dalton State College professor, Dr. James A. Stevenson, who, shockingly, contributes antiwar columns to the pro-terror conspiracy website. The other reviewer? Also a Dalton State professor.

From reading a few of both Dr. Stevenson's and Dr. El-Najjar's columns, it seems likely that the pair are old-school Leninists (eg, Zionism: The Highest Stage of Imperialism; While World Capitalists Spend Trillions of Dollars on their Wanton Wars, Hunger Kills 18,000 Children Each Day). Not surprisingly, the website has many links to The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and a link to our favorite peace-rage activist Rachel Corrie.

Again, none of this is "news" in the sense that its "new". Campus Watch reran an extensive 2003 Washington Times story about El-Najjar here. American Intelligence has all the still valid hosting info here. Nor, as I said, is it at all surprising that terror supporters are in academia (eg, Julio Pino at Kent State; Joseph Massad and others at Columbia, etc.). Like I said, what is really surprising is that the people of Georgia aren't demanding the immediate firing of Dr. Hassan A. El-Najjar.

Or does tenure & academic freedom trump all other considerations? Including that of supporting terrorism and spreading antisemetic conspiracy theories?

PS: The President of Dalton State College, Dr. James Burran: jburran@daltonstate.edu. Be civil.

And here is complete telephone contact information for the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia. E-mails can be sent via this page.

Double P.S.: Just in case there was any question as to whether the editor of aljazeera.info was really the same man as the Dr. Hassan A. El-Najjar, who teaches at Dalton State. A) He openly admits it and B) Here is the address listed at the contact page:

Editor,
Al-Jazeerah Information Center,
P.O. Box 724, Dalton, GA 30722, USA.



BRITAIN TO IMPRISON MORE KIDS IN USELESS SCHOOLS

Typical Leftism: Treat all kids as if they are the same. Sitting through what passes for a High School education these days may even be helpful to most but it will certainly not be helpful to all

Teenagers who drop out of school or training at 16 will face criminal action and 50 pound on-the-spot fines under plans to raise the age for leaving full-time education. Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, said that dropouts would be served with ASBO-style "attendance orders" specifying a study course that they are expected to attend. Breaching an attendance order will be a criminal offence, punishable by a 50 pound fixed penalty or prosecution. Ultimate sanctions include community sentences or fines.

Mr Johnson accepted that there was no point in forcing nonacademic teenagers to struggle on in the classroom. But he emphasised that compulsory education or training to 18 was essential to ensure that the next generation of workers could compete in a knowledge-based global economy. At present Britain has one of the lowest staying-on rates for education among developed countries, ranking twentieth in the OECD rankings, with 76 per cent of young people aged 16 to 18 remaining in education or training. "It should be as unacceptable to see a 16-year-old in the workplace without any education or training as it was to see a 14-year-old, which used to be common before the Butler Education Act [of 1944]," he said. He added that he expected the sanctions, which may also include the confiscation of driving licences, to apply only to a small "hardcore" of refuseniks.

Under the plans, training could take the form of full-time academic or vocational studies, workplace apprenticeships or training courses. Teenagers already in employment would be expected to undertake accredited training one day a week. The names of all 16 and 17-year-olds will be added to a database held by local authorities so that they can track their participation in education or training. Local authorities will receive 476 million pounds a year to employ advisers to help young people to choose suitable forms of training. The education maintenance allowance of 10 to 30 pounds a week, which is paid to 400,000 youngsters from low-income families to encourage them to stay at school, will be replaced with a new "training wage". This is likely to include a basic allowance for those who turn up to training, and "bonus" payments for those who gain qualifications and demonstrate progress.

The new measures will be phased in from 2013, when the leaving age in England will be raised to 17. In 2015 it will be raised again to 18. The older leaving age will cover pupils starting secondary school in September 2008. Currently, parents face criminal prosecution if they fail to ensure that a child under 16 goes to school. The new measures shift the legal responsibility on to the young person. Employers will face fines if they do not allow employees aged 16 and 17 to undertake accredited training. This rule will apply equally to parents employing their children in a family business.

Start-up costs of the measure are expected to be 200 million, with annual costs running at 700 million. The plans received a mixed reaction. David Willetts, the Shadow Education Secretary, said that it would be better to focus on improving education standards up to the age of 16. Richard Lambert, the director-general of the CBI, the employers organisation, said that it was a necessary step. But Steve Sinnott, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, warned that criminalising young people could alienate those already disaffected with the system. The Scottish Executive has no plans to raise the education leaving age from 16. The Welsh Assembly aims to increase the number of 16 to 18-year-olds in education or training and is due to issue a strategy this year.

Source



Grade inflation in Ireland too

Grade inflation is a trend over time of better grades being awarded in educational qualifications that is not matched by real improvements in learning. Grade inflation is a direct function of declining educational standards.

Extensive research conducted and published on this website shows that there has been significant grade inflation in both the University and Institute of Technology sectors in the Republic of Ireland. In 1994 the percentage of first class honours awarded across the Universities was 7%. By 2005 that figure had jumped to 17%.

In the Institutes of Technology over the same period, despite a steep decline in the CAO points of entrants, there was a 52% increase in the award of first class honours degrees. Thus, weaker and weaker students have been entering the sector, only to receive ever improving grades.

Grade inflation in Irish higher education has been driven by institutions prioritising student numbers and growth at the expense of educational standards. Weaknesses inherent in the assessment process at third level have enabled an increasing divergence between academic performance and grades awarded.

Grade inflation undermines the status of qualifications and misleads the stakeholders in education, such as students, employers and policy-makers. It inevitably results in a continuing decline in the quality of education, with serious long-term implications for the competitiveness of the Irish economy.

Source

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

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

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

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 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.

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



24 March, 2007

THE LYING UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS

Below is their excuse for banning the talk on Islam by Dr Kuenzel. Immediately below that is a response exposing the lies in the "explanation"

As the responsible officer, I write in response to your message to the Vice-Chancellor.

Dr Kuentzel's proposed public lecture last Wednesday evening was cancelled neither for any reason of censorship nor because of pressure from any interest group. It was cancelled because the organisers did not give us enough notice to provide the normal level of portering, stewarding and security (around twenty people in total) for such an event.

It is simply not true that we somehow capitulated to threats or complaints. As a matter of fact, we received no threats, and only a handful of complaints - fewer indeed than for a talk delivered on our campus the previous evening by an Israeli diplomat. The talk by the Israeli diplomat went ahead; the difference was that the organisers (the University's Jewish Society) told us about that talk the week before and worked with us to make the necessary arrangements.

Assuming that we are given enough notice, and appropriate logistical information, I know of no reason why Dr Kuentzel should not deliver his lecture in Leeds at a future date.

For the record, and despite press reports to the contrary, the University did not in any way seek to prevent two other talks by Dr Kuentzel on (I believe) the same theme: as internal academic seminars, they did not require the same level of support as a large public meeting.

I would refer you to a statement on the University's website (http://www.leeds.ac.uk/media/news/kuentzel.htm ).

Yours sincerely
Roger Gair

Comment by Dr. Matthias Kuentzel on the above:

First of all I have to emphasize that I never got a written or even verbal explanation by Mr. Gair or by the office of the University's vice-Chancellor as to why my talk on Islamic antisemitism had been canceled on the very day I arrived in Leeds. No one responsible for the cancellation ever apologized. The University of Leeds did not and does not treat me like an invited guest speaker, but like someone unwelcome who just makes mischief - quite an unpleasant experience.

Against this background, I was confronted with conflicting information with respect to the two seminars scheduled as follow-up events to my public talk. A press officer told me that only my public talk was cancelled. Faculty members of the German department told me that these seminars were cancelled as well. I finally gave these seminars at a location off the University grounds. Many faculty members and students of the University nevertheless participated. The statement by Roger Gair "The other two events [the seminars] are going ahead as planned" (see Times, March 16) was simply not true.

Roger Gair's statement of March 19 is as inconsistent as his press release of March 15.

1. His comparison of my talk with the talk of an Israeli diplomat is completedly misleading, since I am not a diplomat (with all the security requirements that such a status implies) but an academic.

2. He admits that the University in my case "received no threats, and only a handful of complaints". Why then has my "lecture been cancelled on safety grounds . to protect the safety of participants in the event" as his press release says? Why then did Mr. Gair demand that "around twenty people in total" or - in his press release four days earlier - "around 30 people in all" had to be in place just for security reasons?

3. His assertion that the organisers of my talk "did not give us enough notice" to provide for this amount of security staff is misleading, since my talk in Leeds had been scheduled four month earlier and the publicity for it had been out of weeks.

4. It was not my lecture which came to the University's "attention less then 36 hours before it was due to take place" - as his press release asserts - but rather some E-mails by Muslim students who asked the University only on March 13 to "provide a solution . by cancelling the lecture all together" and to "apologize to the Muslim Community as a whole, for suggesting such a topic."

That is why I cannot find the Secretary's claim that my public lecture "was cancelled neither for any reason of censorship nor because of pressure from any interest group" convincing. Instead, there are many indications that the University anticipated potential protests before they ever happened and thus practiced self-censorship.

More here



Australia: Federal Leftist leader warns far-Left on hatred of private schools



Kevin Rudd has broadened his campaign to move Labor to the political centre with an aggressive defence of his policy not to cut government funding to private schools, which he says is a fact of life. The Labor leader has used his own story - starting in public education and later moving to a private school and back again - to argue Labor must recognise that parents will move students between different types of schools according to needs and interests.

Mr Rudd and his education spokesman, Stephen Smith, promised this week that private schools would not lose money - a policy designed to bury Mark Latham's "hit list" of private schools in 2004 and Kim Beazley's freeze on funding of rich schools in 2001. The blunt message is one of a series of steps being taken by the Labor leader during the first half of the year to drag the party away from some of its historic left-wing pillars and create a less intimidating face for mainstream voters.

The next move will be on indigenous policy, with the ALP party conference in four weeks' time to debate a fundamental shift that will put economic development for Aboriginal people at its core. The same conference will be asked to junk opposition to the privatisation of Telstra - a critical part of delivering Mr Rudd's $4.7 billion broadband package - and to end the 25-year prohibition on new uranium mines.

The Left is set to come under further pressure over its opposition to Mr Rudd's move to scrap Labor's no-new-mines policy after Queensland Labor Premier Peter Beattie yesterday reversed his opposition to allow further uranium mining in his state. Mr Beattie relented after accepting advice that uranium mining would not threaten Queensland's coal industry. The move paves the way to open up $3.2 billion worth of uranium deposits. This leaves only the Labor states of Western Australia and NSW still opposed to new uranium mines.

Mr Rudd yesterday outlined his centrist credentials during a speech in support of Morris Iemma's bid to be re-elected as NSW Premier this weekend. "What we offer is a balance of fairness and flexibility," he said. "It's the Labor way. We know what it takes to grow businesses. We know what it takes to expand the economy. "We've been in this business for a long, long time. "But we are never prepared to sacrifice the interests of working families, as the Liberals seem to think is the only way ahead. "So the choices, friends, are stark. The choices are stark when it comes to the future provision of public services."

At a caucus meeting on Tuesday, several speakers responded to the education announcement by asking for a Labor focus on the public school sector. Former teacher and ACTU president Jenny George, and NSW colleagues Sharon Bird and Julia Irwin said Labor must be seen as a strong supporter of government schools. Mr Rudd is believed to have lectured the caucus, reminding MPs that Labor's endorsement of Robert Menzies's 1963 decision to give public funds to private and religious schools was made more than 30 years ago by Gough Whitlam.

Labor should forget about distinctions between the public and private sectors and instead talk in terms of equal opportunity. The party did not want two tiers of schools to develop, the leader argued. "He was almost spelling it out to them slowly and deliberately, 'Get used to it'," a Labor insider said.

The present ALP platform says Labor governments must give priority to the public sector, and that priority is seen as an important means to help children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Others at the meeting said they were worried that the coverage of education policy always ended up focused on private schools, presenting a false emphasis in voters' minds. However, the speakers did not directly attack the party policy announced by Mr Rudd and Mr Smith, which stipulates that private schools will not lose money. But sources said Mr Rudd regarded the demands from Labor members that he talk up the government schools as showing a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue.

The education move has parallels with the decision to dump Labor's opposition to privatising Telstra. That change allowed the party on Wednesday to propose a $4.7billion rollout of advanced broadband services, paid for in part with money drawn from the Future Fund, which holds billions of dollars worth of Telstra shares.

Both strategies give Mr Rudd a way of developing a new centrist policy while pushing the Howard Government further to the Right. "We say there's a role for government," Mr Rudd said yesterday in reference to the funding approach for broadband. "They (the Coalition) say there is no role. The choice is as stark as that. "We come from a different set of ideas, which says public services are a normal part of the fabric of Australian life and we are the party which delivers it. They are the party which gets rid of them. That's the choice."

Labor insiders fear the decision to take money from the Future Fund has left Mr Rudd vulnerable to attacks by Peter Costello on the Opposition's economic credentials. But the Treasurer's assault in regards to raids on the Future Fund will be blunted by a new Treasury report revealing the ageing of the population is becoming far less menacing.

Ms George and Ms Bird did not comment yesterday on the caucus meeting, but Mrs Irwin said she was happy to hear Mr Rudd say he wanted to create a world-class education system for all. Labor's policy, which is to create a needs-based formula but also to continue indexation of grants for wealthy schools, has been welcomed by the Independent Schools Association and the Independent Education Union. The Australian Education Union, which represents government schools, believes there is still an imbalance in the present funding arrangements, under which public schools receive about 35 per cent of the federal funds while educating about 70 per cent of the students. Private schools receive little taxpayer support from state governments.

Source



One Australian State Government faces up to illiteracy among older kids



READING and writing coaching will be offered to Years 6 and 7 after students fell below accepted standards. Education Minister Rod Welford said yesterday that Education Queensland would pay teachers $54 an hour, the supply teaching rate, to conduct the intensive coaching after school. "We will be alerting parents that their students have fallen below Year 5 benchmarks and that we can give them this assistance," Mr Welford said. "It is absolutely essential that they improve their skills before they reach secondary school or they will be unable to handle secondary subjects."

The most recently released National Report on Schooling in Australia showed that Queensland children are the nation's best readers in Year 3, but by Year 5 they descend to being almost the worst, second only to Northern Territory children. In Year 3, when Queensland children are younger than many of their southern counterparts, 97 per cent achieved the national reading benchmark. However, by Year 5 only 83 per cent of Queensland children reached the benchmark. The latest set of assessments is due out next week.

Mr Welford said international data showed that Queensland's best primary school readers and writers were on a par with children in Finland, which was the best performing nation in the world on literacy. "However, we have a very long tail of students who are not making the grade, a very wide gap between the most able and least able students," Mr Welford said.

The move was welcomed yesterday by Ken Rowe, research director of the Learning Processes research program at the Australian Council for Educational Research. "It's never too late," Dr Rowe said. He said experience in Melbourne had shown that an hour of weekly expert coaching could make a real difference to students' ability to read and therefore to learn all subjects. "It is the foundation," he said. However, Dr Rowe, who chaired the Federal Government's 2005 National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy, said intervention should ideally start with some students as early as Year 3, as soon as problems were identified.

Source

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

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

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

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 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.

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



23 March, 2007

Any mention of Christianity is "pollution" in Oregon

No doubt mention of Islamic thinking would have been right and proper, though

During his eight days as a part-time high school biology teacher, Kris Helphinstine included Biblical references in material he provided to students and gave a PowerPoint presentation that made links between evolution, Nazi Germany and Planned Parenthood. That was enough for the Sisters School Board, which fired the teacher Monday night for deviating from the curriculum on the theory of evolution. "I think his performance was not just a little bit over the line," board member Jeff Smith said. "It was a severe contradiction of what we trust teachers to do in our classrooms."

Helphinstine, 27, said in a phone interview with The Bulletin newspaper of Bend that he included the supplemental material to teach students about bias in sources, and his only agenda was to teach critical thinking. "Critical thinking is vital to scientific inquiry," said Helphinstine, who has a master's degree in science from Oregon State. "My whole purpose was to give accurate information and to get them thinking." Helphinstine said he did not teach the idea that God created the world. "I never taught creationism," he said. "I know what it is, and I went out of my way not to teach it."

Parent John Rahm told the newspaper that he became concerned when his freshman daughter said she was confused by the supplemental material provided by Helphinstine. "He took passages that had all kinds of Biblical references," Rahm said. "It prevented her from learning what she needed to learn."

Board members met with Helphinstine privately for about 90 minutes before the meeting. The teacher did not stay for the public portion. "How many minds did he pollute?" Dan Harrison, the father of a student in Helphinstine's class, said at the meeting. "It's a thinly veiled attempt to hide his own agenda."

Source



Who Should Pay for Security at Controversial University Events?

Post below lifted from The Volokhs

Last month, the UCLA Objectivist club, L.O.G.I.C., tried to put on a debate about immigration, between Carl Braun of the Minutemen and Dr. Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute. As it happens, L.O.G.I.C. and Brook are strongly pro-immigration; nonetheless, the event led to a post on IndyMedia aimed at organizing a protest that "shut . . . down" the debate, on the grounds that "[h]ate speech is not free speech." That in turn led to the event being canceled: According to UCLA,

The security arrangements that were made prior to the event with the support of LOGIC were deemed insufficient due to the significant threat posed against one of the speakers and the large amount of off-campus promotion for what was to be a student sponsored event for the UCLA Community. The costs to adequately secure the venue were estimated to be $10 - $12 thousand and it was highly unlikely at such short notice that our UCPD could provide the adequate security coverage.

UCLA's original position was that L.O.G.I.C. had to pay the $10-12,000 in security costs when the event was rescheduled. To its credit, UCLA has retreated considerably; Acting Chancellor Norm Abrams (a colleague of mine at the law school) wrote,

The university understands its obligation to bear the reasonable security costs relating to demonstrations that might result in response to controversial speech. It was not appropriate for campus representatives to suggest that the student group would be obligated to pay for additional security needed because of a protest that was anticipated. The students will not, in fact, be charged for additional security associated with anticipated demonstrators when the event is rescheduled and occurs.

Unfortunately, this apparently referred only to the police security costs (which I should note are the great majority of the costs). UCLA will still require the student group to pay for private security guards, chiefly to be present inside — to eject hecklers, to deter hecklers and hooligans, and to make other students feel safe. The guards cost about $20/hour per guard, and for a 1.5-hour debate they'd need to be present for about 3 hours. The required number of guards will turn on the protests' likely magnitude and nature of the protests, which in turn flow from the viewpoint of one of the debaters.

I couldn't get a good estimate of how many guards would likely be needed (that apparently won't be available until the school consults again with the club and with the UC Police Department), but if 20 were required, that would end up costing $1200 or so, not a small amount for a student group. The group would have to get outside funding for that, though it's possible that UCLA student government would defray some of that from funds available to student groups. (I'm told by the UCLA people that historically the government has offered anywhere from a very small amount to a bit above $1000 for events generally. In principle the student government must be viewpoint-neutral in its funding decisions, but I'm not sure how it is in practice, and in any event such a requirement is very hard to enforce in discretionary judgment such as student government funding decisions.) L.O.G.I.C. reports that they have rescheduled the debate for May 1, and that they will be able to fund the security guards; but they will bear a cost, and a cost that stems from the possibility that thugs will try to disrupt the event.

So those are what seem to me to be the facts. Now to my thoughts on how the First Amendment and academic freedom principles play out here.

1. If the event took place in a traditional public forum, such as on a sidewalk or in a park, the government would not be allowed to charge organizers money (or require organizers to spend money) when the amount was based on the expected public reaction to the speech. That's the holding of Forsyth County v. Nationalist Movement (1992), which struck down a permitting scheme that did turn on the likely security costs:

The fee assessed will depend on the administrator's measure of the amount of hostility likely to be created by the speech based on its content. Those wishing to express views unpopular with bottle throwers, for example, may have to pay more for their permit.

Although [the county] agrees that the cost of policing relates to content, it contends that the ordinance is content neutral because it is aimed only at a secondary effect — the cost of maintaining public order. It is clear, however, that, in this case, it cannot be said that the fee's justification "'ha[s] nothing to do with content.'"

The costs to which petitioner refers are those associated with the public's reaction to the speech. Listeners' reaction to speech is not a content-neutral basis for regulation. Speech cannot be financially burdened, any more than it can be punished or banned, simply because it might offend a hostile mob.... This Court has held time and again: "Regulations which permit the Government to discriminate on the basis of the content of the message cannot be tolerated under the First Amendment."

2. Nonetheless, this event would not take place in a traditional public forum, which must remain open for untrammeled public speech. It is to take place in a university building that the university has opened up to student speech. Such a building is a "designated public forum," and while viewpoint-based restrictions are generally impermissible even in a designated public forum, content-based or speaker-based limitations on the forum (e.g., "we'll open this forum only for curriculum-related speech," "we'll open this forum only for student-run groups," or likely "we'll open this forum only for speech that doesn't involve profanity") are permissible.

Would fees or spending requirements based on the likely response to a group's viewpoints be viewpoint-based, and thus unconstitutional even in a designated public forum? Or would they just be content-based limitations on the forum and thus constitutional, since the university doesn't care at all about the debaters' viewpoints as such but only about the possible misconduct that the debaters may arouse among their enemies? I think the answer is that they would be viewpoint-based and therefore impermissible, but the viewpoint-based/viewpoint-neutral distinction is notoriously vague and underdefined in cases such as this one, so the answer is not clear.

3. But it seems to me that regardless of the First Amendment outcome, academic freedom principles should lead the university to pay all the security costs itself. It looks like L.O.G.I.C. will be able to pay for the private security; but many groups might not be able to, and even L.O.G.I.C. might not be able to pay if the expected counterprotest is large enough. Sometimes, the thugs' threatened disruption would get the event shut down, or at least moved off campus to a park.

So the question is: Should the university let the thugs drive debate on important and controversial issues off the university campus? I think the answer is that it should not.

I sympathize with the desire to save money that could be used for other academic purposes. I sympathize with the concern about violence (though I think it's to the university's credit that it will pay the great majority of the costs of deterring and containing the possible violence, rather than blocking the event or requiring student groups to pay for police protection).

Still, it seems to me most important that the university take a stand, even at some cost, in favor of protecting free speech and against those who are threatening to disrupt the speech. If the university doesn't do it, and the thugs win, that will just promote more thuggery in the future. Behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated.

Recall also that, thanks to Chancellor Abrams' sound decision to provide police protection at UC expense, the debate now is over sums that are relatively modest for the university. But the sums are not modest for the groups involved, and may in fact lead to some events' being canceled. If $1000-2000 extra for the relatively rare event that requires a good deal of security is the price to be spent for defending free debate at the university against the goons, that seems to me a price the university should be willing to pay



Australia: Another Leftist speaks up for a return to educational standards

REVIEW of "Dumbing Down" by Kevin Donnelly. Review by much-published Leftist historian Ross Fitzgerald . He writes that Kevin Donnelly is a first-class polemicist hammering the postmodernists wrecking Australian schools

AS a liberal-humanist and member of the Left, I still find it disconcerting that so-called progressivists continue to oppose selective schools, unambiguous academic standards and the teaching in our schools of distinct disciplines such as history, geography, science, mathematics and English. This is because, for the working class, high-quality education represents the most effective avenue for social mobility and for ascending the ladder of economic and intellectual opportunity.

Kevin Donnelly is a first-class polemicist in the best sense of that word. In his regular contributions to The Australian, his provocative book Why Our Schools are Failing (2004) and now in Dumbing Down, he focuses attention on the pernicious effects of outcomes-based and politically correct curriculums and the impact of the so-called culture wars on our primary and secondary schools and, by implication, ouruniversities.

For the record, Donnelly and I were both on a committee appointed by then federal education minister Brendan Nelson to introduce the teaching of civics in our schools. Unlike Donnelly, I am a member of a committee reporting to Education Minister Julie Bishop, which oversees the teaching of values in our schools.

In Dumbing Down, Donnelly is particularly strong in dealing with the teaching of history and English. With regard to Australian history, it is difficult to disagree with his contention that many students leave school "with a fragmented and superficial understanding of the past".

He usefully reminds us what the distinguished conservative historian Geoffrey Blainey actually said in his now famous-notorious 1993 John Latham memorial lecture. Blainey argued that what he termed the black-armband view of Australian history "might well represent the swing of the pendulum from a position that had been too favourable, too self-congratulatory, to an opposite extreme that is even more unreal and decidedly jaundiced". Blainey in fact acknowledged that the stories, contributions and sufferings of women, indigenous Australians and of non-Anglo-Celtic migrants had too often been ignored. Hence he maintained that "it is wrong to ignore the sins of the past and that what is needed is a balance between celebrating our achievements and acknowledging our past mistakes".

Donnelly is also right on the money when he discusses the deleterious effects of English departments in Australian universities being recast as centres for cultural studies and of school children no longer required to be taught the basic rules of spelling, grammar and syntax. He rightly accepts that there is "a certain amount of truth in the argument that education can be used as an instrument to enforce control and to impose a one-sided view of the world". As Blainey acknowledged, the way Australian history was taught in our schools in the 1950s and '60s "undervalued indigenous history and uncritically promoted Australia's British heritage and the benefits of Empire". At the same time, it is important to stress that the rules of grammar and syntax, and of basic mathematics, remain the same "whether taught by a socialist or a capitalist".

In his 1869 article, On General Education, no less a person than Karl Marx argued that "Nothing (should) be introduced either in primary or higher schools that admitted of party and class interpretation. The rules of grammar, for instance, could not differ, whether explained by a religious Tory or a free thinker."

Sometimes Donnelly's stress on proper style and correct spelling, grammar and syntax comes back to bite him: too often in Dumbing Down he resorts to the worn-out phrase "of course" and once at least refers to "its principle conclusions".

Nevertheless, he usefully attacks the stupidity of entrenched notions of cultural relativism, which maintain that there is nothing inherently worthwhile about particular cultures and that all cultures are of equal worth. As he argues, this approach "ignores the fact that some cultural practices such as female circumcision, misogynism and sati (where wives throw themselves on their husbands' funeral pyres) are unacceptable in the West and that values such as tolerance, compassion, the rule of law and being committed to a free and open society are culturally specific."

Both the Coalition Government under John Howard and the ALP under Kevin Rudd have rightly nominated education as a key issue leading up to this year's federal election. It behoves us all as citizens and parents to ask, for example, why it is that competition and academic excellence, a belief in our best students being rewarded and in the central importance of an intellectually rigorous academic curriculum are so often attacked by educationalists as "elitist and socially unjust".

To the contrary, an understanding of the basic building blocks of science, mathematics, history, geography and English is the surest launching pad for culturally and economically disadvantaged children, as is an education system whose standards are assured via competitive examinations, discipline-based curriculums and more formal methods of teaching.

Source

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

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

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

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 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.

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



22 March, 2007

Dumbing-Down of America

Fifty years ago this October, Americans were jolted by the news that Moscow, one year after drowning the Hungarian Revolution in blood, had put an 80-pound satellite into Earth orbit. In December, the U.S. Navy tried to replicate the feat. Vanguard got four feet off the ground and exploded, incinerating its three-pound payload. America was humiliated. Khrushchev was Man of the Year. Some of us yet recall the Vanguard newsreels and the humiliating laughter.

Stunned, America went to work to improve education in math and science, and succeeded. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores of high school seniors began to rise, reaching a high in 1964. However, test scores for high school students have been falling now for 40 years. In 1984, the Reagan administration issued "A Nation at Risk," documenting the deterioration of American public education.

More trillions of dollars were thrown at the problem. And if one judged by the asserted toughening up of courses and rising grades of seniors, it appeared we had made marvelous progress. On March 4, The Washington Times reported: "In 2005, 17 percent of graduates had completed a 'standard' curriculum, 41 percent completed a 'midlevel' curriculum, and 10 percent completed a 'rigorous' curriculum. Fifteen years earlier, the percentages were 9 percent (standard), 26 percent (midlevel) and 5 percent (rigorous). Grade point averages (GPA) increased, as well. The average overall GPA increased from 2.68 in 1990 to 2.98 (virtually a B level) in 2005.

However, it is all a giant fraud, exposed as such by the performances of high school seniors on the National Assessment of Educational Progress exams known as the "nation's report card." An NAEP test of 12th-grade achievement was given to what The New York Times called a "representative sample of 21,000 high school seniors attending 900 public and private schools from January to March 2005." What did the tests reveal?

-- Since 1990, the share of students lacking even basic reading skills has risen by a third, from 20 percent to 27 percent.

-- Only 35 percent of high school seniors have reached a "proficient" level in reading, down from 40 percent.

-- Only 16 percent of black and 20 percent of Hispanic students had reached a proficient level in reading.

-- Among high school seniors, only 29 percent of whites, 10 percent of Hispanic students and 6 percent of black students were proficient in math.

This is only the half of it. Among the kids whose test scores on reading and math were not factored in were the 25 percent of white students and 50 percent of black and Hispanic kids who had dropped out by senior year. Factor the dropouts back in, and what the NAEP test suggests is that, of black kids starting in first grade, about one in eight will be able to read at the level of a high school senior after 12 years, and one in 33 will be able to do the math. Among Hispanic kids, one in 10 will be able to read at a high-school senior level, but only one in 20 will be able to do high-school math.

Yet, as columnist Steve Sailor writes on VDare.com, the Bush-Kennedy No Child Left Behind Act mandates "that all children should reach a proficient level of academic achievement by 2014." We're not going to make it. We're not even going to come close.

Why are so many Americans ignorant of the depths of failure of so many schools? As Sailor explains, it is due to government deceit. "Not surprisingly, practically ever single state cheats in order to meet the law" mandating a rising academic proficiency. "For example, Mississippi ... recently declared that 89 percent of its fourth-graders were at least 'proficient' in reading. "Unfortunately, however, on the federal government's impartial National Assessment of Education Progress test, only 18 percent of Mississippi students were 'proficient' or 'advanced.'"

Hence, a huge slice of the U.S. educational establishment is complicit in a monstrous fraud that, if you did it in business, would get you several years at the nearby minimum security facility. This is corruption. Teachers are handing out grades kids do not deserve. States are dumbing-down tests to make themselves look good. Voters are being deceived about how much kids are learning. There is no real moral distinction between what teachers and educators are doing on a vast scale and what professional athletes do on a smaller scale when they take steroids to enhance performance.

As The Washington Times noted, according to the Digest of Education Statistics, spending for public education, in constant (inflation-adjusted) dollars, rose from $6,256 a year per student before "A Nation at Risk" to $10,464 in the 2002-2003 school year. Taxpayers have thus raised their annual contribution to education by a full two-thirds in real dollars in a quarter century. More than generous.

Under George W. Bush, U.S. Department of Education funding has risen 92 percent in six years, from $35.5 billion in 2001 to $68 billion in 2007. Sinking test scores are what we have to show for it. Taxpayers are being lied to and swindled by the education industry, which has failed them, failed America and flunked its assignment -- and should be expelled for cheating.

Source



Why governments should run schools -- NOT

A cautionary tale from the Australian State of NSW

PRINCIPALS have resorted to conducting a survey of up to 300 public schools to uncover a 10-year backlog of maintenance problems that the NSW Education Department has been fighting to hide. Public schools have been forced to put up with 10 years of stinking, blocked toilets and threadbare carpets and four years of termite infestation and raised asphalt in playgrounds, the survey by the Public Schools Principals Forum has found.

The State Government is refusing to release a document which reveals how school maintenance programs were suspended at a time it was pouring $1.6 billion into the Olympic Games. In a document called the Asset Maintenance Plan, written in 1998, the Education Department estimated the cost of repairs needed in schools around the state and rated them in order of priority. But nine years later the department still insists it is secret and has refused repeated freedom-of-information requests to release it, and rejected the Herald's request last week.

When asked whether money had been diverted from school maintenance and capital works to the Olympics, the Minister for Education, Carmel Tebbutt, said it was a "popular theory". She admitted that repairs had been delayed to make way for other priorities within the state budget over the past 10 years. And she acknowledged that school maintenance was a problem with "a backlog we haven't managed to get on top of". "It has caught up, and we need to address it. That's why we have put in an extra $120 million over four years on top of our existing commitment," she said.

The department refused to release the Asset Maintenance Plan, 1998-2003, after The Sun-Herald lodged a freedom-of-information request for it in 1999. It claimed then, as it did last week after the Herald lodged another request, that the document was exempt because it had been prepared for submission to cabinet.

In 1999, Brian Chudleigh, then the chairman of the Public Schools Principals Forum, raised concerns about the poor physical state of public schools and questions about how much maintenance spending for schools had been put on hold to build Sydney's Olympic stadiums. Mr Chudleigh, who was principal of Robert Townson Primary School, said it was "the best-kept secret in town". "All principals were told back then was that there is no money for school repairs," he said. "We invested millions in the Olympics and perhaps that's why so much of the school infrastructure has been allowed to run down."

The president of the Secondary Principals Council, Jim McAlpine, said the public should know how much money earmarked for education had been spent on the Olympics.

Mr Chudleigh, once again the chairman of the Public Schools Principals Forum, which conducted the survey, said principals were insulted by the low priority the Government had given to basic repairs. Last week the Government pledged $158 million over four years on equipping each school with an interactive whiteboard. It will spend an extra $120 million over four years to tackle maintenance problems. "It is no good to put icing on the cake like whiteboards when we don't have the fundamentals in place," Mr Chudleigh said.

According to the survey of principals, Blaxland Primary School in the Blue Mountains has put up with leaking roofs since 2004 and Kempsey High School has been battling termites for close to four years. Newbridge Heights Primary School says its sewer has been blocked for up to 10 years. Muswellbrook Primary School has complained of leakinging demountables for seven years.

Mr Chudleigh said that at his own school a child had tripped over worn-out carpet and hit their head on a desk. Since the department subcontracted its maintenance about 10 years ago, carpets had become threadbare and painting infrequent. "Instead of replacing carpets, they began patching them with any colour they could get their hands on," he said. Ms Tebbutt said the extra maintenance funding brought the total for maintenance for 2006-07 to $214 million.

Source

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

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

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

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 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.

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



21 March, 2007

UCLA bias

Southwestern Legal Foundation (SLF), a Los Angeles-based advocacy group dedicated to defending individual rights protected by the U.S. Constitution will file a lawsuit against the Regents of the University of California and individual administrators - on behalf of UCLA lecturer Orna Kenan. SLF President, Patrick Manshardt, represents Kenan, in the matter. The basis for the action is that Kenan's constitutional right to free speech and to be free from political discrimination in public employment have been and are currently being violated by UCLA administrators. Orna Kenan, an Israeli-American, who was a lecturer in the History Department for six years at UCLA, was recently stripped of her duties as a lecturer because administrators viewed her as having a pro-Israeli bias.

UCLA's original process for determining Kenan's retention and tenure was tainted by the presence of biased administrators. The original process was conducted so badly, that the faculty's union demanded it be done over. But in the second process, UCLA kept the identity of the decision makers and the proceedings secret. "Ms. Kenan was being discriminated against by administrators who are well-known Palestinian sympathizers who refuse to tolerate an opposing point of view," Manshardt said.

Added Manshardt, "UCLA should be a place where academic freedom is strictly observed, not were dissent or politically correct views are squelched." Manshardt concluded, "the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be left in the Middle East and should not spill over to the making of personnel decisions at a public university in this country."

Source



Interest groups rewrite education study the day it appears

The report in Capitol Weekly last week that "Getting Down to Facts" -- the 1,700-page study-to-end-all-studies of California public education -- called for vast new spending was wrong. As a result, so was I in my cynical post last week about it being one more effort by the discredited education establishment to pretend that all we need to do to fix a broken status quo is fund it better.

Go here to see why I mean. The link is to a 69-page study of schools and funding released today that was my light lunch reading. The study says over and over again that there is no evidence that increased spending leads to better schools. Given its variance with conventional wisdom -- and the education policies seen around America for a quarter-century -- it's pretty astonishing.

But the interest groups say who cares what the report actually says -- let's pretend it says what we wanted it to say. Look at this joke of a press release:

A coalition of community-based and advocacy organizations -- California ACORN, Californians for Justice, PICO California, and Public Advocates -- responded today to the second day release of the cost study findings in the "Getting Down to Facts" studies on school governance and finance for California's K-12 education system.

"Students are demanding a better education. Our schools are overcrowded. I've been in a class with 58 people in it where they mixed up different English classes. And schools are still falling apart in our neighborhoods," said Naydalli Haro, a student at Cabrillo High School in Long Beach, and a leader in Californians for Justice, an organizational member of the coalition.

"We need experienced, qualified teachers, but we're not getting them. There is not enough money for counselors to prepare us to go to college. Teachers use their own money to pay for basic materials in our classrooms. This needs to change," she added.

"While exact figures are not definite, these studies make it clear that California needs to make a substantial new investment in public education -- in addition to system reform --to ensure all students meet expectations," said John Affeldt, who serves as Managing Attorney for Public Advocates, another organizational member of the coalition.

John, John, John, you're drawing your own reading comprehension skills into question. The studies in fact say that without huge changes in the system, it's pointless to spend more money. In other words, we should do huge reforms first, then consider adding more money -- if we can find areas where there is real evidence it will make a difference. I've given the governor loads of grief here (not that he cares), but he got this exactly right:

"Today's studies show that no amount of money will improve our schools without needed education reform. We need to focus on critical school reform before any discussion about more resources. And as I have always said, our schools need more accountability, teachers and administrators need more flexibility, and parents need more information about how their children are performing."

Amen, Arnold.

Source



Hooray! South Australian kids deserting useless education

UNIVERSITY campuses in the country are struggling for students because of a booming regional economy enticing young people away from study and into full-time jobs. An unemployment rate as low as 3.8 per cent in some areas - well below the average for Adelaide - has left about a third of places at country campuses vacant this year.

The University of South Australia's director of regional engagement, Professor Len Pullin, said campuses at Mount Gambier and Whyalla both had a capacity of 85 but only had about 60 students enrolled. "We could take many more than that, there's no doubt about that," he said. It was "tough" getting university enrolments in regional areas, he said, because of the lure of well-paid jobs in growing regional industries and an emphasis on practical training. "Because there's a huge skill shortage, people can look at those instead of coming to uni where you're facing virtually three years of low income," Professor Pullin said.

Easy entry to equivalent courses in metropolitan areas was contributing to regional vacancies, and cut-off scores were not as high as they should be, he said. Courses in business, accounting, nursing and social work are offered at both Mount Gambier and Whyalla, with scores less than 60 required to get into nursing at both. The cut-off for the equivalent metropolitan course was 67.05 this year.

Whyalla mayor Jim Pollock said electricians, boilermakers, labourers and other "hands-on" jobs were in demand across the Upper Spencer Gulf. "I certainly do think it's a lot easier for young people to get jobs in the country areas with mining exploration happening in our region," he said. Limestone Coast Regional Development Board chief executive officer Grant King said many of the jobs in forestry and timber processing, growing industries in the South-East, required some training. "There are plenty of opportunities but it's not easy to come straight out of school to pick up some of the jobs that are in demand," he said.

Source

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

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

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

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 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.

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



20 March, 2007

In defence of "Obsession"

By Wayne Kopping

I am the Director of the film "Obsession" and I am writing in response to the February 26, 2007 article entitled "Film's View of Islam Stirs Anger on Campuses".

First of all, the headline of the piece is terribly misleading - "Obsession" is not a film about Islam as a whole, but rather it discusses the hijacking of Islam by Radical Muslims who seek to foster terrorism against the West.

Second, it is erroneous to claim that "Obsession" will incite Islamophobia or create an anti-Islamic backlash. In "Obsession", we make a clear distinction between 'radical' and 'moderate' Muslims, and we repeatedly declare that the majority of Muslims are not radicals. To date, the film has already been seen by millions of people around the world, and there has not been even one reported incident of violent backlash as a result of 'Obsession'. On the contrary, the film has received acclaim and commendation from leaders, critics and military experts alike, who have found the film to be fair and accurate in its presentation [see here for quotes]. The film only seems to 'stir anger' from those fringe quarters who share the agenda of defending groups with radical tendencies.

To that end, it is with regret that our film finds itself the victim of slanderous attacks from the Muslim Student's Association (MSA), et al, who have succeeded in shutting down at least two screenings of the film on college campuses. Additionally, there have been other reports of intimidation by the MSA, in their quest to stop further screenings of the film.

We denounce the actions of the MSA in the strongest terms. Rather than furthering vital conversation around the issue of Radical Islamic terrorism and helping to bridge the gap between communities, the MSA is stifling valuable dialogue. Our aim is, and has always been, to work together with those moderate Muslims who recognize the threat of Radical Islam -- which is why we were so surprised by the hostility of the MSA, (who purport to be a moderate Muslim group). Moderate Muslims around the world are often the first victims of the Radical Islamist ideology. It is for this reason that we had hoped that the MSA would stand as partners with "Obsession" and declare themselves against the Radicals and the terrorists.

And finally, we take exception to the fact that Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller is quoted in the article as saying that the film was propaganda and "a way to transfer the Middle East conflict to the campus, to promote hostility." The article fails to note that Rabbi Seidler-Felder has the reputation of being an outspoken 'leftist ' who, earlier this year, admitted to assaulting a pro-Israeli journalist at a rally in 2003. The failure of mentioning Rabbi Seidler-Felder's background provides a false impression since it implies that the Rabbi speaks for the Jewish community at large, which he certainly does not.

It is our hope that people will continue to view the film, so that we can nurture an open dialogue and continue on the path of education and understanding.

Source



Britain: Horsy schools are winners

It’s the morning break at Danesfield Church of England school, where the staff are engaged in a rather delicate discussion: which one of them is going to clean up the pile of freshly deposited horse manure on the playground?

Danesfield serves the Somerset town of Williton, in the middle of horsey country. Not red coat and 4x4 Mercedes horsey country but the sort of place where down-at-heel boxes — some apparently held together by bailer twine — are towed by elderly Land Rovers that wheeze up hills. The Quantocks are on one side, Exmoor and the Brendans are on the other.

No surprise then that some of the pupils here pack jodhpurs and hard hats into their kit bags. What might surprise you is that Danesfield is a state middle school where 25% of the pupils have special needs.

It’s one of a growing number of state schools that are taking an interest in riding, once seen as a rather upper crust occupation. The organisers of the schools championships at Hickstead in West Sussex say that nearly half the entries now come from state schools, competing alongside the likes of Millfield, also in Somerset, and Cheltenham Ladies’ college. At Danesfield they are particularly proud of their record as the only state school to win a local jumping competition, organised by Wellington school.

Riding is not only a test of athleticism and skill, but it teaches discipline: the horse is in the care of the rider. It can’t be thrown into a box like a cricket bat at the end of a poor innings: it needs feeding, brushing, and mucking out. Saddles and the rest of the tack need to be polished.

And all this discipline has had a marked effect on the special needs pupils of Danesfield. “What it’s really good for is the children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,” says special needs co-ordinator Sian Moore. “Some of them come from very deprived backgrounds; they can be very aggressive. But learning to respect an animal, learning that an animal has feelings is very good for them.”

The school offers lunchtime riding lessons at a nearby stables, weekly lessons at the Conquest centre in Taunton, which specialises in teaching riders with learning difficulties.

For some, the prospect of riding lessons is much more attractive than maths, English and history. Parent Lorna Webber used to have difficulty getting her son Jake, 12, out of bed for school on a Monday. He has Asperger’s syndrome and found it difficult to concentrate on his work. Now he not only looks forward to riding on a Friday, but his new enthusiasm has had a knock-on effect with his other work. “He’s taken to it really well,” says Lorna. “He wakes up on Monday morning and says, ‘It’s horse riding on Friday’. “It’s really helped him with his other work because now he has something to look forward to at the end of the week. His concentration is better; he can get his head down and focus.”

The headmaster at Danesfield, Ian Bradbury, has been so struck by the impact of riding at his school that he’s considering expanding. “I’m thinking of putting in our own stables,” he says.

Even with a couple of stables, the school riding team will be a long way behind their independent rivals as far as facilities are concerned. Millfield, famed for its sport, is planning its own specialist polo unit to go with its polo field. It is also laying out its own cross country course. Millfield is just one of a number of schools that provides livery — accommodation for pupils who want to bring their own horses.

Stonar, an independent girls’ school near Bath, has stabling for 60 horses and offers riding scholarships. “Many girls choose to keep their own horses at school,” says the prospectus. “An ambitious young horsewoman can combine her studies with equestrian training, whether or not she has her own horse. Our most talented often go on to compete at national and international levels.” A team from Stonar won the national schools jumping championships last year at Hickstead.

But it’s not just the sport and the glory, it’s not just the discipline, it’s not even the boost it can give to pupils who are struggling with their academic work. There are hidden fringe benefits of riding lessons. As one Danesfield teacher told me: “We had a very promising rider here, who went on to work with horses. Thanks to that, she’s now living with a millionaire.”

Source



Australian Left backs private schools

A big backdown from hate-filled class-warfare rhetoric of the recent past

FEDERAL Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd today promised not to cut government funding for private schools. His announcement reaffirms a decision by his predecessor Kim Beazley last year to dump a hit list of elite schools. Mr Rudd said a Labor government would support the rights of parents to choose which school to send their children.

"We will do that by funding all schools, whether they are government, non-government, religious or secular, based on need and fairness," Mr Rudd and Labor education spokesman Stephen Smith said. "A Rudd Labor government will be concerned about the quality of education rather than engaging in a government versus non-government schools debate. That is behind us," they said.

In 2004, then-leader Mark Latham unveiled a list of 67 elite private schools to lose government funding if he was elected. "Previous attitudes by federal Labor to a so-called hit list in non-government schools was wrong," Mr Rudd and Mr Smith said today. Labor's objective was to raise standards in all schools, they said. "We are about supporting schools rather than taking money away from them."

Source

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

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

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

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 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.

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



19 March, 2007

KEEP DEM DARKIES DOWN!

That's the effect of this policy:

It's called Black English Vernacular - or more commonly - Ebonics. In a newsletter to staff, Rochester City School District officials say it is OK for students and teachers to speak Ebonics in class. The newsletter, Diversity Dialogue, suggests teachers use BEV to communicate with students. It says teachers can:

* "Switch into BEV in specific situations or informal discussion."
* "Translate common phrases in Standard English into BEV."
* "Read and retell stories in both BEV and Standard English."

"We need to embrace the diversity they bring into our schools," said the district's Chief of Diversity and Leadership, Michele Hancock. Hancock and Tyra Webb-Johnson, Director of Coaching and Leadership, wrote the newsletter. They are both former elementary school principals. "We want (teachers) to have a better understanding of what BEV is so they can incorporate it into their teaching. That way, they're not alienating the students who are speaking the vernacular and degrading them," Webb-Johnson said.

Ebonics was debated nationally in 1996 when the Oakland, California school district proposed using it in the curriculum. Ebonics is defined as a speech pattern used by some African-Americans that does not follow standard grammar.

"No matter how you speak, you do need to learn the standard form so you can embrace the larger audience of people," Hancock said. "But you can hold on to the richness of your family environment and not feel that is beneath any standard of living." Hancock says many people, including her own son, who graduated from college, know how to "code switch" between Standard English and Ebonics. She said students must learn to be proficient in Standard English. "Many African-Americans are bi-dialectic in their speech patterns. I think it's critical teachers understand those speech patterns so they can effectively, visually show children how they are speaking, but not to denigrate it, but to celebrate it," Hancock said.

13WHAM News showed the newsletter to several black leaders in the community. "Anybody who suggests that these kids will lose their identity because they cannot be, should not be encouraged to speak Ebonics is wrong," said school board member Van White, who is pushing to create an African-American studies department in the district. "We are not African-Americans because of how we speak, but who we are as a people."

"I understand there's a need for teachers and students to meet on some common plane, but I'm not sure expressing that as Ebonics as that plane is a way to go," said City Councilman Adam McFadden. "It's acceptable in hip hop culture, but I don't think anyone would suggest the way forward for students already coming to school with severe educational deficiencies is to maintain a deficient language pattern," said former Mayor William Johnson. Johnson and then-Police Chief Bob Duffy fired a white police officer for writing a memo called "Ghetto Lingo," which claimed to translate English phrases into African-American vernacular.

Hancock and Webb-Johnson say many white teachers come to them for help communicating with students. The BEV suggestion is not a mandate, they said. "It doesn't hurt the kids. What we're saying to the children is we value what you bring. You have value," said Hancock. "What if one of your teachers started speaking Ebonics to you tomorrow? I would think they were crazy!" said Jada Scott, an 8th grader.

"I just think that's outrageous. Ebonics, that's something that kids speak out in the street with their friends, it's not something to be encouraged in the classroom," said Maxine Humphrey, a high school senior. "I think it's not a good idea," said senior Candice Scott. "If we learn to speak Ebonics and we get into the real world, I don't think it's going to be of any help to us." "I don't think it's a very good idea. I think it's more important for the kids to reach up to the school standards, instead of the school coming down to the kid's level," said parent Melynda Scott.

Source



CLASS WARFARE REVIVED IN BRITAIN

Middle-class pupils face losing out on university places if their parents have degrees and professional jobs, after changes to the admissions system. For the first time, applicants will be asked to reveal whether their parents also went to university, as part of moves to attract more working-class students into higher education. The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (Ucas) said yesterday that it had also decided that information on the occupation and ethnicity of applicants' parents should also be made available to admissions officers. Previously this had been held back until after places were offered. Ucas said that the decision was specifically designed to "support the continuing efforts of universities and colleges to widen participation". Bill Rammell, the Higher Education Minister, confirmed yesterday that the Government was backing the changes.

Critics said that the move smacked of social engineering and that it could be used to discriminate against middle-class students. The new questions, which will appear on Ucas forms from next year, will also ask students if they have ever been in local authority care.

Pat Langham, president of the Girls' Schools Association, said that she had grave concerns over the changes. "Why collect this information at all? If they are going to use it to discriminate against those who they feel are privileged - ie, those whose parents went to university - then what would be the point in anyone ever trying to improve themselves? "I was the first person in my family to go to university. My father was a policeman and my mother a dinner lady. But I'm a headmistress with a degree; were I to have children applying for university under these rules, would they be discriminated against because I have worked hard?"

Research shows that being the first member of a family to go to university is the hardest barrier to break. The former Labour leader Neil Kinnock proudly proclaimed in 1987 that he was "the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to get to university."

Ms Langham also suggested that the new questions would encourage applicants to bend the truth. "If your parents were property developers, applicants could mark them down as a `builders'; if they were managing directors you could describe them as `clerks'. Who is going to establish the veracity of these forms?"

Jonathan Shepherd, generalsecretary of the Independent Schools Council, called the changes "nonsense". He said: "What next? Are they going to go back two or three generations or start collecting people's DNA?"

Oxford University said that it had no intention of using the information, adding that it would hold it back from college admissions officers until after offers had been made and acted upon. Mike Nicholson, director of admissions at Oxford, said: "We haven't any evidence to suggest that this type of information has any valid relevance to the decisions we have to make. It would be far more useful to know whether a candidate predicted to get good grades goes to a school where few pupils expect to do well." But Drummond Bone, president of the vice-chancellors' group Universities UK, said it would allow institutions to understand more about how the applicant got to where they are.

The Government has set aspirational targets for universities designed to get more students from state schools and working-class groups. Some funding is contingent on this. But ministers have been frustrated by lack of progress.Between 2002-03 and 2004-05 the proportion of entrants from state schools fell from 87.2 per cent to 86.7 per cent. Over the same period the proportion of students from lower social classes fell from 28.4 per cent to 28.2 per cent.

Although Ucas says that the new questions are optional, opponents believe that those who refused to answer may also be discriminated against. Boris Johnson, the Shadow Higher Education Minister, said that students should have a right to withhold the new information without fear of prejudice.

Source

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

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

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

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 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.

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



18 March, 2007

CALIFORNIA: Deep flaws found in school system

Study says allocation of funds and teacher quality are key problems among many

A yearlong, $3 million evaluation of California public schools by more than 30 education experts reveals a "deeply flawed" system that misdirects school money, emphasizes paperwork over progress, and fails to send the best teachers into the neediest schools. "Getting Down to Facts" -- a collection of 22 studies -- begins with the sobering reminder that despite years of academic reform, California students of all ethnicities still score among the worst in the nation on tests of basic reading and math.

A year ago, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and a bipartisan group of state educators and lawmakers asked the researchers to find out what was wrong with the public school system. All agreed that once the report came out, they would together try to fix the problems. On Wednesday, the Republican governor joined Assembly Speaker Fabian N£¤ez, D-Los Angeles, and state schools Superintendent Jack O'Connell in presenting Part 1 of the two-part research package and vowed to pass laws that will fix the systemic problems -- but next year. "We'll definitely make next year the year of education reform," Schwarzenegger said, noting that this year he is busy dealing with prisons, health care and campaign finance.

Yet, it may take the full year just to understand what the thick study contains, much less determine what new laws will make sense, and identify funding sources for any additional money recommended in Part 2 of the study, to be released today. The "findings may make many of us uncomfortable," said O'Connell, because they are intended to upend financial and employment practices that have been in place for 30 years. Among the many revelations offered up about the 6.3 million-student system are these key points:

-- California's education data systems are so bad that it's impossible for schools to share information about what's working and what isn't, such as how many students are dropping out.

-- The state imposes too many one-size-fits-all rules -- "regulationitis," says the report -- ensuring that principals and other administrators spend more time filling out paperwork than overseeing instruction.

-- California has no coherent way of identifying and keeping quality teachers, or removing ineffective ones.

-- The state hands out education dollars "irrationally," then largely prohibits principals from deciding how best to spend them.

"Solely directing more money into the current system will not dramatically improve student achievement and will meet neither expectations nor needs," according to the report, led by Stanford economist Susanna Loeb and paid for by private foundations. Though it gives no specific solutions, the study highlights such troubling realities as the "complex and irrational" system by which the state finances school districts. The result is that two school districts with a lot in common -- say, many English learners -- often get different amounts of money from the state. That seemingly arbitrary approach stems from arcane rules dating from the 1970s, the study says.

Assembly Education Committee Chairman Gene Mullin, D-South San Francisco, said he intends to propose laws to correct such systemic quirks. The study also faults California's "multitude of teacher policies" for undermining the state's own efforts to get a qualified teacher into every classroom. For one thing, the study (relying on existing research) found that even though "teacher quality matters a lot," the state seems unable to answer the basic question of what a good teacher is. Simply choosing people who have more years of schooling, higher test scores, or better certification is a poor way to predict who will be an effective teacher, the study says.

Children whose teachers have five years of experience generally score higher than children whose teachers have only been on the job for a year or two, the study adds. But it also found that children do just as well with five-year teachers as they do with those that have 10 or 15 years of experience. Nor does scoring well on verbal or general knowledge tests indicate who will be an effective teacher. "Many lower-scoring teachers are much more effective than their higher-scoring colleagues," the study found.

Barbara Kerr, president of the California Teachers Association, all but rolled her eyes at that news. "We've been saying for years that teaching is an art," she said, adding that the best way to see if teachers have potential is to watch them teach for about two years.

More controversial is the report's emphasis on principals' frustration with state regulations that make it hard to fire ineffective teachers. Although Nunez said Wednesday that Democrats are willing to work with that issue, his colleague Mullin indicated otherwise. Mullin is a former San Mateo County teacher of the year. "If that becomes the focus, you'll get into a pitched battle," he said.

Meanwhile, the school system suffers from "regulationitis," meaning that principals are buried under paperwork. As a result, district employees often "focus more on following the letter of the law rather than achieving district (academic) goals," said the report.

Source



Britain: Gifted grade school children to be offered extra activities

A poor substitute for accelerated progession. The kids concerned will still be bored stiff in class

The most gifted 10 per cent of primary school children are to be offered extra classes under plans to track the brightest 400,000 through school and into university. Under the scheme, to be announced by Tony Blair on Monday, children as young as 4 will qualify for summer schools at universities, as well as online tuition, Saturday morning classes and joint activities with bright children from other schools. The scheme will extend the reach of the National Gifted and Talented Youth Agency, which is aimed at 150,000 pupils in state secondary schools. It was set up in 2002 after concerns that middle-class parents were abandoning the state sector for private schools because mixed-ability teaching failed to challenge the brightest pupils.

The initiative coincides with the release of figures from the Independent Schools Council suggesting that the growth in admissions to private schools is being driven by the primary sector. Pupil numbers in state primaries have fallen by almost 300,000, to 4.1 million, since 1997, and prep school numbers have increased by more than 14,000, to 159,000.

Downing Street emphasised, however, that the scheme aimed to ensure that more bright children were identified early on. A source said: "This is about helping each child to reach their full potential. That means identifying and developing the talents of children from an early age, and at the same time giving extra support to children who are struggling."

Under the scheme, each school will be required to appoint a teacher to select the 10 per cent most gifted and talented children. Assessments will be based on teacher assessments and the results of national Key Stage 1 tests that children sit at the age of 7. The term "gifted" is taken generally to apply to children of high intelligence, while "talented" refers to those with outstanding ability in a specific area, such as art, music or sport.

Bethan Marshall, a lecturer in education at King's College London, said: "Some children who are not labelled gifted and talented might feel like failures if they are not selected, particularly if they come from a competitive home. Children who are selected may feel it is an expectation that they have to live up to."

Peter Congdon, an educational psychologist and director of the Gifted Children's Information Centre, said that research had shown that teachers had insufficient training properly to identify gifted and talented pupils. "Teachers tend to choose children who produce good work on paper and who behave themselves. What are known as `gifted disabled' children, who may be very intelligent, but also dyslexic, may be missed, as may the ones who are very bright, but who are misfits," he said.

Alan Smithers, Professor of Education at the University of Buckingham, said: "If it is intended to buy off the middle classes it won't work because what they want is a good all-round education," he said. Sir Cyril Taylor, the chairman of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust and the driving force behind the National Talent Register, the existing table of the 5 per cent of pupils with the best scores for maths and English, has not been consulted over the plan to extend the programme to primary children. Sir Cyril cautioned against diverting attention and funding from the gifted and talented programme for secondary schools and said that neither scheme would work unless those running it knew exactly what they were aiming to achieve. The announcement will coincide with the release of the names of the ten local authorities that are to pilot a scheme to measure pupil progress

Source



Australia: Poor teacher training recognized

State Education Minister Rod Welford has called a meeting of the heads of university teacher training departments to plan an overhaul of teacher training in Queensland. The meeting follows the release of a joint survey by the principals of state, Catholic and independent schools showing that teaching graduates wanted courses overhauled to give them the skills to teach and manage students. Almost a quarter of beginning teachers plan to leave the profession within five years because of the pressures they face.

Mr Welford met with 70 principals in the Cairns area yesterday, and said they were deeply concerned about the levels of practical training given to students. "It's far too little," he said. Some students undertaking four-year degree courses spent less time prac teaching than those undertaking 12-month postgraduate teaching courses, which had struck a better balance.

Mr Welford said as well as discussing the report, the meeting with the deans of education was essential as new national guidelines for teacher training were being drawn up and the Queensland College of Teachers was reviewing teacher training in Queensland. Mr Welford said the report had shown that Queensland schools and principals were the best in Australia at inducting new teachers into schools. "They deserve a big tick for this," he said.

The Minister's view was supported by first and second year teachers at St Rita's College Clayfield, Monya Duplessis, 23, Anna Sayers, 36, John Mundell, 29. The three beginning teachers said they were being mentored and supported by their department heads and were guided in how to handle issues such as parent-teacher interviews. Even with strong support, however, they find their 7.30am to 5pm days a challenge. "You have to be constantly on the ball and there is very little down time," Mr Mundell, a University of Queensland graduate said. He spent 26 weeks of his 18 month Bachelor of Education degree prac teaching and found the experience invaluable.

Ms Duplessis, a QUT graduate, said her lecturers prepared her well for the challenges of prac teaching in schools at Shailer Park and Woodridge. "If you are equipped with the skills and if you are prepared it is not too much of a problem."

Ms Sayers, a former marketing and business executive who completed her teacher training part-time at the Australian Catholic University said life would be much harder for teachers in smaller rural and remote schools with fewer resources. Principal Sister Elvera was concerned by the report's revelation that 27 per cent of beginning teachers are asked to teach subjects in which they are not trained. "I think it would be very very difficult and the students would soon be aware of the fact," she said.

Source

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

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

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

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 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.

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



17 March, 2007

Early Years Foundation Stage: UK Childhood Indoctrination

Post lifted from Random Observations. Melanie Phillips also has some scathing observations on this. Her summary: "This surely is the Nanny State gone stark staring mad"

It is just me, or is this UK precedent, reported in the Telegraph, distinctly creepy?

Babies will be given marks for crying, gurgling or babbling under the Government's new curriculum for 0-5 year olds which all nurseries must follow.

Playgroups and childminders will also need to show that they help babies make progress in 69 areas of education and development or risk losing funds.

The new Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum lays down how children are expected to develop from birth to the end of the first year of compulsory schooling, the year in which they turn five. The document, which has the force of law, was published yesterday alongside a book of guidance and cards containing the main requirements and underlying principles.

And of course:

By three years and four months, children will begin citizenship lessons so they understand that "people have different, needs, views, cultures and beliefs, that need to be treated with respect".

What does it mean to be a British citizen? It means recognizing others are different. Is that it? Different how? And what does "respect" actually entail?

This working document [pdf, as HTML] on the curriculum reveals there's a huge focus on indirectly instilling cultural relativism in 3-year-olds though their caregivers. In fact, it's apparently the first thing that pops into the authors' minds:

The first page of this document states that it is to be ’a single framework for care, learning and development for children in all early years settings from birth to the August after their fifth birthday’. This statement has huge implications for racial equality. It means those responsible for working with young children must:

* have an understanding and knowledge about how racism* is deeply embedded in our society and its implications for working with all children and their families

* ensure that every child is equally cared for. This means ensuring equality of treatment, being knowledgeable about the needs, family background, culture, religion (or none) ... of every child, being observant and watchful about their experiences within the setting and being aware and understanding of any potential racial prejudice or discrimination a child may experience or manifest and how to address them effectively...

* encourage every child equally to develop ... their ability to stand up for themselves about fairness and justice as well as standing up for others who are treated unfairly

How to break this down? First, let's note that little tiny asterisk next to the word "racism", where the footnote reveals "racism" doesn't simply mean actual racism -- which all good-minded people oppose -- but rather also includes "cultural racism", "enthnocentrism", "institutional racism", and "structural racism."

And what do these various terms mean? For example, here's what "cultural racism" denotes:

The culture of minority groups is seen as flawed in soem [sic] way, and thus as standing in the way of their progress. Unlike post-reflective gut racism, however, cultural racism does not involve belief in the existence of any biological incapacity to change. On the contrary, change is exactly what is sought. Minorities are encouraged to turn their back on their own culture and to become absorbed by the majority culture.

So it turns out these alleged "citizenship" lessons ultimately mean we convince children there is nothing better about British culture than, say, a society ruled by the Taliban. (But certainly not the reverse. Down with assimilation!)

And "institutional racism"?

... institutional racism generally refers to the way that the institutional arrangements and the distribution of resources in our society serve to reinforce the advantages of the white majority... [necessitating] the moral judgment that once the discriminatory consequences of the institutional practices are raised to consciousness, anyone seeking to perpetuated them is guilty of racism

Example: If some minority group is more often arrested for some category of crime, whether the police and lawmakers have racist motives or not, those involved are guilty of "institutional racism" -- and anyone who still insists due process should be racially blind "is guilty of racism", ironically.

So the goal here is, amazingly, neo-Marxist* structural analysis, where the caregiver (and thus, by influence, child) is taught to think in terms of membership groups, rather than as individuals; in terms of relative societal power of those groups rather than goodness or badness of an individual's behavior; and in term of outcomes rather than traditional standards of fairness -- by which I mean applying the same rules equally to all.

And thus the instruction to be "observant and watchful" for "discrimination a child may experience or manifest" means that we watch for traditional ethics and values instilled in children from "family background, culture, [or] religion" and counter it. Indeed, the document further admits the curriculum must "plan how to support children in learning positive attitudes and unlearning any negative attitudes to differences between people... helping children unlearn any prejudiced attitudes..."

Concerning the selection of caregivers, the document adds:

At present there are great differences in qualifications, knowledge and experience about racial equality among providers and practitioners. This means that this document must be explicit about such issues. It points to the considerable need for training for them about equality issues

And, they add, "recruitment practice" (hiring of new caregivers, presumably) must "ensure only those knowledgeable or committed to implement equality are selected." Note the exact phrasing: "those committed to implement equality", apparently in a revolutionary sense. The focus, again, is a desired societal outcome, not merely to prefer individuals who have a heart for small people, or those who will apply the same rules equally to all kids.

In fact, quite to the contrary:

... treating all children equally – this does not mean treating them all in the same way because every child is different from every other one

So the upshot here is that if you want to take care of a child in the UK, you will be gauged and even selected henceforth on your committment to these dogmas.

A nice, efficient way of taking control, it would seem, of "all nurseries" in the UK and turning them into state-run creches -- while halting the transmission of familial and majority moral, religious, and cultural values. (Under the guise of providing "uniform care", of course.) In fact, it seems this particular document addresses nothing else.

So why am I writing this? Not because I wish to defend racism, that's for sure. But what we see is the installation of an entirely different moral paradigm and value set -- one which is rampant in today's university -- into very young children, under the guise of fighting racism. That's why you see so many different words with "racism" appended, like "cultural racism" which is simply the charge of not buying into cultural relativism, framed so to make those who disagree "racists."

And ultimately, I believe this alternative morality create citizens who are conditioned to avoid critical thinking, and who are more malleable to the needs of a strong, centralized government. Dewey would have been proud.



Australian teachers criticize their own education

Graduate teachers say universities are failing to make the grade and want courses overhauled to give them the skills to teach. The 1351 state, Catholic and independent school teachers surveyed in all states in October last year said they needed better training in how to actually teach and manage students. All the teachers canvassed had less than three years' experience.

While 93 per cent said they "loved" or "liked" teaching, almost one in four, or 24 per cent, planned to leave the profession within five years because of the pressures they faced. Much of the pressure resulted from more than a quarter of the teachers, or 27 per cent, who were teaching subjects outside their areas of expertise. This occurs most often in English, maths and religion, but also in science, social studies, languages, the arts, technology and special needs. "At a time when literacy and numeracy are high on both the Commonwealth and State Government agendas, it is a concern that mathematics and English are the two subjects with the highest volume of beginning teachers working outside of their training," the survey report said. Uncertainty of employment was also a major concern, with 54 per cent of the surveyed teachers on contracts.

Among Queensland teachers, 60 per cent rated their practical teaching in schools as excellent or very good preparation to teach effectively. But only 30 per cent said their university pre-service was excellent or very good as teacher preparation. Comments from teachers included:

"The university is out of touch with real teaching."

"The Bachelor of Education was a whole lot of ----. I did not learn anything until I started teaching."

"I was disillusioned with my diploma of education training. I felt that the lecturers were out of touch with today's school environment. They were more concerned with the academic aspect of the degree than the practical hands-on experience that could have really made my transition into teaching so much easier."

"Not enough on behaviour management."

Queensland Teachers Union president Steve Ryan said the findings were no surprise and supported the union's research. "It is certainly a concern to us that good teachers are leaving the system too early," Mr Ryan said. "It is not simply lack of training but workload and stress are also major problems."

In the report, teachers said they valued schools with strong induction programs, saying it made them more likely to remain in the profession, rather than being left to their own devices, with little support. Many also said they were overwhelmed and dispirited because of high workloads and the bureaucratic requirements of state education departments. "I could cope if I could just teach," a teacher said.

Almost half of those surveyed had become teachers after previous careers. Leonie Trimper, the president of the Australian Primary Principals Association, said the wide range of experience of many new teachers was "a rich resource we cannot afford to lose". "We've had 25 reports into teacher training in the past 20 years and little has changed," she said. "It's just not good enough." Geoff Ryan, the chairman of the Association of Heads of Independent Schools of Australia, said: "we need an improvement in the relationship between schools and teacher training institutions".

Source

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

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

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

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 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.

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



16 March, 2007

Britain: Islamic extremists 'infiltrate Oxbridge'

Leading universities including Oxford and Cambridge have been targeted by Islamic extremists who remain widely active on campuses, a prominent academic is warning. Up to 48 British universities have been infiltrated by fundamentalists and the threat posed by radical groups must be "urgently addressed", according to Prof Anthony Glees. The claim calls into question the Government's attempted crackdown on Islamic extremism in universities and casts doubt on claims by Bill Rammell, the Higher Education Minister, that the problem is not widespread.

Prof Glees will warn the Association of University Chief Security Officers (Aucso) next month that the disbanded extremist group, al-Muhajiroun, claims to have infiltrated "the main campuses such as Cambridge, Oxford, the London School of Economics and Imperial College". His speech on "radicalism in universities" also states that at its peak before the July 7 bombings in 2005, al-Muhajiroun had a presence at "more than 48 universities and faculties", and that Omar Bakri Mohammed, the group's founder, claims it is "still operational" in several campuses.

Prof Glees, the director of Brunel University's Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, said: "We must accept this problem is widespread and underestimated. Unless clear and decisive action against campus extremism is taken, the security situation in the UK can only deteriorate." Following a report from Prof Glees showing that 31 universities and colleges had hard-line Islamic groups within their campuses, the Department for Education and Skills last year issued guidelines on dealing with any extremism.

Student Islamic societies have faced growing scrutiny after it emerged that one of 12 men charged in connection with the alleged plot to blow up transatlantic airliners was president of the Islamic Society at London Metropolitan University. Last year, Aucso launched a "counter-terrorism" group to tackle the spread of Islamic fundamentalism on campuses.

Prof Glees called on the Government to provide extra investment in campus security and urged university officials to interview undergraduates to ensure that they were bona fide students.

A spokesman for Oxford University said: "We always take any extremism seriously and work closely with the police on any form of extremism that might affect our students or staff." A Cambridge University spokesman said he was not aware of any current extremist activity but that the university "remained vigilant". The Government's controversial guidance asked university staff to "monitor" student Islamic societies and report any "Asian-looking" students they suspected of extremism to the security services. Student groups attacked the move as "bearing on the side of McCarthyism". Other critics suggest that the guidelines are widely ignored. Chris Pope, an associate fellow of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies, said: "My understanding is that this problem is ongoing and expanding in some campuses."

A spokesman for Universities UK, the umbrella group for British vice-chancellors, said: "In the rare event of such problems, universities work very closely with the police and other authorities."

In a recent report from a London-based Arabic newspaper, Anjem Choudary, the former head of al-Muhajiroun in Britain, who joined the group as a student at the University of Surrey, confirmed that while the movement officially disbanded in 2005, "the students of Omar Bakri continue to preach on campuses".

Last year, Dhiren Barot, said to be al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's "UK general", was jailed for 40 years for planning terrorist attacks. Barot, 34, faked his identity in order to study at Brunel University. The London School of Ecomonics and Imperial College were unable to comment. Mr Rammell said: "Our assessment has not changed. Violent extremism in the name of Islam is a real, credible and sustained threat to the UK and there is evidence of a serious, but not widespread risk of violent extremism in the name of Islam on our university campuses."

Source



British university is accused of censoring lecture on Islamic anti-Semititism

The University of Leeds was accused of infringing free speech last night when it cancelled a lecture on "Islamic anti-Semitism" by a German academic. Matthias Koentzel arrived at the university yesterday morning to begin a three-day programme of lectures and seminars, but was told that it had been called off on "security grounds".

Dr Koentzel, a political scientist who has lectured around the world on the antiSemitic ideology of Islamist groups, told The Times there were concerns that he would be attacked. He said that he was "outraged" that his meetings had been cancelled and had yet to receive an explanation. The university, which acted after complaints from Muslim students, denied that it was interfering with the academic freedom of Dr Koentzel, and said that proper arrangements for stewarding the meeting had not been made. The lecture, entitled "Hitler's Legacy: Islamic antiSemitism in the Middle East", was organised by the university's German department and publicised three weeks ago. A large attendance had been expected.

Dr Koentzel, a former adviser to the German Green Party, said: "I have been told that it has had to be cancelled for security reasons. It seems there were concerns that there could be violence against my person. "I have lectured in lots of countries on this subject. I gave the same talk at Yale University recently, and this is the first time I have been invited to lecture in the UK. Nothing like this has ever happened before - this is censorship. "It is a controversial area but I am accustomed to debate. I value the integrity of academic debate and I feel that it really is in danger here. This is a very important subject and if you cannot address it on university property, then what is a university for?"

Dr Koentzel, a research associate at the Vidal Sassoon International Centre for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said that he had been shown two e-mails that had been received, which objected to his lecture. One, apparently written by a student, said: "As a Muslim and an Arab this has come to me as a great shock. The only intention that you have for doing this is to increase hatred as I clearly regard it as an open racist attack."

Ahmed Sawalem, president of the university's student Islamic Society, confirmed that he had contacted the office of Professor Michael Arthur, the Vice-Chancellor, to register an official complaint. "The title of the talk is provocative and I have searched the internet to read his writings and they are not very pleasant," Mr Sawalem said. "We are not opposed to freedom of expression. We just sent a complaint, we did not ask for the talk to be cancelled."

The university authorities contacted the German department on Tuesday and asked for a change in the title. The department agreed to relabel the talk as "The Nazi Legacy: the export of antiSemitism to the Middle East". Yesterday morning, the head of the German department, Professor Stuart Taberner, was called to a meeting with the Vice-Chancellor's staff and the head of security. After the meeting, Dr Koentzel's lecture and workshops were cancelled.

Annette Seidel Arpaci, an academic in the German department, said: "This is an academic talk by a scholar, it is not a political rally. The sudden cancellation is a sell-out of academic freedom, especially freedom of speech, at the University of Leeds." A spokes-woman for the university said that it valued freedom of speech and added that the cancellation of the meeting had been a bureaucratic issue. "The decision to cancel the meeting has nothing to do with academic freedom, freedom of speech, antiSemitism or Islam-ophobia, and those claiming that is the case are making mischief," she said.

What he wrote

" AntiSemitism based on the notion of a Jewish world conspiracy is not rooted in Islamic tradition but, rather, in European ideological models. The decisive transfer of this ideology to the Muslim world took place between 1937 and 1945 under the impact of Nazi propaganda . . . "Although Islamism is an independent, antiSemitic, antimodern mass movement, its main early promoters, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Mufti and the Qassamites in Palestine, were supported financially and ideologically by agencies of the German National Socialist Government."

Source

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

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

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

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 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.

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



15 March, 2007



A puny step forward

The Aspen Institute's Commission on No Child Left Behind recently released Beyond NCLB: Fulfilling the Promise to Our Nation's Children, a report it touts as offering gutsy proposals to solve the nation's educational problems. "It's time to take a bold step forward and commit to significantly improving NCLB," declares a statement on the report's back cover, with its striking American flag and blue-sky motif. "We must insist on high achievement for all students. Our nation's children deserve it."

So what sort of revolutionary changes to the status quo does the report propose? None, really. Sure, it calls for a few new-ish things, like voluntary national standards, focusing on teacher effectiveness instead of credentials, and tracking the performance of individual students, but nothing really bold. Indeed, most of the recommendations would add regulations to a law already larded with them, and none would do what's necessary to truly transform American education: Decentralize our hidebound, government-controlled education system and take power away from the teachers' unions, administrator associations, and other special interest groups that dominate it.

Of course, not all interest groups love everything the commission recommended. National Education Association President Reg Weaver, for instance, complained about the report's teacher effectiveness proposals. But small quibbles aside, the report has been praised by numerous establishment groups, such as the Public Education Network and the National Association of Elementary School Principals, and public officials ranging from Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, a Democrat of Massachusetts, to U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.

If boldness is what you're after, those are not good signs. But what reform would fit the bill? Something that doesn't just tweak our top-down, command-and-control educational system -- or make it worse, like federal standards -- that's what. Something that breaks the stranglehold of special interests and gives power to the parents the system is supposed to serve. Something that would enable parents to move their kids and tax dollars out of bad schools and into good ones, and would release parents and children from their present state of dependence on policymakers and bureaucrats. That something is school choice.

Unfortunately, no reform recommendation of that sort is ever likely to come from a national commission, because such bodies are almost always stacked with members of the very interest groups that would lose power were parents able to take their children and tax dollars out of unsatisfactory public schools. The Aspen commission, for instance, was dominated by insiders, including several former officials in the U.S. Department of Education and other federal entities, a one-time teachers' union president, and numerous other individuals whose livelihoods have come from public schooling. And Aspen isn't alone. Tough Choices or Tough Times, a recent report from the National Center on Education and the Economy, was also the work of a commission heavy on public education and political insiders, and while it advocated some new flexibility for schooling, it also called for expand-the-mold reforms, like vastly increasing teacher pay.

Thankfully, truly bold reform doesn't have to come from a national commission. Indeed, just two weeks ago it came from the state of Utah, where Governor Jon Huntsman signed the nation's first-ever universal school choice bill into law. Utah's new program is far from perfect -- it sets low voucher amounts and largely holds districts harmless when kids leave -- but by giving parents real power, it nonetheless begins to address the fundamental flaw in American public education.

Of course, the special interests aren't taking this lying down. Utah's School Boards Association, Association of School Superintendents, and PTA, among other groups, have joined forces and threatened to take the program to court, just as their cousins in other states have done whenever choice has been proposed or enacted. As revolting as these attempts to keep children captive in public schools are, though, they do have one silver lining: They make it very clear that school choice is a truly bold step forward.

Source



Stalinists in South Australian education

Year 12 board wants to put parents in the Mushroom Club -- kept in the dark and fed bullsh*t. "The children of the light love the light and the children of the darkness love the darkness" -- to paraphrase Jesus (John 3: 19-20)

The state's examination board is attempting to suppress by law the Year 12 performances of individual schools. The Senior Secondary Assessment Board of South Australia has asked the State Government for new laws to prevent public comparisons between the performances of public and private schools. Under a legislative review to be in place by 2010, the Government is about to force the SSABSA to release these details to the Education Department and the Education Minister, but the board wants to keep this from being extended to public release.

Its existing policy is only to publish statewide results, which do not include variations between individual schools or between government, independent and Catholic systems. Individual schools are able to obtain their own results and compare them with statewide averages through a password-protected website administered by SSABSA.

The board, which sets and approves curriculums and assesses student achievement for Years 11 and 12, is a State Government authority, but is not directly answerable to the Education Minister. Under the Government's review, it will be replaced by a new body called the SACE Board, which will be answerable to the minister. SSABSA says its proposal to block the public release of school performance details would avoid the "damaging effects" of comparing these. [Quite a confession of public school failure!]

Chief executive Janet Keightley said the board was "very clear" that the school a child attended was a "small contributing factor" in academic achievement. "To rank schools on this basis is very, very misleading and very dangerous because it means people will make serious decisions on very, very poor quality information," she said. "Any kind of simplistic comparison is not advantageous."

Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop said yesterday that parents had a right to know the academic standards and overall performance of schools and poorly-performing schools would be shown up by the release of results. "If parents were provided with this information, state governments would have to answer to them for the failings of state education systems," she said.

A spokeswoman for SA Education Minister Jane Lomax-Smith said the State Government did not have a position on the issue. "The Government will develop a policy when in possession of all the facts and responses from the public consultation," she said. South Australian Institute for Education Research president Ted Sandercock said researchers needed the data. "Quite often, you want to see what are the differences and what are they due to," he said. Association of Independent Schools executive director Garry Le Duff said he wanted the same access to information as the Education Department. "It should be released to individual schools and all school sectors, not just to the government sector," he said.

Source

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

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

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

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 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.

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



14 March, 2007

A California comparison: Experimenting with school choice

Policymakers, unlike scientists, don't have the luxury of conducting controlled experiments to test competing solutions to social problems. But when it comes to reforming failing public schools, something close to that is occurring in two California school districts: Oakland and Compton. The districts, comparable in many respects, are opting for completely different approaches to fixing their schools. And so far, Oakland's policy of giving parents more choice is showing far more success than Compton's strategy of micromanaging classrooms.

Oakland and Compton are not identical, of course. Compton, located in the outskirts of Los Angeles, does not have the gorgeous San Francisco Bay scenery of Oakland. It has a quarter of Oakland's population and no wealthy neighbors. But they are both high-crime inner cities. Both have a large Hispanic and black population, and a small Asian and white population. Average family incomes are comparable-about $40,000 for Oakland and $33,000 for Compton. They both became targets of a state takeover and a large financial bailout in the last decade. And the federal No Child Left Behind Act for two years in a row has ranked them both among California's 162 districts "in need of improvement." In short, the two districts have similar student bodies, similar challenges, and-until now-a similar history of failure. But Oakland is beginning to break away from this history, and the reason is the weighted-student-formula program it embraced some years ago and fully implemented last year.

Under this program, kids are not required to attend their neighborhood school, especially if it is failing. Rather, they can pick any regular public or charter school in their district and take their education dollars with them; more students therefore means more revenues for schools. Furthermore, as the name suggests, the revenues are "weighted" based on the difficulty of educating each student, with low-income and special-needs kids commanding more money than smart, well-to-do ones. Schools have to compete for funding, but the upside is that they have total control over it.

Compton has stuck to a completely different approach that does not involve empowering parents-or decentralizing control to schools. Instead, it has tried to fix its failing schools by mandating "classroom inputs." To this end, all Compton schools over the last few years have been ordered to reduce class size by 12 percent, improve teachers' credentials, adopt a tougher curriculum, and even clean up bathrooms.

What are the results so far? Oakland schools have shown a remarkable flexibility in responding to student needs, while Compton has stagnated. In 2003-04, for instance, Oakland's high schools offered 17 Advanced Placement classes. Last year, they increased this total to 91, or about one AP class for every 143 students. By contrast, Compton's AP offerings went up by two that year, to one class for every 218 students. Oakland students also are taking high-level math and science courses more frequently. About 800 high school students studied first-year physics last year-nearly triple the number taking the course in the 2004 school year.

More to the point, of course, are student-performance measures. Oakland kids have shown major improvement on the California High School Exit Examination, which all students must pass in English and math before graduating from high school. Sixty-two percent of high school students passed the English-language-arts portion, compared with 57 percent in 2005-a 5-point gain-and 60 percent passed math, a 6-point jump from the year before. By contrast, Compton showed no gains in English-staying stuck at 58 percent-and posted a 2-percentage-point drop in math, from 50 percent to 48 percent.

Similarly, Oakland's score on the state's Academic Performance Index-a numeric grade that California assigns to its schools based on the performance of their students on standardized tests-went up by 19 points. Compton, in contrast, gained only 13 points. Yet even this overstates Compton's performance, because almost all of its gains came at the elementary level, where students are not so intractable. Compton's middle schools lost an average of 6 points, while Oakland's gained an average of 16 points. Meanwhile, half of Compton's high schools lost points on the API score-including Compton High, where now fewer than 6 percent of males are proficient in reading, and fewer than 1 percent in algebra. Conversely, Oakland high schools gained, on average, 30 points. Even Oakland's economically disadvantaged and limited-English students have shown major improvements. In 2006, its economically disadvantaged students gained 60 percent more on the performance index than Compton's, and its English-language learners gained 120 percent more.

Nor is Oakland's progress in any way anomalous. Oakland borrowed the weighted-student program from San Francisco, where the approach has already had six years of success. San Francisco kids in every grade level in every subject have consistently performed above the state average. Since 2001, its low-income students have posted gains of 83 points, 16 percent more than Los Angeles' and 25 percent more than Compton's. Last year alone, San Francisco students overall earned the highest API test scores of any urban district-97 points higher than Los Angeles and 150 points higher than Compton. Even San Francisco's minority, poor, and special education students have shown major improvements. English-language learners, a challenging group, gained 12 points in 2006, compared with zero points for Los Angeles'. Similarly, San Francisco's special education students gained 19 points that year, whereas Los Angeles' gained only 1 point.

What's more, a wide array of schools have cropped up in the city, catering to practically every student need and interest by offering dual-language programs, college-preparatory classes, performing-arts electives, and advanced math and science courses. In fact, every public school in San Francisco is fast developing its own unique blend of size, pedagogic style, and course offerings.

Meanwhile, Oakland hosted a daylong fair last month at which the district's 120-plus schools could vie with each other to entice parents, handing out information about course offerings, highlighting accomplishments, and answering questions. In short, schools are being forced to sell themselves to each and every parent. Compton and the majority of low-performing schools nationwide that can count on a captive audience have no such plans.

What's more remarkable is that Oakland's turnaround happened at a time when the state had initiated a hostile school takeover, triggering protests from the community and the school board. The state-appointed administrator for the Oakland schools was forced to hire a bodyguard because of threats to his life at community meetings. But because the weighted-student formula decentralized control to individual schools and effectively put parents in charge of enforcing accountability, principals were insulated from this ugly infighting, allowing them to focus on what matters: students. In essence, this mechanism proved stronger than district politics.

The success of the weighted-student-formula program has not gone unnoticed. The Washington-based Thomas B. Fordham Foundation last year touted the approach as an important tool for school reform. Former U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige has praised it in The New York Times. Although most teachers' unions resist handing control of school funds to principals, out of fear that this might dilute their ability to enforce such union work rules as seniority-based promotions, some unions have given cautious approval to the concept.

Nationwide, close to 10,000 schools are considered to be failing under the No Child Left Behind Act, hundreds for more than five years. Yet less than 1 percent of students in these schools manage to transfer to a higher-performing school, even though they have that right under the federal law. Political leaders can change this by building on Oakland and San Francisco's modest experiment in school choice. No student deserves anything less.

Source



New Jersey Judge Orders Penal Charges Against Mother for Home-Schooling

Honorable Thomas Zampino of the Family Division of the New Jersey Superior Court has ordered penal charges against a home-schooling mother of seven. According to a report by Matt Bowman on the website constitutionallycorrect.com, the mother's supposed infraction is home-schooling her children without supervision from the local school board - a right explicitly upheld in New Jersey law.

According to the court's opinion, Tara Hamilton is the defendant in a suit brought against her by her recently estranged husband, Stephen Hamilton. Stephen brought the suit in an attempt to force Tara to enroll their school-age children, aged 12 to 4 years, in parochial school because he believes that they are not receiving an adequate education while being home-schooled. All seven children currently reside with Tara.

According to the court document, Stephen claims that "continued home schooling is not in the children's best interest, they lack socialization skills and that it is too difficult for the mother to teach the children at five different grade levels. The father argues that the children are not receiving an education equivalent to a public or parochial school."

Prior to the marital discord that led to this suit, the Hamiltons had similarly home-schooled all of their school-age children.

In an effort to implement "certain basic requirements and safeguards", the judge ordered Tara to submit her home-schooling children to standardized tests supplied by the local school district despite NJ law which says, "A child educated elsewhere than at school is not required to sit for a state or district standardized test."

The judge also ordered the local school board to file a suit against Tara in order to be able to "evaluate the instruction in the home," a requirement only permissible if the local school board determines that there is credible evidence that the home education is below the standards of the public school.

Because of NJ's explicit laws protecting the parental right to educate their children at home, the judge had only limited options when it came to personally implementing his philosophies of "monitoring" and "registering" home-schoolers." The judge cautioned that, should the school board refuse to comply with his 'suggestions', the court would "consider, by formal opinion, a request to join those parties to action."

The New Jersey Department of Education website states, "The provision, "to receive equivalent instruction elsewhere than at school," in N.J.S.A. 18A:38-25 permits parent(s)/guardian(s) to educate the child at home." According to New Jersey law, parents desiring to home-school their children are not required to submit any type of communication of intent to a local school board. Parents are also not required to have their home-school curricula approved by a school board.

A NJ school board may only act against a home-schooling parent "If there is credible evidence that the parent, guardian or other person having custody and control of a school-age child is not causing the child either to attend school (public or nonpublic) or to receive equivalent instruction elsewhere than at school." Under those circumstances, the school board is permitted to request the parents/guardians of a school age child provide proof, such as a letter of intent, that the child is receiving "equivalent instruction."

The judge criticized the NJ law and lamented the fact that it upholds the rights of parents to home-school their children without interference from the government. Implying that children being educated by their parents are unsupervised, the judge stated, "This is shocking to the court. In this day and age where we seek to protect children from harm and sexual predators, so many children are left unsupervised."

The judge continued, "In today's threatening world, where we seek to protect children from abuse, not just physical, but also educational abuse, how can we not monitor the educational welfare of all our children?" He then gave the case of a recently found starving child locked "in a putrid bedroom" as an example of what happens when home-schooled children are not "registered and supervised."

In what Bowman refers to as a "judicial temper tantrum" the judge opines, "This is not an attack against home schooling, but rather a statement that it is necessary to register those children for whom this alternative is chosen and to monitor that their educational needs are being adequately nurtured. Judicial interpretation of the statute requires such steps to measure 'equivalent instruction' when the alternative 'elsewhere than at school' is chosen by parents."

Bowman commented on the judge's circumvention of the law by requiring the school board to take the action that he could not, saying, "Well, state law does allow school districts to haul parents into court under state penal law if credible evidence exists that their children's education is improper. Presto! Order the local school district to charge the mom with violation of penal law! Never mind that the school district is not a party to this divorce proceeding. Never mind that "[t]he mere fact that a child has been withdrawn to be home-schooled is not, in itself, credible evidence of a legal violation.""

Bowman summed up the opinion saying, "The court's opinion seethes with contempt for parental primacy in education, for large religious families, and for the democratic process itself. Instead of legal reasoning, the court disgustingly showcases the prospect of children "found unfed and locked in a putrid bedroom."

Bowman concluded by drawing a scary comparison between the actions of this activist NJ judge and the recent human rights violations against a home-schooling family in Germany. "It can seem distant when we hear news of police raiding homes in Germany and abducting home-schooled children, but in our small world of judicial oligarchy and broken families, Germany is not so far away after all."

To respectfully contact Jon Corzine, governor of New Jersey:

Office of the Governor PO Box 001
Trenton, NJ 08625
609-292-6000

Source

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

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

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

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 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.

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



13 March, 2007

Detroit: Greedy bureaucrats and incompetent unionists combine to stand in the way of improved education for those who need it most

Ida Byrd-Hill hung out at gas stations and McDonald's, passing out fliers that looked like party invitations, to recruit Detroit's high school dropouts back to school. She hustled up funding and donations from Compuware Corp. and others, and opened a small program that caters to dropouts and supports them through graduation. In return for her missionary work to help the students that they failed, the Detroit Public Schools and the Detroit Federation of Teachers are threatening to close Byrd-Hill's school.

Byrd-Hill's story sounds like a morality tale of how not to act unless you want to bring ruin upon yourself -- as the teachers' union and school system continue to do. The school has become a hostage between the two players, while the school district tragically collapses. Byrd-Hill, a former businesswoman, good-naturedly named her program Hustle & TECHknow Preparatory School to lure students to her classrooms housed at Compuware's headquarters. As she puts it: "Corporate America is the ultimate hustle." The school, which opened last year, is a contract program with the Detroit school system and thus is covered by the DFT contract. To keep costs down and classes small, Hustle & TECHknow and other alternative schools like it do not offer the benefits package that unionized teachers have.

As an alternative school, Hustle & TECHknow receives 80 percent of the per-pupil state funding for its 86 students. The district keeps 20 percent, arguing it has to pay for administrative costs. That 20 percent is the issue at hand. Union officials say since the district is saving millions of dollars by contracting out to nonunion alternative schools, it should use those savings to give DFT teachers the raise they haven't had in four years. Unless its gets that raise, the teachers' union is threatening to shut down Hustle & TECHknow and other such schools. These "last chance" programs for dropouts need a waiver from the union to continue receiving their funding from the district.

Byrd-Hill worries her school will run out of funding by spring. "Personally, I have no problem giving teachers what they want," she says. "But then they have to perform. ... The reason why you're seeing a mass exodus from DPS is because of nonperforming teachers." Byrd-Hill is a die-hard loyalist to the union teachers at her children's school, Duke Ellington Conservatory of Music and Art on the east side because they are high-performing professionals. "We love our teachers," she says. "We'd do anything for them."

Her story illustrates the painful reality of today's Detroit schools: The union protects poor-performing teachers, undermining itself, while the district strives to protect its franchise rather than serve students. Hand-in-hand, the two are destroying the city's schools.

In a district that has one of the worst graduation rates of any urban school system in the country and is bleeding students, Detroit Public Schools desperately needs "recovery programs" like Byrd-Hill's to bring back dropouts to its schools.

New union President Virginia Cantrell says she wants her union to take a more practical, conciliatory approach to the district's crisis. In the DFT's recent newsletter, she writes: "We have already begun to build bridges between the DFT and the school district." Byrd-Hill hopes that includes her school. For the sake of her students and the district, we do, too

Source



Australia: Standards for teachers coming

Are we REALLY going to get teachers who can spell and add up?



Teacher graduates will have to meet uniform standards of literacy and numeracy for the first time under a national system to accredit education courses. The draft framework, approved by state and territory teacher registration boards and obtained by The Australian, sets out mandatory requirements that education courses must meet for teachers to be registered in government, Catholic or independent schools across the nation.

The framework, developed by the Australasian Forum of Teacher Registration and Accreditation Authorities, will specify required levels of literacy and numeracy as well as content to be taught in teacher education courses - a minimum four years of full-time study and a minimum amount of practical classroom experience. Institutions will have to provide evidence of "a mix of professional studies, discipline studies and embedded professional experiences (and) ensure appropriate subject content studies," it says.

A spokesman for AFTRAA said the policy would, for example, specify the level of science a student must study to qualify as a science teacher. "At the moment, there aren't explicit requirements that are national and in some places there aren't explicit requirements at all," he said. Teaching courses that fail to meet the standards will not receive accreditation, and the qualifications of their graduates will not be recognised by schools.

The framework comes amid a national debate over the need to increase the standards and professionalism of teachers and moves toward a common school curriculum framework for all states and territories. The Federal Government and the Labor Opposition have both committed to introducing a core national curriculum as a way of improving standards and avoiding syllabuses being hijacked by educational fads. National accreditation of teacher courses is the first step toward national teacher registration and professional standards, which AFTRAA is expected to go on to develop. With a shortage of teachers, particularly in maths and science, national recognition of teacher qualifications is an important step in allowing teachers to move more easily across state borders.

The AFTRAA comprises all state and territory teacher registration boards and was charged by the council of the nation's education ministers to develop national recognition. At present, the accreditation for courses varies widely between the states and territories and this framework will provide mutual recognition, so that a course accredited in one state will be recognised in another. The move effectively sidesteps the federal Government's process for accreditation of teaching courses through Teaching Australia, which is intended to be voluntary. It is considering a model ranking courses using a star system instead of ensuring standards.

The Australian Council of Deans of Education welcomed the framework and its president, Sue Willis, said the deans were strongly committed to a national system for accrediting courses. "We have nothing to fear; teacher education can only benefit from high common standards of accreditation," she said.

But Professor Willis said the council was "totally underwhelmed" by the idea of voluntary accreditation as proposed by Teaching Australia and by using rankings instead of standards. In its reply to Teaching Australia, the ACDE argues that rankings would "significantly compromise the value of accreditation" and that such a system should be separate to accreditation. Professor Willis said the council had argued for national accreditation for the past 10 years and wanted a one-stop shop, so was concerned about how the AFTRAA process would work with Teaching Australia. "We want one accreditation framework, one set of accreditation rules, which everyone applies," she said.

ACDE is also concerned by the lack of representation of teacher educators on the AFTRAA boards, particularly given its intention to prescribe the content of teacher courses. A spokesman for federal Education Minister Julie Bishop welcomed the AFTRAA framework for moving to a national system of accreditation. "The more work that's done in this area, the more likely we are to see a positive change and higher standards in teacher education," he said. The AFTRAA spokesman said that the forum welcomed the involvement of Teaching Australia in the process and there was no reason it could not help co-ordinate the work.

Source

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

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

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

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 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.

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



12 March, 2007

Legalized irresponsibility

Suppose you sent your children to an organization that negligently caused them to be injured, incurring large medical bills. Would it seem unreasonable to expect that organization to admit their negligence and foot the medical costs? If they didn't do so willingly, you might well file a lawsuit to cover the damages. That sort of scenario plays out every day, and damages usually get paid if the organization is truly negligent.

Except... when the organization is the Minneapolis Public School system, the largest in Minnesota. Their response to such a situation? "We have immunity from such lawsuits". Take your children, their injuries, the medical costs, and just lump it.

How can they claim immunity? They discovered an obscure piece of legislation from 1969 that should have been updated or removed but wasn't. It allowed MPS to claim immunity from liability, which also left them free to not purchase liability insurance. How obscure was the law? Evidently MPS was the only district in the state that knew about it, and they carefully avoided telling anyone else. They knew that if the law came to the attention of other districts, they would use it too, causing an outcry that would result in rescinding it. So... they kept it quiet, until the inevitable happened, and the children of two families ran headlong into it.

The injuries happened during an exercise that, in retrospect, seems almost designed to cause problems; having children run around in a dark room, trying to avoid the flashlight beams from each other. Two girls rammed head-first into each other, a not-surprising outcome for running in the dark.

This, unfortunately, is a vivid and typical example of government in action. For most people, it is virtually impossible to avoid sending children to a "public" government school. We are forced to support those schools with our taxes, whether we like it or not, and whether we have children or not. To send our children to a private school, we must still pay for the public schools. Even if we choose to homeschool our children ourselves, as an ever-increasing number of people are doing, we are still paying the same taxes to support the schools our children don't attend. So most of us are forced to send our kids off to public schools.

"It's for the kids" is a mantra the school systems use frequently... especially when they want more tax money. As citizens and parents, we are expected to think about public schools as "our" schools, and of ourselves as part of the school's "community". Here's a quote from the Community section of the website of the Minneapolis Public School system

Our goal is to keep our community informed about various school matters, aware of news and happenings, and engaged in various events district-wide. We are determined to get these messages across through various communications channels, including the use of our very-own radio station KBEM 88.5 FM, as well as our TV station, Cable Channel 15.

Don't they make it all sound cozy and friendly? Keep our community informed? MPS sure used their resources to inform parents about their intent to avoid responsibility for negligent injuries, didn't they?

It isn't just the government schools to blame for this shameful position... the legislature fouled up repeatedly to make it possible. The 1969 legislation shouldn't have been there in the first place, but legislators did "sunset" the immunity after a year. That didn't work either, for when, 30 years later, they went back to delete obsolete laws, they deleted the sunset but not the immunity law, putting the original immunity back into force.

We all make mistakes, and, as private citizens, we have to pay for them. For example, we're required by law to carry liability insurance on our auto policies. If we negligently injure others, we can rightfully be sued for damages. Most of us would do so without laws or lawsuits, as part of our personal moral code.

Government plays by different rules. Many parts of government claim immunity for their actions, but we usually don't know about it until it hits us in the face personally. When you or I make a bad investment or choose a business path that doesn't work, we suffer the consequences. When government does the same, it usually just takes even more money from us to cover up their bad judgement. With no consequences to face, government makes the same stupid mistakes over and over.

Of course, even when the government action is not a mistake, but a deliberate, even immoral, act, the same results occur... no consequences and no change. Sometimes government's actions are obviously planned deceptions, such as the repeated financial bailouts of "public" arenas.

Government is but one of many organizations we deal with on a daily basis, but it is unique in that it holds itself immune from its own actions. For each of us, as individuals, it thus makes great sense to deal with private, responsible entities rather than with government. It is the only way we can be assured of being treated fairly and justly. Logical as that is, government has intruded into almost every aspect of our lives, driving away private options, often leaving us no choice but to deal with them, even when we know that we cannot count on being treated justly.

Source



Leftist avoidance of the education issues

Kevin Donnelly responds to a critique of his new book, saying that Macintyre's review is penned with a "thumbnail dipped in bile". Kevin Donnelly is director of Melbourne-based Education Strategies and author of "Why Our Schools are Failing and Dumbing Down" (Hardie Grant Books). Stuart Macintyre's review of "Dumbing Down" appeared in "The Australian Literary Review" on March 7.

Stuart Macintyre's so-called review of my book Dumbing Down, about the parlous state of Australia's education system, in The Australian Literary Review this month unfortunately teaches the reader more about Macintyre's prejudices and idiosyncrasies than what the book is about.

Macintyre begins his critique by detailing the central role he played in civics projects under the Keating and Howard governments. In the first 880 or so words, we learn that then prime minister Paul Keating personally selected Macintyre to head a review of civics education; that Macintyre, given his unfamiliarity with school curriculum, travelled Australia at taxpayers' expense, researching how civics was taught in schools and how the Kennett government's "draconian policies", to use his words, destroyed Victoria's system of school education.

Readers are also told, notwithstanding an undergraduate degree in English and politics, 18 years teaching secondary school English and social studies and an MEd and PhD in curriculum, that my contribution to discussions about civics education in shared meetings was "restricted to generalities" and "sometimes naive and tendentious". After wading through additional irrelevant and gratuitous comments, such as Kennett government education bureaucrats supposedly describing me as Rasputin and the federal Government employing me as a consultant to the civics education program for a "substantial sum", never quantified but not as much, I would suggest, as some academics earn as a result of Australian Research Council grants, Macintyre finally realises that what he should be doing is reviewing Dumbing Down.

After pointing out some grammatical and other mistakes, Macintyre all too briefly summarises the book's central concerns about falling standards and the politically correct nature of the curriculum. Macintyre also provides a superficial summary of the book's argument that the culture wars of the 1960s and '70s help to explain educational experiments such as outcomes-based education. Macintyre's diatribe finishes with the claim that debates about falling standards and the politically correct nature of the curriculum represent a strategy to divert public attention from the fact that the federal Coalition Government supposedly fails to fund education properly.

Ignored is that state ALP governments have the primary responsibility for funding school education and that the reason federal government funding to non-government schools has increased is because increasing numbers of parents are deserting government schools; the reality, as it should be, is that the money follows the child.

Those who have read Macintyre's book The History Wars, in which he famously compares Prime Minister John Howard with Caligula and extols Keating's big-picture politics on issues such as reconciliation, multiculturalism and the republic, will know, notwithstanding his arguments in support of "academic honesty" and against resorting to "personal abuse", that Macintyre often fails to follow his own advice. When referring to my involvement in civics education, comments such as "He was retained to assist our work by offering specialist expertise but he didn't do much of that" and "Someone from the other side of the table muttered darkly that he was always invigilating the work of the department. Hence his nickname, Rasputin" demonstrate a decided lack of professional integrity.

In arguing that I fail to explain what is meant by outcomes-based education, Macintyre also shows he has either not read the book or, if he has, is guilty of misrepresentation. Not only does the book provide a definition of OBE in its glossary but it also gives a detailed analysis and description of Australia's adoption of OBE in recent years.

Macintyre writes: "The suggestion that outcomes-based education licensed an abandonment of education standards is false: on the contrary, it was an application of evidence-based methodology to the measurement of standards." Not only is such a sentence a prime example of the type of edu-babble that bedevils education, but the claim that Australia's adoption of outcomes-based education is based on evidence that it has been successful, here or overseas, also is wrong. As outlined in Dumbing Down, when outcomes-based education was introduced into Australia, it was experimental, it had been adopted by only a handful of countries and, according to NSW's Eltis report, there appeared little evidence that it had been successfully implemented elsewhere.

Macintyre is also incorrect when he states: "It had taken considerable negotiation for the states and territories to reach agreement in the late 1980s on a set of national statements and profiles that at least identified 'key learning areas'." The facts are that the development ofthe Keating government's national curriculum occurred during the early '90s and most education ministers at the July 1993 meeting inPerth refused to endorse the statements and profiles.

Macintyre states that I am wrong in suggesting Australian students do not perform well internationally, when he writes: "Nor do the standard international studies of student achievement support Donnelly's claims that Australia trails well behind other countries." An unbiased reading of Dumbing Down will show, in relation to achievement, that I never argue that Australia is "well behind other countries"; what I state is that we are in the "second eleven" and consistently outperformed by five to six other countries. I also acknowledge that Australian "students did very well" in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Program for International Student Assessments for 15-year-old students.

Of greater concern, if it were true, would be Macintyre's claim that there is a "paucity of evidence" for my claim, as a result of Australia's adoption of OBE, that standards are falling. Not only do I quote many examples demonstrating that standards have fallen, including a commonwealth study that reveals that almost half the academics interviewed agreed that standards had fallen over time, but I quote from the 1996 national literacy tests showing that 29 per cent of Year 5 children could not read at the minimum level and 33 per cent of Year 5 children did not meet the minimum standard in writing.

In suggesting that I restrict arguments about the curriculum being dumbed down to subjects such as English, history and mathematics, Macintyre conveniently ignores that a good deal of the book addresses broader, but no less important, issues such as the deleterious effect of non-competitive assessment and OBE-inspired approaches to learning such as constructivism and developmentalism.

On the concluding page of The History Wars, Macintyre admonishes those he describes as conservative history warriors for acting like bullies and for forsaking reasoned argument in favour of caricaturing opponents and impugning their motives. On reading what he has to say about Dumbing Down, it is clear he fails to follow his own advice and, to paraphrase Banjo Paterson, Macintyre's review, instead of being balanced, is penned with a thumbnail dipped in bile. [For the victims of a modern education, Donnelly is here alluding to a line in the famous A.B. Paterson poem "Clancy of the Overflow"]

It is also ironic, while Macintyre bewails my contribution to the education debate as "oversimplified, alarmist and opportunist", that the ALP, at both state and national levels, has recently and somewhat belatedly embraced what I have argued since the early '90s, often as a lone voice; that is, that curriculums should be teacher-friendly, concise, written in plain English and based on the academic disciplines.

Source

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

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

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

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 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.

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



11 March, 2007

ANTI-ISRAEL ACADEME

On February 15, the Iraqi Ambassador to the UN, Hamid Al Bayati, spoke at New York's Fordham University. During the course of his remarks, Bayati doubted the fact that the Holocaust had occurred. In his words, "I'm not aware of any dictator who used chemical weapons against his own people. Some academics or diplomats would say Hitler used chemical weapons, but I am sure he didn't use them against his own people - his German people." When pressed by law professor Avi Bell on the fact that several hundred thousand German citizens were gassed to death by Nazi Germany, Bayati still refused to take the point.

Fordham University is far from alone in providing a platform for Holocaust deniers. Last Thursday the Dean's office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology co-sponsored an event on the Arab-Israel conflict called, "Foreign Policy and Social Justice: A Jewish View, a Muslim View." The man invited to provide the Jewish view was Dovid Weiss, a member of the crackpot Neturei Karta sect. Weiss rose to prominence when he traveled to Teheran last December to participate in Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial conference.

While MIT and Fordham were hosting Holocaust deniers in the name of intellectual freedom, their fellow universities were hosting "Israel Apartheid Week." As part of their efforts to criminalize the Jewish state, Arab and Jewish speakers at "Israel Apartheid Week" events refer to Israel as "1948 Palestine" and show propaganda films portraying IDF soldiers and Israeli civilians in Judea and Samaria as murderers.

The events are generally sponsored by the International Solidarity Movement. In addition to their campus outreach, the ISM sponsors the weekly riots against the security fence in Bil'in and in Hebron, where its protesters throw rocks at IDF soldiers. Given the violent content of their actions in Israel, it should come as no surprise that their events on US campuses also breed violence.

At an "Israel Apartheid Week" event at City University of New York, after watching a propaganda film, 19-year old Binyamin Rister rose and politely asked the ISM presenters if they supported terrorism. When he received no reply he politely repeated the question. Rather than wait for an answer, CUNY security guards dragged Rister from the room and then repeatedly banged his head against the wall of an elevator and threw him head first down the stairs. Rister's injuries from the assault by campus security required him to be evacuated by ambulance in a neck brace to the hospital.

In an almost identical case at Georgetown last year, Bill Maniaci a 65-year-old retired Jewish American police officer was brutalized by Georgetown security guards after he asked ISM spokesmen if they supported terrorism. He is currently suing Georgetown for $8 million in damages for the assault. According to Lee Kaplan's report of the CUNY event in Frontpage Magazine, there were seven witnesses to the unprovoked attack against Rister. He too has filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit against CUNY.

EVEN THOSE propounding the view that jihadist murderers in the US and Britain are inspired to kill after being brought under the spell of the "sudden jihad syndrome" cannot deny that the root of the jihad is ideas. Similarly, it is self-evident that the key to beating the global jihad is victory in the battlefield of ideas. Unfortunately, as the pro-jihadist trend on US and Western campuses, and its impact on idea consumers in law enforcement, the media and policy circles throughout the free world shows, to the extent that those charged with engaging in the battle of ideas are engaged, they fight on the side of the enemy.

Source



The Impact of Academic Bias

Professors do lean to the left -- but are students listening?

The debate over bias in the academy usually follows a predictable pattern. Conservatives tout a survey or study that says American college campuses are teeming with pinkos. Liberals assail the report as conservative propaganda. Conservatives mock liberals for denying the obvious. The most recent skirmish in this cycle involves a report released in January, "The Faculty Bias Studies: Science or Propaganda?" Prepared by the education consultant John Lee and published by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the paper concludes that eight studies frequently cited by conservatives are rife with methodological flaws, errors, and biases of their own.

Some of the report's targets were quick to respond with countercharges. Anne Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), told Inside Higher Ed that "AFT's report is not science-it's propaganda." Neal's group had produced two of the studies criticized by Lee. The AFT report identifies some genuine problems with some widely publicized studies of campus bias. For instance, a major 2005 survey on faculty political leanings by Stanley Rothman, S. Robert Lichter, and Neil Nevitte cannot be properly peer-reviewed because the survey instrument has never been made public.

That said, some of Lee's nitpicks make little sense. Take ACTA's 2006 report "How Many Ward Churchills?," which focused on cultural and political radicalism in college curricula. The report can certainly be faulted for inflammatory rhetoric-the title refers to the University of Colorado professor who derided the victims of the 9/11 attack as "little Eichmanns"-but it doesn't make sense for Lee to attack it for a lack of scientific sampling, since it never claimed to be a scientific survey.

More broadly, Lee's attempt to challenge findings that most college professors are politically left of center seems pointless. The studies may be flawed, but their conclusion falls into the realm of the obvious. Even if you were to dismiss the Rothman-Lichter-Nevitte study, which found that 72 percent of full-time faculty identified as liberal while 15 percent considered themselves conservative and the rest middle of the road, there still remains the 2001 survey-never mentioned by Lee-by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA. It found that about 5 percent of faculty members called themselves far left, 42 percent were liberal, 34 percent considered themselves middle of the road, less than 18 percent were conservative, and 0.3 percent placed themselves on the far right. (One likely reason for the difference between the two surveys is that the HERI study included two-year colleges in its sample.) In 2005, when Penn State's Michael Berube wrote a long, snarky blog post assailing the Rothman-Lichter-Nevitte study and its right-wing sponsors, he went on to cite the HERI study and conceded, "Yes, we're a pretty liberal bunch."

The more interesting question, usually neglected in the wash-rinse-repeat cycle of the bias debate, is what danger, precisely, all this liberal dominance on campus poses to the nation. Are tenured radicals really brainwashing the young? For answers, you should look to the voting behavior and party identification of students and recent graduates, not their professors.

A recent poll by the Pew Research Center found that today's 18-to-25-year-olds are "the least Republican generation." In 2006, 48 percent of people in this age group identified themselves as Democrats or leaning Democratic; 35 percent were Republicans-the lowest result recorded since Pew started tracking the data in 1987. Meanwhile, Democrats carried the under-26 vote in the 2006 midterm elections by 58 percent to 37 percent.

So are the conservatives right? Is any of that attributable to the influence of college? Not necessarily: In the early 1990s, when college attendance was just as high and faculty ideologies skewed equally leftward, Republican identification in the same age group spiked to a record 55 percent.

While the HERI does an annual survey of incoming college freshmen that includes questions about political beliefs, no one has tried tracking changes in student political beliefs over the college years. One interesting glimpse is provided by HERI's 2004 report on political attitudes among freshmen and college graduates. In 1994, 82 percent of students in the class of 1998 agreed that "the federal government should do more to control the sale of handguns" and 61 percent agreed that abortion should be legal. In 1998, these opinions were held by, respectively, 83 percent and 65 percent of college graduates in that cohort.

Thus, while college-educated Americans appear to be much more liberal than the general population-at least on certain issues-they also seem to hold those views before they first enter a college classroom.

Other evidence that college students aren't necessarily dancing to the professors' political tune comes from post-9/11 data on opinions about U.S. military action. While opposition to U.S. strikes in Afghanistan was common among college faculty (as ACTA documented in its November 2001 report "Defending Western Civilization"), an overwhelming 79 percent of students supported the war in the fall of 2001. Granted, support in the general population was even higher: 92 percent.

The December 2005 ACTA study "Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action," another paper critiqued by Lee, attempted to measure political bias in the classroom with a survey of students at 50 top colleges and universities. Only 7 percent of the students strongly agreed with the statement, "On my campus, there are courses in which students feel they have to agree with the professor's political or social views in order to get a good grade." Then again, another 22 percent agreed "somewhat." Forty-six percent strongly disagreed. The results suggest that there is, at least, a perception of a problem.

Interestingly, only 21 percent of the students surveyed agreed either strongly or somewhat that some professors on their campus are "intolerant of certain political and social viewpoints." It should be noted that among the students who were surveyed, self-identified liberals outnumbered conservatives by 46 percent to 13 percent, and it is usually harder to notice bias against viewpoints to which you are unsympathetic.

What is difficult either to deny or to quantify is that, especially at the more prestigious colleges and universities, the social climate fosters a strong presumption of liberal like-mindedness and a marginalization of dissent. Being left of center is the norm, and it is freely assumed that other people around you, be they students or faculty members, will share in your joy at the Democratic victories in Congress or your dismay at the passage of a ballot initiative prohibiting racial preferences in college admissions. This can translate into not only a chilly climate for conservatives but in some cases outright hostility.

If a student doesn't subscribe to the campus orthodoxy, the likely effect is not to convert her but to alienate her from intellectual life. Others learn only about a narrow range of ideas. One woman, a Ph.D. student in the social sciences at a Midwestern university, told me recently that when she started reading conservative, libertarian, or otherwise heretical blogs, "it was a whole perspective I had never been exposed to before in anything other than caricature." When that's the norm, the harm is less to dissenters than to the life of the mind. It's not good for any group of people to spend a lot of time listening only to like-minded others. It is especially bad for a profession whose lifeblood is the exchange of ideas.

Source



THE ACADEMIC WAR ON PRIVATE PROPERTY

Excerpt from Boortz



OK .. some of you thought that I was perhaps pulling your legs yesterday when I told you about the  Hillside Children's Center in Seattle, Washington, a private school, that banned Legos.  The teachers didn't particularly like the Lego city the children were building because the young'uns seemed to have incorporated some concept of private property rights in their little fantasy community.  So ... the Lego community was mysteriously destroyed, and only allowed to be rebuilt when the children agreed with the teachers that the idea of private property was a bad one.  Yup .. you didn't believe me.  So I thought I would help you out with a few links today.

First, here is a link to the magazine cover containing the original story that appeared in  "Rethinking Schools."  Here is the article and here is a link to a critique of the Lego ban that appeared in an online magazine.

The message here is that anti-individualist, anti-private property socialist dogma is not only being taught in many government schools and most universities and colleges; you can also find it in private schools ... especially in hard-left communities like Seattle. 

I hope that some of you parents out there followed my suggestion yesterday:  That being that when you sit down with your child at dinner one evening, why not ask them a simple question like:  "Tell me, Joseph.  What are you learning in school about private property rights?"  You might be shocked at the answer.

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

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 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.

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



10 March, 2007

Academic freedom today mostly means free speech for antisemites only

In 1915, John Dewey of Columbia University and Arthur Lovejoy of Johns Hopkins University came together with other educators to establish the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), an organization designed to preserve the integrity of the academy from a politicized donor-driven agenda. The 1915 Declaration of Principles stated the principles for what academic freedom should be: "the freedom of the academic teacher entail certain correlative obligations... The university teacher... should, if he is fit for his position, be a person of a fair and judicial mind; he should, in dealing with such subjects, set forth justly, without suppression or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators... and he should, above all, remember that his business is not to provide his students with ready-made conclusions, but to train them to think for themselves."

However, despite the above, free speech is not used almost interchangeably with academic freedom. Academic freedom is being used a "get-out-of-jail-free card" when a speaker, usually a self-described "scholar-activist," intends to thwart oversight and accountability.

In the United States, whatever goes on in a classroom is deemed protected by "academic freedom," whether it is academic or not. Only sexual harassment appears exempt from this blanket protection. Gradually, the entire campus has become an "academic freedom" zone, where protests and other activities now qualify as academic "speech." The freedom to critique is, predictably, directed mostly at the twin Satans, Israel and America, although efforts to curtail speech that academics find unpleasant and unacceptable have been long standing in the form of "speech codes" and restrictions on "hate speech." Clearly academic freedom is a one-way street; only those having the correct opinions may claim it.

A recent example of how "academic freedom" applies to those who are more equal than others was at Brown University when an invitation to the Egyptian-born speaker Nonie Darwish by a Jewish group was revoked when Muslim and leftist students opposed her views as too "controversial." Such reactive and pre-emptive efforts to control campus speech are increasingly common.

Pre-emptive assaults against Israelis and Jews are becoming commonplace. In the United Kingdom, former Israeli generals are regularly charged with "war crimes" to the point where they refuse to fly to London and are sometimes forced to return, such was the case with Brig. Gen. Aviv Kochavi. Universities have similarly expanded the bubble of "academic freedom" to include pre-emptive restrictions on the participation of Israelis in journals, conferences, and graduate education. The Orwellian inversion of "academic freedom" to mean freedom from Israelis is one more perverse outcome of what began as efforts to protect professors from being fired for their politics.

Fortunately, in the United States there are hopeful signs that some balance is returning to campus, or at least that academics are now aware that they are under a spotlight. Recently, for example, a new guide for professors of Middle East anthropology was released in an attempt to restore the credibility of a field of study whose reputation has been shattered by years of politicized scholarship. The guide -- titled, "Academic Freedom and Professional Responsibility after 9/11: A Handbook for Scholars and Teachers" and produced by the Taskforce on Middle East Anthropology -- illustrates the effectiveness of critiques of Middle Eastern studies and higher education that have finally put the professoriate on the defensive.

The guide usefully suggests that most classroom conflict can be used for educational purposes. If a student challenges the use of "occupation" by a professor, the professor might discuss with the class why that term may or may not be appropriate, as well as "political claims" associated with alternative terms, such as "disputed territories." The guide advocates turning controversy into teaching, and while it has the air of defensiveness, it is by and large a presentation of fair principles.

Post-September 11, the most intense debates about "academic freedom" have involved Middle Eastern studies, especially the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The "right" to teach Israel as original sin and the Israel lobby as a Jewish conspiracy controlling America has been challenged, and, unfortunately, has produced even more virulent rhetoric and overt attacks on Jews. Academia has unconsciously exposed Jews and Israelis as the canaries in the coal mine. If universities are indicators of social trends, then anti-Semitism is becoming more acceptable in the guise of anti-Zionism. Only Jews are unworthy of having a sovereign state, thanks to various sins past and present.

Such attitudes are shockingly common on university campuses, and are protected by "academic freedom." Does calling for the destruction of a state and the dispersal of a people qualify the protections designed by Dewey and Lovejoy? Fortunately, most Americans agree neither with the idea that Israel should be abolished nor with the blanket protections that currently constitute "academic freedom." The gap between academia and the public is increasing, in part because on moral issues, like defending democracy against jihadi terror and rigorous free speech, the public realizes that universities are on the wrong side.

But until donors and parents start asking questions about how their money is being spent and how their children are being taught, the fight will be restricted to critics seeking to make academia a place where the classroom is once again the center for teaching and learning rather than political theater. Until a mindset develops where donors ask questions about what is being done with their money, and until it is better appreciated how a few tenured professors have gone beyond the bounds of their academic appointments, little will change.

Source



BEADY EYE ON BRITISH PRIVATE SCHOOLS

Independent schools are warned today that they will lose their charitable status unless they offer direct benefits to people on low incomes. The savings to the public purse of educating pupils who would otherwise be in state schools will not be sufficient to justify the tax breaks they receive under new rules published by the Charity Commission. Instead, the schools must keep a detailed account of how many free or subsidised places they offer to pupils from low-income backgrounds. They must also show that they provide a public benefit by sharing facilities with state schools.

The commission spelled out its new "public benefit test" in the report put out for consultation but said it would issue further guidance for educational charities later. The presumption that charities advancing education or religion or relieving poverty benefit the public will no longer hold and they will be required to meet the test or lose their status and assets.

According to the Independent Schools Council (ISC), the umbrella organisation for 1,278 fee-charging schools, most registered as charities, the tax benefits amount to around 88 million pounds. It estimates that schools give back 2.20 pounds in bursaries and widening access for each 1 pound gained by charitable status and that they and their fee-paying parents save the country 1.98 billion a year through educating children who would otherwise be in the state sector.

But the commission said wider savings to the economy would not meet the new test. "It would not be sufficient if the only benefit available to people on low incomes is the wider benefit which the public in general receives where a service provided by a charity relieves public funds. Such benefits are primarily to taxpayers, and people on low incomes may pay little or no tax."

The charging of fees did not necessarily disqualify schools or other bodies, such as private hospitals or care homes, from arguing that they operated for the public good. "However an organisation which excluded people on low incomes from any benefits would not be set up and operate for the benefit of the public. Where access to the benefits is based on the ability to pay the fees charged, it must be clear that benefit can still be provided to the public generally, or to a sufficient section of the public, which must include people on low incomes." When people on low incomes were unable to benefit from a charity in an immediate or direct way, because they could not afford the fees charged for the services, there must be other reasonable ways available for them to benefit.

The report suggests that "direct or first-hand" benefits might be provided to people on low incomes through scholarships, bursaries or assisted places. It could also be done by the provision of wider access to charitable facilities or services "for example, a charitable independent school allowing a state-maintained school to use its educational facilities". Jonathan Shephard, the general secretary of the ISC, said he believed the commission had "got the law right" in its report. "We are at the beginning of a long process and the report is setting out general principles, which I think are correct. Most schools already meet the test and those which don't have a year or 18 months to ensure they do."

Source

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

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

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

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 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.

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



9 March, 2007

UK: Religious Schools May Not Teach Christian Sexual Morals "As if They Were Objectively True"

After this April's implementation of the Sexual Orientation Regulations (SOR's), British religious schools may no longer be allowed to teach school children that the Christian viewpoint on sexual morality is "objectively true," a government report says. The Joint Committee on Human Rights, made up of members from Parliament and the House of Lords, has issued a report on the implementation of the Regulations recommending that religious schools be required to modify their religious instruction to comply with the government-approved doctrine of "non-discrimination".

Although religious schools will be allowed to remain open and may continue to give instruction in various religious beliefs, instruction must be modified "so that homosexual pupils are not subjected to teaching, as part of the religious education or other curriculum, that their sexual orientation is sinful or morally wrong."

The report says the Regulations will not "prevent pupils from being taught as part of their religious education the fact that certain religions view homosexuality as sinful," but they may not teach "a particular religion's doctrinal beliefs as if they were objectively true".

Published February 26, the report says, "We do not consider that the right to freedom of conscience and religion requires the school curriculum to be exempted from the scope of the sexual orientation regulations."

With the Equality Act 2006, the government empowered itself to create regulations making it illegal for anyone providing goods, services, facilities, premises, education or public functions, to discriminate against that person on the grounds of "sexual orientation". The SOR's are scheduled to come into effect in England and Wales and Scotland in April this year after a ratifying vote in Parliament. They came into effect in Northern Ireland January 1.

Fr. Tim Finigan, founder of the Association of Priests for the Gospel of Life and pastor of Our Lady of the Rosary Catholic parish in Blackfen, wrote an ominous warning on his weblog that the government's interpretation of the SOR's may represent the end of freedom of religious expression in Britain's schools. "Make no mistake - this proposal will make it illegal for Catholic schools to teach that the Catholic faith is true," Fr. Finigan wrote Friday. "If the recommendations of the Committee are accepted, it is difficult to see how Catholic schools could continue in Britain." Fr. Finigan, who teaches sacramental theology at St John's Seminary, Wonersh and is a trustee of Britain's Faith Movement, said the wording of the report was "deliberately muddied". "Our faith does not teach that 'homosexuality' itself is necessarily sinful, it teaches that it is disordered. It is homosexual acts that are sinful."

He points out, however, that the distinction is moot in government circles. "The people who framed this guidance will not accept our teaching that homosexuality is a disorder nor that homosexual acts are sinful." The homosexual political doctrine, accepted by the British as well as other governments, requires that no distinction be made between the person, the act and the condition or "orientation", making any criticism of the movement's political goals an offence against persons.

British legislators have fully incorporated this doctrine in the law. "They have the bit between their teeth," Fr. Finigan writes. "Although the direction in which public policy has been moving is obvious enough, I am a little surprised at the pace it has now picked up."

The bishop of the Scottish Catholic diocese of Paisley warned his flock last month in blunt terms to become spiritually prepared for open persecution with the implementation of the SOR's. Speaking on the problem of Catholic adoption agencies, Bishop Philip Tartaglia wrote, "This unfortunate episode may well herald the beginning of a new and uncertain time for the Catholic Church in the United Kingdom."

Source



A teacher with a blind eye?

Indianopolis Sixth graders had sex in class

For months it's been a well-kept secret. But now Warren Township Schools confirm a disturbing case of sex in the classroom. The illicit activity has parents concerned and a district at a loss for words.

Shop class gives students a chance to learn outside of the book. But at Warren Township's Raymond Park Middle School, two students engaged in illicit acts in view of goggled eyes. 13 Investigates was tipped off by a disturbed resident who writes: "...during school hours in a classroom with an experienced teacher present, two sixth graders completed the act of intercourse...at least ten students were witnesses. No disciplinary actions were taken against the teacher... All teachers were told to keep quiet."

Middle school students having sex in a busy classroom while a teacher is present? Warren Township Associate Superintendent Jeff Swensson confirmed it's true. It's been kept under wraps since November. The principal at Raymond Park Middle School would not speak to us about the incident or parents concerns. The superintendent in charge of middle schools in the district also backed out of an on-camera interview and instead provided a three-sentence statement:

"Two students were involved in inappropriate conduct in a lab class last semester. We have investigated the matter and taken appropriate action. The school corporation considers the matter closed and will have no further comment."

Associate Superintendent Jeff Swensson told Eyewitness News off camera the teacher didn't know what was going on because another student acted as a "look-out." But once the teacher discovered the behavior, immediate action was taken. Swensson says the students involved were recommended for expulsion. But he did not say whether the board followed that recommendation.

Warren Township School Police were not aware of the incident and say no report was made even though the children were recommended for expulsion.

Source



CURRENT TEACHING METHODS INEFFECTIVE AT EDUCATING ALL COMERS

I volunteer for a music organization in which my son is involved. Recently, through a community outreach program, my son's group was augmented by some boys from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. These boys are really nice kids. They have no "attitude." Instead, they're just sweet little people, and they obviously come from caring homes. They're also very pleased to be where they are, and are enjoying the cachet associated with this organization.

I have noticed something significant about these little boys during music theory class, though. Just as all the other boys do, they wiggle and chat -- all the time. And, as with all the other boys, you have to demand and/or capture their attention (and the theory teacher whom I assist is good at this). But unlike all the other little boys, however, these boys seem to have few - or at least different - tools for learning. They don't respond to mnemonics, because they simply can't grasp the relationship between a mnemonic and knowledge acquisition. Thus, neither the time-worn phrase "Good Boys Do Fine Always" for the line notes, nor the word "F A C E" for the space notes has helped them master note recognition. In this they differ from the other little boys who, from day one, were able to fall back on the mnemonics when they needed to.

When it comes to rhythm recognition, all the other boys, when prompted, will place their fingers under the relevant notes so that they can "read along" as a rhythm is clapped out. These visiting boys, when prompted, freeze. They simply don't understand that concept, and I have to position their fingers under the notes every time so that they can see this principle at work. I know they'll learn this technique. I'm just surprised that they don't seem to have any concept of it now.

At the start of each class, the teacher writes on a white board the notes that are going to be highlighted in the workbook and gives them the relevant "do, re, me" labels. She does this because, in sight singing, these labels are not fixed. That is, "do" is "C" only in the key of C. In the key of G, "do" is "G." This means that for any sight singing exercise, the boys need to know which note will be "do." If the other little boys forget what "do" is in any particular exercise, they look to the white board, spot the note, and read its label. ("Aha! This time, 'do' is 'C.'") These new little boys, however, seem not to move their eyes back and forth between board and book. Even when prompted, they can't seem to track the information on the white board and relate it to their theory book.

Having worked with these little boys for a while, I've concluded that they've never been taught how to learn. To the extent they have mastered academic skills (and they all read, and none are stupid or unwilling), they've learned by brute force repetition. How dull. How meaningless. These boys are a manifest reminder that learning itself is an art form.

To my mind, the perfect approach to teaching children how to learn is to enable them, whenever possible, to see the concrete principles behind what they're being taught. To state that Pi equals 3.14 is dull and, to a young child, meaningless and irrelevant. To have the children measure the circumference of a circle and then visually compare it with the circle's radius makes Pi have some context. Indeed it makes it very exciting (as you will see if you try this experiment yourself).

In the same way, when teaching children about number systems other than base ten, it's useless just to announce the rules for adding or multiplying in, say, base 8. It's much more exciting to look at how we tell time, and to explain that our system goes back to the ancient Mesopotamia, where they had a base 60 system. Children who are already practiced at turning 60 minutes into an hour, aside from being thrilled at this direct connection to ancient times, instantly grasp the abstract principle that there are bases other than 10, and will readily respond to lessons about how to apply this knowledge.

Likewise, when teaching children pattern recognition, how many more minutes does it take to explain why patterns matter? Thus, most teaching is simply limited to giving the kids techniques for calculating the next number in a series of numbers. This is usually based on determining the number of units between each number and the next. (Although, as I discovered, the sequence 0, 1, 2, 3, ___ actually yields two different predictive outcomes: the number 4, if you're dealing in whole numbers; and the number 5, if you're dealing in prime numbers*.) However, it's one thing to be told what to do and another thing entirely to be sent to the kitchen to examine the tile and see why it's extremely important to predict a pattern (the tile would be chaos without), or to understand how Mommy can knit without a pattern, just by examining what came before.

Public schools -- at least the quality public schools in our affluent community -- operate on the assumption that children learn from play and repetition. (Although the games really are a repetition subset, since they're not intended to deepen understanding, but simply to reinforce remembering.) Public schools like to break abstract knowledge into bite size pieces. They seem to forget that, whether the abstract information is a bite or a chunk, small children don't do abstract. They may memorize it, but they can neither apply it nor can they extrapolate from it. It is meaningless information, stuck in an intellectual vacuum.

For my daughter, the main problem in this teaching method shows up with math. Just as it never worked for me so many years ago when I attended public school, it doesn't work for her to be told a formula and then be expected to learn it by repeating it again and again. This holds true even when the formula is introduced through games, brightly colored objects, and gentle repetition. Instead, she learns by having the underlying principles and purposes demonstrated to her, whether she's working on algebra, fractions or pattern recognition. Give her the "why" and she'll master the "how."

My son is one of the lucky ones who has a fairly intuitive grasp of mathematical principles, but he finds writing frustrating: especially the writing in public school that requires him to churn out a daily essay on a (usually) very stupid subject. For months, his essays came back with exactly the same criticisms on them. It only slowly dawned on me that the teacher thought that this repetitive criticism was the way to teach him how to write correctly. I stepped in and, in three weeks, while he still bitterly resents the mindless topics, his writing has improved dramatically, as demonstrated by the teacher's effusive comments on his work. I have to laugh, though, when I think that my behind-the-scenes efforts probably mean that his teacher believes that, just by repeating the same criticism over and over, she has finally encouraged my son to do it right!

All of which gets me back to the nice little boys I introduced at the start of this essay. Neither in their homes, nor in their schools, do they ever seem to have been exposed to any learning techniques at all, whether the superior technique of ensuring understanding before embarking on drills, or the lesser, but still effective, memorization techniques used at a quality public school. The approach these boys have to knowledge acquisition is simply to sit there and let it wash over them, with the hope that something will periodically stick. This passivity is intriguing because, presumably, as public school attendees, they're getting the same curriculum as my children -- but they're not learning how to learn.

I suspect that, for public school children, the big factor isn't the school, it's the home. That is, while there's a huge difference emotionally and socially in requiring a child to go to a rundown, dangerous urban school, as opposed to a spiffy suburban school, the real difference in learning doesn't take place in the classroom, but takes place with, or because of, Mom and Dad.

The parents in my affluent community are just like me: when they see the manifest gaps in understanding that a public school education leaves behind, they step in with lots and lots of help. If the teacher's methodology didn't, or couldn't, explain the steps for adding fractions, Mom and Dad will step in, either directly, or by hiring a tutor. If the teacher, driven by a cast iron curriculum, doesn't have the time to stop and teach principles of paragraph construction to the kid who didn't get it the first time, she doesn't need to worry, because Mom and Dad will take care of it. That's not happening in poor, neighborhoods. Mom and Dad often aren't around to fill in the gaps, and, even if they are around, they themselves don't have the language or education skills to help out, and they certainly don't have the money to hire a posh tutor.

None of the above is meant to be a criticism of the families in poorer neighborhoods. It is meant to be a criticism of the way we keep both throwing money at failing schools, and imposing more and more test requirements, in the belief that these things will magically fix the children's learning deficits. I think the teaching methodology is inherently flawed, in that it stuffs children with facts and rules like geese being readied for the pate machine. Simply beefing up this fact-stuffing approach won't matter in the poorer neighborhoods. What would matter, and what could be done without demanding ever more money, is to adjust the curriculum to help children understand what they're learning and then to give them the tools to teach themselves. While they might master less material, they'll actually learn what is put before them, and they will embark upon a lifetime of knowledge acquisition, no matter the situation in which they find themselves.

Source

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

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

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

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 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.

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



8 March, 2007

British nurseries are opening the gender gap by failing to let boys be boys

Nurseries are stifling the ability of small boys to learn by forcing them to stay indoors and sit still for too long in class, according to a report today on preschool education. Instead they must be allowed to play outside and encouraged to develop their imaginations and take the lead in lessons, school inspectors say. Some boys are being left far behind girls as teachers fail to accommodate their different ways of learning.

Although most children aged 3 to 5 make good progress in class, Ofsted found that children were not speaking or listening properly in about a third of England's early years settings. Bright children were frequently not stretched sufficiently. Experts have long maintained that boys would be far better served by having more male teachers who understand the way they work. Instead, the achievement gap begins at preschool age and tends to grow wider throughout full-time education, with 59 per cent of first-class and upper-second degrees going to women.

The report by Her Majesty's Inspectorate comes weeks after a government study found that toddlers who sang songs and played number and letter games at home often became better readers at primary school than those who attended poor-quality nurseries.

At Westfield Farm, in Lincolnshire, Hannah Dring has recognised that boys learn far better when they are outside looking at tractors than when inside painting. The private nursery, high-lighted by Ofsted as a model for others to follow, has a vegetable garden, a two-acre forest and a large garden for the eight preschool children. Ms Dring said: "Boys don't want to sit down, so when they're outside - as they are most days - they're learning but don't realise it. They're counting the wheels and lights on the tractors. If we go on nature walks, they'll collect leaves and learn about shapes and colours, as well as trees."

Some teachers recognise gender differences, but the inspectors said that not all classes for 3 to 5-year-olds were "aware enough of the impact of girls' and boys' different choices of play activity on their progress in other areas of learning". Girls were "much more likely to chatter to themselves and others while playing, whereas boys' play was sometimes silent and frequently done in isolation". Girls are also more likely to listen and share toys, while boys will run around shouting, but rarely develop their games through talking to each other. The inspectors also found that children in poorer areas who did not speak English as a first language failed to improve if left to "pick it up" on their own. When they received support, they improved.

Ofsted's report coincides with increasing government concern about the gender gap at primary and secondary level. Last week official figures showed that boys achieved lower grades than girls, particularly in English.

Source



School choice in S. Carolina

At 16 years old, Rontrell Matthews has a better idea than most of his peers what an education is worth. This past summer, he made his way through this rural, poor community not far outside of Charleston to show up at the doorstep of Capers Preparatory Christian Academy. In his hand was his first paycheck, a meager sum of $32.86 that he'd earned making sandwiches at the local Subway shop. Spurring him along was a determination to buy his own way out of one of the state's many failing public schools.

School choice is always controversial, and often opposed on the grounds that it will undermine public schools, subsidize middle-class parents and cherry-pick the "best" kids for a private education. After meeting Rontrell in Capers' cramped conference room on a recent afternoon, it's hard to disagree that school choice in this state would help one of the best kids get a better education. Rontrell is now excelling in school, encouraging his younger brother to study hard. He has landed a partial scholarship and continues to work at Subway to pay part of his $400-a-month tuition bill. He's a good kid.

But as South Carolina's state Legislature now debates whether to allow parents to use a modicum of government funds to send their children to a school of their choosing, public or private, it's difficult to accept the objections of school choice on their merits. Rontrell freely admits that he was a problem student in public school, acting up in class and neglecting to hit the books. He might have just as easily given up. He notes his friends from public school still tell him that he's "stupid" for turning his paychecks over to Capers.

Founded in 2003 by Faye Brown, a 55-year-old retired public school teacher, Capers is one of a handful of "independent schools" that serve the state's rural poor. It operates out of rented office space, has a total of 42 students in kindergarten through 12th grade, and makes do on an annual budget of about $160,000 a year. Nearly all of its equipment--desks, books and the eight iMacs in its computer lab--were donated to the school.

The teachers who aren't volunteers make $8 an hour with no fringe benefits. Many of the kids show up without lunch. Often parents fail to make their monthly tuition bills. Only five students at the school come from two-parent homes, and most of the students are African-American. Each year, Ms. Brown is forced to dip into her retirement account to keep the school running. "It's robbing Peter to pay Paul," she told me. "I'll let the power bill go until they're about to shut off the lights and then I'm rushing down there with the money."

One place Capers isn't skimping, however, is academics. The school places a heavy emphasis on reading, writing and math. As a result the school's average SAT score, 1150, is 164 points above the state average, and this year the school expects every one of its graduates to go on to college. St. Johns High School, the public school these students would be attending if not for Capers, has an average SAT score of 788.

Education Superintendent Jim Rex, the only Democrat to win election statewide in South Carolina this past year, recently came out in favor of school choice, saying, "it's time to take the plunge." But his support comes with a caveat. He wants to limit choice to within the public school system, which would do precisely nothing to help Rontrell and his Capers classmates pay their tuition bills.

And it's not just the Capers kids who'd be left out of Mr. Rex's reforms. South Carolina students are, on average, dead last in SAT scores, trail the nation in graduation rates and turn in abysmal scores on proficiency tests in core subjects. There are an estimated 200,000 students across South Carolina who are poor and stuck in failing public schools.

Mr. Rex notwithstanding, there's now a groundswell of support for broad-based school choice. In recent weeks several thousand residents have rallied at the state Capitol and advocates have lined up bipartisan support in the Republican-controlled Legislature for creating a $1,000 tax credit for middle-class parents and a $4,500 state "scholarship" for poor kids in failing public schools that can be used to attend any school.

Two years ago similar reforms were defeated in the state House by seven votes. But school-choice supporters picked up several seats in the last election, one of which is now held by Curtis Brantley, an African-American from rural Jasper County who picked off an incumbent in a Democratic primary last year. "It's time," he told me recently while sitting in his sparsely furnished office, "to try something new."

As a former public school official who, as he tells it, was forced into retirement after trying to reform the school system from the inside, Mr. Brantley is now becoming a powerful voice for reform in Columbia. And he was only too happy to organize buses for school-choice supporters from his district to attend the rally.

In Spartanburg, James Miller, a 34-year-old machine operator and second class petty officer in the Navy reserves, is hoping the state scholarships make it through the Legislature this time. Last year he was called up to active duty and shipped off to the Persian Gulf. He thought heading off to war would prove to be a hardship for his family. It turned out to be a blessing. With his hazard and other increased pay, he earned $4,000 tax-free each month, double what he makes as a civilian, and enough to pull his son Rodney out of a crummy public school.

Rodney is now thriving at a local Christian school, but Mr. Miller worries about next year. He's back from the Gulf and he and his wife Charlene aren't sure how they'll pay the tuition bill coming due in June without one of the state scholarships now being debated in the Legislature. "It's hard," he told me. "We have just the one son and we want to do right by him."

Source

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

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

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

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 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.

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



7 March, 2007

FOR THE SEPARATION OF SCHOOL AND STATE

By Jeff Jacoby

Whatever else might be said about it, US District Judge Mark Wolf's decision in Parker v. Hurley is a model of clear English prose. "The constitutional right of parents to raise their children does not include the right to restrict what a public school may teach their children," Wolf unambiguously wrote in dismissing a suit by two Lexington, Mass. couples who objected to lessons the local elementary school was teaching their children. "Under the Constitution public schools are entitled to teach anything that is reasonably related to the goals of preparing students to become engaged and productive citizens in our democracy."

*Entitled to teach anything.* That means, the judge ruled, that parents have no authority to veto elements of a public-school curriculum they dislike. They have no right to be notified before those elements are presented in class. And the Constitution does not entitle them to opt their children out of such classes when the subject comes up.

As Wolf's straightforward language makes plain, it doesn't much matter what that subject might be. The parents in the Lexington case objected to "diversity" instruction that presented same-sex marriage and homosexual attraction as unobjectionable. That message, the judge noted, contradicted the parents' "sincerely held religious beliefs that homosexuality is immoral and that marriage is necessarily . . . between a man and a woman."

But suppose instead that the facts had been reversed, with parents who passionately support same-sex marriage filing suit because the school kept emphasizing the traditional definition of wedlock -- a definition democratically reaffirmed in many state constitutional amendments and statutes in recent years. As Wolf applied the law, the result would have been the same: The complaint would have been dismissed, and the school would have prevailed. Read again the judge's words: "The constitutional right of parents to raise their children does not include the right to restrict what a public school may teach their children."

Similarly, the school would have prevailed if this had been a case about guns, with parents objecting to a curriculum that emphasized the importance of the Second Amendment and armed self-defense. Or a case about evolution, with parents outraged because their children were being taught that Darwinism and intelligent design were equally legitimate approaches to an ongoing debate. Or a case about race, with plaintiffs suing because their kids were learning that affirmative action amounts to reverse racism.

Parker v. Hurley, in other words, was not just a victory for gay-marriage advocates or a defeat for Judeo-Christian traditionalists. It was a reminder that on many of the most controversial subjects of the day, public schools do not speak for the whole community.

When school systems deal with issues of sexuality, religion, politics, or the family, there is always an overriding agenda -- the agenda of whichever side has greater political clout. Parents who don't like the values being forced down students' throats have two options. One is to educate their children privately. The other is to find enough allies to force their own values down students' throats. In Judge Wolf's more genteel formulation: "Plaintiffs may attempt to persuade others to join them in electing a Lexington School Committee that will implement a curriculum . . . more compatible with their beliefs."

Once Americans may have agreed on what children should be taught, but that day is long gone. On any number of fundamental issues, parents today are sharply divided, and there is no way a government-run, one-curriculum-fits-all education system can satisfy all sides. The only way to end the political battles over schooling is to depoliticize the schools. And the only way to do that is to separate school and state.

Parents should have the same freedom in educating their kids that they have in clothing, housing, and feeding them. You wouldn't let the government decide what time your kids should go to bed, or which doctor should treat their chicken pox, or how they should spend their summer vacation, or which religion they should be instructed in. On matters serious and not so serious, parents are entrusted with their children's well-being. Why should schooling be an exception?

Get government out of the business of running schools, and a range of alternatives will emerge. Freedom, innovation, and competition will do for education what they do for so much else in American life: increase choices, lower costs, improve performance -- and eliminate conflict. So long as education is controlled by the state, the battles and bad blood will continue. With more liberty will come more tolerance -- and more resources spent on learning than on litigation.



21 Catholic Colleges Still Performing Lesbian Play "Vagina Monologues"

Catholic Campus performances of the morally offensive Vagina Monologues continued their steady decline this year, the result of a six-year campaign by the Cardinal Newman Society (CNS). The number of Catholic campus performances and readings of the play dropped to 21 this year, from a high of 32 in 2003.

Most significantly, at the University of Notre Dame a planned performance was pushed off campus because no academic department would support the event. For the past five years the Monologues has been performed at Notre Dame despite annual scolding from Bishop John D'Arcy and outcries from alumni and other Catholics.

Likewise, after a five-year run St. Louis University refused to support the play this year and forced students to move their performance off campus. And Providence College president Rev. Brian Shanley, courageously stood by his decision last year to ban the play despite a campus rally opposing the ban and a petition signed by 1,200 students, faculty, alumni and others.

"Once again we have reclaimed 'V-Day' for its true purpose," said CNS president Patrick Reilly. "The Cardinal Newman Society joins faithful Catholic students, alumni, parents and others in celebrating the more than 200 Catholic colleges that did not host this play, as well as the students and faculty who organized alternative programs to support women in a mature and loving way."

Each year since 2003, CNS has led a nationwide protest to rid Catholic campuses of the Monologues, arguing that there is no place in Catholic education for a sexually explicit and offensive play that favorably describes lesbian rape, group masturbation and the reduction of sexuality to selfish pleasure.

The 21 Catholic Colleges still permitting the grossly offensive play are: Bellarmine University, Boston College, College of the Holy Cross, College of Mount Saint Vincent, College of Saint Benedict, College of Saint Rose, College of Santa Fe, DePaul University, Fordham University, Georgetown University, John Carroll University, Loyola University of Chicago, Loyola University of New Orleans, Marquette University, Regis College, Saint Mary's College of California, Saint Norbert College, Saint Xavier University, Santa Clara University, University of Detroit Mercy, and University of San Francisco.

Source



Australia: Poorly educated teachers hobble science studies

An ageing workforce and rapid advances in technology could have a serious impact on the quality of science teaching, an analysis commissioned by the Federal Government warns. The study concludes: "It is probable that a significant proportion of science teachers may be out of touch with contemporary science and also lack the skills to change their teaching to meet new challenges." The issues paper, published in October, was written by Professor Denis Goodrum, head of education studies at Canberra University, and Professor Leonie Rennie, of the Curtin University of Technology, Western Australia. The authors said the lack of current knowledge was apparent even in teachers who held university science qualifications. "Many teachers have narrow and specialised degrees, which leaves them with limited content knowledge to teach general science, and their knowledge dates rapidly."

The authors have sought submissions on the document, which will be used to help prepare a science education framework for the federal Education Department this year. The paper says insufficient science training at university means primary school teachers "frequently" lack confidence to teach the subject, and staff shortages have forced schools to use teachers with limited science knowledge. It describes course outlines as "content-heavy and alienating". "Many students find the school science curriculum . to be unimportant, disengaging and irrelevant to their life interests and priorities," the paper says. It recommends higher salaries that recognise the experience of scientists who have switched to teaching, and more money for professional development.

Professor John Rice, the president of the Australian Council of Deans of Science, said unless continuing professional learning was better funded and teachers were required to take part "you're always going to have the workforce going out of date".

The Australian Science Teachers Association and the Australian Education Union said improving support for science teachers would help to keep students in classrooms. "If you are going to do your best to make it engaging, exciting and motivating for students, you not only need a knowledge base, but a passion for the subject itself," said the union's Victorian president, Mary Bluett.

The Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists and Managers has warned that skill shortages in areas such as engineering would worsen without an increase in enrolments in school and tertiary science courses. "Australia's economic competitiveness will be the casualty in the process," said the association's chief executive, John Vines.

The federal Opposition has pledged to reduce HECS fees for maths and science graduates, with extra cuts for those entering teaching, but the Minister for Education, Julie Bishop, said promoting the subjects to students and improving pay for teachers were better options

Source



JOANNE JACOBS BOOK NOW IN PAPERBACK:

An email from Joanne:

I’m asking bloggers to spread the word: My book, Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea and the Charter School That Beat the Odds, is now available in paperback. March 6 is the official publication date.

Our School follows the principal, teachers and students at Downtown College Prep, a San Jose charter high school that turns underachievers -- most come from low-income Mexican immigrant families -- into serious students. The charter school’s educational philosophy is: Work your butt off. Students aren’t told they’re wonderful. Teachers tell them they’re capable of improving, which turns out to be true. All graduates in the first three classes have been admitted to college; 81 percent remain on track to earn a four-year degree.

Weird fact: The publisher insisted I take “charter” out of the subtitle for the hardcover; they put “charter” back in for the paperback. Apparently, charter schools are now fashionable.

Our School isn’t written for wonks. Readers tell me it’s a page-turner. The book received excellent reviews in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Post, Sacramento Bee and others.

The book is in some, but not all, book stores and is available through Amazon. (I’ve got the links on my blog, joannejacobs.com, and on ourschoolbook.com.)

With all the despair about educating "left behind" kids, I think people need to learn that it’s possible to make a difference.

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

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

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

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

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



6 March, 2007

Sickening British primary school bottle-feeds 10-year-olds because they 'missed out on love'

Pupils up to the age of 11 are being bottle-fed and mothered in school as part of a radical new move to address poor discipline. A state primary school has become the first in the country to take part in the approach, which was developed in the US to give problem children the love and attention they may have missed out on at a younger age.

Instead of being given a sharp telling off or a few minutes on the naughty chair, they have one on one sessions with a trained school therapist. The children - aged between six and 11 - are bottle-fed like young babies, nursed and encouraged to play games promoting patience and teamwork. Parents who feel they no longer have control over their child can sign up to the Theraplay programme, which lasts up to three years and emphasises the importance of a strong and loving bond with a mother figure.

The controversial approach - developed during the late 1960s - has now been adopted by Rockingham Primary School in Northamptonshire. The technique is based on the assumption that children with behavioural problems have often failed to bond with their parents in infancy. It aims to redress this by making them feel loved and secure once more.

Last night, the school's headteacher Juliet Hart defended the programme amid opposition from critics who claim it prevents children from growing up. "I'm sure there will be some people who won't agree with what we are doing but this form of therapy is recognised around the world for changing behavioural patterns. We are still like any other school. In each classroom children agree appropriate types of behaviour and know the consequences if they are not adhered to, including time-out or missing play-time. They also know that if they work hard they will be rewarded with approval. However, there are some children who need help to develop relationships with their parents. For whatever reason the bond has gone and there is no mutual respect. Through theraplay we encourage that bond to grow so the child feels more secure, calm and happy. It's not about discipline. This is about changing a child's behaviour over time. Admittedly, it will have an impact on discipline but only in the long term."

She added: "For years, teachers have laboured with resistant children and wondered: 'How can I unlock this person'. Once you have emotional literacy, then the learning can begin."

At Rockingham Primary School, which has 180 pupils, they have installed a dedicated Theraplay unit, complete with one-way mirror, run by trained therapist Jo Williams. She works with a handful of children at the school and uses a variety of therapeutic methods to help children who are experiencing problems at home and at school, including calming music and lights. In a typical session she might comb a child's hair, spoon feed them, put cream on their cuts and bruises or wash dirty hands. "It's all about making them feel they're worth looking after," she said. "I had one child who was having trouble bonding with her child. There was little touching and eye contact. By the end, she was bottle-feeding him, he was stroking her hair. She said it was one of the best things that had ever happened to her."

The children who visit her are often from poor and fractured families. Often they come in groups while others come alone whilst a parent watches from a booth.

But campaigners claim Theraplay, by bottle-feeding youngsters as old as 11, holds them back and prevents them from growing up into adults. Dr Dennis Hayes, leader of the education forum at the Institute of Ideas think tank, said: "This is part of the infantilisation of adult life. It's about keeping people permanently as children, not helping them to grow up."

It is not the first time that schools have looked to other non-conventional methods to discipline unruly children. Last year, it emerged children at Liberton and Gracemount high schools in Edinburgh were given lessons in anger management.

Youth workers visited the schools in a bid to reduce classroom violence and cut the number of exclusions. Teachers there reported a noticeable improvement in the children's behaviour during the pilot project.

The theraplay technique was devised in 1967 in Chicago in a bid to build strong families and emotionally healthy children and is now recognised worldwide. They argue that warm and loving relationships are essential to a child's self-worth [if genuine! Not play-acted as here] and as a result help them to gain mutual respect for others around them. The Theraplay Institute, which has 60 therapists in the US and Canada, said it had seen a growing interest from the UK where it has a handful of therapists.

Source. And Dr Helen has some germane comments.



I'd seriously consider home-schooling

Post lifted from The Anchoress

If my kids were little and just beginning in elementary school, I would seriously consider home-schooling for a variety of reasons - mostly because now that I’ve seen how quickly it all went, I want more time with them! But I’d have considered it sooner had this been what they were taught.

“…the students had been building an elaborate “Legotown,” but it was accidentally demolished. The teachers decided its destruction was an opportunity to explore “the inequities of private ownership.” According to the teachers, “Our intention was to promote a contrasting set of values: collectivity, collaboration, resource-sharing, and full democratic participation.”

The children were allegedly incorporating into Legotown “their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys.” These assumptions “mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive.”

They claimed as their role shaping the children’s “social and political understandings of ownership and economic equity … from a perspective of social justice.”

So they first explored with the children the issue of ownership. Not all of the students shared the teachers’ anathema to private property ownership. “If I buy it, I own it,” one child is quoted saying. The teachers then explored with the students concepts of fairness, equity, power, and other issues over a period of several months.

At the end of that time, Legos returned to the classroom after the children agreed to several guiding principles framed by the teachers, including that “All structures are public structures” and “All structures will be standard sizes.” The teachers quote the children:

“A house is good because it is a community house.”

“We should have equal houses. They should be standard sizes.”

“It’s important to have the same amount of power as other people over your building.”

Betsy Newmark writes:

How Orwellian is that lesson? It sounds like something out of Animal Farm but now it’s being taught to children as what is optimal rather than to be condemned.

These teachers are so ignorant that they don’t realize that the rights to private property are not only the essence of our democratic system as well as the best guarantee for a thriving economy. Who would want to invest and improve anything in an economy if they didn’t have guarantees that they would be able to reap the profits from their invested time and money?

Sensible Mom has more thoughts.

Check out this video at Small Dead Animals. I just wrote yesterday about how the left will exploit little kids (and make them lecture us incessantly) to guilt us into acquiescence, and this one is a beaut. I wonder…perhaps we should look into how much energy a klieg light uses…

Dr. Sanity has some thoughts on using kids to win your war.

Betsy also links to a story about home-schoolers in Germany.

Desperate Irish Housewife has a nice post on the Lego situation.

Britain: Half of Muslim schools not inspected for standards



More than half of private Muslim schools have not been inspected for five years, while some have not received a full inspection for a decade. An analysis of the 114 independent Islamic schools in England registered with the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) has found that Ofsted reports are available for only 53. Most of these involve recent visits, but two reports are for the 1997-98 academic year.

Most of the other 61 schools, and their 6,000 pupils, were inspected five or more years ago but, because of a gap in the law, their reports have never been made public. The law has now been changed, but is not retrospective.

Seventeen schools have no listing on the website of Ofsted - the official inspection body - making it impossible to establish whether they have ever been visited.

News of the apparent gaps in monitoring comes as questions are being raised about whether some Muslim schools are adequately preparing children for life in Britain. The Government recently closed an Islamic school in East Sussex, which was raided by police as part of an anti-terror operation, because it did not meet registration standards.

Last month, King Fahad Academy, a west London school funded by the Saudi government, was condemned for using text books that described Jews as "pigs".

Muslim parents are increasingly choosing the private sector because they feel the state sector does not cater for their children.

Last month, the Muslim Council of Britain accused state schools of failing to respect Muslim wishes and called on headmasters to open prayer rooms, introduce single changing cubicles, overhaul sex education and reschedule exams outside Ramadan.

A report by the Open Society Institute says there has been a threefold increase in the number of private Muslim schools in Britain in the past 10 years. They now educate three per cent of Britain's 400,000 Muslim pupils. An ICM poll of British Muslims in 2004 showed nearly half wanted their children to attend Muslim schools. Islamic schools on the DfES register are funded -privately, through the support of local mosques, other private funding and fees - of up to several thousand pounds a year - paid by parents. A number are registered as charities.

Like all the 2,000 independent schools in England registered with the DfES, they are not required to follow the national curriculum. They often devote a lot of time to Islamic studies.

A number of Ofsted reports are critical of poor buildings, inadequate resources, poor management, unqualified teachers and the low level of general education in some Muslim schools.

There are currently seven state-funded Muslim schools with three more in the pipeline. Ministers believe that if the schools are brought into the state system, they will be monitored more closely and have to follow the national curriculum.

David Willetts, the shadow education secretary, said: "All schools, whether state sector, independent sector or faith schools, are subject to the Ofsted inspection regime. It is not acceptable that a -significant number in a particular category, namely independent Muslim schools, appear to be escaping the rigour of the inspection regime."

Mohamad Mukadam, the chairman of the Association of Muslim Schools, said: "Ofsted has the power to inspect independent schools and has not found anything that should worry people about Muslim schools.

"To judge our schools we need to look at the young people that are coming out of them and compare them with those -coming out of the comprehensive system. There is a marked improvement in the academic results being achieved in Muslim schools, a higher amount of young people progressing to higher education, and a far higher proportion going on to work in the professions."

An Ofsted official said: "Since the introduction of the Education Regulations 2003, there has been a cycle for the inspection of all -independent schools who are not members of the Independent Schools Council and covered by their inspectorate.

"Ofsted has not yet completed the first full cycle of reported inspections, but it will be completed by the end of March 2008." If a school had no published report it had not yet had a full reported inspection, but would have one in the next year.

Source

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

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

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

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

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



5 March, 2007

ETIQUETTE SCHOOL

Looking every inch a successful American board-room executive, Spencer finished his lunch of saut‚ed salmon before carefully lifting his champagne glass in a toast to the other diners. Dressed in a blue blazer, white shirt and dark trousers, he thanked them for coming and signalled the waiters strategically placed around the private dining room to serve the dessert. A typical scene at an executive lunch. But Spencer is only 9, about the same age as his dining companions, who are dressed to the nines. He and his sister McKenzie, 10, along with three boys and five girls, had got a place in an etiquette class at the exclusive Hotel Bel-Air in Beverly Hills, California.

The crash courses in polite, or some may say precocious, behaviour are held four times a year, and the waiting list stretches to next summer as Hollywood executives, actors and CEOs from around America try desperately to get their children on it. The youngsters learn how to behave when faced with the sort of situation in which the well-heeled may find themselves, including how to introduce their parents to the Queen or the Pope.

The Petit Protocol class was given by Diane Diehl, known as the Miss Manners of international etiquette. At this class were, among others, Juliet, 8, granddaughter of Berry Gordy Jr, the creator of Motown, Joaquin, 6, the son of an actor who appeared in Gladiator and The Bourne Supremacy, and the children of a powerful Hollywood agent. Oh, and my daughters Abigail, 10, and eight-year-old Sophie, who got in because of their "cute" English accents.

Diehl, the daughter of a top-ranking military officer, travels the world teaching business leaders how to behave abroad, but included youngsters after being begged to do so by parents who did not have time to hammer home the finer points of behaving. One of her first customers was a wealthy New York executive who rarely got to eat with his son because of work commitments. When he did so, the boy's table manners disgusted him so much that he booked the etiquette class that day, and within a few weeks his son was whizzing his way to the East Coast.

First lesson at the Bel-Air was how to present your parents to the Queen. One child wore the crown while two others played daughter and mother. Then there was a lesson on what to say if a telephone caller wants to speak to your parents when they are away for several months, leaving you with the nanny and the staff. Never give out personal information when someone calls, says Diehl; tell the caller that your parents are unavailable and take a message.

One girl, misunderstanding the example, put up her hand and said that if she does not know the identity of a caller, she just looks at one of the CCTV monitors in her home. Sitting in rows of four, the children were well behaved and well dressed, and seemed to understand the finer points of the early lessons. One girl, who was attending the class for the third time, was wearing a fur stole and a pink, 1950s-style dress, and had French polish on her toes. Sitting with her legs crossed at the ankles, she looked as though she already hosted her own dinner parties.

The lesson on how to write a thank-you letter revealed that several of the class had personalised stationery. Spencer proudly told the class that he had his own wax stamp from England with S on it. Robyn Allyn, Spencer's mother, said that she wanted her children to feel comfortable in formal settings. Allyn, whose husband is a personal manager to the stars, said: "We have always eaten out in fine restaurants that have multiple knives and forks on the table, so it is good for them to know what to do. It can never hurt to know how to behave." The children were taught how to use a napkin, hold a glass of wine and how to cut food.

Diehl looks to Britain for examples of good behaviour, believing that manners have declined in recent years in America because of the lack of respectable role models. "The English wrote the book on civility," she says, "and these lessons are about having respect for other people. As children become more comfortable with their surroundings, so they will become more charismatic. "This was an exceptionally good class. The boys always come dragging their feet, but end up enjoying it. Our office receives calls from parents around the country desperate for their children to attend."

Does the course work? Since the class, my children remember more often to take their elbows off the table. And on the flight home a Virgin stewardess said that I had the politest children she had ever seen. I stopped them from telling her about the classes. "Years of hard work," I said.

Source



Britain: PRIVATE SCHOOLS PULLING FURTHER AHEAD

Oxford's attempts to rid itself of its reputation for giving preference to the "old school tie" have been dented by new figures showing it admitted almost twice as many Old Etonians last year as in 2001 . The number of pupils from Eton and other leading independent schools such as Westminster, St Paul's and Winchester have surged despite efforts by the university to boost its state-school intake. While the overall proportion of state-school pupils has edged up slightly at Oxbridge, elite private institutions have notched up the greatest gains. The main losers have been less prestigious independent schools.

The figures suggest Gordon Brown's outburst seven years ago against the "privileges" represented by Oxford has been counterproductive. The chancellor claimed it was an "absolute scandal" that Oxford had rejected Laura Spence, a talented Tyne-side comprehensive pupil. He said the university was "reminiscent of an old-boy network".

While the elite schools insist their success is down to their teaching, Labour critics say Oxbridge has not done enough to encourage state-school pupils. Barry Sheerman, Labour chairman of the Commons education select committee, blamed the universities for failing to broaden their intake. "Oxford and Cambridge shouldn't be seen as finishing schools for Eton and Westminster," he said.

The new data, released under the Freedom of Information Act, give a snapshot comparison between 2001 and 2006. Both universities reduced their independent sector intake by only 177 in that period. The top-performing schools have achieved spectacular gains. In 2006, 70 pupils from Eton were offered places by Oxford, compared with 38 in 2001. At Westminster school 52 pupils received offers from Oxford, up by 14 from 2001. There has also been an increase at Cambridge, although it is less marked. North London Collegiate school won 20 places there in 2006, compared with 17 in 2001; St Paul's school won 23, compared with 21.

The top school for Oxbridge last year was Westminster, where 60% of the upper sixth won offers from Oxford or Cambridge. Stephen Spurr, the head-master at Westminster, believes Oxbridge is not biased but is searching for the brightest applicants to maintain its position in the world rankings.

Tony Little, Eton's head master, said he told pupils that a place at Oxford or Cambridge had to be earned. "There is no golden road. The clever dilettante doesn't wash for Oxford now, if it ever did. We go far beyond the syllabus required for exams."

Geoff Parks, director of admissions at Cambridge, denied the university was failing to give due credit to state school applicants. "The best independent schools are stretching their most able pupils," he said. "There are ways in which state-school pupils are not as well guided as applicants from independent schools. State schools have had to deal with a shortage of qualified maths and physics teachers. They have also been dropping languages."

Source

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

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

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

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

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



4 March, 2007

Some sense about useless education

In a small office at the public high school in Kingsford, Mich., guidance counselor Kip Beaudoin is doing what many parents might consider treachery: He's encouraging a student to just say "no" to college. Senior Will Anderson tells Beaudoin that his parents are pressuring him to apply - that his mother "is always thinking, 'Be a doctor, be something.'" But Anderson says his passion has always been working on cars. He sees college as a waste of time. "I don't need math, science. I just need to learn what I need to learn and get out there," he says.

In recent decades, the number of U.S. high-school graduates who begin college has risen dramatically. But so has the number of college dropouts. Beaudoin is one of many educators who think these figures reflect a growing pressure on students to follow the college track, even when they might be better suited to other options.

When Anderson graduates from high school, he plans to enroll in an automobile mechanics' apprentice program, with Beaudoin's encouragement. But more often than not, Beaudoin says, parents consider such advice a betrayal. "Mostly what you get is, 'Are you telling me my son or daughter is not capable of doing better?'" Beaudoin says.

Joe Lamacchia, a father of five from Holliston, Mass., says teachers often made it sound as if his children would "fall right off the Earth if they didn't go to college." "It was incredible how they really believed that," he says. Lamacchia himself skipped college, and it's fine by him if his children do, too. A few years ago, Lamacchia launched something of a crusade to encourage youths who want to skip college; he even has a Web site. "When you have a trade, you have it made," he says, noting that skilled workers, such as electricians or welders, can easily earn as much as $70,000 a year with overtime. After barely finishing high school, Lamacchia started cutting grass with a borrowed mower. Today, he runs a $2 million a year landscaping and driveway-paving business. "It's a great life - blue collar," he says.

Currently, there's a shortage of blue-collar workers for manual and technical jobs - from electricians to heating and air-conditioning mechanics to iron and metal workers. As demand for these skills increases in coming years, economists say wages will, too.

But economists also caution that skipping college today is much riskier than it was a generation ago. "It's a bit of fool's gold to think that you can drop out of school today and think that you can do particularly well in the U.S. economy in the long run," says Harvard economist Larry Katz. Katz says skilled workers can earn good wages early in their careers, but their earnings cap out early, too. Ultimately, he says, college graduates will make about 60 percent more than those without a degree.

Harvard economist Claudia Golden adds that, more than ever before, students need more education and more highly technical computer skills to perform even blue-collar jobs such as welding, manufacturing and fixing cars. "Perhaps they had a grandfather who did perfectly fine," she says, "and they think they can as well. But in the economy of the 21st century, they're going to do very, very poorly."

At Kingsford High, Will Anderson spends two hours every day in an automobile mechanics class that includes training in the latest computer technology. But fewer high schools offer comprehensive vocational education anymore.

Still, Harry Chapman, who teaches chemistry at Jefferson Community College in Louisville, Ky., says he often encounters students who should have been told long ago that they don't belong in college. "We don't have trouble telling someone they're not suited to be a musician or football player or something like that," Chapman says. "But for the most part, we won't tell someone [that] we don't think they can make it as a doctor or an engineer. It's like an insult."

Rob MacDonald, 25, from Waltham, Mass., wishes he had been better advised. He tried college, then quit - but not before racking up nearly $40,000 in debt. "You don't realize it at the time, when you're going to school, that you're going to have so much debt when you're done," he says. "You don't realize it until you come out." MacDonald now works as a site supervisor for Joe Lamacchia, making $50,000 a year. He's almost done paying off his student loans. And instead of suffering through sociology class, he says he now looks forward to what he does every day.

Source



THE BRITISH SCHOOL PANIC

Getting your kid into a High School where he/she will both be safe and get a good education is not easy in modern Britain

So we didn’t win the state lottery: the best school in our area, our No 1 choice, turned us down. But then the odds were pretty stacked. Hearing about the oversubscribed Brighton school with 420 children chasing 300 places, I could hear London parents crying “Lightweights!” Try 3,000 applicants for 150 places.

A bus journey across Brighton to your second choice of, what, two miles max? Try sticking your tender 11-year-old on an hour-long walk-train-bus-walk schlep. Only got your third choice at the slightly less laurelled comp? Imagine getting none of your six choices and your daughter being allocated a girls’ school closed one day recently for fear of a drive-by shooting.

Sorry. Forgive me. I have been half-crazy for the past five months. I’ve avoided friends, turned down invitations. Monomaniacs, I know, are miserable funsuckers. And my head has contained one subject, spun into a myriad of permutations: which secondary school will my son attend in September? By January I’d started, for the first time, to read my horoscope. Then my son’s horoscope. Then I regressed to teenage superstitions: if I reach the bus stop before that red car passes me, he’ll get in . . . “I told you it was bad,” said a friend, who went through this a year ago. But not this bad. Perhaps she’d played it down, she conceded, because she’d felt — as I do now — silly and ashamed to admit how much she’d cared, how such a mundane event had taken over her life, stopped her sleeping right for half a year. And she’s no neurotic London yummy-mummy cliche either. Neither is another otherwise level-headed friend who’s sure the onset of a serious medical condition was sparked by her own Year 6 hell.

Why does this process rattle us so? Why were Brighton parents baying at each other across the council chamber? Because the difference between a failing school and a successful one throws up, deep in the insomniac night, two future visions of your child: an unemployable bifta-smoking wretch and a ten A-starred, shiny superbeing. And the thought of this being decided randomly by municipal computer is too much to bear.

But the best schools will only ever have so many places (even with the Tories’ wheeze that they should simply expand: like where, I often think, looking at cramped city sites? Into the middle of the main road?). And how can one complain that a fellow taxpayer who lives across town — because she can’t afford the premium-price houses abutting that school — has no right to seek a place for her child? Except that her chance reduces your own sense of control.

Politicians talk about choice, but control is what we really mean. And control is the greatest privilege of wealth. The richer we become as a society, the more we demand it, until many of us expect absolute dominion over every aspect of our lives. We are, in marketing jargon, a generation of “maximisers” who, whether buying a holiday, a fridge or a facelift, vigorously research every decision. School league tables can be a fast-track to insanity.

Other countries may send kids unthinkingly to the nearest school, assuming it will be fine. And we beat ourselves up believing that every Dutch or Spanish school is superior to anything we can create, that foreign children are superior to our own blighted youth. If only you could shop around before birth . . . Or maybe we are more individualistic, selfish even, not satisfied with good, only the best. And yet education in our overcrowded island can only be a lottery. Brighton is simply mutating from a town to the city it campaigned so vigorously to be. “It is all but impossible for parents, particularly in urban areas,” said the Commons Education Select Committee, “to exercise their preference with any degree of certainty.”

Even if — as we did — you hedge your bets by also applying to private schools, this is just a second lottery, albeit a super high-stakes golden rollover. There can be no other financial transaction where you stand waving a cheque for what, over seven years, will be pushing 100,000 pounds, hoping, praying, begging for someone to be gracious enough to take it. Only a millionaire who’d spawned a genius could truly enjoy control.

And of the two lotteries, the private is the more nerve-shattering. At least with the state system any shortening of the odds — moving house, attending church — is done by the parents. Going private means it is down to the child, who must be crammed, nagged, beseeched into taking a four-hour test — when a state primary child may never knowingly have taken an exam in his life — then submitted to interviews to be probed and measured, sorted and rejected. The thing about selection, I thought, as my wheyfaced son set off with his pencil case to yet another school gym, is it’s so damn selective.

There is no doubt, particularly in London, that the school lottery can throw children into grim, hostile places no one would ever choose. But secondary transfer is stressful for all parents, because it marks an end to our power. Children are at last granted the freedom that earlier generations had aged 8 or 9. On your child’s 11th birthday, you reach the brow of a hill and look down over a vast, open landscape. Our ability to care and protect, tying that scarf snugly around his neck against the cold, is over. He will hurtle out of the house, scarfless, a head full of unknowable thoughts, and you have ceded control to him. And then the real lottery begins.

Source



The decline of Australia's schools

Julie Bishop, the federal Education Minister, was quite matter-of-fact on The 7.30 Report on Wednesday night. "About a third of our 15-year-olds are functionally illiterate." Left unspoken were two other obvious conclusions:

First, these were kids their teachers had given up on. Second, their parents lacked the ability or inclination to rectify the problem at home. For the first time since the mid-19th century, reading has become a chore adults quite commonly delegated to other people and inter-generational illiteracy is becoming an entrenched dimension of disadvantage.

It's with this grim view of the present and the foreseeable future in mind that we should take on board last week's report from the Productivity Commission. As usual, it beat the drum on the benefits of reforming energy markets, transport and infrastructure; unfinished business that can further enhance national prosperity. But it stressed the need for a new agenda: human capital reform. Partly this was a matter of reducing chronic disease and injury to ensure fewer people are excluded from the work force. Partly it was a matter of reforming tax and welfare systems to increase incentives to work. Mostly it was about education.

If ever there were a time for a back-to-basics approach, the Productivity Commission says it is now. The agenda takes in improving early childhood education, literacy and numeracy, better school completion rates and skills training. It estimates substantial reform could add 9 per cent to economic output during the next 25 years, increase household incomes by an average $1800 and lift workforce participation by nearly 5 per cent. It also calculates that during that time it could boost state and federal revenues by up to $25 billion.

The Productivity Commission's brief is to imagine how much better off we'd all be in a more rationally ordered world. Sceptics tend to share Kant's intuition that "out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made". But even so, within living memory, before 1970, we know that ordinary state school students were regularly achieving much higher levels of literacy and numeracy than their present counterparts. Is it too much to ask the current crop of schoolteachers to replicate these results?

According to the annual Schools Australia report, released on Monday by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, an increasing number of parents think it is. They are giving up on public education in hordes and droves. In the past decade, private schools have grown at nearly 20 times the rate of government schools. The number of state school students has risen by just 1.2 per cent since 1996, compared with 21.5 per cent for Catholic and independent schools, to say nothing of the more radical option of home schooling, for which reliable statistics are hard to find. In Victoria, where dissatisfaction with public education has long been an issue and nearly 40 per cent of senior secondary students are educated privately, overall enrolments remained relatively steady. In South Australia during the decade, government school enrolments fell by 7.7 per cent and in the ACT by 12.3 per cent.

These regional collapses of confidence in public education are certainly spectacular but they need to be seen against the backdrop of long-term change. Since the Karmel report in 1975 and the era of substantial public funding of non-government schools, there has been a fairly steady drift to the private sector. Jack Keating, an educationist at the University of Melbourne, reckons it at about 0.4 per cent a year. Last year 66.8 per cent of Australian children were in government schools and 33.2per cent in the private sector. If, as seems inevitable, the rest of the country follows Victoria's example, the ratio will soon be 64.6per cent to 35.4 per cent.

The question everyone in the political class is tiptoeing around is this. At what point do most public schools simply become sinks of disadvantage, places where a residue of kids with average or below average IQs and more than their fair share of other problems confound everyone's efforts to teach them life's basic survival skills? You could re-formulate the question by asking: at what stage does the abandonment of public-sector education by what used to be called the lower middle classes reach a tipping point?

Some compare the presence of parents who work in the professions to the proverbial "leaven in the lump" of a school community; the dads who are likeliest to coach the soccer team and the mums who volunteer to teach remedial reading. Others, less sentimentally, say that petit bourgeois parents are good at getting grants and zebra crossings out of local MPs because they're more effective at making formal complaints and marketing grievances to the media. Those parents and their children are gravitating towards the larger, academically successful and selective public schools, which are likely to stay that way while most of the smaller, academically weaker schools will stay small and become weaker still. That means average students are probably going to be increasingly short-changed, as the burden of looking after the overall educational needs of communities in non-selective schools becomes a more thankless task, entrusted to an increasingly demoralised bunch of teachers.

There was a time when I would have greeted any decline in public-sector education as a cause for celebration. I still think that a great many state teachers and their appalling unions have preyed like parasites on the long-suffering proletariat. The trouble is that the private sector often employs the same kinds of teachers, is politically correct and third rate in much the same ways and is infected with many of the same fads and questionable methods.

The Catholic parochial system, for example, is almost beyond parody. The values and formation it purports to instil in its pupils is anything but Catholic. Father O'Bubblegum, Auberon Waugh's comic creation, can still be found strumming his guitar and singing the lyrics of John Lennon's Imagine, with no sense of incongruity, at school masses. Vatican II-era nuns can still be heard pushing the feminist pieties and Marxist Sociology 101 they learned as mature-age entrants in diploma courses 30 years ago. Lay teachers who are often neither Catholic nor discernibly Christian are entrusted with religious instruction.

It is scarcely surprising that so few of the kids passing through the system should still be going to church even one Sunday a month by the time they're 20. Apart from the Archbishop of Sydney, George Pell, few Australian Catholic bishops have attempted any sort of reform or reined in their education bureaucracies. Some profess themselves powerless to do so. Accordingly, there has been a marked trend in recent years for traditionally minded Catholic parents to send their children to Anglican or Lutheran schools where, whatever else is lacking, at least the biblical catechesis is adequate.

While the Catholic schools are more aggressively ordinary and anti-intellectual, there's no shortage of paid-up philistines in the independent schools. And let's not forget the genteel ideologues. The social justice wing of the Uniting Church is over-represented, as are the deep greens, people who won't teach phonics and the social studies teachers who fancy themselves in "Sorry" T-shirts. It's gratifying to see how many of the young survive their ministrations with critical faculties intact and a sceptical, often explicitly conservative attitude to all the codswallop they've been taught.

A great deal more could and no doubt should be said about the shortcomings of Australia's Catholic and independent schools. But, whatever private education's failings, if what we conceive as the public sector is to remain viable it is going to have to become much more like its private competition. Whether along the lines of charter schools or various hybrids, public schools urgently need to be rebadged and given a new remit. The less they operate like government agencies, the more confidence they're likely to inspire in parents. The more power parents and principals have, at the expense of head office and the unions, the better the chance of shifting demoralised or incompetent staff and boosting morale. Performance-linked pay is another overdue development.

In the rebadge exercise, there should be a rethink of the ownership and control of schools that aims to capture the benefits that come when an enterprise is owned (and loved) by the people who work there, or even by an individual, rather than by the state. For example, short of outright sale, there's a case to be made for leasing existing public school premises at peppercorn rentals to the entrepreneurial heads of the low-fee colleges that are burgeoning on the outskirts of most of the capital cities. Some, I'm sure, would leap at the chance to take over deadbeat schools, lock, stock and barrel and run them more or less non-selectively on a state subsidy, which would in all likelihood be a fraction of the present cost. In a market system, as Keating argued in The Age last week, they should be rewarded for taking on the most challenging and disadvantaged pupils.

Source

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

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

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

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

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



3 March, 2007

The Closing of the American Mind and Catholic education

The most recent number of The Intercollegiate Review, published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, features a symposium marking the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. Has it really been that long?

Bloom's book was a real sensation and a surprise bestseller. Looking back, I can see why. The Closing was more than a highbrow attack on contemporary academic careerism (a la Jacques Barzun), a middlebrow defense of great books (a la E. D. Hirsch), or a populist expos‚ of tenured radicals and puerile campus ideologues (a la David Horowitz). The gist of Bloom's polemic-and the book was nothing if not a long, erudite, and hyperbolic polemic-was a brief against the cultural revolution of the 1960s. He said out loud what liberal elite culture could only regard as heresy: The supposed idealism of the 1960s was, in fact, a new barbarism. Whatever moral and spiritual seriousness the long tradition of American pragmatism had left intact in university life, the anti-culture of the left destroyed.

The result? Higher education has become, argued Bloom, the professional training of clever and sybaritic animals, who drink, vomit, and fornicate in the dorms by night while they posture critically and ironically by day. Bloom identified moral relativism as dogma that blessed what he called "the civilized reanimalization of man." He saw a troubling, dangerous, and soulless apathy that pleasured itself prudently with passing satisfactions ("Always use condoms!" says the sign by the dispenser in the bathroom) but was moved by no desire to know good or evil, truth or falsehood, beauty or ugliness.

I remember reading Bloom in 1987, feeling as though he was describing what I was experiencing as a young graduate teaching assistant. Bright, energetic, ambitious Yale students could master material with amazing speed. They could discuss brilliantly. They could write effective, well-researched papers. But they possessed an amazing ability to understand without being moved, to experience without judging, to self-consciously put forward their own convictions as mere opinions. On the whole, they seemed to have interior lives of Jell-O.

I have since learned that students are often not as they appear. Quite a number have steely souls and passionate convictions, but they have learned that the proper posture of higher education is either soft diffidence or its counter-image, snarky critical superiority. At times, a cultivated moral passion is OK, even desirable, especially if it is sincerely felt, unconventional, and asserted as an imperative of personality. An urgent vegetarianism expressed with a vehemence bordering on taboo, for example, can be quite acceptable. What is positively discouraged, however, are reasoned, principled commitments. So students who have real and serious moral or religious convictions hide them and cordon them off from their educational experience.

The need to hide convictions, and the tendency to separate conviction from education is especially true for students who have traditional beliefs. Nearly all faculty stand at the ready to critique and correct. The guillotine of professorial intervention need fall only once or twice before students realize that all truths are relative, and some are more relative than others. Usually, this has already happened in secondary school, and students come to college wise to the logic of multicultural "inclusion."

Bloom helps us see that, whether students lack convictions or disguise them, the educational effect is pretty much the same. The most important question in peoples lives-that is to say, the question of how they should live-remains largely unconnected to the sophisticated intellectual training that continues to take place in the classroom. I can often get students to "share" their moral "opinions," and often with a certain warmth of conviction. I can also get students to analyze classical arguments for or against various accounts of the good life. But I find it difficult to induce students to take a passionate and rational interest in fundamental questions. Students are either soulless creatures, or they recuse their souls from any contact with reason and argument. This phenomenon was what troubled Allan Bloom, and this is why he wrote The Closing of the American Mind.

Leaders in Catholic education should revisit Bloom's spiritual diagnosis. To a large extent, a similar worry about passionless, commitment-free inquiry dominates John Paul II's teaching on education, philosophy, and the dignity of reason. In Fides et Ratio, the late pope expressed a great concern that contemporary intellectual culture has lost touch with "the search for ultimate truth," and as does Bloom, John Paul II evokes the danger of relativism. We should beware "an undifferentiated pluralism," he writes, for an easy celebration of "difference" undermines our desire for truth and reduces everything to mere opinion.

Over the years, I have observed that most Catholic deans, provosts, and presidents ignore or even contribute to the slide of higher education into soulless relativism. Most take the integrity of reason and the truth claims of the Catholic Church for granted, even as it slowly declines into the standard, amoral, post-cultural agenda of secular education. Some actively undermine the relationship of the university to the Church in order to deploy the university as part of the liberal Catholic resistance to the conservative trends in the larger Church. Others imagine that multicultural educational ideologies rightly express a Catholic commitment to social justice and the preferential option for the poor.

Every Catholic university has its own story. But the basic dynamic tends to be the same. For all their good intentions, most Catholic administrators are hopelessly confused and inconsistent when it comes to the goals of education. Just talk to a Catholic dean or college president. They do not want non-Catholic students to be "uncomfortable," and they want everyone to feel "included." Then, not a minute or two later, the conversation shifts, and the very same proponents of inclusion will insist that we need to challenge our students with critical thought and diverse perspectives. Hello! You can't have it both ways-making students comfortable and challenging them.

Of course, what most Catholic educators usually mean is that a professor should challenge the traditional beliefs of Catholic students and challenge any conservative political or economic beliefs that students are foolish enough to expose. This critical project, which is conveniently well-coordinated with the agenda of secular education, has the desired effect of making administrators and faculty feel good about their great vocation as critical educators while-miracle of miracles-making anybody who disagrees with the teachings of the Catholic Church feel comfortable and welcome.

The students are not stupid. Those with traditional and conservative convictions quickly realize that the deck is stacked against them, and they learn to separate their religious and moral and political convictions from the classroom. They remove their souls from the university. The non-Catholic students realize that few faculty create a pedagogical environment where Catholic teaching can make a claim on their intellects and lives. They relax, gratified that they can get an education without having to put any energy into arguing against and resisting. Their souls are left quiescent and unchallenged. What Bloom feared becomes the atmosphere of Catholic education: the question of how we should live fails to enter into the center of university life.

Maybe I'm simple-minded, but I don't think the solution is all that difficult to understand. Catholic universities should challenge students-with the full force of the Catholic tradition. A truth that presses us toward holiness is a far greater threat to naive credulities and bourgeois complacency than anodyne experiences of "difference" or easy moves of "critique," which bright students master and mimic very quickly.

I don't think that the lectern should be turned into a pulpit, but the soul of Catholic education requires classrooms haunted by the authority of the Church and the holiness of her saints. That was the actual, experienced effect of the old system, when large numbers of faculty were priests and nuns.

Every culture demands and prohibits, encourages and exhorts. The desire to have a university free from demands, a classroom sanitized and unhaunted, is nothing short of desiring an education free from culture. Many professors and administrators today desire this kind of education. For multiculturalism, "diversity," and disembodied "critical thinking" add up to an imaginary, spectral meta-culture that is, by definition, no culture at all. And as I have said, students are not stupid. They realize that an education free from the commanding truths of culture is an invitation to live as clever, well-trained, and socially productive animals; and like all good students, they live up to the expectations.

Today the single greatest goal of Catholic universities should be to withdraw this debasing invitation. All students are well served by an educational atmosphere shaped by the demands of Catholic culture, demands that bear down upon us with the frightening force of divine commandments. For the dangerous commitments of truth and not the cool dispassion of critique open minds.

Source



California school revives segregation

With schools under increasing pressure to improve test scores, Mount Diablo High School has resorted to a new way to motivate students: by race. The Concord campus on Friday held separate assemblies for students of different ethnicities to talk about last year's test results and the upcoming slew of state exams this spring. Jazz music and pictures of Martin Luther King greeted African-American students, whereas Filipino, Asian and Pacific Islander students saw flags of their foreign homelands on the walls. Latinos and white students each attended their own events, too, complete with statistics showing results for all ethnicities and grade level.

"They started off by saying jokingly, 'What up, white people,'" said freshman Megan Wiley, 14. Teachers flashed last year's test scores and told the white crowd of students to do better for the sake of their people. "They got into, 'You should be proud of your race,'" Wiley said. "It was just weird."

Several parents later told the Times that the meetings smacked of segregation resurrected. "Why did they have to divide the students by race?" said Filipino parent Claddy Dennis, mother of freshman Schenlly Dennis. "In this country, everybody is supposed to be treated equally. It sounds like racism to me."

Principal Bev Hansen said she held the student assemblies by ethnicity this year and last year to avoid one group harassing another based on their test scores. The 1,600-student campus, one of the most ethnically diverse high schools in the Mt. Diablo school district, is roughly half Latino, 30 percent white and 15 percent black, with Asian nationalities rounding out the mix. Last year, the school improved its academic performance index score, largely based on test scores, to 613 out of 1,000. Among the races, Asians scored highest. Whites earned a 667. African-Americans scored a 580, whereas Latinos earned a 571. "I don't want students being teased," Hansen said.

Ultimately, however, Hansen said she did not know why parents seemed so concerned. The state has reported scores based on race for years. The school assemblies simply reflected those same categories in reporting the numbers to students, she said. "In this country, race is a very uncomfortable topic, and it's time we got over it," Hansen said.

Jack Jennings, president of the National Center on Education Policy, a leading education research group, called the racially divided meetings potentially illegal and dangerous. "It's segregation by race, whatever the motivation," Jennings said, noting that he had never heard before of a school or district doing such a thing. He described the assemblies as a unique byproduct of the intense focus on testing. Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, schools, school districts and states must report and are accountable for scores in reading and math for specific races, English learners, special-education students and economically disadvantaged students. All statistically significant groups must show continuous test score improvement. "It shows that there's so much pressure to raise test scores that teachers and administrators are trying to do anything they can," Jennings said. "Sometimes what they choose is not very wise."

Last spring, California High School in the San Ramon Valley pulled Latino and black students in for pretesting pep talks but not white students. The principal apologized after parents flooded the mayor's office with complaints.

Mount Diablo sophomore Hector Rivera, 15, said he enjoyed the speakers at his Latino student assembly. "The way they were speaking, it was intended to make people feel good," Rivera said. "I guess it was to inspire everybody, like you can do better." Hispanic students made a 50-point gain on the state's 1,000-point achievement scale. White students improved by 46 points, whereas English learners posted the greatest rise, more than 80 points.

"There's nothing negative about these assemblies," said school secretary Arnetta Jones, who is African-American and helped organize the assembly for African-American students. "It wasn't, in any way, to put people down." African-American students raised their score on the state academic performance index by 61 points. "We showed an incredible amount of improvement on our test scores," Jones said. The event also celebrated black culture, Jones said. Two students performed a dance with choreography by African-American dance visionary Alvin Ailey. A black pastor from Bay Point delivered a message. One student read a poem that is the mantra of a black fraternity from UC Berkeley. "That kind of set the tone," Jones said.

However, some African-American students interpreted the school's messages differently. Freshman Jason Lockett, 14, said he saw the pictures of Martin Luther King and the words, "Black Power" projected overhead. But the scores, despite being an increase over last year, still lag other races'. "It was to compare us and say how much dumber we were than everybody else," Lockett said.

Principal Hansen said although some students were upset, they deserve to know the truth about lower test scores. "We need help in closing the achievement gap," Hansen said. "This is one tiny step."

Source



Teach the teachers

Comment from Australia

When a friend asked at a school meeting a few years ago what were the key concepts her child would be learning that year, the beginner teacher couldn't answer. In an age when at some schools you can take a course in text messaging it seems even teachers no longer know what our kids are meant to be learning.

Whole terms are wasted on themed units about the Commonwealth Games and the Olympics. After six years in primary school, my daughter could recite to you the entire history of the Olympics -- but she has only a very patchy knowledge about the history of her own country.

The push by both major parties to have a national curriculum is long overdue but it will only be welcomed by parents if it unites the states behind a higher standard rather than the lowest common denominator. And it will only work if the people delivering that new curriculum are well trained to deliver it.

A report out this week found the training and morale of the teaching profession is just as big a problem as the curriculum they teach. The House of Representatives inquiry Top of the Class found one in five beginner teachers leaves the profession within their first five years of teaching. More disturbing for parents is that the report highlighted the worrying fact that the people teaching our kids may often have no command themselves of maths and literacy. Only four of the 31 universities that carry out teacher training require their students to have Year 12 maths.

Melbourne University told the inquiry it would have to disqualify half its student teachers if it required them to have Year 12 maths. That's why the House of Representatives committee is calling for trainee teachers to have their literacy and numeracy skills tested when they start their degree.

Having a good grasp themselves of what they should be teaching our kids is one thing, but knowing how to get that message across is another. In my job I get to question prime ministers and I've performed in front of television cameras and on radio. However, none of these jobs has scared me as much as the time I had to give a talk to the 25 kids in my daughter's class. Trying to hold the attention of 25 nine-year-olds, keep them under control and try to get a message across is no easy feat.

That's why you'd think our teacher training courses would be chock full of practical teaching experiences for our teachers. But they're not. In NSW, a person who graduates with a one-year Diploma of Education will have spent just 20 days in front of a class. Someone who does a four-year teaching degree will get 80 days in front of a class during their university training. In the ACT, the requirement is just 30 days teaching practice.

The inquiry found that very often this very important practical component of a teacher's education is not supervised by universities or assessed because they don't have the staff or the money. All the educational and psychological theory lessons in the world won't help when you've got to control a class of 30 kids, one of whom tries to use the Bunsen burners to set the science lab alight or throws a chair through the window. That's the sort of behaviour my cousin had to deal with in her first year of teaching.

It's when they leave university that the teacher training system really cheats new teachers. The inquiry found very few of them got any help at all settling in or learning to apply the theory they'd learned at university in the classroom in their first year out. In fact, nearly three out of four of them don't even get a permanent job so the schools who take them on have no vested interest in building up their skills.

A Department of Education, Science and Training survey of recent graduates found 57 per cent were engaged on short-term contracts. Fifteen per cent were stuck with the graduate teacher's nightmare of relief teaching work and only 28 per cent were in permanent jobs. The inquiry warned the teaching profession was rapidly ageing and over the next seven years we would be facing a serious shortage of teachers. Just having a warm body in front of a class will be the priority. No parent will be satisfied with this sort of system. Every parent wants their kids to learn the basics.

Source

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

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

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

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

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



2 March, 2007

College Students More Narcissistic Than Ever

The Leftist "self-esteem" gospel in action

Today's college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society. "We need to stop endlessly repeating 'You're special' and having children repeat that back," said the study's lead author, Professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University. "Kids are self-centered enough already."

Twenge and her colleagues, in findings to be presented at a workshop Tuesday in San Diego on the generation gap, examined the responses of 16,475 college students nationwide who completed an evaluation called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory between 1982 and 2006. The standardized inventory, known as the NPI, asks for responses to such statements as "If I ruled the world, it would be a better place," "I think I am a special person" and "I can live my life any way I want to." The researchers describe their study as the largest ever of its type and say students' NPI scores have risen steadily since the current test was introduced in 1982. By 2006, they said, two-thirds of the students had above-average scores, 30 percent more than in 1982.

Narcissism can have benefits, said study co-author W. Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia, suggesting it could be useful in meeting new people "or auditioning on 'American Idol.'" "Unfortunately, narcissism can also have very negative consequences for society, including the breakdown of close relationships with others," he said.

The study asserts that narcissists "are more likely to have romantic relationships that are short-lived, at risk for infidelity, lack emotional warmth, and to exhibit game-playing, dishonesty, and over-controlling and violent behaviors."

Twenge, the author of "Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled - and More Miserable Than Ever Before," said narcissists tend to lack empathy, react aggressively to criticism and favor self-promotion over helping others. The researchers traced the phenomenon back to what they called the "self-esteem movement" that emerged in the 1980s, asserting that the effort to build self-confidence had gone too far. As an example, Twenge cited a song commonly sung to the tune of "Frere Jacques" in preschool: "I am special, I am special. Look at me." "Current technology fuels the increase in narcissism," Twenge said. "By its very name, MySpace encourages attention-seeking, as does YouTube."

Some analysts have commended today's young people for increased commitment to volunteer work. But Twenge viewed even this phenomenon skeptically, noting that many high schools require community service and many youths feel pressure to list such endeavors on college applications. Campbell said the narcissism upsurge seemed so pronounced that he was unsure if there were obvious remedies. "Permissiveness seems to be a component," he said. "A potential antidote would be more authoritative parenting. Less indulgence might be called for."

The new report follows a study released by UCLA last month which found that nearly three-quarters of the freshmen it surveyed thought it was important to be "very well-off financially." That compared with 62.5 percent who said the same in 1980 and 42 percent in 1966.

Yet students, while acknowledging some legitimacy to such findings, don't necessarily accept negative generalizations about their generation. Hanady Kader, a University of Washington senior, said she worked unpaid last summer helping resettle refugees and considers many of her peers to be civic-minded. But she is dismayed by the competitiveness of some students who seem prematurely focused on career status. "We're encouraged a lot to be individuals and go out there and do what you want, and nobody should stand in your way," Kader said. "I can see goals and ambitions getting in the way of other things like relationships."

Kari Dalane, a University of Vermont sophomore, says most of her contemporaries are politically active and not overly self-centered. "People are worried about themselves - but in the sense of where are they're going to find a place in the world," she said. "People want to look their best, have a good time, but it doesn't mean they're not concerned about the rest of the world." Besides, some of the responses on the narcissism test might not be worrisome, Dalane said. "It would be more depressing if people answered, 'No, I'm not special.'" [Brainwashed]

Source



Canadian homosexual Activists Consider Targeting Private Christian Schools for "Homophobia"

Ontario private schools are coming increasingly under the lens of homosexual activist groups for "homophobic" teaching stemming from the schools' primarily religious foundations, a report in Ottawa's homosexual news media indicated earlier this week.

In an article warning about the increasing trend toward private and religious schools in the province, Ottawa's Capital Xtra objected to religious schools that teach children "only their own values."

The article quotes Tony Lovink, a homosexual Christian teacher in the Ottawa public school system, as saying, "All private schools tend to be at least implicitly homophobic. And I would say all religiously formed independent schools are definitely homophobic."

The Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights in Ontario said they were concerned the provincial ministry of education wasn't "exerting more control" over the curriculum used by private religious schools. Unless a school wants to grant students government-recognized Secondary School Diplomas, Ontario private schools are free to use their preferred curriculum. Even schools that do grant the government diplomas may teach any additional material they choose, so long as the required curriculum is covered.

As well, the CLGRO objected to provincial standards that permit private schools to hire teachers based on the school administration's own qualification requirements.

In October 2006 the Quebec government ordered private Christian schools in the province to begin teaching sex education and Darwinism in compliance with the provincial curriculum, threatening schools with closure if they failed to comply.

Dr. Janet Epp Buckingham, then-director of law and public policy with the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, told LifeSiteNews at the time that parents' right to educate their children in accordance with their religious beliefs is protected under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

In 1986 the Supreme Court ruled that although an Alberta pastor who was running a school out of the basement of his church did have to license the school, the provincial government had to provide reasonable accommodation for religious belief.

The court ruled that the province must "`delicately and sensitively weigh the competing interests so as to respect as much as possible the religious convictions as guaranteed by the Charter,'" Dr. Epp Buckingham quoted.

In an ongoing battle over homosexual content in BC public school curriculums, parents are struggling to gain assurance from the school board that they may withdraw their children from pro-homosexual content in the classroom.

Homosexual activists Murray Corren and Peter Corren were granted an unprecedented say over the development of new pro-homosexual content in the provincial curriculum, as part of settlement in a human rights lawsuit against the province's Liberal government in June 2006. The agreement also introduced a policy that would prevent parents from withdrawing their children from the classroom when the material was being taught.

The Catholic Civil Rights League is continuing efforts to ensure all 60 BC school boards acknowledge parents' rights to oversee the education of their children.

Source



Australian Federal Leftists get on school standards bandwagon



The cartoon above refers to the fact that the new Federal Labor party policy is very similar to the policy of Australia's Federal conservatives. The main difference apears to be that the Left will not put much backbone into it

Kevin Rudd has pledged to introduce a back-to-basics national curriculum in maths, science, English and history within three years of winning office. In a move aimed at seizing the initiative on the national curriculum debate after years of discussion, the Labor leader said it should be "concise, in plain English and understandable to both parents and teachers".

And in a challenge to teachers' unions, Mr Rudd said union leaders would not be offered a place on the National Curriculum Board that a Labor government would establish to develop consistent national curriculums from kindergarten to Year 12.

The new benchmarks would include a recommended reading list of Australian literature and classics, which the Opposition confirmed last night would include Shakespeare. Younger maths students would be required to understand multiplication and fractions, and senior history students would have to demonstrate a systematic understanding of Australian history.

"Australia has been talking for years about the need for a national curriculum," Mr Rudd said yesterday. "A national curriculum will mean that a student moving between Western Australia, Queensland, NSW and Victoria will not be disadvantaged." Labor predicted the plan could be achieved in consultation with the states. It immediately won qualified support from Queensland Premier Peter Beattie, but the NSW Government remained sceptical about the value of a national curriculum, even under a federal ALP government.

Labor's plan would also include a new discussion to boost languages in schools, echoing the elevation of "language other than English" program in the Queensland Goss government during the 1990s, when Mr Rudd was director-general of the Department of Premier and Cabinet. The program, introduced in 1991, had set an ambitious target to have all Queensland students studying a second language by 2000.

A veteran of battles with the teachers' union in Queensland during his years as a public servant and more recently during the debate over the state's controversial Studies of Society and the Environment, Mr Rudd said there was no place for unions on the curriculum board. "We will not have representation from the unions," he said. "This is a professional curriculum body with representation from the states and territories and curriculum experts from the non-government sector as well."

Mr Rudd's show of determination to resist union pressure on education came as the Government sought to paint him as weak on industrial relations. A succession of government ministers demanded Labor reveal whether it would keep small business exempt from unfair dismissal laws after Labor frontbencher Craig Emerson hinted on Tuesday night that Labor would give the sector special treatment. Dr Emerson's comments at a meeting of small business people caused jitters among some Labor MPs and unionists, who are demanding Labor give all workers the same treatment, regardless of the size of their employer.

In parliament, Education Minister Julie Bishop accused Mr Rudd of plagiarising the term "education revolution" from [disgraced] former Labor leader Mark Latham. "Naughty boy! You stole that idea, didn't you?" she said, later adding: "You will have to go to the naughty corner, won't you?"

Ms Bishop said the suggestion that a national system could be achieved through co-operation with the states was "politically naive" and signalled she would introduce her own plan for a national curriculum by using the threat of funding to force action.

Labor was also on the attack over early childhood education in parliament, seizing on secret cabinet submissions revealing the Prime Minister had recommended action in 2003 but failed to deliver.

Mr Beattie yesterday backed the plan to develop a national curriculum, but only if standards were lifted. "We don't want to lose the edge that we have, but if it means lifting the national standard up to Queensland standards then we would support that," he said.

NSW Education Minister Carmel Tebbutt welcomed the more consultative approach adopted by Mr Rudd and Opposition education spokesman Stephen Smith, but said NSW would not accept a national curriculum simply for the sake of uniformity. "I remain concerned that any move to a national curriculum could result in an undermining of our standards," she said.

The chairwoman of the Australian Council of Deans of Education, Sue Willis, said progress towards a national curriculum framework was continually being derailed by short-term policy bursts that failed to provide any consistency over the long term. Victorian Education Minister John Lenders said he was confident that Mr Rudd's proposal would "lift standards rather than dumbing down standards to the lowest common denominator". "Ms Bishop's approach has been aggressive and confrontational," Mr Lenders said.

NSW Teachers Federation president Maree O'Halloran said it was essential for teachers to be involved in any national curriculum. "The people who actually develop and deliver the curriculum and understand the needs of students and teachers are the people in our classrooms currently," Ms O'Halloran said.

The announcements build on Labor's policy to invest $450 million to provide four-year-olds with 15 hours a week of high-quality early childhood education and provide $111 million to encourage students to study maths and science at university.

Source

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

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

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

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

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



1 March, 2007

YIKES! MORE UNHAPPY IMPRISONMENT FOR KIDS COMING

But the Left have always been quick to imprison people -- often "for their own good", of course

School principal Robin Harris used to see the clock on her office wall as the enemy, its steady ticking a reminder that time was not on her side. But these days Harris smiles when the clock hits 1:55 p.m. There are still two more hours in the school day - two more hours to teach math and reading, art and drama. Harris runs Fletcher-Maynard Academy, a combined public elementary and middle school in Cambridge, Mass., that is experimenting with an extended, eight-hour school day. "It has sort of loosened up the pace," Harris said. "It's not as rushed and frenzied."

The school, which serves mostly poor, minority students, is one of 10 in the state experimenting with a longer day as part of a $6.5 million program. While Massachusetts is leading in putting in place the longer-day model, lawmakers in Minnesota, New Mexico, New York and Washington, D.C., also have debated whether to lengthen the school day or year. In addition, individual districts such as Miami-Dade in Florida are experimenting with added hours in some schools. On average, U.S. students go to school 6.5 hours a day, 180 days a year, fewer than in many other industrialized countries, according to a report by the Education Sector, a Washington-based think tank.

One model that traditional public schools are looking to is the Knowledge is Power Program, which oversees public charter schools nationwide. Those schools typically serve low-income middle-school students, and their test scores show success. Students generally go from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. during the week and for a few hours every other Saturday. They also go to school for several weeks in the summer. That amounts to at least 50 percent more instructional time for students in such programs than in traditional public schools, according to the report. The extended-day schedule costs on average about $1,200 extra per student, program spokesman Stephen Mancini said. Massachusetts is spending about $1,300 per student extra on its extended-day effort.

Most of the extra cost goes into added pay for teachers. At Fletcher-Maynard, senior teachers can make up to $20,000 more per year for the extended hours, Harris said. Not all of the school's teachers have opted to work longer hours.

The National Education Association, the largest teacher's union, has no official opinion on extending the school day. But its president, Reg Weaver, said teachers probably would support the idea if, like in Massachusetts, they could choose whether to work the longer hours. He also said teachers must be adequately compensated and should have a say in setting the goals of any such effort.

An important impetus for the debate around extending school hours is the federal No Child Left Behind law. The five-year-old law requires annual testing in reading and math for grades three through eight, and again in high school. All students are expected to be working on grade level by 2014. Schools that fail to meet annual benchmarks are labeled as needing improvement and have to take steps to address the problem.

Up against such a tough requirement, extending the day makes sense, Harris said. "If you want kids to read, and you want to teach them how to read, they have to have time reading," she said. [Not nearly as helpful as realistic tuition methods, though. I have seen some phonics-educated kids able to write intelligible sentences by the end of Grade1!]

Kathy Christie, a policy analyst at the Denver-based Education Commission of the States, said that law "has put enough pressure on more people to realize that the traditional school day is not enough to catch kids up." Christie, whose Denver-based nonprofit focuses on school reform, added, "You can't keep taking away recess."

Schools that are experimenting with longer days are adding more down time and enrichment courses, as well as reading and math. At Edwards Middle School, an extended-day school in Boston, students are staging musicals, designing book covers for favorite novels and coming up with new cheers to boost school spirit - an activity favored by 13-year-old Janice Tang. "This is a class where I can express myself, be active," Tang said one afternoon after she pumped her arms in the air during a girls-only class that incorporates cheering with topics such as sex education and discouraging smoking. "It's very cool, and I have fun a lot."

Massachusetts' education commissioner, David Driscoll, said the offbeat classes get kids excited about a longer day. "Once they're engaged, they'll learn other lessons," Driscoll said. "I think the big mistake that everybody makes is they think that education is all about the academics."

The No Child Left Behind law is due to be updated this year, and the lawmakers involved are eyeing the Massachusetts model. U.S. Rep. George Miller, the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, said he likes the way schools in Massachusetts have invited community organizations to help with some enrichment courses. "If you're just extending the day to bore the hell out of the child, why don't we all just all go home and save the overtime. You've got to rethink these models," said Miller, D-Calif.

U.S. Sen. Democrat Edward Kennedy, chairman of the Senate committee overseeing education, is considering allowing schools that fail to meet annual progress goals to extend their day as a possible solution. Kennedy, D-Mass., also is considering putting AmeriCorps volunteers - recent college graduates who can help teach - into schools that adopt a longer day.

Extending the day has not been tackled extensively in high schools where many students have afterschool jobs or play sports. The idea is not always applauded by parents, at least initially. Dawn Oliver was so apprehensive about a plan this year to expand the day at her daughter's middle school in Fall River, Mass., that she considered pulling 11-year-old Brittany out. "We all had the same thought in our head, which was, 'Oh my God, these kids are going to have their head in a book for the same amount of time as working a full-time job,'" Oliver said. She said her fears began to fade, however, when she saw the list of electives the kids could take in the afternoon, including cooking and forensics. Those reinforce core lessons, Oliver said. "They're making a magazine. She's an advice columnist," she said of Brittany. "The kids get so involved in these things because it's not all book work." [Probably not a lot of use, either, usually] Oliver said the real benefits showed up on Brittany's report card, which improved from straight C's to B's. "I did not foresee honor roll," Oliver said, brimming with pride.

Source



High School dropout deluge alarms California officials

That the root cause of it might be their own stupid educational and social theories will not of course be considered. The no. 1 need is for able teachers and very few people with ability would take on teaching in California's indisciplined and dangerous schools

"Why are we allowing this to continue?" asks Sen. Darrell Steinberg. The Sacramento Democrat known for tackling complex social issues and building consensus among colleagues has turned his attention to high school. "Issues cry out to you as needing attention, and this is at the top of my list. It affects children, families, schools, communities and has major economic consequences for the state," Steinberg said. "We need to make a systemic commitment to eliminating this high school dropout rate." He convinced the state Senate to form a select committee devoted to exploring how California can keep students in school. It began a series of hearings last week that will continue March 14.

In addition to the Harvard researchers and school district administrators who testified at the first hearing was 17-year-old Ann Marie Reyes of Sacramento. She boasts a 3.29 grade-point-average and is looking forward to going to California State University, Sacramento. But during her first two years in high school, Reyes said, she teetered on the edge of dropping out. "My grades weren't good, and I just didn't believe in myself," she said. "A lot of things were going on." The oldest of nine children, she worked nights at a 24-hour child-care center and weekends setting up birthday parties at the zoo. Her report cards were covered with D's and F's. She had joined a gang. "Once I got into my junior year, I realized, 'I'm not going to be able to graduate,' " Reyes said. "It hurt me inside, it killed me. So I cut myself off from all my friends, and all I did was schoolwork."

She also found support at school. Reyes switched from River City to McClatchy High School, where she formed a close relationship with a teacher. She joined a program for at-risk students that stresses values such as courtesy, integrity and perseverance. Reyes told the select committee that lawmakers should fund similar efforts to stem the flow of dropouts. She also said they should consider more training for teachers in how to communicate with teenagers, more English-language support for immigrant students and more college-prep classes for everyone.

Increasing the availability of college-prep classes is one proposal among the five bills Steinberg is pushing as part of his dropout prevention agenda. Fewer than half of California high schools now offer enough college-prep classes to allow all students to participate in the curriculum, according to UCLA researchers. The other bills in his package would:

* Expand the number of high school students who simultaneously enroll in community college. More community colleges would be able to grant high school diplomas under Senate Bill 218.

* Change the way the state calculates the academic performance index, or API, with Senate Bill 219. In addition to reflecting student test scores, the API for each high school also would indicate how many students dropped out, the test scores of students re-assigned to alternative schools, the availability of college-prep courses and what kinds of jobs graduates hold.

* Offer more help to struggling middle schoolers. Schools would be required to provide interventions to students in sixth through ninth grades who fail a class or miss more than 10 days in one semester. (Bill number not yet assigned.)

* Limit which high school students could hold jobs. Students would have to maintain a C-average and an 80 percent attendance record to receive a work permit from their school. (Bill number not yet assigned.)

Many school districts -- including Elk Grove Unified -- already place such restrictions on granting work permits, said Mike Furtado, a work experience coordinator at Elk Grove High School. It's an effective way to keep students in check. "Working is a real carrot for kids. It's important for them to work to earn money, to be a little bit independent. I've found that by having this GPA requirement, it makes students do better," he said. "If it's not universal, perhaps the law does need to be in place."

It's too early for many groups to take official positions on Steinberg's bills. But upon early consideration, the Association of California School Administrators has identified some problems with the API legislation. It's unfair for a high school's API to reflect the test scores of students who are transferred into alternative schools, because the high school can't control the education at the alternative school, said Sherry Skelly Griffith, a lobbyist for the group. But Steinberg said the current system doesn't work because high schools, under pressure to keep their scores up, have an incentive to shove out the low-performing students. "There ought to be a link between a high school and a continuation school," he said. "Otherwise, too many kids are just falling through the cracks."

Source



Australian school authorities say: 'Be happy your son is bullied'

A mother who sought Education Department help amid repeated assaults on her six-year-old son by a classmate was twice told "bullying builds character", a court has heard. Angela Cox yesterday said she was stunned by the comment which came after her son Ben was choked by a nine-year-old boy at Woodberry Public School, near Maitland, on the Central Coast. "I was really annoyed the school hadn't done anything," she said. "(Department officer) Ian Wilson told me bullying builds character and it was a good thing."

Mrs Cox and her son Ben are suing the state, claiming the department was liable for the treatment of her son in 1995 and 1996, which left him depressed, anxious and reluctant to leave the house. "I couldn't believe something like this could happen," she told the Supreme Court yesterday. "(After the violence) he wasn't the same boy he used to be."

Ben, now 18, spends his days watching TV or playing computer games. He has only completed schooling to Year 7. Attempts to have his education continued at other schools and by correspondence failed. Mrs Cox said, with the school doing little more than occasionally putting the nine-year-old on detention, she removed him from class. "I went to the principal, said, 'I'm taking Ben out of school' because they couldn't provide a safe place for (him)," she said. "(The principal) said, 'Sorry, but you keep some, you lose some'."

Needing departmental permission to move him to a school outside the immediate area, she spoke to Mr Wilson again. "He said he couldn't provide total safety for my son and bullying could happen (anywhere). He told me bullying builds character."

When Mrs Cox was asked what the alleged bullying had done to her son's mental health, she replied tearfully: "In his mind he always thinks he's that little boy, ready to be hurt again." Mrs Cox's own psychiatric history was raised in court yesterday and she admitted spending time in hospital due to chronic depression. She denied she had kept her son or her daughters Hannah and Rebekah home from school because she needed companionship when she was too ill to leave home.

Ben had played rugby league in his mid-teens but there were still problems like his fear of the change rooms, she said. Counsel for the state Robert Sheldon asked her if her son had ever been any good at school. "I don't think we ever got the chance to see," she said. Mrs Cox also denied she made any attempt to stop her son from going to school because she was "worried about losing him" as he headed into high school.

Source

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

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

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

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

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