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



31 March, 2009

Let’s not play standards roulette

Whether it's blind hope that Washington can fix anything, a lack of ideas for reforming our crummy schools, or some other reason entirely, calls for national academic standards are increasingly loud and frequent. And while President Barack Obama stopped short of explicitly advocating for them in his first major education address, there have been several high—profile calls recently by American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, the National Governor's Association and Obama's education secretary, Arne Duncan.

But instituting national standards will not solve the problems facing our schools. Indeed, it would be like playing Russian roulette with our kids — with only one empty chamber.

What's driving this bandwagon? The No Child Left Behind Act is a big part of it. NCLB requires schools to bring all students to math and reading "proficiency" by 2014, but leaves it to states to define what that means. This practically begs states to set weak standards in order to stay out of trouble, and has led to standards that vary markedly from state to state but are almost always very low.

Of course, NCLB isn't designed like this because it yields the best educational results. It's optimal politically. The law is structured to make federal politicians appear both tough on failing schools and dedicated to cherished local control.

But NCLB isn't the only problem. Many people simply don't trust the states, and reasonably so. As the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a longtime national standards supporter, has repeatedly documented, even before NCLB, state standards were all too often light and fluffy, not meaty and rigorous. In 2000, the Institute gave state standards an average grade of C minus, and concluded that only five states combined solid standards with strong accountability.

Like NCLB, politics explains this pitiful performance. As Fordham wrote, "Some people seem quite content to let it [establishing strong standards] take forever. ... That will allow all the standards setters, enforcers, testers, monitors and analysts to maintain full employment, and will enable elected officials to continue to claim that they and their states are fully engaged in standards—based reform."

In light of dismal state and federal track records, why should anyone expect national standards to miraculously avoid crippling politics and end up with anything better than what we've seen so far? No one should. Knowing that only a few states have occasionally gotten standards right, trying to nationalize them would be at best a high—risk game of Russian roulette.

Just think about how education politics works. Because their very livelihoods come from the public schools, the teachers, principals and bureaucrats who are to be held to performance standards exert outsized influence over them, and strongly resist being subjected to tough accountability. Meanwhile, politicians do whatever is easiest for them, trying to be all things to all people while keeping on the good sides of powerful interests such as teacher unions and administrator associations.

Political reality simply offers no support for national standards. Likewise, national standards supporters offer no convincing arguments for their proposal.

Randi Weingarten claims that "the countries that consistently outperform the United States on international assessments all have national standards." But most of the countries that do worse than we do also have national standards, making the correlation between national standards and academic success at best pretty weak.

How about the unreasonableness of states having "50 different goal posts," as was cited by Secretary Duncan? Certainly no child should be legally condemned to a bad school, but the fundamental problem isn't that standards differ. Indeed, since all children are unique, differentiation at the individual level is critical to success. No, the fundamental problem is the "legally condemned" part. Unless their parents can afford private schools on top of taxes, children are forced to attend government schools that, by their very one—size—fits—all nature, stifle specialization and are powerfully inclined to low standards.

The last thing we need are government—driven national standards. We must not play Russian roulette with our kids. Indeed, we need to take the political revolver out of education completely. We need to let parents control education dollars, let autonomous schools freely set their own standards, and allow competition to continuously drive standards higher. We need universal school choice.

SOURCE




Are school trips a thing of the past in Britain?

Now that spring has sprung and the evenings are getting lighter, children may be aching to get outside the classroom. What better way to burn off some of that youthful energy and excitement than on a school trip?

Sadly some teachers no longer share their enthusiasm. New research suggests a fifth of teachers never - or rarely - take children on educational school visits, because of the burden of red tape and the cost to parents during a recession.

The survey had responses from 400 primary and secondary school teachers. It found the majority (57 per cent) arrange excursions only once or twice a year. One in eight teachers undertakes visits only every few years, and one in 10 never does so.

Paul Gilbert, chief executive officer of Education Travel Group, which commissioned the research, said: “Our review of teachers’ opinions found that teachers agree education visits are vital. “They give students a broader understanding and provide a fun, first-hand experience of their subjects as well as facilitating team building and socialising. “But the biggest barrier we found to arranging excursions is now concern about costs for parents – nine out of ten teachers we spoke to said the current economic climate would make it harder to arrange trips in future.”

The survey also discovered that two fifths of teachers were put off school visits because they involved too much paperwork, too much organising and raised fears about litigation should the worst possible scenario happen.

More than a third felt they put a burden on staff, a quarter said there were not enough teachers to take children on trips, 17 per cent were concerned about disciplinary action and 15 per cent worried about accidents. Half of teachers felt they could do more to encourage school trips by helping parents to understand their value.

However it raises the question of whether parental encouragement would revive the fortune of school trips, in the face of such fear and reluctance by teachers.

SOURCE





30 March, 2009

British Exam regulator finally admits: Science exams are dumbed down

GCSE boards must act immediately to improve the quality of science questions in order to stretch and challenge students, the exam regulator said yesterday. It said that the qualification had been dumbed down, with too many multiple choice papers and superficial questions.

A controversial new GCSE in single science, which was intended to make the subject more relevant to teenagers, raised “significant cause for concerns” about standards, Ofqual said.

Many of the multiple choice questions were too easy because the wrong options given were “too obviously incorrect”, it said. There were also too many “short-answer questions that were fairly limited in their requirements or in the scientific content that they addressed”. The GCSE physics paper had replaced the testing of physics concepts with questions about the advantages and drawbacks of CCTV, mobile phones and the internet, it said. The regulator called for tighter marking criteria to ensure that “only answers deserving of the marks are credited”.

A separate study found a “decline in the standard of performance” in GCSE physics. Papers had got easier because fundamental principles of science were removed from the syllabus.

The reports have reignited a fierce public debate over the nature of science teaching. The new applied single GCSE in the subject, introduced in 2006, aimed to create scientifically literate citizens and ensure that all students got at least a toehold in the discipline by focusing on scientific processes. But purists complain that this approach results in the squeezing out of “proper” science, adding that efforts to make the subject seem relevant and trendy had not attracted more students to it.

Kathleen Tattersall, chairwoman of Ofqual, said: “Our monitoring shows that the revisions to the GCSE science criteria in 2005 have led to a fall in the quality of science assessments.” She added that improvements had been made to exams being set from this year and the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) was reviewing the GCSE science criteria for courses starting in 2011. “Science is a vitally important subject and it is essential that these new criteria and specifications should engage and challenge all learners, particularly the most able,” she said.

For coursework completed under teacher supervision, which can represent up to a third of marks, standards were too variable, the regulator said. Exam boards should collaborate to ensure that grades were comparable.

On GCSE physics, Ofqual found a “significant reduction in content” from GCSE exams between 2002 and 2007 so that “fundamental explanations of phenomena were not tested”. It added: “Boyle’s law, the use of a capacitor as a timing device and detailed consideration of the optics of the eye and the projector were also removed. The content that was added tended to be concerned with the social implications of technological applications, rather than physics concepts.”

Candidates were required, for example, to discuss the advantages and drawbacks of CCTV, mobile phones and the internet, which “did not add to the candidates’ knowledge and understanding of physics”.

The Schools Minister, Jim Knight, said he was concerned about the findings and wanted to make sure that the most able students were stretched. He added that the Government was investing in measures to increase the numbers of both specialist science teachers and students who can study the triple individual sciences.

Nick Gibb, the Shadow Schools Minister, said: “This is a terrible indictment of the Government and the QCA at a time when scientific education has never been so economically vital, and it shows why private schools are abandoning the GCSE.”

Mike Cresswell, of the AQA exams board, said he was disappointed that the regulator did not address the inevitable conflict between the need to create a scientifically literate population at the same time as training world-class scientists.

Richard Porte, of the Royal Society of Chemistry, said the report confirmed the society’s findings that brighter students were no longer being stretched by the system and candidates were almost walked through the questions. “No fault lies with students or teachers. It is the system that is at fault and that system requires early, radical surgery,” he said.

SOURCE




AZ: State Supreme Court bans school vouchers

The Arizona Supreme Court on Wednesday declared the state's school-voucher programs unconstitutional because they violate a ban against appropriating public money for private or religious schools. The unanimous decision shuts the door on vouchers in Arizona unless voters agree to a statewide ballot measure to change the state Constitution.

Voucher programs give public-education money to parents to help them pay tuition for their children at private and religious schools. Public support for vouchers across the country is weak, and the court's ruling was not unexpected.

"Some of us just think it's wrong to tax people to pay for private or religious education," said Phoenix attorney Don Peters, who argued against the voucher program before the state Supreme Court. "The public schools are struggling enough, and these programs would take money away from public schools and route it to private schools. We think it's entirely the wrong road to be on. Vouchers could just eviscerate the public schools."

In 2006, Arizona lawmakers created two voucher programs, specifically for disabled students and students living with foster families. A coalition of advocacy groups, including local school-board members, parents and teachers, feared the law opened the door for a much larger voucher program in the future. The coalition immediately challenged the state law in Maricopa County Superior Court. The coalition lost that challenge, but in May 2008, the Arizona Court of Appeals reversed the lower-court decision and called the voucher program unconstitutional.

Andrea Weck is the mother of a 6-year-old daughter with autism and used one of Arizona's voucher programs to send her child to a small, private Tempe academy. Weck said her daughter just wasn't thriving in a public school. "The opportunity created by the scholarship program changed Lexie from the inside out," Weck said.

Vouchers are the most controversial and least successful of school-choice reforms that have swept the country during the past decade. Far more successful reforms include privately operated public schools, known as charters, which are growing rapidly, and education tax credits, which give individuals and corporations dollar-for-dollar tax breaks for donations to private-school scholarship funds. Both charters and tax credits are gaining popularity in Arizona.

Seven states and the District of Columbia have limited voucher programs still operating, mostly for disabled students or in small geographic areas. Voters in California and Utah recently turned down statewide programs. Supreme Courts in Florida and Colorado also declared larger voucher programs unconstitutional.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer called the ruling "heartbreaking" and vowed to work with the Legislature to find a constitutional way to help foster parents and parents with disabled children afford private- and religious-school tuition.

Tom Horne, state superintendent of public instruction, said the decision hurts Arizona's reputation as a leader in the school-choice reform movement. "Nobody knows better than parents what's best for their children, and that's especially true for a child's educational needs," Horne said.

While it deliberated, the Supreme Court agreed to keep the program operating until the end of this school year, but the Legislature had already cut funding for the voucher program. In response to the court's temporary decision, legislative leaders transferred about $3.5 million from another education fund to continue to help parents pay for participating students.

In Wednesday's decision, the court allowed parents to continue to receive tuition money until the end of the current school year. Only 473 students are participating in the program this year.

Other parents, such as Jessie Geroux of Apache Junction, were watching and hoping the decision would go in favor of helping disabled kids attend private schools. Geroux has been going from district to district, looking for the right program for her son and wanted the option of choosing a private school. "(State) money that is supposed to be allocated to a child should be attached to them like a little backpack and follow them to whatever school they go to (private or public)," Geroux said.

SOURCE




Australia: Teachers given the cane go-ahead in some Queensland schools

THE cane is still being wielded at some Queensland schools where parents sign legal waivers to give teachers the power to hit their children. The corporal punishment option is offered at some of the state's fastest-growing independent schools as part of their strict behaviour management strategies. Religious beliefs are used to justify discipline at some schools, The Sunday Mail reports.

With more than 55,000 suspensions handed out at state schools last financial year - a jump of more than 20 per cent in two years - Independent Schools Queensland has reported growing support for private schools catering for the "disengaged and at-risk" school sector.

Bundaberg Christian College principal Mark Bensley said corporal punishment had become a drawcard for some parents because of a "lack of boundaries" at other schools. "A growing number of parents come to our school and say the school got their attention because it uses the paddle," Mr Bensley said. "If they choose to not sign it (the waiver), they are not refused enrolment. But a very significant majority of parents sign because they like that we understand the need for boundaries, fairness and consistency." Mr Bensley said the plastic paddle - shaped like a table-tennis bat - was a "last resort" when suspensions, detentions and warnings had failed.

The school, which has 600 students in Prep to Year 12, gave the paddle 10 times last year and seven times in 2007, he said. "I would never use the paddle unless we have spoken to both parents and have their blessing for it to be used," Mr Bensley said. "It is always administered in a loving way. In fact, we pray with them afterwards."

Corporal punishment was banned in state schools in 1995 by a decision of Cabinet but was not written into law. Parents, teachers or guardians are allowed to use "reasonable force" in disciplining children. The 109-year-old law was applied in a case involving a Gold Coast high school teacher last year who was acquitted on an assault charge after he admitted slapping a Year 8 student.

But State Attorney-General Cameron Dick warned that Section 208 of the law that relates to the matter was "by no means a carte blanche authority for teachers to use physical force to manage students".

Colin Krueger, principal of Mueller College at Rothwell on Brisbane's northern outskirts, said the school used the cane at the request of parents. Parents are asked to sign a consent form as part of enrolment which gives teachers the power to use "firm but fair" discipline "administered in a spirit of love according to Proverbs 13.24, 22:6 and 22:15", which promote the "rod of discipline" to "correct the foolishness raging in every child". Mr Krueger, principal of the school for 19 years, said using the cane on a child "depended on the circumstances". "If kids are persistent and we have tried every other avenue, it will be administered if parents request it. We haven't used it for a couple of years," he said. "I've had many kids come back to me and say 'Thank you for giving me the cane'."

SOURCE





29 March, 2009

Obama’s education “reforms”

In his first big education speech earlier this month, President Barack Obama tried to show that he is a reformer, and not a shill for the education special interests that dominate the Democratic Party. While he had a few worthwhile ideas, others sounded good until one turned to the details.

“What’s required is not simply new investments, but new reforms,” President Obama told the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. Some of his reform ideas did address important needs, such as longitudinal student performance data from “childhood through college.” He rightly pointed out that such data can “tell us which students had which teacher so we can assess what’s working and what’s not.” The president also recognized the disparity among state academic content standards. He noted that students in states with weak standards may receive high marks even though these same students would fail in states with tough standards. “The solutions to low test scores is not lowering standards,” he observed, “it’s tougher, clearer standards.” When it came to details and his overall vision, however, President Obama’s call for reform fell short.

Although he pushed for tougher academic standards, the president also said he wanted standards and assessments that measure “21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity.” So-called “21st century skills,” however, is a buzz phrase that liberal educators use to spruce up the failed teaching methodologies they have advocated for decades, such as having students discover knowledge on their own, with little input from teachers.

John Richard Schrock, biology education professor at Emporia State University in Kansas, has pointed out that a number of school districts in his state have adopted the 21st century skills agenda. “The teachers are not to speak for more than a few minutes each class, and then only to give directions,” professor Schrock says. “Students are to work on projects to learn all science concepts on their own.” Overwhelming quantitative research confirms that such methods leave students deficient in core basic skills and knowledge.

In his speech, President Obama said that the “first pillar” of his reform plan is to increase spending on government preschool efforts. That’s why, he said, he’s funneling billions of dollars more into the federal Head Start and Early Head Start early childhood programs. Yet, a 2001 study by a federal researcher found that participation in Head Start “does not have long-term benefits.” In addition, in Oklahoma and Georgia, which both offer universal government preschool, student performance has been disappointing.

The president also wants to change teacher pay and retention practices. In 150 pilot school districts, he wants to institute teacher pay-for-performance schemes where teacher pay will be linked to improved student performance. While this idea sounds great, it is hugely suspicious that the giant National Education Association teachers union, an implacable foe of merit pay, says it can support Mr. Obama’s plan. Further, 150 school districts is a proverbial drop in the bucket. There are approximately 1,000 school districts in California alone. Most parents and students will have to wait a long time for teachers to focus more on student achievement.

President Obama says that if low-performing teachers don’t improve, “there’s no excuse for allowing that person to continue teaching.” However, rules that protect incompetent teachers are negotiated at the local school district level. Mr. Obama does not say how he would change local union contracts to achieve his goal. The unfortunate reality is that he simply cannot.

President Obama has good intentions but his education agenda will fall short of its goals because it is based on a purely government-focused vision. His tweaking efforts divert attention from the big-picture issue that the government school system itself is inherently and irretrievably flawed and that all children have a right to an immediate escape ticket in the form of a voucher or similar school-choice option.

President Obama attended private school and sends his own children to a private school, but in his education speech he again opposed and denigrated vouchers that would allow other children the same opportunities that he and his family have had. The new president thus demonstrates that, for all his reformist rhetoric, he is no true reformer.

SOURCE




Australia: Trial aims to tame bad behaviour in classroom

BASIC etiquette is being taught to parents and children in a prep school trial aimed at tackling bad behaviour and improving academic success. It follows a rise in violent behaviour in prep classes, with Education Queensland introducing suspensions for out-of-control four and five-year-olds to protect teachers and fellow students from pupil assaults.

While unions and school associations have called for full-time teacher aides to stem the violence, others have urged better parenting and social support, which a trial called STEP -- Supporting the Transition for Entry to Prep -- is trying to address.

Participants in STEP, an extension of Mission Australia's and Griffith University's crime prevention Pathways to Prevention Project -- say it has already transformed children's behaviour. STEP co-founder Dr Kate Freiberg said the program targeted lower socio-economic areas where parents with time and financial pressures were least likely to teach their children the necessary skills for a smooth school transition. "The idea is when kids are growing up in tough times of certain circumstances it can constrain and limit their social and emotional development and they start school behind the eight ball," Dr Freiberg said.

She said the program tried to engage parents and children in education while teaching them basic skills such as the importance of discipline and reading. "It can be simple things like not being able to sit and listen and pay attention or know how to participate in a group setting," Dr Freiberg said. "Just really basic things like packing lunch boxes and what the teachers are going to be asking you when you get there and how it is important to sit and listen to what the teacher says and skills for getting along with other kids."

Mother-of-eight, Fua-laau Faolua said she now understood how important it was to read to her children and be involved in their homework. The program also has taught her how to use "time out" and speak at her children's level, which has turned daughter Litarina's behaviour around. Litarina now eagerly attends Durack State School Prep.

SOURCE





28 March, 2009

Jeffrey Maxwell’s Silver Hammer

by Mike S. Adams

I like teaching police officers because it virtually assures that no one will ever go on a shooting spree in my building at UNC-Wilmington. The officers I teach are, of course, allowed to carry guns – and many do as they go on duty directly after attending classes. Because criminals a) are aware of this, and b) are generally rational, the next shooting rampage will not be happening in my general vicinity.

The fact that most academics are generally ignorant of the benefits of guns on campus is readily apparent to those following a recent case at Western Oregon University located in Monmouth, Oregon. The case involves a former Marine named Jeffrey Maxwell who used to carry a derringer to school along with a small knife. He carried both concealed.

Maxwell carries his gun because, like many former Marines, he has a license to do so. His permit allows him to carry although not in federal buildings or in courthouses. He was studying in the student union when Monmouth Police officers approached him to ask whether he was armed.

Maxwell admitted he had a gun and knife in his pocket and an unloaded rifle in his truck. He was arrested and cited for possessing a firearm in public. Of course, he was let go by a district attorney who recognized that Maxwell simply had not committed any crime. But the fact of his complete innocence didn’t stop the university from going after Maxwell.

The university should have apologized to Maxwell. Instead, a student judicial panel suspended him from school for violating a student conduct rule banning the possession of weapons on campus.

The Oregon legislature could try to pass a law banning firearms possession - even for those with concealed carry permits - in places other than courthouses or federally owned buildings. If they tried to pass such a law they could well succeed.

But, in this case, Maxwell’s decision to carry was not challenged by any change in state law. It was challenged by yet another lawless university trying to trump state law with its own handbook. (For those who have not noticed, universities also try frequently to trump federal law with their handbooks. Often, they try to do both at once. It’s an old trick that often succeeds without challenge).

But the Maxwell case involves a more novel trick. It involves having this falsely accused man (who, remember, served his country in the Marines) get a mental health evaluation before returning to school. This may be worse than Hamline University’s decision to suspend a student simply for advocating concealed weapons permits on campus. That student was also ordered to submit to a psychological evaluation before returning to school.

To make matters in this case even worse, Maxwell is being told to write a 10-page paper on following the law and accepting responsibility for his actions. This requirement is coming from a university that did not follow the law and, in fact, is trying to trump it. And the university seems unwilling to take responsibility for doing so.

Speaking for the Oregon university system, Di Saunders correctly asserts that the question of allowing concealed weapons on campus is one of student safety. But she incorrectly asserts that allowing permit holders to carry on campus will make the campus more dangerous. No peer-reviewed publication has ever come to that conclusion based on actual evidence. And many have come to a contrary conclusion.

But university administrators rarely make decisions based on evidence. Instead, they make decisions based upon feelings. How will they feel when the next Jeffrey Maxwell is unable to stop the next Seung-Hui Cho?

SOURCE




Teachers attack 'absurd' British plans to measure pupil happiness

Plans to grade schools based on pupils' happiness have been branded "meaningless" and "absurd". Headteachers said Government proposals for a radical overhaul of school inspections were too bureaucratic and would lead to schools in deprived areas being "castigated".

Under plans, schools will be rated on a range of measures including the take-up of lunches in canteens, the proportion of pupils doing two hours of sport a week, the quality of sex education lessons and relationship advice. Schools will also be measured on truancy, exclusions and the ability to promote "emotional resilience" in their pupils. The so-called wellbeing indicators could also be used in a "report card" system being proposed by the Government as a new way of ranking schools.

It follows a recent report from the Children's Society that said that competitive schooling, league tables and selfish parenting was creating a generation of miserable young people.

But the "happiness" measures are being opposed by teachers' leaders, who claim they are almost impossible to quantify. In response to an official Government consultation on the plan, the Association of School and College Leaders, which represents more than 14,000 secondary heads and deputies, said they were creating "widespread anxiety" in schools. The use of school lunches as a proxy for pupil wellbeing was "absurd", claimed the association, while exclusion rates said little about whether pupils were happy. Officials also warned that schools in the poorest areas would suffer because they admitted large numbers of problematic pupils.

The National Association of Head Teachers, which represents primary heads, said the plans were "fundamentally flawed".

The National Union of Teachers said the proposals would "simply reduce schools' work in this area to a checklist of Ofsted indicators". Another union, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said: "We are disappointed that the Government is spending time and money developing indicators which will indicate nothing of any substance."

But Phil Revell, chief executive of the National Governors' Association, said: "The aim behind what the Government is trying to do – that schools should be reporting to parents on the basis of more holistic indicators than simply pupils' exam performance – is right. But the current set of measures are not good enough."

The comments come days after Carol Craig, chief executive of the Centre for Confidence and Wellbeing in Glasgow, said that teachers' drive to build their pupils' self-esteem had gone too far, with many parents unwilling to have their children criticised for fear it might damage their feelings.

Ofsted and the Government are due to respond to their consultation by the end of the month. An Ofsted spokeswoman said: "Early analysis of the consultation responses shows broad support for many aspects of the consultation. Many of the indicators proposed, including those derived from surveys of parents/carers and pupils and information about attendance and exclusions, are invaluable. They will help schools to evaluate and compare aspects of their own practice with schools nationally, as well providing evidence for Ofsted inspections."

SOURCE




Filipino teachers for America

More than 100 school districts, including at least 20 in California, are recruiting in the Philippines to fill teacher shortages in math, science and special education.

Filipino exchange teacher Ferdinand Nakila landed in Los Angeles expecting "Pretty Woman" scenes of swank Beverly Hills boulevards and glittering celebrities. What he got was Inglewood, where he stayed for two weeks in temporary housing and encountered drunkards, beggars, trash-filled streets and nightly police sirens.

It got worse. In training sessions about American classrooms he received in the Philippines, he was told his students might not be quite as polite and respectful as those in his homeland. Nothing, however, prepared him for the furious brawl that broke out in one of his Los Angeles classrooms, where two girls rolled around on the floor clawing at each other while the other students jumped on the desks and cheered.

But Nakila said his American sojourn has transformed him into a far better educator than when he arrived in August 2007. In the Philippines, he was imperious and demanding, throwing students out of his classroom for inadequate preparation with little thought of their plight.

In Los Angeles, his daily encounters with students struggling to learn despite shattered homes, sexual abuse, physical violence or hunger have humbled him into a new vision of teaching. "I realize we are servants and teaching is more about touching lives and helping students own their own learning," said Nakila, 38, a special education teacher in English at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles.

Nakila is part of a recent wave of foreign exchange teachers from the Philippines, who are primarily being recruited to fill chronic teacher shortages in math, science and special education throughout the United States. More than 100 school districts, including at least 20 in California, are recruiting from the Philippines, said Los Angeles immigration attorney Carl Shusterman.

The Los Angeles Unified School District has hired 250 to 300 teachers from the Philippines -- the largest contingent among more than 600 foreign exchange teachers overall, a district official said. The statewide budget crisis and impending layoffs, however, have prompted L.A. Unified to suspend its foreign recruitment this year, said Deborah Ignagni, a district human resources administrator.

Ignagni said the L.A. district first began recruiting foreign exchange teachers in the 1980s from Mexico and Spain to help with bilingual elementary education. But it shifted to the Philippines and Canada for math, science and special education teachers in the last four years, she said. L.A. school officials have tapped the Philippines for several reasons, Ignagni said. The higher education system is similar, so credits are easily transferable for U.S. teaching credentials.

The Philippines has an abundance of teachers, which allows U.S. recruiters to avoid perceptions that they are taking educational resources needed by Filipinos, Ignagni said. And most Filipinos speak English and can understand some Spanish, which is embedded in the Filipino language as a result of Spain's 300-year colonization of the islands.

Many of the teachers themselves say they jumped at the chance to work in the United States, lured primarily by far better pay. Most teachers in the Philippines earn $300 to $400 a month, less than one-tenth what they can pull down in Los Angeles. But high processing fees from recruitment and visa sponsoring agencies have strapped many with debts of $10,000 or more. Some, such as Gelacio Aguilar, sold land in the Philippines to finance their ventures. Others scraped up money from family and friends; still others took out loans.

To be hired in L.A. Unified, the teachers must pass basic skills exams and interviews, fulfill the requirements for a California teaching credential and have three to five years of successful teaching experience in public schools.

The teachers had hoped for work visas that would potentially lead to green cards. But L.A. Unified brings them in on three-year teacher exchange visas known as J-1s because they are easier to obtain, Ignagni said. The district is now applying for work visas for some teachers whose exchange visas have expired.

Once the teachers arrive in Los Angeles, school officials give them a two-week orientation and offer job fairs to connect them with schools. But many describe a rocky start: loneliness, befuddlement over bus routes, apartment hunting, dealing with U.S. currency, American-style resume-writing. And, once in the classroom, utter shock.

Asked to describe his first year, Garcia leaned back in his chair, covered his face with his hands and murmured, "Oh, God." His ninth-graders' average math skills were sixth-grade level. While he was trying to teach, students roamed the classroom, applied makeup, chatted with one other, tuned out with iPods. A hallway fight started spilling into his class, and when he tried to push the brawlers back out, he said, he was reprimanded for touching them.

During a recent evening interview at his Washington Boulevard apartment, Nelson de la Cruz pulled up his shirt to reveal a black and blue bruise. He got it, he said, after a student threw a book at him. Another teacher suffered injuries after a chair was thrown at her, said Daniel Gumarang of the Filipino American Educators Assn. of Los Angeles, which is aiding the teachers. Some teachers have given up and headed back to the Philippines, but Ignagni estimated them at "less than a handful."

Nakila, for instance, said he learned something every day about how to handle his students. One lesson: be sensitive to their backgrounds. Aiming to inspire them, he presented Latino success stories and asked students to write about their own heroes, but the reaction was negative, even angry. When he told them about his own heroic father and asked them to describe their own, Nakila said one lashed out, "I don't even know his name, and I don't want to know." Now he avoids lessons that might cause them to feel inadequacies in their own families.

He keeps cookies in the classroom to feed students who come to school without breakfast, a situation he said he never imagined he would find in wealthy America. He calls parents to ask why they're giving their children Kool-Aid rather than something more nutritious. He tells students he will never give up on them, even if they show their worst. "I used to wake up thinking 'Oh, my God, let me survive this day,' " Nakila said. "Now I wake up excited, eager to meet my students."

SOURCE





27 March, 2009

YET ANOTHER BRITISH EDUCATION "SHAKEUP"

Two reports below:

Exit Winston Churchill, enter Twitter ... Yes, it's the new British primary school curriculum

Primary schools could ditch traditional lessons in favour of teaching children how to use social networking sites such as Twitter, it emerged yesterday. The usual Leftist fear of knowledge at work

In the biggest education shake-up for 20 years, pupils would no longer have to learn about the Romans, Vikings, Tudors, Victorians or the Second World War. Instead, under the blueprint for a new primary curriculum – which was drawn up by former Ofsted chief Sir Jim Rose following a request from Children's Secretary Ed Balls – they would have to be able to master websites such as Wikipedia, as well as blogging and podcasting. Compulsory sex education will start from five and children as young as nine will be taught to make 'informed decisions' about taking drugs and drinking alcohol.

As swathes of prescribed knowledge in science, history and geography are stripped back, schools will be encouraged to put a big emphasis on internet skills, environmental education, healthy eating and well-being. 'English will cover 'media texts' and 'social and collaborative forms of communication' alongside traditional works of literature.

These should include 'emails, messaging, wikis and twitters'. Wikis, as in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, are information databases that rely on being edited by the public, regardless of whether they have any specialist knowledge in the subject being discussed. Twitter is the latest phenomenon in social networking that entails writing short messages of just 140 characters to update other users of one's activities, feelings or thoughts.

Sir Jim's proposals are the biggest shakeup of primary schooling since the Tories introduced a national curriculum in 1988. But the final draft, which was leaked yesterday, was last night branded 'dangerous' and an assault on knowledge, while critics said children were accustomed to using modern media at home and needed no encouragement at school.

Robert Whelan, deputy director of the Civitas think-tank, which published a damning critique on the curriculum two years ago, said: 'This is yet another step on the journey to drain all academic content from the school curriculum and to replace discrete bodies of knowledge, which have been organised under subject headings for hundreds of years, with a lot of social engineering and flabby attempts at feelgood philosophy. 'These proposals will only serve to increase the educational apartheid between the state and independent sector, because the latter will retain traditional subjects.'

Pointing out the need for greater historical education, not less, he said he had recently asked a group of pupils in their late years at primary school when Shakespeare lived, and the answer came back as '50 years ago'.

Sean Lang, senior lecturer in History at Anglia Ruskin University and secretary of the Historical Association, said: 'This is part and parcel of a general trend both at primary and secondary level to downgrade knowledge, as if all you need is techniques, and knowledge is just stuff you get from the web.'

The Conservatives' education spokesman, Michael Gove, said: 'Sir Jim Rose's review of the primary curriculum has already promised to teach our children less. Now it proposes to replace solid knowledge with nods towards all the latest technological fashions.'

Under the proposed curriculum, children must also gain 'fluency' in keyboard skills as well as handwriting, and learn to use a spellchecker as well as learning to spell. Meanwhile a physical development, health and wellbeing programme will make sex education compulsory in primaries for the first time. From around the age of five, pupils will be taught about gender differences while at nine, they will learn about 'the physical changes that take place in the human body as they grow and how these relate to human reproduction'. They will also be told 'how new relationships may develop'. Under this section, schools will be required to cover healthy diets but will able to offer less variety of competitive sport.

Schools Minister Jim Knight said: 'Sir Jim Rose's report has not been completed let alone published yet – but we are already getting stories about dropping this or removing that from the curriculum. The bottom line is that we are working with experts to free up the curriculum in a way that teachers have asked us to do but British history has, and always will be, a core part of education in this country. 'Of course pupils in primary schools will learn about major periods including the Romans, the Tudors and the Victorians and will be taught to understand a broad chronology of major events in this country and the wider world.'

SOURCE




British grade-schools will teach seven-year-olds to speak properly

Primary school pupils will be taught to speak properly and recognise how to use standard English in formal settings, under proposals to overhaul of the curriculum for seven to 11-year-olds. The proposals will place strict emphasis on teaching children to “adjust what they say according to the formality of the context and the needs of their audience”. The reforms, to be finalised in April, follow similar changes to the secondary curriculum, which aimed to banish expressions such as “I ain’t” from pupils’ presentations.

They will also be taught how to create multimedia products, such as blogs, using moving images, text and sounds and to “share information with people and audiences within and beyond the school”. Crucially, they will also be taught to “make judgements about the reliability” of information gleaned on the internet, so they understand that cutting and pasting someone else’s work from the the internet does not constitute independent research.

The reforms aim to declutter the curriculum and to give teachers more control. The 13 traditional subjects would be merged into six learning areas and cross curricular learning would be the order of the day. These are: understanding English, communication and languages; mathematical understanding; scientific and technological understanding; human, social and environmental understanding; understanding physical health and well-being; and understanding arts and design.

In history children will no longer have to study both the Victorians and World War Two, as there will be greater flexibility over content. But they will still have to learn about “two key periods of history” significant to the UK and will study “a broad chronology of major events in the UK and the wider world”.

Flora Wilson, education manager of the Historical Association, which represents historians history teachers, said she believed that many teachers would welcome the more flexible approach of the reforms. Cross curricular teaching could enable more history teaching to take place than at present. An example may be a course on ‘the role of women in World War 2’, which would combine teaching about the war with lessons on food production and nutrition, she said.

John Bercow, Conservative MP, and author of a government backed review of communication skills, welcomed the report’s emphasis on oracy. “In a world where the job for life has disappeared, there is a premium on communications skills - speaking and listening, which in turn promote social mobility,” he said.

But Michael Gove, the Shadow Education Secretary, expressed scepticism about Sir Jim’s emphasis on technology. “Information technology is hugely important, but it should be a means, not an end in itself,” he said.

SOURCE




Australia: Christian school rejects Muslim teacher

A CHRISTIAN school in Werribee has been forced to defend its refusal to offer a training placement to a Muslim teaching student on the grounds of her religion. Victoria University student Rachida Dahlal has reportedly lodged a complaint with the Equal Opportunity Commission against Heathdale Christian College, accusing it of discrimination and prejudice.

But the faith-based private school stood by its decision last night. It said it would have been "inappropriate" to offer the student a placement because of the school's Christian ethos. Principal Reynald Tibben said Mrs Dahlal - who wears a head scarf and is a devout Muslim - may have found it difficult to work at a school where the teachers' morning staff briefing includes prayer devotion and Bible reading. "The way we practise our education is not just nominal, it's actually what parents want for their kids, and it would have been confusing for the kids. It's not that we have anything against her or her beliefs, we just felt it was an inappropriate placement," Mr Tibben said. "There's obviously a difference between being a Muslim and a Christian - so it was a religious issue from that perspective - but it was as much about supporting her as it was the college."

Mrs Dahlal could not be contacted by The Age last night.

According to the Wyndham Leader, the 35-year-old mother had chosen Heathdale because it was the closest school to her home, and one of few offering her specialty subjects of mathematics and French.

Mr Tibben said his school, which takes about 12 university students for training each year, offered to support Mrs Dahlal in finding another school and questioned why Victoria University hadn't given "a little more thought" in guiding her into a school-based placement. The university's acting Vice-Chancellor, Professor John McCallum, said Mrs Dahlal had been counselled about Heathdale's policy of taking those whose values aligned to its own.

SOURCE





26 March, 2009

More than a quarter of England's primary schools have no male teachers

More than a quarter of England's primary schools do not have a single male teacher, it has emerged, with 4,587 school staffrooms populated solely by women. The figures are despite a multi-million pound Government campaign to encourage men back into what is now seen as a "feminine" career. Men also tend to shun working with younger children over fears they will be accused of paedophilia, but experts say it is vital for boys – many of whom do not have a father present at home – to have positive male role models as they grow up.

For many young men, the lack of male teachers at primary school means they do not have regular contact with an adult man until the age of 11, when they go to secondary school.

The figures, released under the Freedom of Information Act, show that more than a quarter of all the 17,357 primary schools in England do not have a single male teacher. Some counties, including Hertfordshire, Derbyshire, Essex, Surrey, Hampshire, Lancashire, Norfolk and Cumbria, have more than 100 primary schools where there is not a single male teacher. Teacher training colleges are still admitting three women for every man, and the men that do train mostly go into secondary education.

The latest revelation follows research by the Government's Training and Development Agency (TDA) that found that almost half of men believed that male primary school teachers had helped their development. Of the 800 adults surveyed, a third had been challenged to work harder because of men in their primary years, while half said they had been more likely to report problems such as bullying to male teachers. The TDA also found that 83 per cent of parents and 76 per cent of boys want more men teaching in primary schools.

But Matthew Friday, a 32-year-old teacher at Ravenstone Primary School in Balham, south London, said parents were still suspicious when a male teacher arrives. "People expect male teachers to fit into one of two stereotypes: sporty and practical or effeminate and 'therefore gay'," he says." I am neither, so I'm in a sort of uneasy third place. People can be suspicious of your motives and feel they need an explanation, which they don't with female teachers."

Tanya Byron, child psychologist and presenter of BBC's Little Angels, believes the Government needs to do more to reverse the decline. She said: "There is a paranoid, over-the-top concern about paedophilia and child molestation – that it is not safe to leave children with men. "Our anxiety does ultimately discriminate against men. This puts men off working in primary schools because they are concerned about how they will be viewed and what parents will think of them. We have to challenge these negative and unhelpful belief systems."

Although a Durham University study recently revealed that the presence of a male teacher does not improve boys' grades – which have fallen significantly below those of girls in recent decades – they are vital for their overall development and to make clear that learning is not a "feminine" virtue. Miss Byron said: "Male primary school teachers can often be stable and reliable figures in the lives of the children that they teach. They inspire children to feel more confident, to work harder and behave better."

Schools Minister Jim Knight insisted the situation was improving. He said: "There has never been a better time to be a teacher with pay at record levels; more support staff than ever before to free them up to focus on the classroom; better facilities; and schools given full power to impose discipline – but we know there is more to do to take on a long-standing and completely false perception among some men that primary schools don't offer as demanding a job as secondary schools. "The Teacher Training and Development Agency's more direct and male-centred recruitment campaigns are helping to get more men in the classroom – and we are starting to see more male applicants come forward in the last year."

SOURCE




Racial preferences: Wrong In Theory And Practice, Part I

Virginia under the Byrd Machine engaged in “massive resistance” to attacks on state-supported racial discrimination. For a while now Prof. Douglas Massey, a sociologist at Princeton, has been engaged in scholarly resistance to attacks on the racial discrimination at the core of affirmative action in higher education. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a long article today, “Affirmative-Action Programs for Minority Students: Right in Theory, Wrong in Practice,” by Massey and several colleagues. It is adapted from their new book, Taming the River: Negotiating the Academic, Financial, and Social Currents in Selective Colleges and Universities, which will be published by Princeton this year. Their argument, so far as it can be determined by this adaptation, is wrong in both theory and practice.

The first clause of the first sentence turn out to be a reliable tip-off to what’s coming: “The use of race-sensitive criteria in admissions continues to be controversial....” Aside from the not so hidden implication that those of us who oppose the use of “race-sensitive” admissions criteria are insensitive to race, this euphemism reveals a discomfort with the literally accurate “race preference” label these criteria deserve. In less politically correct times I would be tempted to describe this euphemistic squeamishness as a reluctance to call a spade a spade.

The second clause of that first sentence — “and critics have leveled three basic charges against it” — is followed immediately by another and far more serious problem in their handling of the first of the “charges” against those “race-sensitive criteria”:

For one, opponents say the practice constitutes reverse discrimination, lowering the chance of admission for better-qualified white students.

First, as I argued here (and many other times),

Regular readers will know that I don’t believe there is any such thing as “reverse discrimination.” A policy or practice is either discriminatory, or it isn’t.

Racial discrimination, in short, is racial discrimination, no matter what the race of the victim. Even more incorrect, however, is the notion that the only thing wrong with “reverse discrimination,” in fact the only reason for opposing it, is that it “lower[s] the chance of admission for better-qualified white students.”

This assertion is simply, flatly not true. Many (indeed, I believe most) of us oppose racial discrimination because we believe it is immoral, illegal, unconstitutional, and just plain wrong, regardless of the identity or number of victims. Because of this fundamental error, Massey et. al. think they can refute Charge No. 1 by claiming that it

has not stood up to empirical scrutiny. In fact, studies show that affirmative action generally has had only small and insignificant effects on the admission prospects of white students.

First, as I’ve just argued, the argument that not many whites or Asians were and are injured by race preferences policies, even if it were true (which it is not, as I argue below), would not rebut the most fundamental criticism of those policies, that racial discrimination is wrong whether its victims are many or few. This failed rebuttal, in fact, implicitly but no less offensively redefines “discrimination” to be something that can only be suffered by groups, not individuals.

On a number of occasions we have confronted Massey’s argument that racial preference for blacks and Hispanics “has had only small and insignificant effects on the admission prospects of white students.” For example, I looked (rather closely, I think) at the University of Michgan’s use of this argument here1, here2, and here3, from which the following comes:

The following is from a Q&A re University of Michigan Admissions Policies on a Michigan web site with its legal materials. [At least it was there, when I discussed it here and here. Now it has apparently been “revised” and “archived.”]

Q: Does the University’s consideration of race hurt a white student’s chances of getting into the University? A: No. The numbers of minority applicants are extremely small compared to the numbers of white students who apply to the University.... It is not mathematically possible that the small numbers of minority students who apply and are admitted are “displacing” a significant number of white students under any scenario.

But this is highly misleading. Remember, Massey et. al. argue that affirmative action has “only small and insignificant effects on the admission prospects” of whites, not on whether they are actually “displaced.” Thus the relevant question is how many whites and Asians (ignored by Michigan) were denied admission because of their race. Not all of those who were denied admission because of Michigan’s affirmative action would have actually enrolled had they been admitted, but they nevertheless were victims of race discrimination.

For a peek at how many were discriminatorily denied admission let’s turn, as I did in the posts linked above (and staying still with the third one here), to another Michigan source, Dr. Stephen Raudenbush, and expert witness for Michigan in Grutter v. Bollinger, the law school case. I quoted from Judge Bernard Friedman’s summary of some of Dr. Raudenbush’s data in his U.S. District Court opinion in Grutter, namely, that under the race preference policy in effect in 2000 170 “underrepresented minorities” were admitted to the University of Michigan law school that year and that, if Michigan had used race-blind admissions, 46 would have been offered admission. Thus 124 white, Asian, or unpreferred minority applicants were denied admission solely because of their race.

Michigan, of course, was and is not unique, although the degree of discrimination is even greater at some other schools. For example, here, I quoted Prof. Robert Heidt, a law professor and former member of the admissions committee at the University of Indiana law school, who wrote in a courageous article that

to meet our de facto quotas, we must leapfrog less qualified minority applicants over approximately 330 more qualified non-minority applicants each year, many of whom, of course, will be Indiana residents.

But wait; there’s more. In the “Q & A” I quoted above Michigan also leaned heavily on the weak reed of Bowen and Bok’s The Shape of the River.

William Bowen and Derek Bok, in their book The Shape of the River, look at the nationwide statistics concerning admissions to selective universities. They determined that even if all selective universities used a race-blind admissions system, the probability of being admitted for a white student would go only from 25 percent to 26.2 percent.

Here’s what I had to say about that in the post I’ve been quoting from:

What Michigan, and Bowen and Bok, are actually saying here is that there is no discrimination because there's not much of it, and what there is affects only some individuals, not their groups. Their argument is that discrimination against individuals doesn't count. The only discrimination that matters, that is in effect even worthy of being called discrimination, is against “groups” — and even then, only if its impact is severe enough to make a group “underrepresented.”

....

Go back and look at the Bowen and Bok numbers quoted above. [But before you accept these numbers as accurate, you should read the long critique by Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom in the UCLA Law Review, June 1999....] According to Bowen & Bok, “a white student” has a 25% probability of being admitted to a selective college under the current regime of race preferences, but under a “race-blind” system that probability would increase “only” to 26.2%. But what if one also considers Asians and other non-preferred minorities? B&B don't say. In any event, based on their numbers, for every thousand applicants to a selective college, 12 whites (Asians, etc., still invisible) are rejected only because of their race or ethnicity. Applying those numbers to Michigan’s 25,000 applicants every year to its freshman class, Michigan rejects 300 white applicants a year based exclusively on their race.

The article by Massey et. al. does not refer to the studies that allegedly find insignificant amounts of discrimination (presumably they do in the forthcoming book), not do they acknowledge here the studies that reach the opposite conclusion. For example, to pick just one example from one organization that has conducted many such studies, the invaluable Center for Equal Opportunity, here are some numbers for a 2006 study of the University of Michigan (taken from the Oct. 17, 2006, press release):

In the four years analyzed [1999, 2003, 2004, 2005], UM rejected over 8000 Hispanics, Asians, and whites who had higher SAT or ACT scores and GPAs than the median black admittee — including nearly 2700 students in 2005 alone.

Of course not all of those 8000 rejected applicants would have been admitted in the absence of racial preferences — selective universities do not and should not admit on the basis of test scores and grades alone — but surely more than a “small and insignificant” number would have been.

Do Massey et. al. really regard those numbers — and the 124 applicants to the University of Michigan law school in one year and the 330 applicants to the University of Indiana law school in one year and the roughly 300 applicants for undergraduate admissions to Michigan in one year and the 1.2% of all white (and Asian etc.?) applicants to all selective colleges and graduate schools and professional schools ever year (if Bowen and Bok’s estimates are correct) who are denied admission solely because of their race — as “small and insignificant”? Perhaps they will tell us in their forthcoming book.

Attentive readers will have noticed that I have dealt with only the first of the “three charges” Massey et. al. say we critics make against affirmative action. That’s why this post is Part I. If you’ve got the stomach for it, come back later when I’ll be back with Part II.

UPDATE [2:45PM]

NOTE! This UPDATE is not Part II. In fact, it is not so much an UPDATE as a transition to the still coming, later today, Part II. But I need to point you here and now, not there and later, to Roger Clegg’s post today on National Review Online’s Phi Beta Cons. I would like to say that great minds work alike, but it would be much more accurate to say that a great mind says there one or two things I said above, several things I didn’t say but should have, and more things that I like to think I would have thought to say in Part II even if I hadn’t read them here. Here’s one of the things he said that I should have said but didn’t: “... there are a lot more than just three criticisms of racial admission preferences”:

The list of costs [of using racial preferences], on the other hand, is long and largely irrefutable: It is personally unfair, passes over better qualified students, and sets a disturbing legal, political, and moral precedent in allowing racial discrimination; it creates resentment; it stigmatizes the so-called beneficiaries in the eyes of their classmates, teachers, and themselves, as well as future employers, clients, and patients; it fosters a victim mindset, removes the incentive for academic excellence, and encourages separatism; it compromises the academic mission of the university and lowers the overall academic quality of the student body; it creates pressure to discriminate in grading and graduation; it breeds hypocrisy within the school; it encourages a scofflaw attitude among college officials; it mismatches students and institutions, guaranteeing failure for many of the former; it papers over the real social problem of why so many African Americans and Latinos are academically uncompetitive; and it gets states and schools involved in unsavory activities like deciding which racial and ethnic minorities will be favored and which ones not, and how much blood is needed to establish group membership.

So much for what the Massey et al. article doesn’t discuss, Clegg writes. (By the way, he also suggested a major revision of my post, which I’ve made: he informs — wish I could say reminds — me that it’s “et al.,” not “et. al.”) “As for what it does discuss,” you’ll have to read his entire post ... and my forthcoming Part II.

UPDATE II [5:55PM]

No, this still isn’t Part II. There’s one more aspect to the Massey argument that affirmative action produces only a “small and insignificant” amount of discrimination against whites, Asians, and others that I would like to keep with this post. Above, I discuss what I think is overwhelming, irrefutable evidence (much of it from defenders of racial preferences) that the number of white, Asian, and other victims of affirmative action admissions is in fact dramatically large and significant.

But there is another measure of discrimination, in addition to and beyond the number of victims, and that is the amount, extent, depth of the preference given to the preferred groups. And here, too, Massey et al. minimize the amount of discrimination at the core of affirmative action. Consider the following:

To measure affirmative action at the institutional level of each campus, [Massey et al.] took the difference between the average SAT score earned by blacks or Hispanics and that earned by all students at a particular institution. We hypothesized that the larger the gap, the more an institution used criteria other than test scores to determine minority admissions. Among the 28 institutions that we studied, none displayed mean black and Latino SAT scores that were above the institutional average, suggesting that all institutions practiced some form of affirmative action. The differences between the SAT scores of black students and all students at those institutions ranged from 43 to 194 points and averaged 122 points. For Hispanics the average difference was 61 points, with a range that went from 56 to 139.

This SAT score gap is considerably smaller than that found in many other studies. For example, in these studies of freshmen classes entering in Fall 2003 “[t]he median SAT score for all University of Virginia admissions is 1350, while the average for admitted black students is 1026” and at less selective North Carolina State University “[t]he average SAT score for all ... admissions is about 1200; the average for admitted black students is 909.”

Perhaps part of the reason the Massey numbers minimize the degree of preference awarded to minority students is that they are based on a comparison of minority SAT scores to the SAT scores for “all students,” a group that includes the minorities. Comparing minority scores to the scores of those not receiving admissions preferences is much more revealing, as was done in this 2006 study of the University of Michigan, also cited above, which found that “[i]n the most recent year (2005), the median black admittee’s SAT score was 1160, versus 1260 for Hispanics, 1350 for whites, and 1400 for Asians.” This Michigan study also found that “[t]he black-to-white odds ratio for 2005 was 70 to 1 among students taking the SAT.... (To put this in perspective, the odds ratio for nonsmokers versus smokers dying from lung cancer is only 14 to 1.)”

I wonder if Massey et al. think the distance the bar is lowered for minorities is as "small and insignificant" as the number of white, Asian, and other victims of discrimination it produces.

SOURCE. (See the original for links)





25 March, 2009

Why the phonics phobia?

Leftist educators have long been waging a war on teaching kids phonics -- even though it works much better than any other method of teaching kids how to read and write. Is it just normal Leftist destructiveness? A reader has written in with the explanation below:

I have read a different theory on why leftists and state-sector teachers are hooked on whole language. Phonics (which is the way I learned to read) empowers the individual. With the skills he learns, he can read any text, either to himself, or aloud. If he reaches a word he cannot understand, he will be able to pronounce it anyway and can discover its meaning himself. Although Whole Language advocates like Mr. Cambourne talk about love of reading, whole language turns reading into a chore. I started school at the end of the 1980s, which meant that there were come children (such as I) who had learned by the traditional method before starting school, and others who would learn whole language in school. Thirteen years later the differences were all too clear, with people who had learned by whole language stumbling over all but the simplest words, and looking to the teacher to give them the pronunciations. I can’t speak for them, but I cannot help but think that an eighteen year old, told that he has reached the age in which he is considered an independent, matured human being, must feel great humiliation at asking a teacher to tell him how to say a word.

Learning to read has become a political issue for simple reasons that; parents vote; teachers’ unions make political contributions; and business has to pick up the mess and create a productive labour force. Learning to read is an ideological issue because the two methods, whole language and phonics, can stand for, and perhaps even define the way an individual sees himself vis a vis the state. Whole language teaches dependence on authority, dependence on the state. Phonics emphasises the ability of the individual, guided by his knowledge and his reason, to make his own way through the world. Can you think of a leftist who would tolerate that?




Political row as top British grammar school becomes the first to be placed into special measures despite brilliant exam results

British Leftists HATE selective (Grammar) schools because they offend against the "all men are equal" Leftist faith. Below we see that they are trying to destroy one because it is not politically correct enough

A grammar school with a 96 per cent GCSE success rate has been threatened with closure after inspectors criticised its 'outdated' race equality policy. Stretford Grammar was branded 'failing' by Ofsted inspectors who also singled out its sex education programme. They said the school's curriculum was 'inadequate', while admitting academic standards were 'exceptionally and consistently high'.

The Manchester school is the first grammar in Britain to be placed into special measures, putting it at risk of closure if it does not improve. But the decision has caused fury, with school supporters accusing the Government of hostility to grammars. Robert McCartney, of the National Grammar Schools Association, said: 'This report seems ludicrous. 'Here you have a school getting almost 100 per cent five A* to C GCSEs and they are getting caned because they're not allegedly up to the mark in some non-academic subjects. 'This smacks of a plot, another line of attack, to try and undermine grammar schools. Ministers have a skewed idea of what is really valuable to children in education. 'You wonder how many comprehensives are failing on the criteria this school is alleged to have failed.'

Last year, 96 per cent of Stretford pupils achieved five GCSEs at A* to C grade, or vocational equivalent. But Ofsted said achievement, the curriculum and leadership were inadequate. It said of the curriculum: 'Arrangements for sex and relationship education are underdeveloped.' Its report also warned that the school was 'not compliant with statutory requirements in relation to race equality and community cohesion'.

Achievement was judged inadequate despite its headline results because 'girls and higher ability students make very slow progress'. Ofsted found persistent 'significant underachievement' in relation to children's abilities on arrival.

Stretford is in the constituency of Children's Minister Beverley Hughes, who criticised the school and Tory-run local education authority. She added: 'This is the first grammar school in the country to go into special measures. The Conservative council is trying to brush this under the carpet and pretend this is not happening. This is a shocking indictment of the management.'

But parent Kevin Parker, 50, said: 'On one hand Ofsted are saying how excellently they have done in their exams, on the other there is an assertion of out-and-out failure. It's hard to make head or tail of it. 'We have been pleased. My son gets all kinds of great attention.'

Headmaster Peter Cookson was on extended sick leave before resigning soon after Ofsted visited. The head of nearby Sale Grammar has been drafted in to turn the school around.

Rakshanda Ali, 39, whose son is in Year 7, said: 'On the days the school hasn't had a head in place, conditions have been poor and parents were worried. But I'm confident things are going to change for the better.'

Graham Brady, the Conservative MP for nearby Altrincham and Sale West, said: 'Any school can suffer if its management and leadership are not right, and it appears from this Ofsted report there are significant problems in that regard at Stretford Grammar.'

Councillor David Higgins, chairman of Trafford council's children's committee, said: 'Schools depend very heavily on a good head teacher and unfortunately the head has been away through illness for some time.' But he added: 'There must be a lot of teachers doing a good job to have obtained the results Stretford Grammar School has obtained. They stand very well against results across the country. It's hard to argue how much further you can get above excellent.'

SOURCE




Number of students achieving three A-grade A-levels double in a decade

British exam results are becoming increasingly meaningless

The number of sixth-formers gaining three As in their A-levels has doubled in a decade, according to figures published yesterday. Just days after Cambridge University announced that a hat-trick of As was no longer enough to win a place, it emerged that one in eight students are now achieving the feat. Last year, 12.1 per cent of students achieved a trio of As - more than 31,000 - against just 6.1 per cent when Labour took office in 1997, according to figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

As the pass rate soared to 97.2 per cent last summer, exam chiefs heralded the era of 'unfailable' A-levels.

Cambridge said it had opted to raise standard entry requirements to an A* and two As after being forced to turn away record numbers of students with three As - around 5,500. Senior tutors said that in time the standard offer could be raised to two A*s and an A.

Dr Geoff Parks, director of admissions at Cambridge, said: 'This is about a move towards a system where we are using the public examinations system to do the selection for us, rather than just saying three As, which is easier to get. 'It means students are proving themselves in the public examination system, rather than proving themselves in the interview process.'

Meanwhile Imperial College, Bristol University and University College London have revealed they will make some offers using the A* when the new grade is awarded for the first time in 2010.

While ministers staunchly deny claims of grade inflation, A-levels have been plagued by suspicions that relentlessly rising pass rates cannot be solely down to pupils' and teachers' greater mastery of their subjects. With sixth-formers now passing one in four of all A-levels with a grade A, sceptics fear standards have been eroded over the years. This is said to have been hastened in 2000 by the splitting of A-level courses into bite-sized chunks which are separately examined and can be retaken an unlimited number of times.

A Durham University study recently suggested that A-level standards have fallen at the rate of one grade a decade since the mid-1980s. Sixth-formers now achieve two grades more than students of the same ability in 1988, it was claimed, meaning that a pupil who gained a C two decades ago would now be in line for an A.

Isabel Nisbet, acting chief executive of Ofqual, said last month that A-levels may need to be 'recalibrated' upwards for the first time in 50 years to counter rising pass rates.

Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said: 'Many universities have to run remedial courses to get the students up to the standards they had been in previous years.' He added: 'Grade inflation has to be halted or the exam system will descend into chaos.'

SOURCE





24 March, 2009

Canadian university to probe clashes over Mideast

One of Canada's largest universities says it will probe recent campus clashes relating to the Middle East.

In a move welcomed by Jewish students and communal leaders, York University announced Monday that it will form a task force "to review concerns about the student environment" on campus. Jewish students have complained of a toxic atmosphere on campus arising from Israel's recent military incursion in the Gaza Strip.

On Feb. 11, about 100 anti-Israel protesters barricaded Jewish students in a Hillel lounge and shouted anti-Semitic and anti-Israel slurs. Police were forced to escort Jewish students from the lounge to ensure their safety. Other anti-Semitic incidents, including graffiti and verbal attacks, continue to be reported on campus. "Recent events on campus have raised serious concerns over whether our most cherished values and commitments are being undermined by excessive conflict, intolerance and even intimidation," said the task force's terms of reference, the Globe and Mail newspaper reported.

"We are pleased that the university has taken into account the deep concerns expressed by our community," said David Koschitzky, chair of the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto. "We will lend support to this task force with the expectation that it will lead to a campus that respects civil discourse and the fair enforcement of the rules," said Daniel Ferman, president of Hillel@York. "We also urge the York administration to address the immediate safety concerns affecting Jewish students on campus prior to the Aug. 31 deadline of this task force," he said.

SOURCE




Australian university rejects demand for Muslim prayer room

The existing eight Muslim prayer rooms are not enough, apparently

AUSTRALIAN universities are responsible for providing quality education, not consecrated religious spaces, according to a university involved in a bitter dispute over Muslim prayer rooms.

Dozens of Islamic students plan to protest today to demand that a dedicated Muslim prayer room replace an existing multi-faith centre at Melbourne's RMIT. But acting pro vice-chancellor Maddy McMaster said it was not for universities to provide consecrated religious spaces. "A university's responsibility to its students is to provide them with a quality education," she said. "Recognising that the educational experience is not confined to the classroom, RMIT offers other services, including prayer rooms. It falls to religious communities to provide the consecrated spaces."

The dispute over prayer rooms at RMIT's Swanston Street campus began when a Muslim prayer room was demolished in late 2007 as part of renovations. The university's Islamic student association claims it was promised new rooms but that the institution reneged on its promise by making them multi-faith. They are now campaigning to have the multi-faith rooms declared Muslim-only. "As a result (of the multi-faith centre) students and staff have been forced to pray," the RMIT Islamic Society said on its website. "As a consequence of not having a Muslim prayer room on Swanston St, Muslim females have allegedly been subject to sexual abuse, harassment and religious vilification."

Organisers of the protest - which has the backing of the National Union of Students and the RMIT Student Union - say they have been left with no choice but to take action.

But Dr McMaster said the university already provided a number of prayer rooms for Muslim students across all its campuses. "It is difficult to see how we can improve on eight Muslim prayer rooms, with one more opening, as well as providing Muslim students with preferential access to two prayer rooms in the multi-faith Spiritual Centre," she said. "(Universities) should provide quality resources for those who choose a spiritual path. But as a secular institution, such resources do not include consecrated spaces such as churches, synagogues or mosques."

NUS president David Barrow said the demand for Muslim prayer rooms was increasing and space was a problem. "With the influx of international students from Muslim countries, the Muslim prayer rooms haven't been able to cope with the load," he said.

SOURCE




Australia: The crazy politics of learning to read

Miranda Devine comments on destructive ideas that also flourish in the USA and UK

Ideological promoters of the discredited "whole language", or osmosis method, of teaching children to read have been unmasked this week. The whole language lobby's devious and irrational opposition to evidence was exemplified in a bid to derail the State Government's trial of MULTILIT, a successful remedial reading program based on explicit phonics teaching.

In an email stream last week from Associate Professor Brian Cambourne, of Wollongong University, to literacy educators who subscribe to a university mailing list, strategies for winning the "reading wars" were laid bare. Cambourne, regarded as the "godfather" of whole language in Australia, urges his network to "flood Verity's [the Education Minister, Verity Firth's] office" with messages designed to denigrate MULTILIT and undermine the trial "at an almost subconscious level". He also suggests linking the program to "readicide", which he defines as "the systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in schools".

Confronted this week by The Australian's education writer, Justine Ferrari, Cambourne came up with this extraordinary quote: "When you rely on evidence, it's twisted … We rely on the cognitive science framing theory, to frame things the way you want the reader to understand them to be true."

That sounds like a postmodern justification for obfuscation.

To their great credit, it appears that both Firth and the federal Education Minister, Julia Gillard, are more interested in results than ideology. Gillard has tied literacy and numeracy funding to programs proven effective by evidence-based research. "This is about finding out what works," Gillard said in a press release last May. Similarly, Firth has said she is not interested in "internecine debates". She urged educators to "stop arguing about what we believe and start talking about what we know".

In other words, reading programs should be based on evidence of what works. Paying lip service to phonics under the rebadging of whole-word theory as "balanced" instruction isn't enough. Both Firth and Gillard are lawyers who understand the value of evidence. Interestingly, both are also members of the Labor Left, which will insulate them from the ideological ad hominem attacks usually employed by the leftists of the whole-language lobby, and may help to unhook the teaching of reading from its historic left-right baggage.

It has never made sense that the whole-word doctrine has been a hobbyhorse of left-wingers, when its results work particularly to the detriment of the working class. Underprivileged children have suffered most from the marginalisation of phonics in schools, as their homes are generally not rich learning environments. The National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy (of which I was a member) found as many as 30 per cent of year 5 students had literacy problems preventing them from "effectively participating" in further schooling. The National Curriculum Board reportedly puts the figure for struggling readers at between 20 per cent and 40 per cent.

How can anyone dismiss the miracles that go on every day in classrooms in Uniting Church centres in Ashfield and Redfern and in a Noel Pearson-led trial in Cape York, where the reading age of indigenous students is three to four years behind the national average.

You just have to see for yourself the joy in the faces of children as they learn the sounds of the alphabet and how to put them together in words, and they suddenly realise what the "black stuff" on the page means.

In the program trial in Coen, on Cape York, some children started learning so quickly a special accelerated program had to be devised for them. After two terms there were average gains of almost two years in reading accuracy.

How can anyone ignore Melbourne's Bellfield Primary, one of the most disadvantaged schools in Australia, which transformed itself by rejecting whole language theory and instituting a program of explicit phonics instruction. The results were stunning, with 91 per cent of grade 2 students reading with 100 per cent accuracy compared to the previous 31 per cent. How can anyone reject results of the seven-year study of underprivileged children in Clackmannanshire, Scotland, who were taught to read using an intensive form of phonics, and wound up more than three years ahead of their peers.

In his email stream, Cambourne gives a clue to the origins of his ideological blinkers when he dismisses the evidence on which the MULTILIT trial rests as a "neo-liberal" concern.

"I believe that the neoliberal views of 'evidence-based research' … can be shown to be just as flawed as their economic theories". How the science of teaching children to read became an ideological battleground is a mystery to Professor Kevin Wheldall, the inspirational creator of MULTILIT. But there is no doubt it has been a tragedy, as the whole language movement has held sway for 40 years, with its Rousseauian notion that children learn to read naturally just by being exposed to books. When it became clear this was not the case for as many as two-thirds of children, whole-language proponents did not question their beliefs but turned to social justice for justification. Teacher education courses became infected with the revolutionary idea that only by eradicating poverty and underprivilege (by overthrowing the patriarchal, authoritarian, elitist capitalist system, of course) could students progress.

This has been as futile and damaging as the notion that we cannot prevent catastrophic bushfires unless we stop climate change. It is using the tragedy of illiterate children as the means to achieve an ideological end.

SOURCE





23 March, 2009

SC: No girls here, no boys there

School's single-gender classes show promising early results

Berkeley Middle School sixth-grader Matthew Desmond said he loves learning in a single-gender program so much that he'd recommend to fifth-grade boys that they sign up next year. "You can throw balls in class and stuff, and you're with your friends all day," he said. Matthew thinks he's just having fun when he and his classmates toss a ball in class or do some other activity that gets them out of their seats. But he's really learning while moving, a technique single-gender advocates have said resonates with boys.

Berkeley Middle School joined a growing statewide trend when it began offering a single-gender program last fall. South Carolina leads the nation in the number of schools that offer single-gender classes, said David Chadwell, single-gender coordinator at the state Department of Education. About 500 schools across the country offer some all-boy or all-girl classes or programs, and 216 of them are in South Carolina, he said.

Berkeley Middle School Principal Lee Westberry said her school's program is unique because it is comprehensive. Students take all four of their core courses — English, math, science and social studies — in a single-gender setting, she said. And only students, parents and teachers who want to be in the program are taking part in it. About 140 middle-school students in sixth through eighth grades are enrolled this year, Westberry said.

Staff members spent the entire year last year developing the program, she said, and they regularly get training in how to teach in ways that work with boys and girls. The teacher's gender isn't important, she said. What matters is the teaching style.

Westberry, a strong supporter of single-gender education, said such programs are successful not because they separate boys and girls but because teachers use strategies that work with the gender they are teaching.

In a boys' class Tuesday, the teacher and students spoke loudly and everybody moved around. In a girls' class, students sat in small groups and talked to each other. Their teacher dimmed the lights and the slight smell of cinnamon wafted through the air.

Chadwell said the Berkeley Middle School program also is collecting data on how students are doing, which is very useful. According to the data, Westberry said, the program is working. After one semester:

• Sixth-grade girls' average grade-point average in all four classes is 4 points higher than their peers in mixed-gender classes.

• Sixth-grade boys' average is 4 points higher in math and social studies and the same in English and science.

• Seventh-grade boys' and girls' averages are 5 points higher in all core classes.

• Eighth-grade girls' average is 2 points higher in English and social studies, but their average in math and science is slightly below that of their peers in mixed-gender classes. Program leaders attribute that, at least in part, to more students enrolling after the start of the school year.

• There is no group for eighth-grade boys.

Overall, Westberry said, "they're performing better and they're happier." In the single-gender classes, discipline problems among the same students have dropped 72 percent from last year, and absences are down 50 percent, she said. Those are impressive early statistics for a school that didn't set out to start a single-gender program, she said.

Westberry started as principal at the school last year and learned immediately that "our girls outperformed our boys in every subject area and at every grade-level," she said. The idea for single-gender classes was born as a method to help boys succeed, she said. But it's worked well for girls, too.

Chadwell said many schools in the state offer single- gender options because they give public-school parents a choice about the learning environment in which they enroll their children. State Education Superintendent Jim Rex is pushing for more choices in public schools, he said.

Chadwell also said the programs are easy and inexpensive to implement and don't require that schools purchase a lot of new materials. "There's no boys' curriculum or girls' curriculum," he said.

All that's really required is teacher training, Westberry said. To help her teachers decide if they would be better at teaching boys or girls, Westberry tapped her pen loudly on her note pad throughout a meeting. At the end of the meeting, she asked teachers to raise their hands if they found it annoying. Those who did probably aren't well-suited to teach boys, who usually like to move and tend to fidget as they learn, she said. Boys also tend to respond well to a fast pace, loud voices and competition, while girls often do better working face-to-face in a quieter, more colorful environment.

"It's all about strategies," Westberry said. "The kids love it and they're thriving."

SOURCE




More than 100,000 children languish in 'coasting' British schools, figures show

More than 100,000 children are being taught in "coasting" schools which fail to stretch their most able students, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal. The schools, many of which are located in leafy suburbs and shire counties, have avoided scrutiny in the past because they achieved average or better than average exam results. But the statistics hid the fact that talented pupils failed to achieve their full potential.

Figures obtained by this paper from more than half of England's 150 education authorities suggest that at least 130 schools across the country can be classed as "coasting". The figures are an embarrassment for the Government which has poured millions of pounds into raising standards in secondary schools and improving provision for bright pupils.

Michael Gove, the shadow children's secretary, said: "It is worrying that so many schools are being identified as coasting. Parents have a right to expect that heads are continually striving for improvement. We need to shine the light of accountability on all schools to ensure that parents do not have to put up with a second class education for their children."

Schools are classed by the Government as "coasting" if they display one or more of a list of indicators. These include pupils starting school with good SATs results but going on to get poor GCSEs, "unimpressive" pupil progress, static exam results, disappointing Ofsted ratings, "complacent" leadership and lack of pupil tracking and early intervention.

The Sunday Telegraph asked education authorities if they had entered any of their schools into a new Government scheme, called Gaining Ground, which aims to tackling coasting secondary schools.

Of the 83 councils which responded, 34 said they have entered more than 76 schools between them. Some, such as Calderdale, Leicestershire, Bedfordshire, Herefordshire and Norfolk, have entered at least five coasting schools each.

If the responses were replicated across all 150 authorities in England, it would mean that more than 130 schools, with more than 130,000 pupils, would be affected.

The 40 million pound Gaining Ground scheme aimed at "kick starting" coasting schools will start next month. It will pay for consultants and training in the schools and for possible federations with successful secondaries. If schools fail to respond, local authorities have the power to intervene, by replacing governing bodies or head teachers.

Councils with schools in the scheme denied that they were "coasting" and said none were complacent. A number of shire counties also complained of years of low per pupil funding, with the lion's share of Government spending focused on inner cities.

Karen Charters, the head of school improvement at Gloucestershire County Council, which has five schools in the Gaining Ground scheme, said: "These schools are not seen as 'coasting' – they had already been addressing issues and measures are in place to support improvement. There should be no suggestion of complacency on the part of the authority or the schools."

Leicestershire County Council said: "The term 'coasting' is not a phrase the authority wishes to subscribe to. It is not clearly defined and for some implies negative characteristics, such as complacency, that cannot be fairly ascribed to the schools."

Norfolk County Council also objected to the term. It said the eight schools it had proposed for the scheme, which were yet to be signed off by the Department for Children, Schools and Families, were judged by Ofsted to be satisfactory but with the potential to improve.

Professor Alan Smithers, the director of the centre for education and employment research at Buckingham University questioned how successful the Gaining Ground measures would be. "What is proposed smacks of bureaucratic intervention" he said. "Labour does not have a very good track record and has spent immense amounts of money on education in the last 12 years but we still have failing and coasting schools. Sending in consultants sounds like tinkering at the edges. "Research shows that what makes the greatest difference is the quality of teaching. The quality of teaching and shortages of specialist teachers in areas like maths, physics and foreign languages needs to be addressed."

Head teachers criticised the crudeness of the indicators used by the Government to categorise schools. John Dunford, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: "Local authorities should not be forced to label schools as 'coasting' on the basis of only one indicator. Five of the indicators on the list do not qualify as good reasons on their own to judge a school."

A Department for Children, Schools and Families spokesman said: "These schools are not 'failing' schools – they will have acceptable, or sometimes even good results, but may not be fulfilling the potential of their pupils. Sometimes they may not be stretching their most able pupils, or perhaps not meeting the needs of their pupils who face difficulties. "These schools may not have received focused attention to date, but will now qualify for additional funding and support to raise their ambition and improve pupils' progress."

SOURCE





22 March, 2009

British 'Islamophobe' head-teacher wins claim against Muslim-loving County Council

A campaign by two Muslim governors to give Islam a greater presence in a state school played a key part in forcing a successful head from her job, the High Court found yesterday. Erica Connor, 57, the former head teacher of the New Monument primary school in Woking, Surrey, was forced to leave the school because of stress after she was accused of Islamophobia.

The High Court ruled yesterday that Surrey County Council had failed in its duty to protect her and to intervene when the actions of the governors created problems in the school’s governing body, and awarded her 400,000 pounds damages.

The court was told that over two years, two governors campaigned to make the school more Islamic and that their behaviour had torn apart the school’s governing board. Paul Martin, a Muslim convert, tried to stir up disaffection in the community against the school and Mumtaz Saleem was verbally abusive in school meetings, it was said in court.

Although during the first five years that Mrs Connor was in charge of the school there had been good relations with the local Muslim community and improved results, the judge, John Leighton-Williams, QC, said that the situation had changed when the two men were elected as governors in 2003. He said that the school’s governing body had become dysfunctional as a result of the behaviour of the two, and that the authority’s failure to act had led to low morale and stress among staff. The council had shown excessive tolerance for the two governors and had lost sight of the adverse effects of such conduct on the school.

Judge Leighton-Williams said that the men had an agenda to increase the role of the Muslim religion in the school and that this, combined with the authority’s failure to protect Mrs Connor, had led her to suffer serious depression. “Mr Martin’s and Mr Saleem’s conduct had the effect of tearing apart the governing body, and together with the poor response by the defendants, had as their effect two years of anxiety and low morale for the school staff, stress leading to early retirement for some staff and disruption in the local community with little, if anything, positive to show for it.”

Mrs Connor told the court that she had suffered serious depression after a string of vituperative complaints against her by members of the school’s governing body, and that the council had left her as a helpless scapegoat after failing to defend her. She was forced to quit her job suffering from depression and with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Ill health forced her to take early retirement.

Mrs Connor said after the ruling: “The last five years have been a long haul, at great personal cost to myself and my family, so I am thrilled that justice has prevailed. I was subjected to dreadful pressures from a small group of individuals, unrepresentative of the local community, without the support I would have expected from Surrey County Council.”

SOURCE




British school subjects 'should be ranked by difficulty'

School subjects should be ranked according to difficulty to help pupils and academics determine the merits of a particular set of A levels, a leading education expert has said.

All subjects are not equal and Government exam agencies should introduce league tables reflecting this, Professor Peter Tymms, director of the Centre for Education and Monitoring at Durham University, said today. He also called for university subject tables to recognise the fact that the same degrees from different universities are not of equal quality. “It is not reasonable to expect that the difficulty of subjects are made equal by exam bodies.

“An A in physics is not the same as an A in theatre studies. A first from Cambridge is not the same as a first from another university. We need to look at league tables of subject difficulty,” Professor Tymms told a meeting of exam regulators and education policy makers.

His comments are a barb to the supporters of standardisation of exam grades which critics say is dumbing down the more academic subjects.

Fears that people will be offended if told they took soft or easy A levels have prevented the Government from admitting that some subjects are harder than others, Professor Tymms added. “There is no debate that some subjects are graded more harshly than others. There is a real problem with making subjects similar difficulty. “If you shifted them all to be the same then everyone doing further maths would get an A* and everyone doing theatre studies would fail. We need to look at the relative difficulty of subjects.”

A spokesman for the Department for Schools said: “We simply don't recognise the labels ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ A-levels. All subjects are rigorously measured against each other to maintain standards.” “The new independent regulator, Ofqual, has been set up precisely to maintain rigorous standards and control the exam and qualifications system tightly.”

The league table - which Ofqual could administer - would be based on a points system with each subject awarded points according to its relative difficulty, Professor Tymms said. University tutors and employers would use the information to help them choose between candidates with similar grades in different subjects.

A spokeswoman from Ofqual said the debate about standardisation of exams was important. "All subjects have to meet strict criteria in order to be accredited. Ofqual has led the way in looking at comparability across subjects and developing ways in which to do this.”

Professor Tymms added: “We know that [degrees] are not the same. From subject to subject and university to university they are different.”

Pam Tatlow, chief executive of million+, a university think-tank representing former polytechnics, said: “Such a league table would be fiendishly difficult to apply with any degree of reliability, is unlikely to add value to the university application process and is very likely to mislead both students and employers.”

One source close to the Government said such a league table would not be useful because no-one is under the impression that a degree from Cambridge is the same as a degree from elsewhere.

SOURCE





21 March, 2009

Why KIPP Schools Work

The informal motto of KIPP, the network of public charter schools that stands at the vanguard of America's burgeoning education-reform movement, is "Work Hard. Be Nice." That's also the title of an important new book, by veteran Washington Post education reporter Jay Mathews, which chronicles how KIPP's network of 66 schools developed and offers some lessons from KIPP's extraordinary success. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently praised KIPP as a "proven strategy ready to go to scale" and mentioned the need for schools across the country to embrace KIPP's example of a longer school year, making Mathews's book even more timely.

Mathews's story starts in 1992 with David Levin and Michael Feinberg, two tall, gregarious seniors at Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively. Not sure what to do with their lives, Levin and Feinberg signed up with Teach for America (TFA), the nonprofit that places America's brightest college graduates in classrooms teaching the nation's lowest-performing students. Levin and Feinberg both got teaching assignments in Houston, where-initially overwhelmed by the difficulty of imparting knowledge to rambunctious fifth-graders from the inner city-they began to develop a revolutionary new education model.

From one Houston teacher, Harriet Ball, they learned the importance of classroom management-the need to maintain order while keeping the classroom vibrant, enjoyable, and full of energy. From Rafe Esquith, an award-winning instructor in Los Angeles, they discovered the merits of extended class time and a rigorous, content-rich curriculum that holds low-income and minority students to high academic standards. Levin and Feinberg immediately appropriated one of Ball's secrets: the use of mnemonic chants that, as Mathews puts it, "firmly attach essential rules of grammar and mathematics to the brains of nine-year-olds." They used the chants to great effect, getting kids to commit important facts to memory in the same way they memorize lyrics from the latest hip-hop song. (Education-school professors frown on such devices as "rote memorization." But today, all KIPP fifth-graders can recite their multiplication tables by heart-a skill that eludes 80 percent of their peers nationwide, according to a recent study.)

Levin and Feinberg did add a few twists of their own. They implemented a broken-windows-style discipline policy, believing that leaving any misbehavior unaddressed would increase the likelihood of further misbehavior and distract from lessons. They stayed after school to work with struggling pupils, assigned mountains of homework, and encouraged students to call them at home if they needed help with their assignments. Perhaps their most important step, however, was reaching out to parents. Against the wishes of school administrators, they visited students at home and enlisted parents as active participants in their children's education. Among many memorable stories that Mathews tells: Feinberg goes to the home of a television-addicted student who has repeatedly failed to turn in her homework-and with her mother's permission, exits the house with the family's 36-inch TV in his arms.

Levin and Feinberg achieved remarkable results: nearly every one of their low-income minority students passed the Texas math and reading tests with flying colors. But they were often stymied by bureaucrats who didn't appreciate their aggressive style and unorthodox teaching methods. In fact, after his fellow teachers voted Levin Teacher of the Year, the principal fired him for insubordination.

As their two-year Teach for America commitment ended, Levin and Feinberg began to hound the Houston School District for permission to start a special initiative that they called the "Knowledge Is Power Program"-KIPP for short. It would feature a 7:30 AM to 5:00 PM school day, Saturday classes, and a three-week "summer prep" program. In exchange for hard work, students would be rewarded with perks, such as lunch at McDonald's, weekend excursions, and an end-of-the-year field trip to Washington, D.C.

The Houston school authorities finally agreed to let Levin and Feinberg launch an experimental fifth-grade program-if they could find 50 students willing to sign on to the long hours and academic rigor. The young teachers canvassed neighborhoods, asking students and their parents to sign the "KIPP Commitment to Excellence," a contract listing the specific obligations of teachers, parents, and students. In August 1994, the first 50 "KIPPsters" walked into Levin and Feinberg's classroom. Half the students began the school year having previously failed both the math and English portions of the Texas state test. By June, all but one had passed both tests, with an average class improvement of two full grade levels.

From there, the KIPP story became one of growth and replication. Levin and Feinberg hired other talented, dynamic teachers and added a sixth grade, then a seventh, and then an eighth. Homesick for his native New York, Levin approached Sy Fliegel, president of the Center for Educational Innovation (then a part of the Manhattan Institute), to help him establish a KIPP program in one of the city's low-performing school districts. By 1998, with Fliegel's help, KIPP had two fifth-through-eighth-grade middle schools in Houston and New York that were successfully preparing some 600 students for high school-many KIPP students win scholarships to attend private high schools or pass tests to attend competitive public ones-and then college. Levin and Feinberg also added cultural enrichment programs, such as orchestra and choir, which become important KIPP hallmarks.

According to Mathews, the "tipping point" for KIPP occurred in 1999, when 60 Minutes broadcast a heartwarming piece profiling students who had started at KIPP years behind in math and English and who, by eighth grade, were doing high-school-level algebra and reading a dozen novels a year. Politicians and school superintendents across the country began to reach out to Levin and Feinberg, asking them to open KIPP schools in their cities. Fortunately, Don and Doris Fisher, founders of the Gap clothing store, also saw the 60 Minutes piece and decided to commit $15 million to bankroll KIPP's expansion. (The Fishers have since contributed another $35 million, and major education philanthropies, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation have also joined the KIPP movement.)

It's difficult to replicate a successful school model on a grand scale, but KIPP, after trying a few different approaches, figured out a way to develop and monitor new schools. The process starts with the recruitment and training of "Fisher Fellows," the handful of people selected to become potential leaders of new KIPP schools. They attend a rigorous six-week summer leadership course at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, where they study topics such as curriculum, how to choose effective teachers, school management, and fund-raising. (It's telling that the Fisher Fellows have no involvement with Berkeley's education school; KIPP adheres to a results-oriented business-school ethos, rather than the soft-headed nonsense taught at most ed schools.)

Those Fisher Fellows deemed KIPP material (many don't make the cut) then spend the fall semester observing and assisting at an existing KIPP school. In January, they begin seeking space and recruiting students for their own schools. They must sign a legal licensing agreement that allows them to use the KIPP name so long as they follow the basic KIPP model. The national KIPP Foundation raises money to pay for training and start-up costs of the school, and once it's off the ground, Foundation staffers periodically evaluate and audit it. They've closed down several, or stripped them of the KIPP name, for not meeting the organization's high standards.

Today, 66 KIPP schools in 20 states enroll more than 16,000 students, and the network has expanded to include elementary and high schools as well as middle schools. (KIPP's goal is to have 100 schools and 25,000 students by 2011.) In every city, KIPP students surpass district and citywide performance. In New York last year, for example, 94 percent of KIPP eighth-graders scored at or above grade level on the state math test-and 78 percent did the same on the English test-while in the city as a whole, those numbers were 60 percent and 43 percent, respectively. In fact, in many cities-including New York, Washington, Baltimore, San Jose, and New Orleans-the top-performing public middle school is now a KIPP school. It's worth noting, too, that KIPP's impact reaches far beyond its own network of schools, as scores of other charter schools across the country now emulate the KIPP model.

KIPP's many admirers offer various explanations for the schools' success. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell notes that KIPP students, like children in Asia, spend about 60 percent more "time on task" than students in traditional American public schools. New York Times columnist David Brooks has written extensively about how KIPP transmits to low-income minority students the "cultural capital"-how to speak effectively, how to look attentive, how to fill out a college application-that middle-class suburban kids take for granted. Oprah Winfrey has praised KIPP's ability to raise students' expectations of what they can accomplish if they're willing to work hard.

Mathews attributes KIPP's success to a combination of such factors-its instituting "high expectations for all students, a longer school day, a principal totally in charge, an emphasis on finding the best teachers, rewards for student success, close contact with parents, a focus on results, and a commitment to preparing every child for a great high school, and, most important, college." But he might offer the best explanation for KIPP's success when he notes how KIPP recalls the best "inner-city Catholic schools . . . with warm but strict teachers whose commitment to their students is motivated by far more than a weekly paycheck."

KIPP fosters the sense of community that noted sociologist and education reformer James Coleman singled out many years ago as the key difference between public and private schools. At KIPP's small schools, every teacher and school official knows every student by name. For many students, KIPP provides an oasis of affection and stability in their otherwise chaotic lives. And just like the Catholic schools of old, KIPP doesn't simply teach facts and figures but unapologetically seeks to instill values, build strength of character, and forge good habits of mind and behavior.

Mathews also acknowledges two developments that coincide with the KIPP story and have been instrumental to the schools' success: the advent of Teach for America and the rise of the charter-school movement. Mathews makes clear that KIPP wouldn't be the success story it is without the synergistic relationship that it has developed with TFA. (In fact, the synergy between the organizations runs all the way to the top: TFA founder Wendy Kopp is married to KIPP CEO Richard Barth.) From KIPP's earliest days, the majority of its teachers have come from TFA, which is now one of the nation's most selective and sought-after postcollege programs. This year, 11 percent of the Ivy League's graduating class applied to become TFA teachers; only a handful were selected. The partnership allows KIPP to attract spectacularly talented and dynamic teachers, and TFA knows that its "corps members" will teach in schools with the best chance of success. Often, TFA teachers move on to start new KIPP schools: some 60 percent of KIPP school leaders are former TFA teachers. (For a less sanguine view of TFA, see "How I Joined Teach for America-and Got Sued for $20 Million.")

As for charter schools-independently operated public schools free from union work rules and other bureaucratic impediments-they first arrived on the scene in the early 1990s in Minnesota and California, and the idea spread to other states during that decade. (Over the strenuous objection of the powerful teachers' unions, New York State passed its charter law in 1998.) KIPP schools, all of which are charters, enjoy flexibility with staffing decisions and can hold teachers accountable for student performance-so far. A recent move to unionize KIPP teachers in two New York City schools is a worrisome development.

KIPP is not without its detractors, and Mathews gives them a fair hearing. While some critics claim that KIPP is too authoritarian-the "Kids In Prison Program," some call it-Mathews points to the schools' overwhelming popularity among students, parents, and alumni. Some condemn KIPP for "teaching to the test," but Mathews retorts that it is precisely KIPP's relentless focus on student progress-which is, yes, measured by frequent quizzes and even standardized tests-that makes the schools so successful. As former education secretary Margaret Spellings liked to say in response to complaints about the testing requirements mandated under the No Child Left Behind Act: "What gets measured, gets done."

Mathews also addresses the most serious criticism of KIPP (and other charter schools): that the schools "cream" the best and most motivated students. Though KIPP schools are open-enrollment public charter schools and students are chosen by lottery, critics contend that because of its long school day and rigorous standards, only the most promising students from the most intact families apply to KIPP and stay enrolled. There may be a grain of truth in this argument. KIPP officials, however, offer statistics that show little difference between KIPP students and their public-school peers, at least with regard to race, socioeconomic status, and previous academic achievement. Two limited independent studies have confirmed KIPP's claims, and KIPP has recently hired the research firm Mathematica to conduct an extensive multiyear, longitudinal study comparing KIPP students with non-KIPP students.

Mathews devotes substantial space to the personal lives of Levin and Feinberg, which may or may not interest readers. Overall, however, his book provides a compelling look at America's most successful charter-school network and debunks the dispiriting notion that low-income minority children should not be expected to make much educational progress. As Mathews makes clear, KIPP has proved that great teachers, high expectations, extra class time, and much encouragement and commitment can close America's educational achievement gap.

SOURCE




Australia: McDonald's makes major move into school education with free online maths program

A lot of Leftists will pop a few rivets over this

McDONALD'S will today make a major move into school education, offering a free maths program to more than 1.4 million students. McDonald's restaurants across the nation are bankrolling the company's biggest foray yet into schools. Under the scheme the Maths Online tutoring program - usually costing $40 per month - will be provided free to individuals, classes or entire schools in the government, Catholic and independent systems.

When they open the program on their computers, students will see the McDonald's logo and the words: "Proudly provided by your local McDonald's restaurant."

McDonald's yesterday refused to reveal how much it was paying for the school campaign, claiming the figure was "commercially in-confidence". But The Daily Telegraph understands the total cost will run into millions of dollars.

McDonald's has the support of Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard and the Australian Secondary Principals' Association and will promote the program to students from Year 7 to Year 12. Ms Gillard yesterday commended the company for "encouraging secondary schools and students across the country to utilise this resource".

But State Opposition education spokesman Adrian Piccoli said that parents expected education to be independent of corporate interests. "Maccas should stick to making hamburgers and the Government should stick to educating children," Mr Piccoli said. Professor Bobby Banerjee from the University of Western Sydney College of Business said the program might improve students' maths but it was also promoting McDonald's. "There is a return for the company - they claim they are doing it to serve the community but that's not entirely true," he said.

Maths Online was developed by a team led by Sydney teacher Patrick Murray and features hundreds of animated and narrated lessons and over 15,000 exam-style questions. Secondary Principals Association president Andrew Blair said McDonald's was making a "generous contribution to building the foundation skills of Australian students". "The Maths Online product will be a marvellous assistance to the work of mathematics teachers throughout Australia," he said.

SOURCE





20 March, 2009

Less than $4,500 a year... a British university graduate's paltry pay premium

Thousands of graduates end up in jobs that don't pay enough to justify the cash spent on tuition fees and living expenses, a study revealed yesterday. With some university chiefs wanting fees to rise as high as 20,000 pounds a year, research showed the graduate earnings 'premium' is minimal for many students - especially arts and humanities graduates with middling or poor degree grades. Studies have already suggested the earning power of a degree is declining as student numbers soar.

Ministers claimed that graduates could earn 400,000 pounds more over a lifetime as they sought to justify raising fees to 3,000 a year three years ago. Subsequent studies put the figure at 160,000. Now a study from Warwick University has found that the earnings 'premium' for some graduates is negligible. Male arts and humanities graduates earn on average just 2,800 a year more than counterparts who went straight into jobs after A-levels. With debts accrued through tuition costs and board, those who attended more obscure universities and gained unremarkable grades may have been wealthier if they gave university a miss.

The research comes amid a growing row over a call yesterday by university chiefs for fees to be more than doubled to 6,500 a year. Meanwhile a BBC survey showed that some vice-chancellors wish to see fees rise to 20,000. Former Education Secretary David Blunkett said it would be 'unacceptable to lift the cap on fees and have a free-for-all across universities'.

The Warwick research, involving almost 3,000 Britons born in 1970, found that the earning power of a degree varies widely according to the discipline and class of degree attained. Social sciences, including law and economics, gave the highest return. The report found that on average there was still a 'substantial' earnings premium linked to gaining a degree, but for students at less prestigious universities who get mediocre degrees the decision to attend university will be 'marginal', and more so with a hike in fees.

SOURCE




Judge orders public schooling for home-schooled kids in divorce case

Ostensibly he is taking the side of the father. That would be a very rare event if so.

A North Carolina judge presiding over a bitter divorce case has ruled that three home-schooled children must start attending public school - a decision their mother angrily says was based on her religious beliefs. Wake County Judge Ned Mangum granted Thomas and Venessa Mills joint custody of their children - ages 10, 11 and 12 - and ruled that the children's "best interest" would be served by sending them to public school this fall, according to a temporary custody order.

But Venessa Mills insists her association with the Sound Doctrine Church played a "big factor" in Mangum's ruling, in which he also ordered her to undergo a mental health assessment within 30 days. "He disregarded the facts and said that even though the children are thriving in home school, they'd do better in public school," Venessa Mills told FOXNews.com. "It's a clear cover-up by the judge. He made a bad ruling about home schooling and he is clearly covering his tracks."

Venessa Mills, whose home-school curriculum includes swimming, piano lessons and instruction from Sound Doctrine members via phone and Web cam, claims Mangum showed his bias by not including rebuttals to damaging testimony by her relatives and close friends in his ruling. "He said that public school will challenge the ideas that I taught them," Mills said. "My children have clearly stated they do not want to go to public school. They want to remain at home school ... so why rip them out?"

Mangum disputed that claim in his order released Tuesday, ruling that the children's father, Thomas Mills, has the right to expose his children to alternative views. "As previously stated in open court, while this Court clearly recognizes the benefits of home school, and any effort to characterize it differently is incorrect, it is Mr. Mills' request to re-enroll these children back into the public school system and expose them and challenge them to more than just Venessa Mills' viewpoint," Mangum wrote. "Contrary to Ms. Mills' requested relief, this Court can not and will not infringe upon either party's right to practice their own religion and expose their children to the same."

According to court documents, the Millses had a "strong and happy" marriage until 2005, when Venessa Mills joined the Sound Doctrine Church in Enumclaw, Wash. At that point, her husband testified, she "became unrecognizable as the person" he had married. "She withdrew emotionally from me," said Mills, who admitted to having an affair.

Venessa Mills' mother, Dawn Lewis, told the judge she soon became "concerned" about her daughter's involvement with the church and its effect on her grandchildren. The church was described by as a "cult" by former members, according to court documents. "Sound Doctrine is not a healthy place for kids to grow up," former member Tina Wasik testified. "It is run by fear and manipulation." Referring to the church's leaders, Tim and Carla Williams, Wasik said, "Timothy and Carla manage to ruin relationships between man and wife and parents and kids."

Jessica Gambill, another former church member and acquaintance of Venessa Mills, testified that Tim Williams made several inappropriate sexual comments about girls as young as 4 years old.

"After I joined Sound Doctrine, Tim Williams told me that my oldest daughter (then age 12) was the kind of girl men would take advantage of, that my middle daughter (then age 7) was the kind of girl that would sleep with any guy, and that my youngest daughter (age 4) was the kind of girl that would use her looks to seduce men," Gambill testified.

The accusations against Sound Doctrine were denied by church officials and in affidavits filed by Venessa Mills' attorney. "They're completely false," Malcolm Fraser, an assistant pastor for Sound Doctrine, said of the accusations. "Clearly someone has an ax to grind with the church."

Attempts to reach Thomas Mills were unsuccessful. Calls to his attorney, Jaye Meyer, were not returned.

The judge indicated that his ruling had nothing to do with Venessa Mills' religious beliefs - and rather that her husband should be allowed to "expose their children to more than just the experiences that [she] desires" - supporters say Venessa Mills was wronged.

Robyn Williams, a home-school mother who has chronicled the divorce proceedings at hsinjustice.com, accused Mangum of attacking both Venessa Mills' character and her church. "He is diverting attention from his own biased decision and is attacking the church because he knows he's wrong," Williams told FOXNews.com. "If the roles were reversed, do you really think the judge would have ordered them to be subjected to home schooling?"

SOURCE





19 March, 2009

There are good reasons to subject the theory of evolution to critical thinking

Please encourage the Texas State Board of Education to vote unanimously to teach strengths and weaknesses of evolution. I believe the well-meaning efforts of groups like the 21st Century Science Coalition are instead misleading. I agree with some of their positions, but am disappointed by their false portrayal of critical thinking as something that DOESN'T require teaching of strengths and weaknesses. In reality, the coalition is asking Texans to cling to 19th and 20th Century hypotheses that use things like the fossil record as evidence for molecules-to-man evolution.

An example of real 21st Century science is the mounting evidence against the idea of molecular clocks. Scientists look at differences in genes along with fossil evidence to determine when two species diverged from a common ancestor. For the human species, scientists use molecular clocks to predict the date of "Mitochondrial Eve", our Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA) that supposedly originated in Africa.

Molecular clocks came into use in the 1960s. In the 1990 edition of Biology by Neil Campbell, an age between 200,000 and 400,000 years is given for "Eve" (p. 669). Moving ahead to 2004, we find in the 10th edition of Biology by Starr and Taggart that Eve is now only 100,000 to 200,000 years old (p. 471). The fact that the estimates were cut in half, on top of the huge error involved (50%), would make any reasonable scientist question molecular clocks.

And they do. As we entered the 21st century, we saw F.J. Ayala's paper titled "Molecular Clock Mirages". And then there's F. Chang's study using genealogy and statistics to predict an MRCA of less than 1,000 years ago. Chang began with an overly-simplified model, so over the next few years he added to it, and in 2003 colleague D. Rohde published research revealing an MRCA of between 2,000 and 5,000 years ago. And molecular clock skeptics Thorne and Wolpoff voiced their opinions in the 2003 Human Evolution Special Issue of Scientific American, flatly stating "putting aside the idea of a molecular clock, one can interpret the genetic data in a much more reasonable way." (p. 52).

In 2004, Rohde, Chang, and Olson published their latest findings in Nature, and their findings shift the MRCA from Africa to somewhere in Asia. In 2006, world renowned evolutionary biologist Thomas Cavalier-Smith stated in a paper "Evolution is not evenly paced and there are no real molecular clocks."

In 2008, a paper by Matsen and Evans tried to tie genetics with the genealogy of Rohde and others, and they simply concluded genetic diversity is related to the number of descendants, confirming the ability of Rohde and other's model to explain the human diversity we see today as resulting from a very recent ancestor.

This crash course in 21st century science may be a bit confusing, but the reason for that is not just the complex mathematics involved, but the basic fact that confusion exists over what happened in the past. To add to the confusion, in 2008 fossil collectors discovered a human footprint alongside that of a dinosaur providing evidence for the coexistence of humans and dinosaurs.

The truth is, there will ALWAYS be confusion about what happened in the past because we cannot go back and verify it. Not only that, scientists believe up to 99.9% of the species that ever existed may be missing from the fossil record. On top of that, genetic mutations are almost always neutral (see "neutral theory") or harmful, rarely beneficial, and never has a gene been observed to mutate and create a new and beneficial function. And finally, as Professor Jerry Coyne said on page 17 of Why Evolution is True, "By predictions, I don't mean that Darwinism can predict how things will evolve in the future."

Evolution is weak when it comes to explaining the past, present and future. It tries to explain itself by looking at similarities, but says our understanding of differences "remains murky at best" (see p. 13 of Unit 9 in Rediscovering Biology). As such, its status in Texas Biology textbooks should be weak. At the very least, teach the weaknesses. And please consider asking the SBOE to have a special session, rewriting the Biology TEKS to remove sections on origins and "macroevolution", and replacing them with a more modern coverage of genetics and ecosystem management. 19th century science has had its turn long enough.

SOURCE




British grade-school chaos: Mother's fury after son is sent to different school despite 36 others being closer to home

A boy has been placed at a primary school an hour's drive from his home - even though 36 other schools are closer. Robbie Cowley missed out on his chosen school and then found that all the others near his home were oversubscribed too. From September, the four-year-old will have to make an eight-mile journey across Oxford every weekday morning.

His mother, Tracey Richen, said she was devastated at losing out on Larkrise school because both she and Robbie's elder sister had been pupils there. She had even paid 1,500 pounds for her son to attend a foundation class at the primary. The 32-year-old midwife said: 'Larkrise is a really special family school where we know all the teachers and staff. 'But sending him so far away is ridiculous as I'll lose my job if I'm late every morning going through the traffic.

'All the teachers at the school really like Robbie so they just can't understand the decision. Robbie's made loads of friends since doing a foundation unit there so it's unfair to make him move elsewhere.' Robbie has been given a place at Botley Primary, which has some of the worst results in Oxfordshire. The school is 3.7 miles from his Headington home as the crow flies but requires an eight-mile drive around the centre of Oxford.

The 36 oversubscribed schools are within 3.7 miles of the family home. Miss Richen might have got Robbie a place at one of them, but she was so sure Robbie would go to Larkrise, she left blank the second and third choices. She added: 'This is very disrupting for Robbie because he was all set to go to Larkrise. Now he faces having to go to a school which is alien to him. 'I really hate the idea of him going to a school where he won't know anyone and miles away from any of the other pupils.'

She and her partner Kevin Cowley, Robbie's 39-year-old father, plan to appeal against the decision but the process could take months. They will not find out the result until a few weeks before term starts. John Mitchell, a spokesman for Oxfordshire County Council, said: 'We have immense sympathy for any parents who find themselves in this position. 'But schools have a finite capacity and there will always be occasions that some schools will be oversubscribed.' Councils last week informed the parents of 92,000 children that they had missed out on their first choice of secondary school.

SOURCE





18 March, 2009

The Fairness Doctrine: Coming to a Campus Near You

by Mike S. Adams

I am pleased to finally be able to write a column praising a decision by the administrators at my university. Recently, the Women's Resource Center (WRC) decided to put up an "art" display featuring pictures of naked females with captions below them telling stories about their lives. The problem was that some of the females were minors. Recognizing that posting a picture of a naked 12 year-old girl is not protected by academic freedom, the university administration removed the illegal pictures.

There is something very wrong with a Women's Resource Center that posts pictures of nude women with fake breasts in our library with captions arguing that they are grotesque and perverted. But there is something even more disturbing about their subsequent decision to post pictures of naked children arguing that they are not in any way grotesque or perverted.

I think the UNC-Wilmington administration has finally realized that the Interim Director of the WRC is simply a complete embarrassment to the university and must be monitored in order to protect the university from potential legal liability. Indeed, this is what happens when leftist extremists start to implement their own religion of moral relativism on our nation's campuses. Pretty soon, they're at a loss to find an objective basis for judging anything. And they become so arrogant that the argument "it's illegal" is irrelevant.

Given that leftist relativist groupthink is producing such poor decisions at my university I believe it is time to consider implementing a version of the Fairness Doctrine. Given my university's recent experiment with common sense and sanity, I think we would be a great place to start what could be a nationwide trend. Plus, we are a public university which, like the public airwaves, should not be dominated by speech from one side of the political spectrum.

We could begin implementing the Fairness Doctrine at my school by having Dr. Frank Turek speak to the Sociology of Religion class that is being offered next fall. Students in that class are being asked to read texts by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. In these books, the authors explain why they hate a God that doesn't exist. Dr. Turek could give a lecture explaining why he loves a God that does exist.

We could also invite Dr. Miriam Grossman to speak to the Sociology of Gender classes. Currently, we employ feminists who argue that all male/female differences are "socially constructed." Dr. Grossman could explain, in medical terms, why the feminists' Ms-guided decision to encourage promiscuity hurts women more than men.

We could also invite Dr. Larry Schweikart to speak in American History classes where students are taught that Ronald Reagan ran up higher deficits than Franklin Roosevelt. Larry could present them with charts they've never seen, which introduce them to the complex statistical idea of controlling for inflation.

In Microeconomics, we could have Dr. Richard Vedder explain how FDR's New Deal policies exacerbated the Great Depression. We could invite the president to attend the lecture. I mean the President of the United States, not the President of UNCW.

In Linguistics, we could have John McWhorter talk about the deleterious effects the ebonics movement is having on black progress.

In our graduate course in Social Justice, I could make a guest appearance to talk about how most people on death row are white despite the fact that most homicides are committed by blacks.

The Campus Fairness Doctrine would cut both ways, of course. In my "Trials of the Century" class I teach about the O.J. Simpson case and the Charles Manson case. I argue that both are guilty. So, naturally, I would allow the feminist in my department who thinks O.J. is innocent (read: sides with O.J. over Nicole) to come make her case. I would also ask the sociologist who once told me that Manson was a "poor guy who got railroaded by the system" to come argue his innocence. Then I'll remind everyone that insanity can negate mens rea but it can't negate tenure.

Finally, I'll have my friend Travis Barham of the Alliance Defense Fund give a speech to the Women's Resource Center. In it, he'll explain that the Fourth Circuit has ruled that the display of child pornography is not protected by the First Amendment. Someone has to tell the empress that she isn't wearing clothes.

SOURCE




Cambridge university no longer happy to accept rubbish High School marks

The general dumbing down and grade inflation of British High school education meant this had to happen if Cambridge's high academic standards were to be maintained

Fears of a new educational elitism emerged yesterday after the University of Cambridge changed its admissions policy in a way that critics said would favour independent schools. The university announced that 3 As at A-level would no longer be enough for entry. From 2010 at least one grade should be at the new A* being introduced that academic year. Others, including Oxford, are expected to follow. The decision was taken even though the Government's advisory body said the new grade should not be used as a benchmark until it had been tested.

Independent schools welcomed the move, but Labour MPs, teaching unions and education experts said that the measure would be used to "fillet out" state school pupils. In 2007, 59 per cent of Cambridge's intake were from the state sector. Barry Sheerman, chairman of the Commons' Children, Schools and Families Committee, said: "I'm very concerned that some of our greatest universities are becoming no-go zones for children from normal backgrounds."

The Sutton Trust, which campaigns to reduce inequality in education, said that using the A* would benefit only students at the best schools. Its director, Lee Elliot Major, described it as "another sign of the ever-growing arms race that defines the issue of social mobility - just as the playing field begins to level out for the less affluent up pops a new way for the privileged to assert their advantage".

Universities argue that it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between the thousands of applicants predicted to achieve 3 A grades. Last year Cambridge rejected 5,500 teenagers who went on to achieve 3 As. The A* would require a mark of 90 per cent. The university said that its admission criterion would probably rise to two A*s and an A "in the fullness of time".

Exam boards have been wary of the A*, saying it would take "time to bed down". The National Council for Educational Excellence has recommended that universities delay using the grade until it has been reviewed. Sussex, Worcester, Dundee and East Anglia universities have said that they will not use the A* grade in 2010 because of concerns that it would result in more independent school pupils being be awarded places, jeopardising their government funding.

Geoff Lucas, secretary of the Head-masters' and Headmistresses' Conference, which represents independent schools, said: "We are delighted that Cambridge has shown leadership in coming out in support of the A*."

SOURCE





17 March, 2009

School Choice Clarity From a Public Ed Heroine

Michelle Rhee, Chancellor of the struggling public school system in the District of Columbia, has already won bi-partisan admiration for her energetic and innovative efforts to shake up one of the most troubled educational establishments in the country. Now she deserves further plaudits for her courageous clarity on the issue of vouchers. Most public education bureaucrats reflexively oppose vouchers as a threat to their monopoly, denouncing any use of government funds to allow poor children to choose parochial or private school alternatives to failing neighborhood schools. Ms. Rhee, however, fearlessly spoke up against efforts by Congressional Democrats to kill a promising vouchers program in the nation's capital. "Part of my job is to make sure that all kids get a great education," she told the New York Times, "and it doesn't matter whether it's charter, parochial or public schools. I don't think vouchers are going to solve all the ills of public education, but parents who are zoned to schools that are failing kids should have options to do better by their kids."

Her clarity on this issue should embarrass the Obama administration to halt the efforts by its allies to undermine the vouchers program in the nation's capital. Currently, the Opportunity Scholarships Program provides $7,500 annually to cover tuition, fees and transportation expenses for 1,700 poor children to attend private school. A recent study showed that the parents of these students overwhelming preferred the religious and private alternatives they chose in large part because they considered the environments safer than the D.C. public schools. Of the children who currently participate in the program, 90% are African-American, and 9% Hispanic - with less than 1% white or Asian.

Nevertheless, Congressional Democrats have urged Ms. Rhee to prepare to re-enroll the vouchers kids in public schools after they succeed in terminating the Opportunity Scholarships. If they do return to the D.C. system, taxpayers will spend far more - twice as much, in fact --- for each of them than the cost of the current $7,500 a year scholarships.

The brain-dead Democrats who support this idiotic teachers union priority ought to explain why they want to waste public funds and to take away choice from 1,700 black and Latino kids, in order to force them into a school system whose heroic chancellor doesn't even want them back. Why should purportedly compassionate liberals impose their own partisan values not only on a group of impoverished but loving parents who support and depend on the vouchers program, but on Michelle Rhee, one of the most courageous and clear-thinking school administrators in the country?

SOURCE




Harvard's poisonous MBAs

Harvard is far to the Left of the American mainstream so the influence of the Leftist credo "There is no such thing as right and wrong" is to be expected.

SPIRITUALLY deformed graduates from business colleges taught by people whose reputations are based on jargon have robbed millions. They have sentenced many more, often in countries whose names they could barely pronounce, and whose location remains a mystery, to lives of unemployment and penury. With the so-called free market in freefall, with industrial legends of 20th century capitalism begging for help, and as arrogant bankers ask taxpayers they have caned for years to bail them out, it's time to look at who's to blame. One name keeps coming up: Harvard University.

The business school of the wealthiest and most prestigious university in America churns out 900 graduates each year. I wouldn't employ any of them. Harvard Business School's motto "to educate leaders who make a difference in the world" has been fulfilled, but it can't have been the difference its founding fathers envisaged. Most likely it does not care.

Harvard has become the unacceptable face of capitalism and you should see who they've been teaching. Let's start with Stanley O'Neal who many saw as a role model for ambitious black Americans. He had all the Harvard traits. He was earning about $45 million a year, seemingly cared little for his colleagues, and under his watch as chairman and chief executive Merrill Lynch sank in the mire of subprime home loans. In August and September 2007, as the company posted losses of $8 billion for the quarter, he reportedly managed 20 rounds of golf, once squeezing in three rounds in one day on three different courses. We know this because the friendless O'Neal recorded the results - he played alone - on an amateur golf website. Rather than sack Wall Street's worst performed CEO, Merrill Lynch allowed him to "retire" with a package valued at $161 million.

Harvard wasn't finished with Merrill Lynch, even if the company was all but washed up. Another of its graduates, John Thain, took over from O'Neal - receiving a $15 million signing on fee - and quickly renovated his office spending $1.2 million doing so, including $1400 on a waste paper bin. It's a beauty.

Thain oversaw $4 billion in bonus payments to Merrill Lynch employees as the company groaned under losses that rose to $15 billion for the fourth quarter last year. By then Merrill Lynch was staggering and Thain arranged for it to be purchased by Bank of America which having failed to do its homework nearly collapsed with the debt in January, before being saved by US taxpayers. Thain asked for a $10 million bonus for his efforts.

Franklin Raines graduated from Harvard in 1971, went on to become an investment banker and later worked for then president Bill Clinton. His stewardship of mortgage lender Fannie Mae was less successful, indeed some blame him for its troubles which in turn helped drag down the entire US economy. When he was in the driver's seat Fannie Mae misstated its earnings as things went seriously awry with its unsustainable lending policies.

He took the blame for this, in a traditionally Harvard manner. "While I long ago accepted managerial accountability for any errors committed by subordinates while I was CEO, it is a very different matter to suggest that I was legally culpable in any way," Raines said, settling a legal action against him and two other senior executives. By now Raines name was mud.

He was succeeded by another Harvard graduate whose name was already a problem. Daniel Mudd took over as CEO of Fannie Mae, but things worsened and he was sacked and sent home to his 22-room colonial mansion with servants' quarters.

Christopher Cox left Harvard in 1977 for a glittering career in law and finance that saw him become a Californian congressman and be appointed by George Bush as chairman of the powerful US Securities and Exchange Commission. With Cox in charge of the SEC, which should have been looking for corruption and mismanagement on Wall Street and elsewhere in the US financial system, it would subpoena reporters whose stories embarrassed big corporations.

Meanwhile, Bernard Madoff, who Cox's team should have spotted long ago, was able to lie, cheat and steal his way to a $100 billion fortune as he ripped of banks and private investors and ruined lives, all of which Madoff admitted in a New York court last Friday. Cox, meanwhile, resigned on January 20.

The seemingly self-delusional and brittle deputy leader of the [Australian] federal Liberal Party, Julia Bishop, has also passed through Harvard business studies school where she clearly attended the popular "always blame others" classes. Last year The Australian revealed that the cat-clawing one-time shadow treasurer's chapter in the book Liberals and Power included words borrowed from a prominent New Zealand businessman Roger Kerr. Her chief-of-staff, Murray Hansen, took the fall for that one, with Bishop blaming the editor-in-chief of the newspaper for the "campaign" against her. Earlier, she appeared to have used some sentences from the Wall Street Journal website in a speech in Parliament. Of course, she denied stealing the Journal's words, but she could not rule out the possibility her staff had nicked them.

Once you've been to Harvard the buck never stops with you.

SOURCE





16 March, 2009

Do boys need boys schools?

In today's Times 2 I have an article about the problems with boys and schools. It came about because of a fascinating book I read recently, The Trouble With Boys: A surprising report card on our sons, their problems at school, and what parents and educators must do. The book is written by Peg Tyre, the mother of two boys herself, and a specialist in education journalism. When Tyre started looking into this whole issue, she was amazed by the response. Parents across America contacted her to thank her for bringing this issue - fears for boys, of all backgrounds - to the forefront.

There is so much to talk about when it comes to boys and education, and it's something which the government (and all the political parties and educationalists) are well aware of. Girls are doing better than boys these days, in GCSEs and A levels, and also entering university in greater numbers. The government has launched "Boys into Books" to help "build a platform for boys' educational success" and last year launched the Gender Agenda, a national year of gender action research. There is now a whole "industry" being built on the differences between girls and boys. People argue that boys should be taught differently, treated differently, and helped an awful lot more in the classroom.

Some feminists are now asking whether people are getting excited simply because girls are being given the chance to achieve. "In some ways it's nice to see women on top," admits Tyre. But she still thinks that this is a "massive cultural shift" and we do need to be concerned. It's difficult to pay justice to this huge area in one blog post. That's why I'm going to refer you to my feature (!), ask you for your thoughts on boys and education, and move onto one thorny issue in particular, single sex education.

A few months ago I posted a piece asking whether girls need girls schools. It had a phenomenal response, and comments keep on coming. This post was inspired by a speech from the then head of the Girls School Association, who thinks this issue is self-evident: girls, she argues, do better in their own environment. Girls Schools also perform exceptionally well in the league tables.

But what about boys? Graham Able is the master at Dulwich College, an independent school which boasts 1460 boys. Not surprisingly, he also thinks that separate schooling is vital. "Is there a gap or difference between boys and girls? Obviously, there is," he says. "Girls mature at a much earlier age than boys, and in any classroom, the greater the range of ability and maturity, the more difficult it is to teach well." Mr Able is convinced that boys also learn differently to girls - more visually - and that they need to "run around more and let off steam." "Go and look at any primary school playground and you'll see lots of little girls working together, while little boys run around at great speed," he says. "There's something about the male brain which seems to find motion appealing."

But while Peg Tyre might agree with some of Mr Able's arguments (the running around, for example), she's not convinced that single sex schooling is the answer. Instead she calls for more research to be done in this area and is keener on changes to be made to the existing set-up - to understand boys better.

Dr Alice Sullivan, from the Institute of Education, has looked at the impact of single-sex education, and is not convinced that it is vital for girls or boys. "I don't think there's any evidence that boys do worse in co-educational schools," she says. "It's very fashionable to say that they have different brains and need different teaching styles, but there's very little evidence to support it." Yet Dr Sullivan does admit that there is some truth in the idea that single sex schools don't stereotype students as much. Boys are more likely to do humanities and modern languages, while girls are encouraged to take maths and sciences.

On a purely anecdotal basis, I asked a number of people what they thought of boys and girls schools. Many were happy with the thought of sending their daughters to girls schools, but unhappy with the idea of educating their sons in a boys school. "Boys at secondary school need girls to civilise them," one mother of three boys told me. Another said that she wanted her sons to get used to being round girls, and was worried about the "social disadvantages". I found this fascinating.

Graham Able, naturally, would hope to persuade these parents otherwise. "I don't see any problem with the boys here when it comes to relationships with children of the opposite sex," he says. "In isolated boarding schools, that may be a danger, but there it is total nonsense. We are inner-city boys school."

But Angela Phillips, who wrote her own book called The Trouble with Boys back in 1993, strongly disagrees. "The social importance of putting girls and boys together outweigh anything else," she says, although she does add that "middle-class, single sex schools do well, especially girls schools."

Of course, this class argument is one which shouldn't be ignored (there's so much to say on this topic!). One of the main reasons girls - and boys - schools do so well is because of the intake (i.e selective nature) of the pupils. In America, however, there are all sorts of experiments going on. The Eagle Academy, an all male public (i.e. state) school in the South Bronx is just one example. Here boys from disadvantaged African-American backgrounds are taught together in a single-sex school with the aim of receiving a better education.

Graham Able thinks that we need a lot more research on how children learn and what's best for them. But he's concerned that social conventions (the idea that boys shouldn't be separated from girls) might mean that boys aren't given the chance to shine. "We shouldn't restrict ourselves because of some social conventions" he says. "Undoubtedly it helps to be in single-sex schools."

SOURCE




Different reading methods on trial in Australia

This is a fraud. Such a trial was done a few years ago in Scotland with the result that kids taught using phonics ended up two years ahead in reading age compared to the rest. What's so different about Australians and the Scots? This is just a ploy to delay the inevitable. Leftist teachers WANT kids to be poorly educated. And they succeed. With "whole word" learning, lots of kids end up virtually illiterate. Knowledge is the enemy of Leftism and being unable to read is a major obstacle to acquiring knowledge

The divisive debate over how best to teach children to read has prompted the first trial in Australia comparing phonics-based techniques with other methods. The NSW Government is planning a pilot study assessing a reading program that teaches children letter-sound combinations as the first step in reading. Their progress will be compared with students taught by methods that place less emphasis on phonics and more on "whole language" techniques, such as pictures and sentence structure. It is believed to be the first head-to-head comparison of phonics with other reading programs in the nation.

In an interview with The Weekend Australian, NSW Education Minister Verity Firth said the aim of the trial was to gather evidence of what worked. "Surely all of us can agree we want the best for our kids, and stop arguing about what we believe and start talking about what we know," she said. "As Education Minister, my job isn't to find myself in the middle of internecine debates, but to try to be able to look at how reading is taught with the primary motivation of what's best for our kids."

NSW will run the trial as one of the programs funded through the National Partnership with the commonwealth on literacy and numeracy that was agreed to by the Council of Australian Governments. Ms Firth said the state's aims were in line with the federal Government's objectives, which had called for phonics trials. The NSW study will use the MULTILIT (Making Up Lost Time in Literacy) reading program developed by education researchers at Macquarie University, which places letter-sound relationships or phonemic awareness as the foundation of learning to read. The details of the trial are still being finalised but it is envisaged it will run for at least a year, targeting students in Years 3 and 4 reading well below the level of their peers.

The debate in the reading wars is over the importance of teaching phonics to children learning to read, with "whole language" techniques supplanting the sounding out of words as the first step in learning. The term whole language is no longer used, proponents now call for a "balanced" approach that teaches a range of methods, such as looking at the pictures on the page, the context of the word and the syntax of the sentence, rather than starting with sounding out the letters of the word. As reported in The Weekend Australian last month, the Australian Association for the Teaching of English has criticised the emphasis on phonics in the draft national curriculum, saying it "comes at the expense of the focus on a balanced reading program".

In its submission to the National Curriculum Board, the AATE calls for explicit reference to be made to "all three cueing systems" used to make sense of the written word. Under the three cueing systems model, the sounding of letters is the least important skill, with children first asked to use semantics and guess the word based on the context including using pictures, and then use the sentence syntax to work out the meaning. The third and least important cue is sounding out the letters.

Literacy associate professor Kerry Hempenstall said the three cueing system had been discredited as a method for teaching reading. "It has never been validated that anyone can integrate these three methods," he said.

SOURCE





15 March, 2009

Brilliant. UK education gets an A* for defeatism

British schools are failing horribly. But when a useful idea emerges that might help, it gets shot down in flames

Bankers becoming teachers? What a bonus! Or maybe not. The Government's plan to fast-track ex-City workers into teaching has unleashed a furore from people who see it as a scam, a quantitative easing of the unemployment figures. "What will they teach?" is the common refrain. "How to screw up the stock market?" Well, perhaps they could teach more children to count. When 150,000 pupils start secondary school innumerate every year, I'm not sure we can afford to be so precious about who is at the blackboard.

One of the most inspiring teachers I ever met was a finance man, Steve Mariotti. After being mugged in the Bronx he tried to deal with the trauma by becoming a maths teacher and signing on at a sink school. After two terms he was close to giving up: he asked his worst students if they remembered a single thing he had said. After a blank silence one boy retold, in detail, a story Steve had given from his business career. This boy didn't care about abstract maths. But he was hungry to understand money and profit, the language of the street. So Steve kept teaching, but made more use of his life experience. He created an "entrepreneurship" curriculum (called NFTE), which improves results across many different subjects, and is now used in 13 countries.

I have seen his ideas working in US charter schools, which are publicly funded but independently run. In a school in Brooklyn, with metal detectors on the door, I was mobbed by a group of teens selling T-shirts, home-made gizmos and books that were the practical product of the course. Some of the books were in Japanese: I must have blinked. "Yes we've just started Japanese," I remember the headmistress saying. "I don't see why our students should be denied the opportunity". There, in one of the bleakest parts of the city, was ambition on a scale those children deserved. She saw no reason why her mostly African-American pupils should not go as far as any on the Upper East Side. And she was right. But she was lucky to be running a charter school, free from deadening bureaucracy.

I have seen great schools transforming the lives of poor children in Britain too. But there is a fatal lack of ambition in much of the education debate. Increasingly the view seems to be that whole swaths of children have become almost impossible to teach, that teaching is mostly behaviour management and that anyone who thinks they could do it better is naive. That is the tenor of most of the comments about fast-tracking bankers. But there is no genetic reason why Finland routinely comes top of international league tables that Britain keeps slipping down. When one in five children is leaving school without any recognisable qualification after 11 years in the classroom, a period in which we have spent 650 billion pounds on education, we literally cannot afford to be defeatist.

Defeatism is widening the gap between rich and poor. In 2002 the Government decided that learning a modern language was asking too much from children. It made languages optional. The result is that fewer than half of 14-year-olds are now taking a language GCSE, and some schools are closing the opportunity to all pupils. Languages, like proper science, are increasingly the preserve of the fee-paying minority. So are top exams. If you grow up in Singapore, or New Zealand, or go to an independent school, you can take international exams that are more rigorous than the dumbed-down GCSEs that Manchester Grammar School has just said it will scrap. If you're in the UK state system, you're being told to travel third class.

Last week we learnt that more than half of the pupils who got three As at A level were educated at private school: a shameful figure, since the independent sector educates only 7 per cent of children. The 13 per cent of pupils who are on free school meals, the Tory education spokesman Michael Gove said this week, made up only 0.5 per cent of those getting three As. This is indefensible: Gove called it "an affront to our national conscience".

But where is the sense of shame, of urgency, in the Establishment? Having lumped "Schools" together with "Children" and "Families" in an Orwellian mega-department, the Government is now backsliding on its own city academy programme, which was supposed to free teachers from bureaucracy. More than 70 academy heads said last month that the steady erosion of their independence was making it harder to raise standards.

Eight years ago I sat in a Whitehall office trying to convince education officials to create a fast-track teacher- training scheme for graduates. This was important for what later became Teach First, a programme that brings top graduates into teaching. The officials were not interested in what could be achieved, or what had already been done in America. Their sole concern seemed to be that a new training scheme might devalue those who had slogged their way through the old one. I seem to remember the use of the word "unseemly". The huge outcry about a little government scheme to recruit new teachers sounds the same. They should suffer like we did. It won't work.

There can be no monopoly on thinking when one in five children leaves school without one C grade at GCSE. Of course, not all bankers will make good teachers. They're hardly famed for empathy. But the junior bod from the equities desk, or the ex-corporate lawyer, might well be harbouring a vocation. Many of those who went into the City in the past ten years got there, contrary to myth, from poor backgrounds. They are used to stress and negative feedback, which could prove invaluable: to judge by the hostility of teachers' comments in the blogosphere, they may find the classroom a pushover compared with the staffroom. What few have lacked is ambition. And that, surely, is to be encouraged.

SOURCE




British education policymakers ‘are out of control’

Schools are being swamped by initiatives, legislation and edicts on children’s wellbeing as education policymakers run “out of control”, head teachers said. Their criticisms coincided with a report by the House of Lords Merits Committee, which said that the Government needed to back off and adopt a less heavy-handed approach.

Jane Lees, the president of the Association of School and College Leaders, told the opening of its annual conference in Birmingham that future heads were being deterred from seeking leadership roles because of the mass of bureaucracy and lack of support. She said: “The problem isn’t that there’s a lack of talented potential or experienced leaders, but more of a reluctance to take on the mantle of leadership with all its responsibilities and accountabilities. It seems we have football manager-style employment of heads.”

Schools find out in May the extent of their responsibilities for children’s wellbeing, when the results of a joint consultation by Ofsted and the Department for Children, Schools and Families is announced.

SOURCE





14 March, 2009

Obama's education push includes merit pay

President Barack Obama laid out a broad education vision Tuesday that includes expanded merit pay for teachers and more charter schools, ideas long troubling to teachers' unions. With his congressional agenda already packed, the president is not proposing a major new piece of legislation. Instead, he spelled out the goal of a "cradle to career" education system aimed at serving Americans better at every level. He said he would use the budget to expand programs that work and encourage voluntary action by states and individuals.

The president's plan, which largely implements promises from his campaign, includes new incentives for states to boost the quality of preschool programs and easier access to financial aid for higher education. Mr. Obama also called on states to raise standards for student achievement. Perhaps the most controversial step would increase the number of school districts that benefit from a federal program that supports performance pay for teachers.

Mr. Obama also called on states to remove caps on the number of public charter schools. Twenty-six states and the District of Columbia now cap the total, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

The president cast his proposals as an effort to move past the debates that have dominated education policy in the past. "Too many supporters of my party have resisted the idea of rewarding excellence in teaching with extra pay, even though we know it can make a difference in the classroom," he told the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. "Too many in the Republican Party have opposed new investments in early education, despite compelling evidence of its importance."

Mr. Obama's support for merit pay breaks with some in his party, who fear it can't be administered fairly. The Teacher Incentive Fund currently supports 34 grant recipients at a cost of $97 million this year and another $200 million was allocated through the economic-stimulus plan. Mr. Obama said he'd like to see as many as 150 districts added, but the administration did not say what its 2010 budget request will be.

"It's time to start rewarding good teachers, stop making excuses for bad ones," Mr. Obama said. "If a teacher is given a chance or two chances or three chances but still does not improve, there's no excuse for that person to continue teaching." Mr. Obama said that teachers who are rewarded for excellence should help their schools improve.

Teacher unions said Tuesday that they welcomed Mr. Obama's overall approach and could support merit-pay plans as long as they are fair to teachers. The presidents of the two largest teachers' unions said they were confident Mr. Obama would only support proposals that meet that test. "This is a president who actually respects teachers for who they are and what they do. We can work many of these things out," said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.

Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, said that merit-pay plans should be negotiated to ensure they are not run in an arbitrary way, and he cautioned: "If you pay one teacher more you have to pay someone else less." Mr. Van Roekel rejected another Obama proposal to pay math and science teachers more in hopes of filling the recruitment gap. He said a small additional payment will not change the financial calculations of math and science graduates who have more lucrative options than teaching.

Mr. Obama also used his address to talk about parents' responsibility for the education of their children. "Government…cannot turn off the TV or put away the video games. Teachers, no matter how dedicated or effective, cannot make sure your child leaves for school on time and does their homework when they get back at night. These are things only a parent can do," he said. Other aspects of the Obama plan include:

--Early Learning Challenge Grants to help states improve the quality of child care, including improving the quality of teachers. Incentive grants will provide aid for states to better collect data about programs, push for standards and increase help for the most disadvantaged students.

--Challenging states to voluntarily raise their standards in reading and math. As it is, certain states give students high grades for scores that would rate low in other states. But the president did not say anything about changes to the landmark No Child Left Behind law, which imposes federal standards on schools.

--For higher education, an increase in Pell grants, including inflation adjustments. Mr. Obama also wants to simplify the application process for financial aid.

SOURCE




Bright schoolchildren take back seat to 'social misfits', says British head teacher

State schools are being forced to prioritise "social misfits" at the expense of the majority of pupils, according to a former academy head teacher.

The most disruptive children are being plied with "indulgence and sentimentality" instead of firm discipline, it was claimed. Steve Patriarca blamed Gordon Brown's decision to create a new "Orwellian" Government department with duel responsibility for schools and social services. It meant education for the most able often came second best to the needs of problem pupils, he said.

The comments will come as a huge embarrassment to the Government. Mr Patriarca led fee-paying William Hulme's Grammar School in Manchester when it was tempted out of the private sector by Labour in 2007. In a high-profile move, it axed parental fees and academic selection to become one of the Government's flagship city academies - semi-independent state schools sponsored and run by the private sector. A total of five independent schools have now converted.

Mr Patriarca, who retired last summer, said the school agreed to the move because academies offered the chance of "effective denationalisation" of state schools by taking education out of the hands of "overpaid, ill informed, over comfortable" civil servants. But talking openly about the move for the first time, he said the school struggled "to retain educational values" in the face of pressure from the Government. "The Department for Children, Schools and Families lives up to its Orwellian title," he said. "There are direct tensions between its responsibilities for social work, children and families and its commitment - if that is the word - to education. It seems to me to be a cumbersome hybrid which fulfils none of its roles very well.

"It is politicised in a way which seems to find achievement embarrassing. It is preoccupied with the less able and the social misfit - which would be fine if it actually achieved anything in dealing with such children. It doesn't because it panders to them - it prioritises their needs over the needs of the vast majority." The DCSF was created in 2007, replacing the old Department for Education and Skills.

In a speech at Wellington College, Berkshire, Mr Patriarca backed the principle of academies but insisted they were no longer "independent" of civil servants, despite Government claims. Academies are not allowed to put pupils on alternative exams, such as the International GCSE now favoured in private schools, he said. He also criticised the lack of freedom to control admissions, and he attacked the practice of forcing academies to share pupils expelled from other schools. "The more disruptive the child is the more attention it receives and the more benefits," Mr Patriarca said.

He added: "We have a chance to break free of this through the establishment of academies as genuinely independent schools with the DNA of the private sector operating within the state system. The present Government has lost its nerve on the academies programme."

It comes just days after a delegation of academy principals wrote to the Government, saying their attempts to improve education standards were being "increasingly hampered".

A DCSF spokesman said: "We make no apologies for the fact that the DCSF has broadened Government's focus beyond the school gates. Common sense and every teacher in every classroom tell us that what happens outside school hours and parents' involvement in children's education are both vital to their progress. "By strengthening family support during children's formative early years, getting parents more involved in their child's learning and making sure young people have more exciting things to do outside school, we hope to make this country the best place in the world to grow up."

SOURCE




Home tutoring option explored after kids from a good British grade school are sent to a sink High School

The parents of 25 pupils at an outstanding primary school plan to educate them en masse at home with a private tutor after a third of this year's 92 school leavers failed to secure a place at any of their preferred secondaries. Most were rejected by the local secondary school because they live just outside its 1.08-mile catchment area, even though it is their nearest one.

Catherine Roberts, whose son Alexander Lindfield was among them, was at a meeting of 25 families from Madginford Park Junior School, near Maidstone, Kent, at which home tutoring was discussed. Ms Roberts said: "We have been allocated, along with about 22 others, a place at the second-worst-performing school in the Kent league tables. "Unless you were selected for one of the grammar schools or had a sibling link to a non-selective school, virtually no one from Madginford Park Junior School gained a place at any of the schools on their selection list."

She added: "The children in my area have been failed in their desire for, and right to, a decent education at secondary level and after such a promising start at junior school are now being let down by the local authority. You wonder why there is a preference system if you are not able to gain a place at your nearest school which is also your first choice."

SOURCE





13 March, 2009

Critic Says Islamic Extremism Gets Whitewashed in American Textbooks

An education expert is warning that some American textbooks present a biased view of Islam and offer a sugarcoated picture of Islamic extremism, a trend that has parents worried about what's being taught in public schools.

In numerous history textbooks, "key subjects like jihad, Islamic law, the status of women are whitewashed," said Gilbert T. Sewall, director of the American Textbook Council, an independent group that reviews history books and other education materials.

Cindy Ross, the mother of a junior high school student in Marin County, Calif., said she couldn't believe her eyes when she read her son's textbook last school year. "I was very shocked by what I saw, looking through the book," she said - shocked at how Islam was portrayed in her son's seventh grade history text. "What did strike me was that all the other religions seemed to be lumped together, where there is an inordinate emphasis on Islam specifically," Ross said.

Sewall claims that publishers have been pressured by Islamic activists to portray the religion in the most favorable light, while Islamic terrorism is downplayed or glossed over. "The picture is incomplete ... and the reason for this is that publishers are afraid of the Islamist activists. They don't want trouble," he told FOX News.

Sewall, who authored a report on how textbooks teach and present Islam, singled out one book that he said failed to explain what the story of the September 11 terrorist attacks. In a section discussing Islamic fundamentalism, the textbook "World History: The Modern World," published by Prentice Hall, omits direct mention of the 9/11 hijackers' religion, referring to the 19 Islamic fundamentalists as "teams of terrorists."

"On the morning of September 11, 2001," the book reads, "teams of terrorists hijacked four airplanes on the East Coast. Passengers challenged the hijackers on one flight, which they crashed on the way to its target. But one plane plunged in to the Pentagon in Virginia, and two others slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York. More than 2,500 people were killed in the attacks."

In his report on the text, Sewall called the passage "dismaying" in its flatness and brevity. "In terms of content, so much is left unanswered. Who were the teams of terrorists and what did they want do to? What were their political ends? Since 'The Modern World' avoids any hint of the connection between this unnamed terrorism and jihad," he wrote, "why September 11 happened is hard to understand."

But Muslim advocacy groups say students need to learn more about Islam to correct misconceptions and help turn away a wrongheaded focus on extremism. "It's wrong to show an entire faith community from the lens of a small extremist community, which is really a fringe. It's a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the Muslim community, and that's not how Muslims want to be framed," said Daisy Khan, executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement.

"I think there is an unbalanced portrayal of Islam seen mostly through a political lens, but that is not the reality of who a majority of Muslims are," she told FOX News.

Khan said when it comes to teaching about Islam, "I think the more important issue is American values of tolerance, respect and mutual understanding," which can best be imparted with accurate information about the religion.

But the content of those religious lessons also has Sewall concerned, particularly on the controversial topic of jihad. Sewall says the violent aspects of Islamic jihad are glossed over and that it is presented as an internal struggle or a fight for protection in books like "History Alive! The Medieval World and Beyond," published by the Teachers Curriculum Institute.

"Jihad is defined as a struggle within each individual to overcome difficulties and strive to please god. Sometimes it may be a physical struggle for protection against enemies," the book reads, noting that Islam teaches "that Muslims should fulfill jihad with the heart, tongue and hand. Muslims use the heart in their struggle to resist evil."

It's a lesson that Sewall says needs to change. "What is frustrating is that repeatedly the textbook publishers have been called on their bias on the sunny, doctored view of Islam" but have refused to balance their books, he said. None of the textbook publishers contacted by FOX News regarding their books responded to requests for statements or interviews.

Parent Cindy Ross told FOX News she is concerned that unpleasant facts are being ignored for the sake of political correctness in her son's textbooks. "When you are talking about a history textbook, that is supposed to be talking about historical facts and they are talking about jihad in terms of spiritual terms ... I think it would be completely inappropriate for a public school."

SOURCE




Stop Avoiding the Issue of Failing Boys

Hardly a month goes by without another major foundation or education advocacy group reminding us of the peril our country faces if we don't send more students to college. The International Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warns that the United States is slipping fast in international rankings. Among 25- to 34-year-olds, we rank no better than 10th in higher education attainment. Most striking among the measures is the "survival rate," the measurement of enrolled students who actually earn diplomas. Our students rank at the bottom of the developed world.

Visit the Web sites of the prominent foundations -- Gates, Lumina, Broad -- and you will see the same message that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and corporate leaders such as Intel's Craig Barrett have been warning about for years: We need to broaden the college pipeline, and do it quickly. The latest study pointing out our educational weaknesses - and offering solutions - arrived earlier this month from the respected MDRC, which offered the Obama administration a 15-point plan for turning things around.

Interestingly, however, there's something all these groups studiously avoid talking about. These U.S. education numbers look bad primarily because the schools are failing boys. For the most part, those awful high school graduation numbers are driven by boys, not girls (32 percent of boys drop out, compared to 25 percent of girls). And the lackluster college graduation rates are due primarily to men floundering in college (men earn about 42 percent of four-year degrees). Given that men are far more likely to major in math and science - a special worry for the technical industries -- the chamber should be particularly concerned about men falling behind.

But the gender angle never gets mentioned. Popular, well-thought-out solutions, which include strengthening the high school curriculum, building better after-school programs and making college more affordable, skirt the obvious solution of reaching out to failing boys specifically. As for MDRC's 15-point plan - gender didn't get a mention.

Those omissions are striking, given that boosting the number of men earning college degrees should be the low-hanging-fruit remedy. Why the silence? The boys issue gets skipped because it has become a controversy; one of those he said/she said spats where the dialogue becomes downright unpleasant. In cases like this, the easy tactic is to steer clear. Interestingly, only in the United States is the boys issue considered so controversial. Countries such as Britain and Australia have been openly confronting the problem for years. There, the boy troubles are an issue to be studied and remedied, not something to squabble about.

All this gives our new education secretary, Arne Duncan, an opportunity: Why not do what Australia did and launch a federal probe into the boy problems? Duncan has the ideal vehicle, the freshly unveiled $15 billion grant program to reward initiatives that draw academic achievements from students less inclined to succeed. That would include boys.

In fairness to Duncan, he needs to know what he would be getting himself into. Why is this considered a controversy? That question can't be answered with absolute precision, but from years of reporting on this issue I have picked up on two threads. The first arose in 1992 when the American Association of University Women released a report about girls being shortchanged in schools, in part because teachers paid more attention to hyperactive boys jumping up to wave their hands in the air: Call on me! I was one of many education reporters who wrote about the report uncritically. That was a mistake. Hindsight tells us the schools-favor-boys research was shaky.

Regardless, the AAUW report unleashed a save-the-girls juggernaut. That girls' crusade ended up doing a lot of good by boosting female participation in advanced math and science classes. Today, girls dominate most of those courses. But the flawed research left behind an unfortunate legacy. Boys, who clearly needed the help more than girls, once again got ignored.

The second thread emerged in 2000 with the release of Christina Hoff Sommers' book, The War Against Boys. Sommers expertly laid out the case that boys, not girls, were suffering in school. Given that she was one of the first to tackle this issue, combined with the fact that The Atlantic serialized the book, Sommers had a unique opportunity to set the agenda about boys. Had Sommers stuck with her solid argument that boys were in trouble and then proposed solutions, it is conceivable the U.S. Department of Education would have launched a national investigation, identified the problems and funded experiments to arrest boys' academic slide. Today, the United States today could rank with Australia at the forefront of fashioning solutions to help boys.

But that's not how things played out. Instead of focusing solely on boys, Sommers devoted most her book to attacking feminists, blaming them for the boy troubles. Naturally, the feminists fought back, fingering Sommers as the tip of the spear of what they dubbed a "backlash" movement, those pushing back against the hard-won gains of women. Who could blame the feminists? After all, the book's subtitle was, How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men.

Since then, everything's been pretty much downhill. If boys are suffering any problems, argue feminists, those problems are limited to minority boys and rooted in racism and poverty, not gender.

Higher education leaders, who feel they are blameless in the boy troubles and have reaped the benefits of ever-rising numbers of female applicants, look the other way. That is proving to be a mistake. High-tuition second and third-tier private colleges that tolerated significant gender imbalances are now under stress from the recession. Today, they may be wishing they had stepped forward to try to solve the male college pipeline problem, which goes well beyond poor and minority boys.

Elite colleges generally don't suffer gender imbalances, especially those offering boys admissions preferences. Plus, their faculties remain fixated on the Larry Summers fiasco at Harvard. His musings over why fewer women occupy top academic spots politicized campus gender issues, leaving professors likely to embrace the viewpoints of the feminists, who argue that women, not men, are the aggrieved parties in higher education.

Given all this, it's easy to understand why groups such as Gates and the U.S. Chamber prefer to duck. Who can blame them? Problem is, ducking does nothing to solve the very problem they raise, the slipping status of the United States as an educated workforce - a phenomenon driven mostly by boys. Secretary Duncan, you have a unique opportunity to get us beyond this political divide. Settle this issue once and for all. Boosting college graduation rates is an issue too important to be mired in this controversy.

SOURCE





12 March, 2009

Texas: No one is really talking about any weaknesses in evolution

In March, the State Board of Education will vote on amendments to the new Texas high school biology teaching standards. Please contact your State Board of Education (SBOE) representative and encourage them to unanimously approve of teaching strengths and weaknesses regarding all scientific theories, particularly evolution. There is great confusion over what evolution is. The reality is that back in the 1940's, genetics and evolution were united to form the modern evolutionary synthesis. The synthesis takes parts from genetics that I would consider science, and unites them with speculative ideas about origins, which I would refer to as macroevolution or just evolutionism. But even microevolution has weaknesses, and some scientists consider the theory of natural selection as nothing more than a tautology, a circular reasoning argument that says those organisms that survive are fit, and, those that are fit, survive. Here is a definition of natural selection from a biology textbook used in Texas schools:

Natural selection is the outcome of variations in shared traits that affect which individuals of a population survive and reproduce each generation. This microevolutionary process results in adaptation to the environment.

Consider for example a female sockeye salmon in Alaska's Copper River. Let's say she lays 3,000 eggs, and all of them hatch. Now, to keep the population stable, only two of those eggs need to mature to adults and return, which means 2,998 of them will probably not make the return journey and produce offspring. Some will get eaten by birds, others by bears, or maybe even a salmon shark. Some will get smashed against rocks, others may starve. Only two are likely to survive to journey from their birthplace to the sea, then venture thousands of miles, before returning to their birthplace.

Now, do you really think the two salmon that survived to adulthood did so because they were clearly the best suited for the environment? Perhaps, but in reality, there is only a 1 in 3000 chance the salmon with the best set of genes survived to adulthood. And the likelihood gets smaller when you consider redfish, which can lay over one million eggs each season.

So the chances that natural selection results in adaptation to the environment are small, as are the chances the life cycle of a salmon, redfish, or any organism, happened through random mutation of genes. A better explanation is that organisms were designed to adapt. Take for example the recent reports of the "rapid evolution" of Italian Wall Lizards imported to Croatian Islands. According to Professor Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution is True, genetic mutations are the "engine" driving evolution, and he even devoted an entire chapter to The Engine of Evolution. Surprisingly though, scientists who studied the rapidly evolving Croatian lizards found they were genetically indistinguishable from their ancestors. This is a huge contradiction, because if evolution is true, a rapidly evolving lizard should have rapidly evolving genes that distinguish it from its ancestors. The logical conclusion must be that Italian lizards adapted to their new Croatian homes using preexisting genetic information. Another conclusion is that large segments of evolution are not true, but instead evolutionism is dominating real science. Neither creationism nor evolutionism should be taught in public schools. Real science calls for following the evidence. Following the evidence calls for studying both the favorable and unfavorable evidence, both the strengths and weaknesses.

Genes mutate, resulting in differences in parents and offspring. However, the low probability of mutation and selection working together to produce fitter populations is a weakness of natural selection theory, and Texas high school biology textbooks should explain such weaknesses.

SOURCE




The British government is waging a malevolent class war by punishing all academic excellence

While top universities find themselves penalised, with money being taken away from them to fund places at lesser universities for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, we learn of the complete collapse of education standards further down the line. The headmaster of Eton, Tony Little, told a conference that clever pupils `wrestle with questions of crippling simplicity' at GCSE because they cannot believe that there isn't more to such questions than appears to be the case.

Worse still, the brightest are penalised because the standards are so low. He related how one Eton pupil gained five A grades at A-level but failed a sixth exam altogether. Eton sent the `ungraded' paper to two university dons who said the work was of the standard normally achieved in a first class honours degree. Mr Little said the boy was given almost no marks because he used `intelligence and flair' and refused to answer the question in the formulaic way demanded by examiners.

What an extraordinary situation this country is now in, that in order to pass a public examination ostensibly designed to test academic achievement a candidate now has to express dullness, stupidity and narrow intellectual reach!

The reason is the fact that these exams are now dominated by a `tick-box' approach, which requires candidates to deliver in their answers a list of expected sound-bites for the examiners to tick off. As Little observed, it is an approach that `makes no allowance for lateral thinking, for creative extension or wit.' Indeed, such expressions of intellectual ability or flair are actually penalised - because such knowledge or brilliance does not appear on the examiners' check-lists. So the more able the candidate, the more likely he or she now is to fail. Truly, an education system straight out of Lewis Carroll.

Now independent schools are moving towards dropping GCSEs altogether because they are such a farce. But in truth, this problem has beset A-level and GCSE for years. The problem is so bad it's certainly not just the top independent schools that are tearing out their hair. As Martin Stephen, high master of St Paul's boys' school said, heads from all types of secondary schools now shared a `deep concern at what is seen as the comparative neglect of academic education and the needs of a significant number of our gifted and talented children'.

No wonder so few pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds are making it to good universities - causing `social mobility', or the progression of poor people up through the social classes, to go into reverse.

But instead of acknowledging the disaster in our schools and the profound collapse of education standards - caused by more than two decades of benighted education theories pushing `equality' and the inertia or worse of successive governments -ministers are still determined to press on with their malevolent `class war' by punishing academic excellence still further. So some 400m pounds will be hurled next year at the former polytechnics - which are more likely to target sixth-formers from poor backgrounds - despite claims that overall student numbers have barely increased in recent years. At the same time, universities such as Imperial College London and the London School of Economics, which were recently named among the best in the world, have seen their research funds cut.

Britain's education system was once acknowledged to be the finest in the world. It produced a class of people who went out and governed that world. Now, in no small measure because its intelligentsia has turned upon that class precisely because it once governed the world and was therefore `racist', `colonialist' and exploitative, Britain has developed an education system which risks giving itself no significant future in the world at all.

SOURCE




Why is school selection fine, when it's done on the basis of daddy's wallet, and wrong when it's done of the basis of the child's ability? Beats me

And so that time of year comes round again when thousands of [British] parents will discover that 'school choice' is a joke, and their child has not got into the school they wanted for him. All kinds of things will have helped decide his destination. But hardly anywhere, except in Northern Ireland and a couple of English counties, will the child's academic ability have any influence on which school he goes to. Even in those English counties, ability will count for less than it should because England's rare remaining grammar schools are so besieged by parents prepared to do almost anything to get a good secondary education, worth at least 60,000 pounds in post-tax income, for free.

His parents' wealth will be the main influence - not through fees, but through the devout socialist's method of paying fees - buying your way into the catchment area of a desirable school, and then telling all your friends how much you believe in state education.Though quite why anyone would want to believe in such a thing, I am not sure.

I agree that there are other methods (I go into them all in my forthcoming book, 'The Broken Compass'). But the catchment area technique is supreme, and adopted by a lot of hypocrites who claim they are against privilege, as well as by others who just see it as a perfectly reasonable way of buying something important - getting double value for a nice house in a good area, in fact.

There are many problems with this arrangement, the biggest being that bright children in poor homes are utterly barred from good schools, a terrible crime which makes me grind my teeth whenever I think about it. I am sure that a few of the usual suspects will still try to argue that this system is preferable to the supposedly cruel selection of the 11-plus. I can't see how they can continue to believe this, honestly. Ability's obviously a better guide than wealth, if you have to choose. And we do.

But the other thing that is perhaps wrong with it is that it creates two kinds of complacency. Even the best state schools aren't that good any more, because the comprehensive system has forced the dilution of exams and curriculum to a far lower level than used to exist. So even that 'good' state school is only good by the unexacting standards of GCSEs, A levels and the OFSTED classroom police. And it will go on getting worse as long as the system is unreformed.

The other kind of complacency is political. The better-off classes ought to be outraged at the betrayal of the nation, and the trashing of its future, caused by the comprehensive cataclysm. It will in the end help to destroy the peace and prosperity we seem to think are ours by right - but aren't. But because it does not affect them immediately and personally, they let it pass.

New Labour are, I think, aware of this. They continue to press, bit by bit, for the egalitarian wrecking of our whole education system. They know that their deep hopes of an egalitarian society depend more on this than on any other project. But precisely because it matters so much to them, they proceed with great caution.

They have their fingers on the windpipes of Oxford and Cambridge, through funding threats linked to pressure to give more places to state school applicants. They likewise have their fingers on the windpipes of the independent schools through the new, militant Charity Commission run by Dame 'Suzi' Leather. They are working, through 'adjudication' on the ability of the Roman Catholic secondary schools to select (now that Mr Blair's children have been educated) and are beginning to find ways of menacing Church primary schools.

The first shots have been fired (by think tanks, as usual) in what will be a long war designed to drag them down to the bog standard and erase their religious element. They have done as much as they can to besiege Northern Ireland's grammar schools, in alliance with the IRA. The 'Academies', whose alleged benefits are unproven anyway, face more and more attempts to regulate and regiment them into Bog Lane methods and aims. The remaining English grammar schools are under never-ending pressure of one kind or another, designed to demoralise them and force them into the comprehensive fold.

Everyone sensible should be in revolt over this. Politics should be in turmoil over the dogmatic destruction of a precious national resource, over the waste, the slamming of educational doors in the faces of the poor.

And if New Labour had pressed ahead with schemes to end the catchment system, and allocate places by lottery, then the direct and obvious personal interests of the middle class would have coincided with their political interests (which they are not so good at spotting), and the Tory-Labour-Liberal coalition against good education would have been blown apart by parental fury.

The Schools Secretary (I know he calls himself by another name, but who cares?) Ed Balls, like all cunning revolutionaries, had the sense to see that it was too early to take this step. That is why Mr Balls has retreated on plans to make such lottery schemes more widespread. But they haven't gone away. Schools are the principal battleground of the modern class war, comprehensive education is the true 'Clause Four' of New Labour (now accepted by the Tories too) and the Left will not give up on their education revolution until every last escape route from mediocrity has been closed.

SOURCE





11 March, 2009

On Education Spending: Facts, not faith

Obama pours money into discredited programs

President Obama's massive education initiative detailed in his proposed budget aims at the right challenge - lifting our schools and narrowing achievement gaps. But huge chunks of his eye-popping $131 billion package, now before Congress, would go for stale federal programs that have long failed to elevate students' learning curves.

Mr. Obama promised a sharp break from President Bush, who often bent scientific findings to advance his favored dogma. Instead, "it's about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology," Obama promised at his inauguration. Few question the president's plea to improve the quality of our schools and colleges, racheting-up our economy's competitiveness. This requires not just retooling auto factories or investing in solar power, but enriching the nation's human capital as well.

To boost school quality Obama declared that he would only fund programs that lift pupil performance. "In this budget," he declared before the Congress, "we will end education programs that don't work." Music to the ears of the empirically minded. But hard-headed scholars are scratching those craniums over Obama's desire to spend billions more on disparate federal programs that have delivered little for children or teachers over the past decade.

Take Washington's biggest schools effort: the $14 billion compensatory education program, known as Title I, supporting classroom aides and reading tutors for children falling behind. A 1999 federal evaluation showed tepid results at best, largely because local programs fail to alter core classroom practices or sprout innovative ways of engaging weaker students. President Bush, pushed by congressional Democrats, expanded Title I school aid by 50 percent as he implemented No Child Left Behind. The result: achievement gaps have barely budged, even as the education attainment of young Latino and African American parents has inched upward.

So, under Obama's scientific principles this moribund program should be cut, right? Well, the president's new budget actually expands Title I by half again, with spending rising more than $20 billion a year. Ditto for special education funding, upped by $6 billion in the president's new budget, a heartfelt effort that's shown a modicum of success in boosting reading skills for millions of children.

Two dilemmas already haunt the White House. First, Obama went along with House Democrats last month who seized on the stimulus package, a long awaited chance to dramatically boost school spending and make college more affordable. To move quickly, the president agreed to pump-up already authorized yet deeply entrenched programs like Title I, whether these well-intentioned efforts have yielded detectable benefits or not.

Second, powerful lobbies arise every time the Congress creates a new program. Boosting Title I and Head Start spending will protect or spawn new jobs, providing urgently needed economic stimulus. But these hikes also embolden constituencies that fight tooth and nail to protect their favored program, hope they want to believe in.

Pieces of Obama's education plan are built on foundations of solid evidence. His proposal to expand Early Head Start - offering prenatal services and child care for toddlers - is backed by experimental results showing gains for mothers and children alike. The benefits of Head Start are less impressive, but significant, and could grow if efforts to boost teacher quality take hold. Massive dollar infusions may elevate program quality. But this assumes that the daily work of teachers or tutors, after a quarter-century of institutionalized habits, can be recast markedly to energize students.

What's risky is when Obama ignores empirical rigor for programs backed by powerful interests. He expands charter school funding to please corporate leaders who desire market remedies. Or Title I wins lavish funding as teacher unions argue that one day the program will lift achievement. It's ironically reminiscent of the Bush doctrine under which ideology and speculation trump hard evidence.

Making tough decisions with facts, not faith, is so emblematic of Mr. Obama's new pragmatism. But as the Congress begins debate over his huge education initiative, we will discover whether Obama's commitment to science is real, or simply rhetoric.

SOURCE




More State-funded boarding schools for Britain?

Academy [charter] schools could become boarding schools if the Conservatives won power at the next election. Michael Gove, the Shadow Schools Secretary, said that he would explore setting up state-funded residential academies "so that children in the greatest need can secure a placement that offers them the very highest standards of education and care".

There are currently only 35 state boarding schools in Britain offering free education and low-cost care for pupils, but no academy yet provides residential care.

Mr Balls announced plans for the 100th academy yesterday. The schools remain in the state sector but are independent of local councils and accept sponsorship from private companies or charities. Mr Gove told the charity Barnardo's that a study had found that 85 per cent of vulnerable children placed in state boarding schools were doing as well as, or better than, their peers.

SOURCE




Many British children turned away at the school gates

This week thousands of children were denied places in their first choice secondary school. Here, a teacher argues that the British education system is as crisis-ridden as British banks

The parent sobbed openly at the reception of the secondary school where I teach: "But it's not fair! You have to let her in!" Our secretary had to ask our caretakers to escort her off the premises. But she wasn't surprised. Every year, she gets hundreds of calls from panic-stricken parents wanting to know why their child didn't get into our over-subscribed comprehensive. Every year, she says the same thing: read the instructions in the admissions booklet very, very carefully. There's no way she can explain such a complex process over the phone. If she did, she'd never go home.

I teach in a very popular, co-educational comprehensive in outer London which gains some of the best results in the country. In common with many similar institutions, every year, over 400 applicants don't get an offer of a place. Much as we would like to take them, we have only one place for every three children applying. This year was no different: there were hundreds of bitterly disappointed families.

It's little consolation, but they might comfort themselves with the knowledge that they are not alone. On National Offer Day earlier this week, where parents discovered whether their child had been successful in applying for a place at secondary school, one fifth of parents didn't get their child into the school of their choice. In counties such as Kent, nearly a third of parents failed to get their preferred school.

It's no wonder thousands of parents are furious. A report from the London School of Economics published this week suggests that the whole system is in a state of chaos, with schools flagrantly flouting the rules - asking parents for personal information including marital status, occupation and even children's hobbies - and parents themselves being bamboozled by the arcane bureaucracy involved.

As a parent, teacher and writer who has researched this subject for years, I can only concur with the LSE's report. The central problem is that there is no consistency in the system: the rules or "admissions criteria" by which schools admit their pupils differ from school to school. There are a host of different rules when applying to grammar schools, academies, faith-schools, specialist schools and plain-old bog standard comprehensives.

If you're applying to a faith school, you usually have to prove you've attended church regularly for a number of years, live within the parish and have a glowing reference from your local vicar or priest. If you're going for a specialist school, you'll get preferential treatment if you can prove your child has an "aptitude" in that specialism. For example, schools that specialise in sports will often need to see references from coaches and team leaders. For grammar schools, you'll need to pay for a private tutor so that your child will excel in the 11-plus exam. And if you're going for a good local comp, you might have to consider selling your house and moving closer to the school - or lying about your address, which increasingly parents are doing.

But even moving near a good school can backfire. Take Katie, who moved house so she could be near the only popular school in her area, a faith-based school which specialised in languages. She thought she had everything covered - the attendance at church, the vicar's references, the proof that her son has an aptitude for languages - only to find that in the year of her application her local authority switched to a lottery system: all the schools were allocated randomly. As a result, her application failed. She is now faced with the absurd prospect of having to drive her son miles away to a sink school, despite the fact that she lives next door to an excellent one. All her hard work was for nothing. "This Government has ruined my family's life," she told me, trying to hold back the tears.

Time and again, conscientious parents who have fought so hard to get their children into good schools have had their best laid plans smashed by idiotic Labour legislation.

But it isn't only the school admissions system that the Government has broken. It's the exam system as well. Since they arrived in 1997, Labour apparatchiks have done nothing but interfere with exams. Each new initiative has made things worse. The Sats exams for seven, 11 and 14-year-olds have been mired in controversy from the start, with claims from parents and teachers that they are irrelevant and put pupils under unnecessary pressure. The situation was so bad last summer, when swathes of Sats papers were lost and thousands denied their results, that the Children's Secretary, Ed Balls, abandoned Sats for 14-year-olds and indicated that he was even considering scrapping the exam for all ages - a ghastly admission of defeat.

Even more seriously, A-levels and GCSEs have lost their credibility. The Government trumpets that the number of pupils gaining five A*-C grades at GCSE has risen from 44 per cent to 65 per cent since 1995, but any teacher knows this supposed improvement is nonsense. Recent research by Durham and Cambridge universities shows that the exams have become so dumbed down that these statistics are meaningless and that far from fostering real learning, the exam system has made our children less intelligent than they were in the 1970s, when far less was spent on education.

Meanwhile, the world education rankings run by the respected Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) - the only really trustworthy league table there is - shows Britain slipping from fourth to 14th for reading and from eighth to 24th for Maths. Put simply, most children from Europe and the Far East outperform our pupils every time - even in English.

Our exam system has become such a joke that many schools are giving up on it. Just this week, one of our top independent schools, Manchester Grammar, decided to abandon GCSEs, on the grounds that they were too easy, and to replace them with the International GCSE (IGCSE). In a letter to parents, the head poured scorn on the new GCSEs that the Government is introducing this September, observing that they threaten teachers' abilities to do their jobs well: they are stuffed full of easy questions and coursework.

Quite why the Government is bringing back coursework when its own investigations have uncovered widespread cheating and plagiarism appears a mystery until you realise that coursework significantly boosts results. In other words, the revamp of GCSEs is a cynical ploy to manipulate the statistics. But as any experienced teacher knows, coursework has a corrupting effect upon pupils because it makes them believe they can cheat their way to the top.

A real educational apartheid is developing between the independent schools who are abandoning the government's testing regime and the rest of us in the state sector who are lumbered with it. Clearly, children who take the wrong GCSEs haven't a hope of getting into the top universities because they haven't had the opportunity to gain respected qualifications.

One of the consequences of the Government decimating our exam system is that the process by which students apply for university has become farcical. The fact of the matter is that our best universities have lost faith in GCSEs and A-levels and have introduced their own tests. As a result, students have to fill in a barrage of forms, write a personal statement and take numerous A-level exams before gaining a place, and are also compelled to take exams set by the suspicious universities - particularly for popular courses such as medicine.

To make matters worse, the university admissions procedure is so haphazard that there is no uniformity over when the universities make their offers. So students are required to accept or reject an offer before they've heard back from all the places to which they have applied. Having been tested to the point of extinction, these poor students are frequently forced to sign up for inferior courses, even though they may have gained places on better ones. As with school admissions, one suspects this is a cynical ploy to make sure that the inferior universities are filled with students.

Our education system is failing on all counts: it is shockingly unfair, riddled with incompetence and corruption, and benefits no one but the bureaucrats. But while the pen-pushers enjoy enormous power and over-inflated wages, parents can see no end to their misery. Too many parents have watched helplessly as their children's education has gone down the drain: too many children have endured mediocre schools, taken too many worthless GCSEs, and saddled themselves with crippling debts to gain worthless degrees that lead nowhere but the dole queue.

Despite the phoney propaganda the Government peddles, Labour's incessant meddling, monstrous dumbing down and moronic self-righteousness have consigned our schools to the scrap heap. It pains me to say it, but our education system is as crisis-ridden as our banks.

SOURCE





10 March, 2009

Killing school choice in DC

If ever there were a case of mixed-up priorities in Washington, this is it. Tucked into the $410 billion "omnibus" spending bill passed by the House of Representatives on February 25 is a provision designed to terminate the Washington Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP), the school choice program established with bipartisan support in 2004 that is providing a glimmer of hope to thousands of students and families in the District of Columbia.

More than 2,000 students have been able to attend one of the D.C. area non-public schools through the program since it was established, and more than 7,200 have applied for scholarships, demonstrating the overwhelming public demand in the District among parents for new educational options for their children.

The D.C. opportunity scholarship program is creating greater opportunities and transforming lives.

"[The OSP] gives me the choice to, freedom to attend other schools than D.C. public schools," one thankful parent told researchers from the University of Arkansas, which conducted an in-depth study of the program's performance. "I'm not really badgering or bashing the system, but right now, well at the time, I just didn't feel that I wanted to put him in D.C. public school and I had the opportunity to take one of the scholarships, so therefore, I can afford it and I'm glad that I did do that."

In a video entitled "Voices of School Choice" posted on the website of the education reform-minded Heritage Foundation, local students participating in the OSP tell President Obama first-hand about the importance of the program, and implore him to keep it alive.

Buried in the so-called "omnibus" bill, however, is a poison pill intended to terminate the program. The language in the bill, proposed by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), sunsets the program after the 2009-2010 school year unless both Congress and the D.C. City Council take specific steps to reauthorize it.

Reauthorization is clearly not the intent of the Democratic leaders who run Congress. Powerful teachers unions that oppose school choice contributed millions to Democratic campaigns last year, and the Democratic leadership in Congress now has the program in its crosshairs. In a recent statement, House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey (D-OK) advised D.C. School Chancellor Michelle Rhee to "promptly take steps to minimize potential disruption and ensure smooth transition" for children currently participating in the program to re-enroll in the District's public schools.

SOURCE




The declining prestige of academics in Britain

So you want to be a nuclear physicist. I bet your parents are horrified. Nor do they want you to be an Oxford Don or a classicist. That's the bizarre British conundrum that Gail Trimble can't answer. When the University Challenge contestant let slip that she would like to be an academic when she finishes her doctorate in Latin literature, the comment that surprised her most was, "get a job".

Parents in Britain spend more than 1.5 billion pounds a year on tutoring. Many have spent this term agonising over whether Freya or Felix will get into a grammar school. They are thrilled if their child is asked to join the Government's gifted programme. Schools are assessed on their academic league tables. Gordon Brown's sole intervention in education as Chancellor came when he tried to help Laura Spence get into Oxford.

Yet once undergraduates arrive at the dreaming spires or the red bricks it would be a calamity if they actually decided to stay and become a don. What a waste of an education. Britain lauds its television presenters, not its academics. Sir David Attenborough is Britain's most famous naturalist; 100 years ago it was Charles Darwin. Young historians want to be Andrew Roberts, Willie Dalrymple, Simon Sebag Montefiore or better still Amanda Foreman whose book on Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire was turned into the film starring Keira Knightley. They want to visit the White House, appear in glossy magazines and be asked to write lucrative articles in newspapers. They'd rather not disappear into the dusty corridors of academia never to be seen again. Boris Johnson uses his classics education to entertain. Carol Vorderman is Britain's best known mathematician. Stranger still, the diminishing role of the academic in Britain has coincided with a massive expansion of higher education. We now want half the country to reach university but we deride those who will teach them when they get there.

The rising number of students partly explains why becoming an academic is such an unappealing career. The amount of government money universities receive for each graduate has fallen by 50 per cent in real terms over the past two decades. Lecturers now spend hours preparing lessons, marking dissertations, filing paperwork, monitoring students and fending off pushy parents, while also attempting to publish research papers. Even at Oxford there is precious little time for dreaming amid Matthew Arnold's spires. While the average graduate worked 44 hours per week in 2004, academics worked 47 hours per week.

For this they are paid a pittance. Back in the 1960s, an Oxford professor earned as much as a Liverpool football player. But the boom years never reached the campus. Between 1982 and 2001, academic earnings went up by 7 per cent in real terms, whereas average earnings for all full-time employees in Britain went up by 44 per cent. Academics now earn 23 per cent less than lawyers, 24 per cent less than doctors and 49 per cent less than dentists. Having missed out on the boom years, they are now participating in the bust. Universities have been told to cut back even further on original research projects, which are increasingly seen as an extravagance. And despite recent falls, house prices in Oxford and Cambridge mean most can no longer afford to live near the centre. According to the Association of University Teachers, three quarters of academics believe there has been a decline in their status in the past five years alone. No wonder the exodus of postgraduates abroad is higher than any other developed country. When my grandfather, a physicist, was professor at Imperial College before the Second World War, he lived in an eight-bedroom house in Notting Hill that is now worth œ20 million. My other grandfather, director of the Cavendish Laboratory after the war, lived in an even more imposing Georgian house in Cambridge that is now a hall of residence.

In the 1950s intellectuals still wanted the prestige - and money - that came with being a successful academic. Now the blockbuster historians, economists and scientists prevail, but if they want to keep up their advances they need to find a subject that has broad appeal rather than concentrating on specialised research on narrow topics. William Hague has admitted that he did no original research for his much admired autobiography of Pitt the Younger. The top-selling history books are mainly spin-offs from television programmes.

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian would have struggled if it had been an academic thesis on the changing face of agriculture in the former Soviet Union, but became a bestseller because it started: "Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blond Ukrainian divorcee". Yet the former subject would have added more to our knowledge.

Who cares? Well, perhaps the future blockbuster writers who will find that there is no one inspirational left to teach them at university. There is little point in sending an ever greater number of young people to rack up debts for three years if they are going to taught by overworked, demoralised, second-raters.

In America academics are sought after in public life. President Obama has crammed his cabinet with intellectuals. His Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, won the Nobel Prize in physics. The director of the National Economic Council, Larry Summers, was a professor at MIT and Harvard. France also has a longstanding connection between public life and academia. Christine Lagarde, the finance minister, worked as a law lecturer, the education minister, Xavier Darcos, was a professor of literature.

Britain was like that once. Lord Annan called the years from 1945 to 1975 the golden age. Academics moved in and out of Whitehall as wise men. C.P. Snow chronicled their moves in his novels. Harold Macmillan became Chancellor of Oxford while still Prime Minister. Rab Butler became Master of Trinity. Harold Wilson, who had been a lecturer at Oxford, stuffed his Cabinet with former Oxford dons.

Yet few ministers now have a doctorate. In Brown's Britain, being clever is equated with being posh and elite. Mr Balls prefers beautician diplomas to Beowolf discussions, he calls for universities to "skill" students rather than educate them.

Britain has prospered during those periods in its history when scientists and thinkers have played a key role in our national life. Queen Elizabeth I was the best-educated woman of her generation. Technological advances drove the industrial revolution. Scientists helped to win two world wars. If we want to replicate that success today, putting senior common rooms rather than dealing floors at the centre of our national life might be a good place to start.

SOURCE




British government schools slip farther behind private schools at final High School exams

The Labour government has wreaked vast destruction on British education

Private schools had more pupils gain three grade As at A level last summer than all the comprehensives put together, according to data suggesting that poorer students are falling farther behind their middle-class contemporaries. More than 10,000 privately educated students got three As last year, the standard required to win a place at top universities, compared with just under 7,500 children at comprehensive schools. This is despite independent schools educating only 7 per cent of all pupils.

The figures, obtained by the Conservatives, also show that the achievement gap between the better off and the poor is widening at A level. Since Labour came to power in 1997, the gap between the proportion of students gaining three As at comprehensives and independent schools has widened from 12.2 to 22.7 percentage points. Almost a third of private pupils get three As, compared with less than one in ten at comprehensives. Last year 38 per cent of students achieiving straight As at A level were at fee-paying schools, compared to 28 per cent at comprehensives and 16 per cent at grammar schools.

Michael Gove, the Shadow Schools Secretary, said that pupils were now four times more likely to get three As at an independent school than at a comprehensive school. Despite millions of pounds of government investment directed at raising standards in comprehensives, through programmes such as the National Challenge, there was a widening gap between opportunities for better-off families and the rest, even among results for the brightest pupils, he said. At a conference organised by the children's charity Barnardo's today, he will say that there is a widening gap between opportunities for richer families and the rest. A Tory government would aim to reverse this. "We will make it easier to set up new academies, especially in poorer areas, and make it easier for them to hire great teachers, and we will make it easier for talented people to become teachers," he said.

Conservative plans to allow new state-funded schools to open in deprived areas, based on the Swedish system, with extra cash for children from more deprived homes, would reverse a growing social class gap, he said.

The figures show that the pattern of the education achievement gap is complex and impacts on all ability levels, not just among the less able or borderline pupils, where most government resources are directed. Separate figures from National Strategies, the Government's programme for professional development for schools, show that of the more than 26,000 pupils who obtained three As at A level, the number on free school meals (the rule of thumb measure for poverty) was 176, representing less than 1 per cent. Nationally, the figure is about 13 per cent. Clive Bush, of National Strategies, told a conference of head teachers organised by the Future Leaders programme last week, that British schools showed the biggest variation in performance of any school system in the world. There were wide discrepancies between types of school and within individual schools.

The figures come after concern expressed by Christine Gilbert, the Chief Inspector of Schools, that poor children had "the odds stacked against them" in education and that pupils were becoming divided along economic lines in schools.

SOURCE





9 March, 2009

Surgical sex change now a right on campus?

Take a walk over to our campus library and you can see why I think the inmates are running this asylum, which is otherwise known as UNC-Wilmington. There is a display showing a little girl being held down as someone prepares to take a razor blade to her genitals. The picture reminds me why I am opposed to genital mutilation. And I'm always opposed to genital mutilation.

The crazy aspect of the display is not the fact that it is graphic and offensive. It is that it is so dishonest. Put simply, the feminists at the UNCW Women's Resource Center are not really opposed to genital mutilation. The fact that they co-sponsored a film called Trans-Generation shows that they are ambivalent on the issue.

Feminists will say there is a difference between the kind of genital mutilation portrayed on their display and the kind portrayed in Trans-Generation; namely, that the former is coerced and the latter is freely chosen. But that logic is flawed for two reasons.

First, Trans-Generation glorifies genital mutilation among college students, many of whom are under 21. Surely, someone who does not have the maturity to sip a beer does not have the maturity to order someone to surgically alter its genitals. They cannot have developed a full appreciation of the effects of their "decision."

Second, there can be no valid consent offered by one who is profoundly mentally ill. We would never assert that a man who thought he was a unicorn could "choose" to have his penis attached to his forehead. We would assert that he is mentally ill or run the risk that others would deem us mentally ill. Nor should we ever assert that a man who thought he was a woman could "choose" to have his penis carved into a female sex organ. We should assert that he is mentally ill or run the risk that others think the same of us.

But a group called the Gender Mutiny Collective disagrees. This fringe political group advocates the position that those who crave genital mutilation are not mentally ill. Instead, those who would stand in their way are "trans-phobic." In other words, they think that opponents of "freely chosen" genital mutilation are themselves suffering from a phobia (read: mental disorder).

The Gender Mutiny Collective has gone to the extreme of asking college administrators to monitor the lectures of college professors whom they suspect to be suffering from "transphobia." To date, the American Association of University Professors has had no comment on this obvious infringement of academic freedom.

In 2006, my department was asked to sponsor Trans-Generation not financially but emotionally by offering our approval of the film. One of our level-headed faculty members noted that sponsoring a film that endorsed genital mutilation would make us look bad in the community. One feminist's bigoted and stereotypical reply claimed that the community was comprised of nothing but people with "pot bellies" who drive "pickup trucks."

In other words, we have now "progressed" to a point in academia where those who advocate "chosen" genital mutilation deem themselves to be morally superior to the people who oppose it. And, remember, those people are not just fat rednecks. They're also mentally ill.

I wrote this column to state publicly that I do not endorse the film Trans-Generation. I simply will not take advantage of the mentally ill in order to establish my own sense of moral superiority. And I certainly won't do it in the name of tolerance and diversity.

If any member of the Gender Mutiny Collective is offended by this column I invite you to come and monitor my classroom. I also invite you to kiss my ass.

SOURCE




British professors reveal watered-down degrees

Academics are breaking ranks to expose a grim picture of higher education

A group of academic whistle-blowers have warned that British higher education is being blighted by watered-down degrees, rampant plagiarism and systematic pressure from university authorities to inflate the grades of weak undergraduates. The complaints by the academics - working at universities including Oxford, Sussex, Birmingham, Cardiff and new institutions such as Central Lancashire and Manchester Metropolitan - have been presented in a 500-page dossier to an MPs' inquiry.

One reports a student begging "please don't dumb down any further", while another says students are more interested in sending text messages in class than paying attention. The problems are blamed on two decades of relentless university expansion without adequate funding.

The evidence increases pressure on John Denham, the universities secretary, to take steps to guard quality as he prepares to announce a strategy for higher education this summer. One source at the select committee said: "It has to be quite a brave person to stick their necks out like this. "There is sufficient commonality between their concerns to be worth taking seriously - it is incumbent on the authorities to do so. The worry is they are inclined to dismiss rather than investigate."

Those who have given evidence include Sue Evans, an economics lecturer of some 30 years' standing at Manchester Metropolitan University. She describes a disappointed Slovakian undergraduate saying last term: "This university is like high school in Slovakia." Another begged the department: "Don't dumb down the subject any more than you already have." Evans also provides extensive allegations of marks frequently being revised upwards without justification. She says she has raised her concerns "repeatedly" with the university but without any response.

Her complaints are echoed by Stuart Derbyshire, a senior lecturer in psychology at Birmingham University. On one occasion, he said: "When I complained, he [an external examiner charged with scrutinising standards] stated that it was no longer 1986 and that we cannot mark like we did in the past. `We must', he said, `look harder for excellence'."

Some of the submissions raise concerns over the commitment of students themselves. The dossier includes warnings from some of Britain's most senior academics. Alan Ryan, warden of New College, Oxford, wrote that, while he approved of expanding university education, too much of it is "remedial secondary education passed off as something else". At Oxford, he said, "anyone who remains awake and is tolerably well organised can get a 2:1". He added that there is a "dumbing to the middle" at the university in which compliance with government quality procedures is more important than "waking up minds".

Peter Dorey, a politics academic at Cardiff, said: "They often sit in seminars with only their mobile phone in front of them on the desk . . . but no books or notepads." He told the inquiry: "Many of them are semi-literate," adding that he was starting to feel "as if I am wasting my time with today's students".

Some of the greatest concerns raised are over the quality of science education. Janet Collett, emeritus biology lecturer at Sussex who also holds a post at Harvard, warned the committee of "serious slippage of standards". She said many leading American academics believe "sharp critical thinking and fostering independence are no longer the hallmarks of British university education". Collett said this weekend that American colleagues complained that even Oxbridge science graduates "just didn't know enough".

Higher education is now more popular than ever, with figures released last month showing applications to start degrees this autumn up 7.8% on last year, when 413,000 started at university. However, there are signs that head teachers at the most academically successful state and independent schools are starting to steer the brightest pupils to join a steady trickle across the Atlantic. Andrew Halls, headmaster of the independent King's College school in Wimbledon, south London, claimed that at a recent parents' meeting, half the 200 or so present said they would consider sending their children to America. "US universities are starting to have a real edge," said Halls. "The more they [British universities] water down their degrees, which they patently are, the worse."

David Willetts, the shadow universities secretary, said there was still widespread excellence, but added: "A lot of students who get in touch with me are raising issues such as how crowded their seminars are, how rapidly they get work returned with a mark. Those are the types of issues students and parents really worry about. Universities have to listen."

Universities contacted this weekend to respond to the submissions denied there were quality problems or that staff were pressed to change grades. A spokeswoman for Manchester Metropolitan added: "Miss Evans expresses a lot of very personal views but presents very little objective information. There is no evidence staff are put under any pressure to bump up grades. We are extremely disappointed and upset that a colleague has chosen to raise these issues externally."

David Boucher, head of the school of European studies at Cardiff, said: "The school does not recognise the picture of students Dr Dorey paints."

SOURCE





8 March, 2009

Mayoral Control improves schools

But teachers' unions are still hostile

Mayoral control of public education has gained currency in recent years, including in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and Washington, D.C. Results vary from place to place, but one clear success story has been New York City, where the policy deserves to be extended.

Upon taking office seven years ago, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg waged a campaign to abolish the city's 32 community school boards; hire and fire the schools chancellor; and appoint a majority of members on the city's Board of Education. Prior to the change, two out of three public schools in Gotham were underperforming and graduation rates were stagnant. Meanwhile, the Board of Education would blame the mayor, who pointed to the schools chancellor, who cited the Board of Education, and so on.

Mr. Bloomberg sought to end this circular blame game by taking responsibility for school performance in return for more control over education policy. In the event, test scores have improved and more kids are graduating. The New York State legislature has until June to reauthorize mayoral control, and it would be a breeze if not for teacher-union hostility. "Today, more than 10,000 additional students are graduating than we took over in 2002," said schools Chancellor Joel Klein last month. "Today, many more students are meeting and exceeding standards in math and reading. And today, the gap separating African-American and Latino students from their white and Asian peers is shrinking."

Mayoral control has also been a boon for reformers looking to expand school choice for low-income families. In 2002, New York City had fewer than 20 charter schools; next year it will have more than 100. This is a direct result of charter-friendly policies pushed by the mayor that would have been blocked by teacher union control of the school board. Mr. Klein's long tenure -- now seven years -- also makes for more policy staying power.

Eva Moskowitz, whose Harlem Success Charter Network operates four schools, says the change has been "fundamental" to her efforts to offer disadvantaged kids an alternative to failing schools. "The only way to fix the problem of the education monopoly is competition," said Ms. Moskowitz, a former member of the City Council. "And you can't have competition unless you have mayoral control. The local forces -- the teachers unions -- are fundamentally opposed to competition, whereas the mayor is responsive to the voters and the parents."

The United Federation of Teachers, the local union, claims to favor mayoral control. Yet it's urging state lawmakers to scotch the mayor's ability to appoint a majority of school board members -- a modification that would increase the union's influence and end real accountability. State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a union ally, says he favors renewing the law but also wants to give parents a greater voice in the system, whatever that means. In fact, a recent poll found that parents with children in public schools favor mayoral control by 57% to 39%.

The way to truly empower parents is to let them decide where their children attend school. Mayoral control is no education panacea, but to the extent that it is aiding competition and raising standards in New York it is saving thousands of kids from the tyranny of union-dominated failure.

SOURCE




Identical British twins go to schools 18 miles apart

Adam and Luke Bolton are identical twins who do everything together, but this week they were told that not only have they been allocated places in different secondary schools, but also that the schools are 18 miles apart. The news has come as a bombshell. The ten-year-old boys read the same books, play the same computer games and, although they have separate bedrooms, have sleepovers in each other's rooms every weekend. They have different hobbies - Luke plays piano and is a footballer, Adam prefers reading - but most of the time they stick together. To date their biggest anxiety has been being asked to sit at different tables in their class at Tewin Cowper Primary School, in Hertfordshire.

Their mother, Ann Connolly, said: "When we applied to secondary school we tried to prepare them for the fact that they might be put in different classes. That would be a huge step for them. So for them to find themselves in different schools is very distressing. "Twins are not like other children. They have a total reliance on each other to be their primary friend and they look to each in stressful situations."

Adam and Luke are a living example of a problem highlighted this week by Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary. Hertfordshire is one of 25 local authorities that use a lottery system to allocate places in oversubscribed schools. The aim of the lottery is to make school admissions fairer and prevent middle-class parents from playing the system by buying or renting homes close to the best schools.

Ms Connolly said that the thinking behind the system was muddled. "It makes it impossible to make a rational choice of school because you can have no idea in advance what will be your chances of getting in," Ms Connolly said. "I asked the local authority if they could allocate places to two children together via the lottery process but they said that would bias its random nature and so couldn't be allowed. It is ludicrous."

Mr Balls agrees and has asked the Schools Adjudicator to look at the issue of twins being split in lottery-based systems. "I am asking the Schools Adjudicator to look at how we can make crystal clear in guidance and in the [School Admissions] Code that splitting up twins when parents don't want them to be split is the wrong thing to do," Mr Balls said.

Luke was allocated a place at the twins' first choice, Richard Hale school in Hertford, which is a six-mile (9km) bus ride from the Bolton home, while Adam was given a place at their second choice, Verulam School in St Albans, which is 12 miles from the house in the opposite direction and an hour away by train and bus.

Ms Connolly, who works in the pharmaceutical industry, said: "All I can do is put Adam on the waiting list for Robert Hale and hope that a place becomes available, but it could be months before we hear and in the mean time we just have to sit and wait." What is particularly frustrating to her is that now that one twin has been allocated a place at the Robert Hale, the family can take advantage of the school's sibling rule to get the other one in. This effectively means that Adam will be higher up on the waiting list than he otherwise would be. Ms Connolly said that it was bizarre that the boys counted as siblings only after the first round of applications but not when they first applied. [Indeed. British bureaucracy at its best]

SOURCE





7 March, 2009

A Double Standard for Campus Free Speech

In what is yet more evidence that universities have become, as Abigail Thernstrom has described them, "islands of repression in a sea of freedom," Toronto's York University witnessed a near riot of some 100 pro-Palestinian Israel-haters, as police had to be called to usher Jewish students to safety after they had been barricaded inside the Hillel@York offices and were "isolated and threatened" by the physically and verbally aggressive demonstrators.

York, one of Canada's largest universities, also has a sizable Jewish student population, but that has not served to diffuse what has become an increasingly volatile, and distressing, problem on its campus, one that raises issues about what is acceptable behavior and discourse at universities worldwide. Universities, of course, have well-articulated regulations that supposedly define student behavior and place limits of speech and actions that might shatter what administrators like to refer to as the "civility" of the campus community. York's own student code of conduct, for instance, specifically prohibits "threats of harm, or actual harm, to a person's physical or mental wellbeing," including "verbal and non-verbal aggression . . . verbal abuse; intimidation; [and] harassment"-all of which were clearly violated by the demonstrators' physically intimidating protests.

More troubling is the invidious language used in this event, mirroring a surge of unbridled Jew-hatred manifested on campuses, as well as on city streets, worldwide since Israel's recent defensive incursions into Gaza. Parroting the morally incoherent and factually defective exhortations of Israel-haters elsewhere of "Zionism equals racism!" and "Racists off campus!," the York mob, members of both the York Federation of Students and Students Against Israeli Apartheid, demonstrated once again that what is positioned as "intellectual debate" on campuses about the Israeli/Palestinian issue has devolved into something that is not really a conversation at all; rather, it is something more akin to an ideologically-driven shout fest in which pro-Palestinians, employing a revisionist history in which the dark-skinned, third-world Arabs are the long-standing victims of white, European, colonial Zionists, have escalated the debate far beyond discussion of borders, refugee status, and the rights of both Jews and Arabs to self-determination, statehood, and peaceful coexistence.

So now, supporters of the cult of Palestinianism apparently no longer feel even a bit uncomfortable voicing what is actually on their minds when the subject of Israel comes up: when the York Hillel students were trapped inside of locked offices, surrounded by an increasingly violent and aggressive mob, the intellectual "debate" that day included such invidious and raw slurs as "Die bitch-go back to Israel" and "Die Jew-get the hell off campus." The most vicious anti-Semites have of late been able to conveniently inoculate themselves from what had become socially unacceptable in the modern age- hating Jews-by artfully masking any anti-Semitism on their part by stating, "Oh, no, it's not Jews that I loathe, only the oppressive, genocidal, and racist policies of Zionism and Israel."

But even that concern for appearing to be politically correct has now, too, vanished. When students are calling for the death of the fellow students based on their religion or political inclinations, something more serious and troubling is going on here that cannot be easily dismissed as part of the back and forth in the "marketplace of ideas" that universities are so fond of facilitating. But craven college administrators, who in their zeal to achieve "diversity" and "multiculturalism" have relieved campus victim groups of any responsibility for their noxious or morally reprehensible views and regularly fail to condemn the behavior of favored groups on campus while publicly denouncing, punishing, or distancing themselves from the opposing voices coming, for instance, from conservatives, Christians, Republicans, or pro-Israel groups or faculty members.

Imagine for a moment that during the latest incident instead of Hillel, another of the University's student organizations, the Trans Bisexual Lesbian Gay Allies at York, had held a press conference in the student union to give their views, say, on gay marriage, a topic over which there can, and are, many viewpoints. Imagine further that counter-protestors, joined in their demonstration by Rev. Fred Phelps from Westboro Baptist Church and inflamed by what they felt was an assault on their Christian faith, angrily barricaded the TBLG Allies in their offices, pounded violently on the walls and screamed out, as the ever-sensitive Phelps is wont to do, "God hates fags," "No fags in heaven," "death to sodomites," or that some of them were "Jezebellian switch-hitting whores."

Assuming that such a counter protest would even have been allowed to occur on campus, does anyone doubt the extent of denunciation and condemnation that would have risen from an apoplectic administration and faculty if this hateful speech and behavior took place? Would not the gay students have felt "threatened," "harassed," "intimidated," or had their feelings hurt, and called for forced sensitivity training for the offenders? Is there any doubt that the counter-protestors would be de-funded, sanctioned, or punished into silence or prevented from further demonstrations or the ability to express their opinions on campus again?

Therein lies the hypocrisy in academic free speech on campus today: while coddling selected victim groups and granting them unlimited expression as a purported way to further diversity of thought, college administrators have regularly denied those same rights and privileges to groups deemed not to deserve or need them, namely, conservatives, Christians, Republicans, and or those who seek a strong defense against radical Islam and terrorism aimed at Western democracies, principally the U.S. and Israel. So if pro-Israel and Jewish students have to be escorted by police to protect them from physical assault and nothing is said about the egregious nature of the offense, and pro-Israel, anti-terror speakers such as Daniel Pipes are shouted down and heckled relentlessly when they come to York, the university is failing in its stated objective to foster true debate and free speech where reasoned conclusions can evolve through animated and lively discussion of alternate views.

" The `Israel debate,' " say Gary A. Tobin, Aryeh K. Weinberg, and Jenna Firer in The Uncivil University, "is not a true intellectual debate at all, but rather a failure of the university community at all levels to properly protect its highest ideals. No institution of higher learning should allow Jewish students to be intimidated or attacked, or pro-Israel speakers to be so physically threatened that they cannot safely visit a campus."

Why? Because "such an environment is antithetical to the mission" of the university, they say, and if the academy abandons that goal for the sake of selected groups and favored causes today, it clearly make victims of other groups whose views and voice deserve the same hearing in our marketplace of ideas.

SOURCE




British teachers 'not allowed' to chase four-year-old school runaway - because of health and safety risk

Using police instead of teachers is a huge waste of resources

It's being called a 'safe handling policy,' but the extraordinary health and safety rule which has enabled an inquisitive four-year-old boy to repeatedly wander out the school playground is enough to give any parent nightmares. On four occasions since the start of term, youngster River Baker has walked out of school grounds during break time to explore the outside world. Each time he has apparently been spotted by the supervising member of staff. But instead of grabbing or running after him to bring him back, the teacher has 'tracked' the youngster on foot to ensure he comes to no harm and rung the police so officers can stop him.

On one occasion River and another boy of similar age were followed as they walked near a busy main road and five police vehicles turned up to pick them up, she claimed.

The bizarre series of events and refusal of staff to physically stop the four-year-old walking out the open school entrance has appalled and astonished River's mother Suzan Baker, 44. 'There are all sorts of issues here,' she said. 'The school policy is crazy but the security is also pathetic. The teachers say they keep an eye on the kids in the playground all the time, but when they get out, which is so easy to do, they have to follow them a couple of hundred yards behind. It's ludicrous.'

River has left St Mary's Roman Catholic Primary School in Richmond, North Yorkshire, four times since January - twice going into a school next door, once walking alongside a busy road and once heading for woodland.

Miss Baker, a single mother-of-three, said she was told due to policy staff were not allowed to grab him. 'I was on a driving lesson when I got a call telling me that they had picked him up from woods at the back of his school. They told me they had followed him and rung the police. When I questioned them about it they just said "do you know how fast a four-year-old can run?"

'It's crazy, an adult could easily catch up with him and safely restrain him. But apparently it is school policy not to grab them.'

Two weeks earlier River and a friend were heading towards an abbey about a mile from the school and walking next to a busy road. 'Again the teacher followed behind and this time five police vans turned up to pick them up. When I found out about this I flipped my lid. 'It's so dangerous out there, it's terrifying what could have happened to them. They could have been run over or grabbed by a sicko before the police got there, it doesn't bear thinking about.'

Miss Baker, a caterer who also has a 14-year-old daughter and a six-year-old son, lives in fear of the next call from school and keeps her mobile phone with her at all times. The youngster has once climbed the six ft high fence, but usually just walks out the open entrance. 'When I ask him why he runs away he says "I want to get some exercise." 'He's four years old and he's a boy, so of course he is going to want to run about and explore like all other kids do. He's always been a lively lad.'

And it seems staff are acting according to local authority policy. Acting headteacher Jill Wilkinson said:'We have a positive safe handling policy that allows us to use reasonable action. However it can be dangerous to chase after a child because often it makes them run faster.'

A spokeswoman for North Yorkshire County Council said it helped draw up a 'protocol' about what to do when a child runs away and denied ordering staff not to stop them leaving school. 'If a teacher or a member of support staff considers a child is in immediate danger of running away then he or she can use reasonable and appropriate physical intervention. 'If a child does run away a member of staff has to make a quick judgement as to whether giving chase in order to restrain a child might put that child in greater danger, such as running into oncoming traffic. 'The school is situated next to a busy highway. If they consider this is the case they are advised to track the child rather than chase and if necessary call the police.'

SOURCE





6 March, 2009

British teachers' careers 'blighted' by false allegations

Hundreds of teachers are facing false allegations of abusing children every year, union leaders said. More than 800 claims are being made against staff, according to the NASUWT union. Many of the allegations follow attempts by teachers to discipline pupils who misbehave in class, it was claimed.

The union argued that teachers were seen as "guilty until proven innocent" and can face suspension, police investigations or disciplinary procedures if they are confronted with abuse allegations or claims they used excessive force against a pupil. Even if a teacher is later cleared, the complaint is still held on record, they said.

Chris Keates, NASUWT general secretary, said the majority of allegations were unfounded and told the BBC that the situation was a "blight" on the teaching profession. She said: "Whatever the outcome of the investigation, that will be on the teacher's file. If that teacher applies for another job that allegation will be resurrected under the Criminal Records Bureau check. "So you could say that every one of those 800 teachers has got a blight over their career for the rest of their time teaching." While no-one doubts that children needed protection, Miss Keates added: "This presumption of guilt is one of the major flaws in the current system."

Ministers said they were looking at the guidance on accusations against teachers. A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: "Guidance on more consistent and swifter handling of allegations was issued for education in 2005. "We are also looking at whether guidance should be amended to make clear that accusations which have been demonstrated to be untrue do not need to be included in teachers' references."

SOURCE




Australia: Mathematics in crisis as teachers go private

Advanced mathematics is disappearing from public school classrooms, leaving students able to learn only basic maths, because the few qualified teachers are being snapped up by the private sector. The shortage of maths teachers will become more acute as fewer students continue maths at university, undermining the nation's skills base in engineering, the sciences and technology, scientists warn. "The inequitable access to quality mathematics education is a national disgrace," the National Committee for the Mathematical Sciences says in a report calling for a national strategy to boost the discipline.

An estimated 40 per cent of senior school mathematics teachers do not have a maths major, the minimum needed to teach the subject to senior years, the committee believes. That is up from 30 per cent in 1999. At the same time, university enrolments for maths majors fell almost 14 per cent between 2001 and 2007.

The committee is part of the Australian Academy of Science. Its chairman, Hyam Rubinstein, said state schools could not compete with the private sector for qualified maths teachers. "Students not having access to (higher level maths) in government schools is really disadvantaging them in a number of important areas of study," Professor Rubinstein said. "It is just going to make the skills shortage worse because, even with the economic downturn, we need to replace our engineers who are all ageing, and we aren't going to be able to do that if people aren't doing mathematics at school."

The number of Year 12 students studying advanced maths has fallen 20 per cent, from 25,000 in 1995 to 20,000 in 2007. The proportion of Year 12 students studying senior maths has now fallen from 14 per cent to 10per cent, with the proportion taking intermediate maths down from 27 per cent to 21 per cent. In contrast, the proportion studying elementary maths has risen from 37 per cent to 48 per cent.

Mathematical Association of Victoria head Simon Pryor said: "Year 7 and Year 8 are critical years, especially if you are going to get kids to love mathematics." Mr Pryor said principals, hit by limited resources, were being forced to staff maths classes with teachers lacking maths qualifications. This year, Mr Pryor took a call from a young teacher at a Victorian state school who last studied maths at school in Year 12. He was desperate for coaching after discovering he had been given a full load teaching maths to Years 10 and 11.

While it is not new for the association to get cries for help from teachers with little maths training, Mr Pryor said he was surprised that senior school students were being taught by teachers lacking maths training. A senior mathematics teacher, who preferred not to be named, said unqualified maths teachers inevitably could only teach practical maths. As a result students were missing out on the higher, abstract maths required to go on to university study.

The National Committee for the Mathematical Sciences is calling for a national system of mathematics teacher registration. It wants school systems to be able to offer "golden handshakes" to attract mathematicians into teaching. It also wants schools to offer tenure to new maths teachers. It recommends a widening of the federal Government's HECS discount scheme for science graduates entering teaching to include other degrees that also include maths, such as computer science and engineering. It also wants the Government to crack down on universities and ensure government money specifically targeted for maths and statistics departments is not spent elsewhere within the universities.

SOURCE





5 March, 2009

Leading British school is first to ditch all government middle-school exams for tougher rival

Dumbed down government curriculum being abandoned

A top independent school has become the first in the country to ditch GCSEs wholesale in favour of a more 'challenging' international alternative. Manchester Grammar is to drop the GCSEs from September in almost all subjects and switch to the International GCSE, which is modelled on the old O-level and takes the focus away from coursework. The switch will heighten fears that a two-tier national exam system is emerging as new qualifications challenge GCSEs and A-levels.

Other private school heads are considering a similar move, with one describing GCSEs as 'pap' and 'baby food' for the most able pupils. The trigger for Manchester Grammar's decision was a Government overhaul of GCSE courses starting in September, which will split courses into bite-size modules that pupils can resit as they go along.

Dr Christopher Ray, Manchester Grammar's high master, said the heads of individual subject departments at his school had almost unanimously decided to move to IGCSEs. 'The difficulty that we have got is that the entire GCSE syllabus, if you want to use a metaphor, is rather like getting able students through a combination of dressage and a low hurdle race,' he said. 'You have to explain to them how they put their feet very carefully over low hurdles so they will not irritate the examiner. It's not challenging at all.' He added: 'The vast majority of time spent on coursework is at best unhelpful and at worst it's destructive to creative intellectual capacities. The whole thing is misconceived.'

Manchester Grammar, a 9,000 pounds-a-year boys' day school whose alumni include former England cricket captain Michael Atherton and Oscar-winning actor Ben Kingsley, has offered the IGCSE in Maths for the past four years, and the sciences for the past three. From September, English Language, English Literature, History, Religious Studies, Latin, Music and Modern Languages will move to the IGCSE, with Geography following in 2010. Art is the only subject for which there is an IGCSE alternative which will not move away from the domestic GCSE exam.

The decision means the school - described in the Good Schools Guide as a 'premier league academic powerhouse' - will slump to the foot of official GCSE league tables because the Government does not recognise IGCSEs. But Dr Ray said the tables were 'totally irrelevant'. Other well-known schools are moving to the IGCSE in some subjects, including Winchester College and St Paul's School in Barnes, West London.

Dr Martin Stephen, high master of St Paul's and a former high master of Manchester Grammar, said: 'The new GCSEs are appalling for the most able students. They are simply pap, they are baby food, they are examination rusks in too many subjects, and they do not stretch and challenge the most able.'

SOURCE




Lazy feminist

Overpaid and under-worked

At a moment when the University of Florida is slashing its budget and laying off faculty and staff, administrators thought it was reasonable to ask Florence Babb to increase her teaching load to three courses a year. She doesn't agree. Babb, an endowed professor and graduate coordinator of UF's Center for Women's Studies and Gender Research, has entered into arbitration proceedings to challenge the increased teaching load. Babb was given an appointment letter in 2004 that said her teaching load would be limited to one course each semester, and now says the university isn't upholding its written agreement.

The United Faculty of Florida, a statewide union affiliated with the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, is backing Babb. As more universities contemplate budget cuts, Babb said it's important to make a stand. "This could be a kind of a test case," said Babb, who makes close to $100,000 a year. "I think there is some awareness that this is a big issue for me, but it's potentially a significant issue for many more people."

The university does not dispute that Babb's appointment letter laid out a one-class per semester course load. Even so, university officials argue that changing teaching loads is permissible under Florida's collective bargaining agreement with the union. "From the university's point of view, it is black and white in the collective bargaining agreement that a chair can adjust the assignment of a faculty member whenever they need to do so," said Joe Glover, Florida's provost. According to the agreement, the university is authorized to "determine the mix" of duties, which include teaching, research and service. Assignments must be "fair and reasonable," according to the agreement

Babb draws an annual salary of $99,223, according to university officials. The two classes she's teaching this spring have a total of 43 students. One of the classes she's teaching this spring is a graduate level course. "I was hired with a very attractive set of conditions, but no more attractive I think than other endowed professors at the University of Florida -- very typical of what I've seen in other contracts," she said.

In addition to her teaching, Babb serves as graduate coordinator in the women's studies center. Given her duties as coordinator, her new teaching load expanded to three courses over spring and fall semesters -- as opposed to four classes -- because her coordinator responsibility qualifies as a course. Prior to Babb's tenure in the position, the university had never previously granted the center's graduate coordinator course relief, because the center is relatively small, Glover said.

Florida took a $69 million budget cut last year, and Babb's college was already in financial trouble -- even before the state's economy started to plummet. Glover said the cuts put strains on the university's teaching mission, and increasing Babb's load was necessary. "This is a time when the budget process in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences was so bad that we took the unprecedented step of laying off seven faculty, including several who were tenure track," Glover said. "Travel budgets were cut to the bone, there was very little hiring and everything was cut back. This is a professor who had a 1:1 course load who has complained about being asked to teach an additional course. I think that's a disproportionate response given the severity of the situation the college was facing."

Babb argues, however, that's she's been singled out in a way that others have not. "We're not aware of faculty who have had an increase of course load for the indefinite time period," she said. "That's striking." Actually, there was one endowed faculty member in Babb's college who was asked to increase his teaching load, according to Glover. That faculty member, whom Glover declined to identify, opted to retire instead, he said.

Milagros Pena, director of the Center for Women's Studies and Gender Research, declined an interview request. She did, however, send an e-mail affirming that the center's "most important" function is teaching. "The central mission of our center is its teaching mission," she wrote. "With loss of faculty and diminished . resources the center is facing the need for all core faculty to be available to meet the needs of the center's teaching mission."

The sticking point in the debate over Babb's teaching load may be the presence of a written document that articulates her teaching responsibilities, limiting them to one class each semester. Inside Higher Ed requested the document from both Babb and the university, neither of whom provided it Monday. Both parties confirm, however, that the agreement limits Babb's teaching load.

John Biro, president of the university's chapter of the United Faculty of Florida, said the union would not have backed Babb if it didn't feel there was a strong case to be made that the university had violated its contract. "It's not the case that everyone's teaching load is specified in our collective bargaining agreement; that could not be the case for 2,000 faculty," he said. "The point is, when it is specified as part of the conditions of the employment then it can't be arbitrarily changed."

The union always has an interest in addressing any potential contract violations, but Biro said the need to do so was only heightened in an environment when the university is using budget cuts to justify layoffs and other changes. "I think it's especially important [now] to be vigilant about the contract," he said. "That's not incompatible with saying that we would at any time, under any circumstances, without exception challenge any violation."

SOURCE





4 March, 2009

Catholic Church slams new British code of conduct forcing teachers to promote Islam and gay rights

The Roman Catholic Church has severely criticised a proposed new code of conduct for teachers which it says will force Christian schools to actively promote Islam and gay rights. The Bishops' Conference of England and Wales has warned the General Teaching Council, by the professional regulatory body, that many teachers will quit the profession because they will not be able to accept the revised code of conduct in good conscience. Their advisers say the code would also seriously undermine the religious character of church schools by imposing on them a hostile form of secular morality. The legally-binding code would discriminate against Christian teachers in recruitment and in the classroom, they say.

Principle 4 of the code demands that teachers `proactively challenge discrimination' and `promote equality and value diversity in all their professional relationships and interactions' before they can be registered. It means that campaigners can complain if teachers fail to observe the new demands and that teachers and schools can be punished if a complaint is upheld.

Oona Stannard, head of the Catholic Education Service, an agency of the bishops' conference, told the GTC in a written submission that `there was an understandable fear that the call to "proactively challenge discrimination" could be used to oppose faith schools per se, and the rights that they have in law, for example, to select leaders who are of the faith'. `This anxiety extends similarly to the direction to "promote equality",' Miss Stannard said. `It would be unacceptable to expect anyone to be required to promote something contrary to their own faith beliefs and, indeed, it would not be possible for a person of faith to promote another faith - this is a matter of conscience.'

Miss Stannard added that there were grave concerns in the Church over the question of whether Catholic teachers would in good conscience feel able to register under the new code. This means they would either quit the profession or would be dissuaded from entering in the first place, heightening the recruitment crisis already afflicting many schools. The code proposed by the GTC would be binding on all schools, including the 2,300 primary and secondary schools run by the Catholic Church and the 4,660 run by the Church of England.

The GTC is insisting that all teachers will have to sign up to the new code before they can practice. The code will then be used by the GTC to assess cases of serious misconduct by teachers and trainee teachers. However, it will also be used by school governing bodies and local authorities in recruitment and disciplining of teachers; universities in assessing candidates for teacher training and by employment tribunals assessing claims of unfair dismissal.

Many Christians already fear that equality and diversity rules are being used against them. Caroline Petrie, a nurse, was suspended by North Somerset Primary Care Trust, for failing to `demonstrate a personal and professional commitment to equality and diversity' after telling a patients she would pray for her, while marriage registrar Lillian Ladelle, disciplined for refusing to preside over same-sex civil partnerships, lost her case at the Employment Appeal Tribunal after the panel ruled in favour of the Islington Council's `commitment to equality'.

Brighton Council also withdrew funding from Pilgrim Homes, a Christian care home, after staff refused to quiz elderly residents over the sexual orientation in keeping with `fair access and diversity' policies.

The Christian Institute, a non-denominational charity, says that the GTC code means that universities might ask applicants about their willingness to promote gay rights and Islam. If a teacher was asked at interview if he or she was willing to use materials designed by gay rights groups, the teacher could be rejected for declining because he or she would be in breach of Principle 4. If a pupil asked an RE teacher if Jesus Christ was the only means to salvation and the teacher replied yes, a non-Christian parent could complain to the GTC over a breach of Principle 4.

Ofsted inspectors would also be able to criticise schools for promoting the Christian vision of marriage, while teachers who say they will pray for troubled pupils could be suspended for failing to `value diversity'. Colin Hart, Christian Institute director, said: `Respect for people as people is not the same as respecting or valuing every religious belief or sexual lifestyle. `Forcing this on Christian teachers is to force them to go against their conscience,' he said. `Teachers are there to teach not to be diversity officers.'

The GTC consultation on the new code closed last Friday.

SOURCE




British government backpedalling on school admission lotteries

They have suddenly realized that the despised middle class have got a lot of votes and upsetting them is not wise

The use of lotteries to allocate school places is to be reviewed by the Government as it emerges that more than 20 per cent of children are failing to get into their first-choice schools in parts of the country. Competition for secondary school places has reached record levels this year, increasing anxiety for hundreds of thousands of families. A survey by The Times of 43 local authorities suggests that in many areas up to a fifth of children face disappointment. Families in London are the hardest hit Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, is setting up an inquiry into the part played by lotteries, arguing that "in some areas, this is the fairest way of resolving a tiny minority of decisions".

This week is admissions week, when about 570,000 families will be receiving their secondary school offers. As the recession forces more parents to consider a state education rather than a private one for their child, early indications are that more than a third of local authorities have seen rises in applications for secondary school places.

This year, just 62 per cent of parents in Richmond upon Thames got into their first-choice school, down from 64 per cent last year. The council said the fall was after a rise in applications. In another London authority, Tower Hamlets, 72.1 per cent of parents got their first choice. In Leeds and Warwickshire 85 per cent were successful, in Derby it was 81 per cent, while in Wiltshire, Stockport and Lincolnshire the figure was 89 per cent.

In many authorities the figures are similar to last year. Exceptions include Brighton and Hove, which introduced a lottery system to allocate oversubscribed places last year. This year, it has seen a 3.5 per cent increase in the number of children gaining their first choice, bringing the total to nearly 88 per cent. However, more than 5 per cent of children in the area have been allocated a place at a school that did not appear among any of their choices. In Blackpool, there was a 7.4 per cent increase in the number of children gaining admission to their preferred school, bringing the total to 96 per cent. In several local authorities more than 90 per cent of children gained admission to their first choice of school, the highest being Stockton-on-Tees, with 96.9 per cent.

Mr Balls, accepted that nearly 20 per cent of parents in some areas would not obtain a place at their preferred school. "More than eight out of ten parents get their first choice, but until every school is a good school and there isn't a concentration of oversubscription in some, then there is going to be disappointment, so there is more to do," he said. "I have sympathy with the view that a lottery system can feel arbitrary, random and hard to explain to children in years five and six who don't know what's going to happen and don't know which children in their class they're going to be going on to secondary school with," he said.

Lotteries are being used, at the Government's own suggestion, by a small number of oversubscribed schools in around 25 local authorities. They were meant to prevent middle class parents from playing the system, by buying or renting homes close to the best schools.

SOURCE





3 March, 2009

Two Letters of Recommendation

By Mike S. Adams

To: Shannon K. Jones

Good afternoon, Shannon. I received your request for a letter of recommendation to UNC School of Law. I also received your resume, your transcripts, and your LSAT results. Based upon what I read I have written you two letters of recommendation. The first letter is for North Carolina Central School of Law, which I believe would be a better choice given that your grades and test scores are good but less than stellar. The full text of the letter follows:

To Whom It May Concern:

As a professor at UNC-Wilmington, I have had the pleasure of knowing Shannon Jones for the last four years. She has been a good student and an asset to our program. I would like to take this opportunity to recommend Shannon to N.C. Central School of Law.

I feel confident that Shannon will continue to do well in her studies. She is a dedicated student and thus far her grades have been strong. She has a 3.1 overall GPA. In class, she has proven to be a leader who is able to successfully develop ideas and presentations and to implement them.

Shannon has also assisted us in our main office. She has successfully demonstrated leadership ability by speaking with prospective students. Her advice has been a great help to students, some of whom have taken time to share their comments with me. Many noted her pleasant and encouraging attitude.

It is for these reasons that I offer recommendations for Shannon without reservation. Her drive and abilities will truly be an asset to your law school. If you have any questions regarding this recommendation, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Sincerely,

Mike Adams, Associate Professor, UNC-Wilmington

As you can see, I wrote this letter without any reference to your status as a black female. Instead, I relied on your legitimate qualifications as a potential law student. But I also wrote a second letter based upon the sliding scale that is used for minorities (especially double minorities) in the law school admissions process. The full text of the second letter follows:

To Whom It May Concern:

As a professor at UNC-Wilmington, I have had the pleasure of knowing Shannon Jones for the last four years. She has been a good student and an asset to our program. I would like to take this opportunity to offer a minority recommendation for Shannon's consideration by the admissions committee at UNC School of Law.

I feel confident that Shannon would do better in her studies were she to attend another law school. However, I am confident that Shannon will be given special consideration at UNC School of Law. Even if she lands near the bottom of the class, she will be guaranteed a good summer job by the progressives working in the placement office. She is a dedicated student and thus far her grades have been strong - although they are about half a grade point below the average expected of white male applicants. Her LSAT score of 156 is also well below that expected of white males. But her status as a black female should more than make up the difference.

Shannon has also assisted us in our main office. She has successfully demonstrated leadership ability by speaking with prospective students. Her advice has been a great help to students, some of whom have taken time to share their comments with me. Many noted her pleasant and encouraging attitude. This will undoubtedly help her to console other struggling minority students many of whom suffer greatly from the double standard operating at the law school.

It is for these reasons that I offer recommendations for Shannon without any reservations aside from the fact that she is not actually qualified, which I understand to be irrelevant in this case. Her demographic characteristics will truly be an asset to your law school's mission as you have defined it. If you have any questions regarding this recommendation, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Sincerely, Mike Adams Associate Professor UNC-Wilmington

As you may have guessed, Shannon, I only intend to send one of these letters of recommendation. The one you choose will reveal whether you wish to be judged by the content of your character or the color of your skin. It will also say a lot about your character.

SOURCE




Can we please have less politics in our exams? Plea from a British 16 year old.....

Joe Iles is 16. He's about to do his GCSEs and hopes to study Latin, German, Further Maths and English or History at A Level (so he's no slouch). After that, he's thinking of studying Classics and Modern Languages at University. But he's not happy with the school curriculum, and was inspired to write for School Gate after the Cambridge Primary Review criticised the restrictions for children at a younger age. He thinks that there's too much politics, that these are pushing out proper learning, and that social issues are being pushed far too hard... So, over to Joe:

In recent years, it seems that the school curricula are featuring more and more in public debate. There was considerable press coverage of a study last week which revealed that in primary education, the focus has been steered away from the arts and humanities leaving children "tied to their desks" struggling with the nine times table. The report claims this has "squeezed out" other areas of learning, rendering children's artistic capacities under-developed and neglected. Furthermore, the report claims not only that the curriculum has been narrowed, but that what remains has become heavily "politicised".

As a current GCSE student, I can identify with this "politicisation". It seems to me as if the GCSE curricula, above all for science, no longer focus on understanding the subject. The core biology science curriculum now calls for very little knowledge of the biology that we had studied in the years preceding GCSE, but seems to be a governmental attempt to raise awareness of current social issues. For example, section A of the core biology exam concentrates on contraception, drugs, alcohol, smoking, obesity, anorexia and the MMR vaccines, whilst section B tackles broader issues such as global warming, GM crops, creationism vs Darwinism and alternative energy sources.

Perhaps this is the best solution to the some of the social problems that Britain faces today. Maybe through education, education and education, Labour may finally succeed in reducing teenage pregnancies, child obesity and begin to steer Britain towards a greener way of life. Perhaps indeed, learning about the advantages and disadvantages of wind and solar power is vastly more useful to the average sixteen year old than a full understanding of the differences between prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells. In this way, the younger generation may begin to have a much clearer idea of current affairs, enabling us to partake more readily in the critical issues of the day, making us more informed voters and leaders of tomorrow.

An important aspect of the "politicisation" of the curriculum is the use of exams. Not only are the social issues agenda studied in class, but students must take exams on these topics, requiring an in depth analysis of the themes, and also meaning that students' grades at GCSE depend on their knowledge of the subject in hand, encouraging a much more motivated and engaged learning process.

However, one of the key problems with sitting exams about topics of this nature is that the exam board are required to write mark schemes clearly detailing the answers that they want within a rigid framework. This leaves no room for debate on the part of the student, meaning that instead of producing insightful, perceptive and interesting answers, pupils tend towards putting down what they think the mark scheme is most likely to have as an acceptable response. For example, in a question about embryo screening, the advantage of screening embryos in accordance to the mark scheme was to reduce health care costs for the parents. I found it a little disconcerting, if not positively concerning, to discover that my answer that it would improve the quality of life for the child, did not feature. Is it right to present these issues to pupils in such a way that they are blinkered into one channel of thought? Is it not more productive to allow pupils to debate current affairs in such a way that they are able to access all viewpoints and form their own opinions? Arguably, the government is now more concerned with indoctrination than discussion.

In my view, it must be asked if the science curriculum is really the right place for these social issues to be debated and taught. Indeed, if education is really the process by which someone's innate intelligence is led out, then perhaps topical issues should be addressed elsewhere. Arguably, in the hours that we spend in full time education, it is more important to develop an understanding of the basics of the world around us; to understand the science behind the issues as opposed to an awareness of the actual issues, and indeed problems, that science can both cause and solve.

Furthermore, those who are employed to teach Biology, Chemistry and Physics may well become frustrated by the deviance of the curriculum from their chosen subject. Thus, their passion for the subject, presumably because of which they chose teaching in the first place, diminishes. Can pupils really find a topic which frustrates their teachers engaging?

For the pupils, this intervention and politicisation can become annoyingly transparent. Having studied global warming in all three sciences, Geography, English, French, German and Spanish, I have found that its initial shock has now ceased to have an impact. The topic has become stale, and my will to change for the better has been weakened.

There is no doubt that there are a number of social issues, concerning young people, which need to be addressed in one way or another. My question is whether GCSE science is really the place for it. Maybe PSHE is a more obvious option, but the problem is that PSHE is not regarded with anywhere near the same level of importance. I think that as young people, we do need to understand the current topics being debated, but it is possibly more beneficial to be invited to participate seriously in balanced discussion, as opposed to having to show we know the effects of smoking in part b) of question nine."

SOURCE





2 March, 2009

Oops! I'll Do It Again. And Again. And Again...

Beginning next month, the College Board will allow high-school students who have taken the SATs multiple times to submit only their highest score to the colleges to which they are applying. Called "Score Choice," this policy brings the SAT into line with the ACT, the rival college-entrance examination, and it is supposedly designed to reduce the stress that this examination places on students worried about their futures.

Of course, Score Choice will also give what many would see as an unfair advantage to those who can afford the time and the money to take the test more than once -- and the more they can take it, the greater the advantage. For colleges, it must make the job of assessing their applicants' abilities more difficult and may thus contribute to the trend toward downgrading or eliminating standardized testing in college admissions.

But Score Choice is also a manifestation of the do-over mentality whose insidious creep into the larger culture has been made apparent over the past several months by the queue of failed businessmen and financiers who have come to Washington with their hands out, asking to be rescued from the consequences of their own poor answers to life's examination questions.

Friedrich Hayek once wrote, in "The Constitution of Liberty," that a free society depends on the willingness of its people to take responsibility for their actions. Not to do so is not merely to create what we have all lately learned to call "moral hazard," but to jeopardize the very foundation of our free institutions.

If we had to point to a cause of today's all-but-universal sentiment in favor of rewarding the improvident, we might want to look first to the self-esteem movement in education. Many of the financial hotshots now wielding begging bowls must have been schoolchildren in the 1980s, when this curious philosophy took hold of our educators. Back then, in Maryland's Montgomery County, near Washington, the school district banned placing students in alphabetical order for fear that the self-esteem of those whose names began with the later letters of the alphabet would suffer.

In 1986, California was the first state to introduce self-esteem education as such. It was based on the assumption that constant praise for even the feeblest effort would encourage schoolchildren to do better. In fact, it simply removed the incentive for them to work hard. The de-emphasis on competition in school sports and the grade inflation that has become so unfortunate a feature of the academy since then have had similar effects. Studies have shown that, while American students perform poorly compared with many foreigners of the same age, they are top of the charts when it comes to how well they think they have performed. Artificially pumping up their self-esteem produces only self-deception in the first instance and frustration and anger when -- or if -- the truth must be faced.

Maybe it is our instinctive recognition of this fact which has made "American Idol" the most popular show on television. There, people are forced to face unwelcome truths about their abilities -- most of them from the British judge, Simon Cowell, whose unconcern about treading on people's vanities makes him sound deliciously naughty in a world based on self-esteem. The loud resentment felt by many of those whose illusions have been punctured is another manifestation of this culture-wide sense of entitlement.

A friend of mine not long ago listened to her 8-year-old granddaughter play a piece on the piano and suggested to her that she needed to practice some more. The child burst into tears. "Grandma," she wailed. "You're not proud of me!"

We do children no favors by teaching them that they have a right to a favorable outcome in all that they do. It used to be the case that education was thought of not just as the acquisition of knowledge -- still less as the acquisition of credentials -- but as a form of character building. And one of the ways to build character is to submit students to the same sorts of stresses and failures that adult life does, in order to teach them how to cope with such things.

There are some signs that the worst may be over. Last summer, after the British Olympic team did better than expected in Beijing, the Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown, gave a speech saying that competition was a good thing after all.

But much of our popular culture is still wedded to the assumptions behind the self-esteem movement. On her most recent album, the popular chanteuse Joni Mitchell rewrote Rudyard Kipling's famous poem, "If . . . ," changing his words,

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds' worth of distance run . . .

to her own,

If you can fill the journey of a minute

With sixty seconds worth of wonder and delight.

Of course, there are no more unforgiving minutes in the wonder and delight of Ms. Mitchell's imaginary land of endless do-overs -- which gives the lie to her subsequent promise: "Then the Earth is yours and everything that's in it, / But more than that I know you'll be all right."

No you won't. If you fail, sooner or later that failure will have to be recognized, confronted and put to rights. Not to do so in a timely fashion is only to spread the consequences of failure much more widely -- to the whole educational system in the case of the SATs and the ordinary taxpayer in the case of the bailouts. Both deserve better.

SOURCE




Caning pupils 'can be effective behaviour control'

Behaviour among British children has got worse since the cane was abolished, according to parents.

Government research showed some mothers and fathers believed corporal punishment was an "effective method of control" when they were at school. They said the decision to outlaw physical chastisement contributed to a decline in discipline. The comments - in a study backed by the Department for Children, Schools and Families - come just months after a fifth of teachers called for the cane to be reintroduced to restore order in the classroom.

This week, a report by Ofsted suggested traditional discipline methods such as suspending hundreds of troublemakers at a time and banning children with shaven heads and designer trainers was a good deterrent. Corporal punishment, including the use of the cane and ruler, was abolished in state schools in 1987 and 1998 in the fee-paying sector.

In the latest study, the Department for Children, Schools and Families held in-depth interviews with 48 adults to gauge their perception of behaviour among young people. When asked to describe what they felt was behind a decline in discipline, they made a series of observations. This included the "increasing demands on teachers - paper work, planning etc - leaving them less effective to teach and discipline effectively".

The group, which included 32 parents, also cited the "suitability of some teachers to the profession", suggesting that some lacked an ability to "instil respect and good behaviour amongst teenage pupils". They added that "the removal of corporal punishment in schools, which many felt had been an effective method of control in their day", also affected discipline standards.

Margaret Morrissey, from the campaign group Parents Outloud, said: "When it was used as a threat, rather than being used to actually hit a child, corporal punishment was often an effective deterrent. It was certainly abused in some schools and it could become something of a badge of honour for those that were hit, but the threat could be effective. "I am just not convinced that in the present climate there is a possibility it can come back. Can you imagine the number of compensation claims it would lead to? "I really do believe that the problem for the deteriorating behaviour is the political correctness of the last 10 years that has told children to stand up and complain the moment someone tries to tell them off." In the study, parents also blamed the fact that "children and young people [were] becoming more vocal and demanding and at the same time less afraid of authority".

Increasing pressure on children to be academically successful was also cited. A survey of more than 6,000 teachers last year found more than a fifth believed the cane should be brought back. One supply teacher told researchers: "Children's behaviour is now absolutely outrageous in the majority of schools. I am a supply teacher, so I see very many schools and there are no sanctions. There are too many anger management people and their ilk who give children the idea that it is their right to flounce out of lessons for time out because they have problems with their temper. They should be caned instead."

But John Dunford, of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: "Thankfully, corporal punishment is no longer on the agenda, except in the most uncivilised countries. I am sure that this barbaric punishment has disappeared forever."

SOURCE





1 March, 2009

Many students from British government schools not well enough prepared for Cambridge

State school students are missing out on places at elite universities because their grades are not good enough, Cambridge admissions chiefs said yesterday. The 'critical obstacle' to an official crusade to widen the social class mix of students is their poor performance compared with private school pupils, it was claimed. In a veiled attack on Labour's record, the university said it had failed to break the 'pernicious link between deprivation and educational attainment'.

Research commissioned by Cambridge found state school pupils make up 86 per cent of A-level candidates but only 63 per cent of those achieving three As in academic disciplines. In an analysis, Dr Geoff Parks and Richard Partington said this figure was 'unlikely' to rise 'unless their exam performance improves'.

Areas which still had grammar schools dominated the top of a table of authorities with the most state school pupils gaining three As at A-level, they added. More than 27 per cent of state pupils in Reading, which has high-performing grammars, achieved three As in 2006, compared with none in Southwark, said the analysis. Many sixthform colleges also did well. But, said Dr Parks and Mr Partington, the research showed the real barrier to top universities was an 'uneven' education playing field and the link between a child's prospects and their social background.

The research follows a Commons inquiry which found that almost 400million pounds has been spent on boosting recruitment of working-class students to university with barely any effect. Cambridge's intervention will rile Universities Secretary John Denham, who believes leading universities should do more to change the social make-up of their students. In a speech this week, Mr Denham declared: 'The more research intensive universities must address fair access effectively, or their student population will remain skewed. 'Failing to attract the best talent from all parts of our society is bad for those institutions and bad for the students who miss out on studying there.'

When Cambridge vice-chancellor Alison Richard claimed last year ministers were 'meddling' in university affairs and expecting them to pursue a 'social justice' agenda instead of concentrating on their core purposes of education and research, Mr Denham said he disagreed 'profoundly'.

Research by Cambridge Assessment, the exam board linked to the university, found that 24,580 A-levels students in 2006 achieved three or more As in subjects excluding general studies and critical thinking. Of those, 8,858 - or 36 per cent - were independently educated [with independent schools accounting for only 7% of the student population]. Grammar schools accounted for a further 4,191 - or 17 per cent - of triple A students.

SOURCE




Neo-Marxist English teachers trying to downgrade literature in Australian national curriculum

The old nonsense about the back of the cornflakes packet being just as important as Shakespeare. Literature introduces kids to diversity in thinking and we can't have that, apparently. And they are still resisting phonics! Too bad if lots of kids never learn to read, apparently.

In their own education, English teachers have had "Theory" drummed into them and they have still not unlearned that -- even though the chief protagonists of "Theory" have now abandoned it.

English teachers are seeking to downgrade the importance of literature in the national curriculum to allow the study of an expanded range of texts covering visual and multimodal forms "as essential works in their own right". The professional association purporting to represent the view of the nation's English teachers also calls for the national curriculum to recognise a whole-language method for teaching reading rather than exclusively emphasising phonics and the letter-sound relationships as the initial step.

In its submission to the National Curriculum Board's framing paper on the English curriculum, the Australian Association for the Teaching of English declares studying literature is "inherently a political action" in creating the type of people society values. The submission disputes the National Curriculum Board's definition of school English as the three elements of language, literature and literacy. "Meaning-making in, and through, language, across a range of forms, media and expressions, should be the core organiser of the curriculum," it says. "There is a need to state (that) English is the study of language, its central focus being the different processes through which meaning is made and received through different textual expressions - literary and otherwise."

It calls for the end of traditional literature as a discrete element, and for other types of English texts - which would include advertising, TV shows, signage, text messages and websites - to be viewed as essential rather than "add ons" to accompany the understanding of literary texts. "The place and role of non-literary texts in a national English curriculum needs to be rethought in terms that do not see the value of such texts as being predominantly in their potential to enhance the study of literature," it says. "The expansion of the range of texts used in English ... will necessarily mean a significant reconfiguration of the subject, including a relative reduction in the number of literary works, as the term is traditionally conceived, studied."

The AATE challenges the curriculum's view that studying literature is "a form of arts-related and arts-enriched learning experience" related to aesthetic value, saying it is only "true to a point". Rather, studying literature is "inherently a political action in that it is also about 'nation' building through the dissemination of a 'national' culture". "Studying literature also has historically had an ethical function, contributing to the shaping of a certain sort of person that societies have found desirable," it says. "It is difficult to imagine, for example, that the enduring value of works such as Animal Farm and To Kill a Mockingbird, both widely taught in schools, rests on their aesthetic qualities."

The English framing document for the national curriculum released in October is unequivocal in mandating the explicit teaching of the basic structures ofthe English language from grammar, spelling and punctuation to phonics in the first years of school. "Explicit teaching of decoding, spelling and other aspects of the basic codes of written English will be an important and routine aspect," the curriculum says.

But the AATE submission says the emphasis on phonics "comes at the expense of the focus on a balanced reading program", which is the term now applied to whole language methods of teaching reading. It calls for explicit reference to be made to "all three cueing systems" used to make sense of the written word. Under the Three Cueing Systems model for teaching reading, the sounding of letters is the least important skill, with children first asked to use semantics, and guess the word based on the context including using pictures and then use the sentence syntax to work out the meaning.

Then children use the syntax or where the word sits in the sentence to try to work out the meaning. The third and least important cue under this model is sounding out the letters. In a separate submission, the English Teachers Association of NSW argues the national curriculum threatens to "deprofessionalise" English teachers for limiting its aims to developing literacy skills and knowledge about literature.

The ETA argues for the definition of school English to be expanded to include cultural studies, critical literacy (a sociological model analysing gender, race and class in literature to expose inherent prejudices and agendas) and personal growth of students.

SOURCE