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31 March, 2010

The self-inflated Juan Cole

As I have noted before, Cole is as thick as a brick

University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole is desperate for you to know that he is eminently qualified to speak publicly on the Middle East. He is, we are told in the opening paragraph of his recent response to the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg,

[a] Middle East expert who lived in the Muslim world for nearly 10 years, travels widely there, speaks the languages, writes history from archives and manuscripts and follows current affairs ...

But from this triumphalist beginning, the story takes a tragic turn: In spite of these qualifications (which you, dear reader, almost certainly do not share), Cole "found that none of [his] experience counted for much when [he] entered the public arena in the United States."

It's not that he's thin-skinned or the like; no, it's that his experience in the real world "is like being a professional baseball player ready for the World Series" who is "kidnapped" and taken not to Yankee Stadium, but to a "secret fight club," where he must take on a "giant James Bond villain." Even when he protests to his kidnappers, "I bat .400," he's made to fight "for insulting our great aunt."

However bizarre the images of Cole's imagination, he is not lacking in self-regard. Baseball fans know that batting .400 is a difficult feat: The last man to accomplish it was Ted Williams back in 1941. Among the game's best hitters who have fallen short of this mark: Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Hank Aaron, Reggie Jackson, Derek Jeter, and Albert Pujols.

But if Cole's self-image is accurate, then why does he strike out so often when he attacks his critics?

In his response to Goldberg, Cole attempts to smear Middle East scholar Martin Kramer (who has penned devastating critiques of Cole): "He has a relationship with the so-called "Middle East Forum," which runs the McCarthyite "Campus Watch," and which was part of a scheme to have me cyber-stalked and massively spammed."

At no time has any project of the Middle East Forum taken part in anything remotely resembling the actions described in these baseless assertions. I challenge Juan Cole to produce evidence that Campus Watch or the Middle East Forum have, at any time, been part of a "scheme" to have him or anyone else "cyber-stalked and massively spammed." Such charges are self-serving conspiracy-mongering with no basis in truth.

As for Cole's other charges: How is the Middle East Forum, an IRS-approved 501 (c)(3) not-for-profit organization, the "so-called Middle East Forum"? This is the organization's legal name. If this is an attempt at sarcasm, it's lame.

In labeling Campus Watch "McCarthyite," Cole resorts to the most hackneyed cliché in the left's repertoire. (In fact, he made the same charge against us just last month -- we corrected it here.) As we have written countless times, we critique professors of Middle East studies; we do not silence them. How could we? We do not possess, and do not seek, governmental powers to issue subpoenas or silence critics.

Cole's accusations against Campus Watch fit his pattern of responding to criticism by engaging in conspiracy-theory-mongering and ad hominem attacks. To explain his failure in 2006 to land a chair at Yale University, he blamed a "concerted press campaign by neoconservatives," who used Cole's frequently intemperate writings on his blog, Informed Comment, to paint him as a radical. Cole dredges up this episode again in his response to Goldberg when he attacks Michael Oren, a Middle East studies scholar who is now Israel's ambassador to the U.S., who, Cole says, "weighed in against my receiving an appointment" to Yale.

Yet as CW contributor David White documented in his article "Juan Cole and Yale," Yale's decision was "based on an assessment of Cole's scholarly work," which several senior scholars "deemed insufficient." As a Yale political scientist told White, "At the end of the day, it wasn't his blog; it was his scholarly work. And that's why he was denied the position."

We challenge Cole to prove his latest charges against Campus Watch. Surely the self-declared Ted Williams of his discipline can hit this ball out of the park.

SOURCE




Mr Ordinary is the perfect role model for boys and not celebrities who set a bad example, warn British teachers

Their humdrum lives may lack the glamour of a footballer or TV star. But teachers say ‘the ordinary working man’ should once again be held up as an example to young boys being led astray by today’s celebrity-obsessed culture.

They warned that traditional working-class virtues are being undermined by the trend to celebrate drunkenness and excessive spending. Rather than badly behaved footballers and reality TV stars, it is hard-working and responsible fathers who are the ‘real superstars’, according to a teaching union.

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers warned that a generation of white working-class boys was growing up believing life on an ordinary wage had little meaning or purpose.

Children are losing sight of old-fashioned values such as taking pride in a job, paying their own way and looking after a family. At its conference in Manchester, the union demanded a campaign to raise the profile of community role models and ‘the ordinary working man’.

The call comes after research showed that white workingclass boys do worse at school than any other group. Teacher Ian Bonner, of ATL’s Cheshire branch, said: ‘It’s almost as if you are a nobody if you don’t earn millions. ‘If anything, the lives of the well-paid footballers demonstrate that vast wages and poor examples generally go together.’

He said celebrities were often hailed as role models even if they had committed crimes such as possessing drugs or hitting photographers.

‘The ordinary honest working man can be a good role model and is an essential member of a society that needs to function well,’ he said. ‘Getting up, going to work, doing a good job, looking after your family, if you have one, not being a drunkard, living within your means, not running up debts you can’t pay, looking after your house or flat, are all part of the role that needs to be presented as important.’

ATL members backed his call for the union to ‘publicise the contribution made to society by men who support and care for their families in a positive and responsible manner’.

Mr Bonner said: ‘It is hard work bringing up children to be responsible and well-behaved, caring and considerate, generous and just good. ‘These are the real superstars in our society and without them this society would go belly-up within months.’

These unsung heroes are ‘far more essential to the life of our nation than those who get paid millions for kicking a ball around or who have found instant stardom on a talent show’, he said.

Suitable role models needed to be promoted for white working-class boys so they can see that ‘life can have as much, if not more, meaning and purpose without lots of expensive possessions’. ‘They will see that raising children to be good members of society is harder than jetting around the world and being in the papers,’ he said.

Mr Bonner told the conference working-class boys were ‘not motivated to learn because they see the education provided for them as irrelevant’. ‘They do not see it as relevant because they do not see people in society who came from their background making the news in a positive manner,’ he added.

SOURCE




Australian student doctors not learning anatomy

This is incredible. Anatomy is utterly basic

MEDICAL students at some universities are receiving minimal training in anatomy, undergoing as little as 56 hours in a five-year course - 10 times less than their counterparts at other institutions.

A comparison of anatomy tuition at 19 medical schools found enormous variations in teaching time, ranging from 85 up to 560 hours across some six-year courses, and as low as 56 hours among five-year degree programs - even though four-year courses managed to offer at least 75 hours.

The research - triggered by recent controversies over newly graduated doctors' shrinking anatomical knowledge - also found most staff who taught anatomy were not senior doctors, but instead non-clinical staff who included physiotherapists and even other medical students.

Further, more than half of Australia's medical schools did not set a minimum level of achievement for their students in anatomy and did not separately mark it. Several universities admitted this meant students could do "very poorly" in their anatomy studies, but could still progress and graduate if they did well in other disciplines.

The study's lead author, Steven Craig, a recent medical graduate, said he could recall fellow students not bothering to revise anatomy in the lead-up to barrier exams that would decide whether they continued in their course, knowing that poor knowledge of the topic would not jeopardise their place on the program.

"We believe consideration should be given to developing undergraduate learning goals or guidelines for anatomical teaching," the authors wrote in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Surgery.

"A standardised national curriculum and perhaps even a standardised national examination to assess anatomical knowledge prior to graduation may be needed to ensure all graduates attain at least some minimum acceptable knowledge base in gross anatomy."

The findings mark the first attempt to gauge how much anatomy tuition Australia's medical schools are providing, after The Australian in 2006 reported growing concern among senior clinicians and academics that many medical schools had cut anatomy teaching to potentially unsafe levels to make way for other topics. Some experts have attacked the priority given to non-medical topics such as communication, ethics and cultural sensitivity.

The medical colleges for surgeons, anaesthetists and pathologists, which train specialist doctors and oversee standards, said the findings vindicated their longstanding concerns and called for all medical schools to properly assess students' knowledge of anatomy and other basic sciences.

John Quinn, executive director of surgical affairs for the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, said "a large variation" in anatomical knowledge was already apparent among recently graduated doctors.

Those with poor understanding of anatomy ordered more tests, including X-rays and CT scans that exposed patients to potentially harmful radiation, when these might not be necessary. "I think it would be reasonable to have a national minimum standard of teaching (anatomy)," Dr Quinn said.

Ross Roberts-Thomson, president of the Australian Medical Students Association, said no student should be able to graduate without being tested on essential topics such as anatomy.

But he rejected calls for a national curriculum or exam, and said students at medical schools that delivered less formal anatomy tuition might be learning in other contexts not captured by the figures. "If you are learning about heart attacks, you learn about the anatomy of the heart during that assessment," Mr Roberts-Thomson said.

Jim Angus, president of Medical Deans Australia and New Zealand, said he was concerned at the claim some students appeared to believe anatomy could be safely left out of exam revision. "Game-playing should not occur - I don't like the sound of that at all," Professor Angus said. However, he rejected the call for national standards.

SOURCE





30 March, 2010

Smart young student sues over forbidden study

Smart kids are rarely well-catered for by "equality"-oriented educators

Colin Carlson is a sophomore at the University of Connecticut working on a bachelor's with a double major in ecology and evolutionary biology. So it made some sense that he signed up for a class on the flora and fauna of South Africa. (Watch out for the gogga, bokkie.) The university refused to allow it and Colin's gatvol over it.

He's halfway through university and complains: "They're upsetting the framework of one of my majors." And they are. It's either this year or next and it's unlikely they will allow Colin to take the course next year either. It isn't that there is no space on the course. The issue is that it requires field work in South Africa over the summer and the school won't let Colin go. Almost any other student on campus is allowed to go, provided they are not on probation and have at least a "C" average. Colin is not on probation and has a 3.9 GPA, which is bascially an "A+" average. The school says it is because he is 13-years-old.

Colin says that is age discrimination and is suing.

Colin started taking university classes when he was 9 even though he only finished the Stanford University Online High School until the advanced age of 11. That was when he enrolled at UConn full-time. He taught himself to read when he was 2 and had finished and was deep into the Harry Potter series by the age of 4.

Colin's mother, Jessica Offir, has offered to sign any legal documents needed to remove all legal responsibility from the university, if they allow Colin to take the course. She has even offered to fly there with her son as an escort, at her own expense.

Colin is upset because the course was critical for his particular interests and said that his ban from the class has forced him to change plans for his thesis. He does have a trip to South Africa planned anyway, wieth a National Science Foundation-funded research group.

The university says it is because they are concerned about his safety. Ah, that desire to Nanny others and protect them from themself.

Colin didn't want to sue, but says he was offered no choice. "When people are drawing lines in the sand, you're going to have to cross them. I'm not going back."

I am a bit disappointed with UConn myself. They seemed amazingly flexible as an institution in the past, they allowed me to design my own major. There were only four or five of us on campus allowed to do this, but we determined the course of our studies provided we had a professor acting as our mentor. My mentor taught sociology with an emphasis on criminology and eventually became a libertarian—which pleased me as you might expect.

The reality is that "adolescents" are far more capable than we ever give them credit for. This was well outlined in The Case Against Adolescence. As I see it, adults treat adolescents as if they are children and then can't understand why they are frustrated, angry and moody. Ninety percent of the time problems can be solved with a simple explanation. Ah, but parents don't explain. Why? Because they can't. Too often parents lay down arbitrary, inconsistent rules and when their teen asks them, "Why?" they can't give a rational answer. So the resort to the answer of the bully: "Because I said so."

Instead of using such times to teach reason and logic, too many parents try to teach blind obedience to authority and respect for the ability to use force. I have more confidence in the teens than I do in the adults of this country. Why? Simple: the adults have already proven they are incompetent and capable of screwing things up.

So I applaud Colin for pursuing his dream and his education and applaud him for standing up for himself in the face of UConn's policy. If want teens to act like adults we have to stop treating them like children.

SOURCE




Delaware, Tennessee win “Race to the Top” funding

In an effort to improve America's public schools, the Obama administration has dangled the ultimate carrot -- money. More than $4 billion of stimulus package money was offered through the U.S. Education Department's "Race to the Top'" grant program.

Delaware and Tennessee are the first states awarded millions for schools. Of 41 states that applied, only two -- Delaware and Tennessee -- got a passing grade today. They will receive $600 million total, while the other 39 states will get nothing for now.

"This is about systemic reform really driving change at a state-level and these two states did a spectacular job of that," said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

The final number came as a surprise to many -- the Education Department originally suggested that as many as 10 of the original 41 applicants could ultimately win.

States were judged on their past success at education reform, as well as their plans to embrace common academic standards, improve teacher quality, create educational data systems, and turn around their lowest-performing schools.

The two winners will receive amounts close to their initial requests. Delaware will receive roughly $100 million and Tennessee $500 million.

Union Support a Contributing Factor

Both Delaware and Tennessee agreed to tie teacher's evaluations to student performance and implement reforms in every school district statewide. Crucially, they also got nearly full support from the teacher's unions.

Experts believed Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana all had strong -- if not stronger -- applications, but what they lacked was the nearly unanimous support from local unions and school districts obtained by Delaware and Tennessee.

"I think this is a win for the unions. What it shows is they have veto power over state application. If they don't sign on, their states are unlikely to get funding," said Michael Petrilli, vice president for National Programs and Policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

But Duncan said this afternoon that local support was just one of many factors considered in the applications.

"This is a 500-point competition. We looked for the strongest applications overall. Buy-in was a piece of the application. It was by no means the determining factor," Duncan told reporters on a conference call.

More here




British School pupils ‘being used as political footballs’, says Association of Teachers and Lecturers

Schoolchildren are being turned into “political footballs” by MPs, according to a teachers’ leader. They are increasingly made to feel like failures at an early age if they struggle to hit pre-conceived Government targets, said Lesley Ward, president of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers. She told the union’s annual conference that meddling by politicians meant children failed to enjoy school as much as previous generations.

The comments come just weeks after inspectors found that Labour’s £4.5 billion school reforms were failing to improve standards in the three-Rs because schools had been “overwhelmed” by red tape. Ofsted found that progress in English and maths has been “too slow” over the last four years as state schools struggled under the weight of new initiatives and teaching materials introduced as part of the National Strategies programme.

In a speech to the union’s annual conference in Manchester, Mrs Ward said: "I don't think I would like to be a school child at the moment. “I don't think I would like to be a statistic. I don't think I would like to be told, at a very early age, what level I should be at, or that I am not at the right level and despite doing my best I am failing somehow. "I don't think I would like to feel guilty for being poorly during Sats week if my absence brought the school's score down. I don't think I would enjoy being a political football."

Mrs Ward, a primary school teacher from Doncaster, said education policy had become stuck, with the same issues being debated now as they were 40 years ago. "I am on to my 15th Secretary of State for Education and my 29th Minister for Education,” she said. “I have lived through, endured, survived, call it what you like, 54 pieces of education legislation since I started teaching. One more and it would be one for each year of my life."

The union, which represents 160,000 school staff, called for the abolition of Ofsted and league tables and a more trust in “teachers’ professional judgment”.

SOURCE





29 March, 2010

The entitlement mentality in academia

Brian Leiter is incensed. Mr. Leiter — famous primarily for his website containing comparative rankings of philosophy programs, as well as his blog, which covers job-related news in academic philosophy — has recently learned that King's College, London (KCL) is facing budget problems and must cut back on staff. In order to assess the extent of layoffs, the school will require every faculty member to interview for their current position.

Leiter has kept his readers updated on the situation through his blog, and linked to The Times Higher Education's coverage of the event — which, in an article titled "'Draconian' measure: King's to cut 205 jobs," emphasizes how the cutbacks will affect the humanities and focuses on the reaction this has set off among academics:

A proposal on "restructuring" in the School of Arts and Humanities, where 22 jobs are at risk, tells staff that "all academic roles … will be declared at risk of redundancy."

Selection of the redundancies "will be done through an assessment based on the performance of each role holder," it adds.

A group of 26 academics from nearby University College London have written to the head of the school, Jan Palmowski, warning that such a "savage reduction of staff numbers" would mean that the best candidates in the humanities will "shun the institution."

Only in academia — or in government — could the reduction of just over two hundred jobs from among thousands (and in this economic climate!) be considered "draconian" and "savage" in an unqualified sense. The reaction of these academics betrays the degree to which an entitlement mentality has permeated institutions of higher education.

No one enjoys it when resources are mismanaged, time and money are wasted, and an organization must face tough decisions on how to clean up after its past mistakes. Sometimes these corrections include firing staff members, some of whom may have been hard-working and dedicated employees. However, while personnel changes caused by financial problems are often tragic, the alternatives — pretending that no such problems exist, for example — are much worse.

Unsustainable activities cannot continue forever, for the simple reason that they are wasteful by definition and must eventually either collapse or become a drag on the rest of society (e.g., through tax- or inflation-funded transfers of wealth). Those companies and institutions not on the public dole do not have the second option: profit and loss mechanisms ensure that all organizations which weigh down the rest of society are dissolved, reformed, sold to more capable owners, reorganized, etc.

However, this is not the case with universities and colleges, most of which are entirely state owned and the majority of which receive sizeable benefits supplied by the public. Administrators at these institutions enjoy the privilege of negotiating political solutions for their financial problems, which amounts to bypassing the need to please consumers first and foremost. Yet this comes at a cost: if you earn your living not by voluntary exchange but through entitlement, it is impossible to run an organization on sound financial principles.

During the good times, few notice the tension between economic reality and university policy. There is enough money to go around, and schools routinely enlarge their scope of activity by hiring promising young scholars and expanding the number of programs they offer. But when recessions hit and everyone is forced to rein in his spending, academics desire to retain their right not to be affected by the rest of the world's concerns. They ride the boom but refuse to feel the bust.

Even the reorganization of one school such as KCL — in this case, the reduction of a small percentage of its faculty — can send academics across the world into a fury. Brian Leiter comments on the situation:

KCL Philosophy is a remarkably consistent unit in terms of strength, so it is an insult that any member of staff should have to re-apply for his or her job. Indeed, we can go much further: it is an insult and an outrage that any professional hired with an expectation of permanent employment absent gross dereliction of duties should have to re-apply for his or her job.

Terms like "insult" and "outrage" imply that the morality of a matter is clear and needs little or no explanation. Yet it is not apparent why KCL's reorganization is such a case.

Granted, KCL has broken promises it made to its professors, who were "hired with an expectation of permanent employment." However, there are many situations in which breaking a promise — while undesirable — is nevertheless necessary in order to avoid an even worse state of affairs. When an institution makes grand promises of a prosperous future, it should be obvious that the fulfillment of such claims is simply not within its control. Who is KCL to decide that it will remain prosperous regardless of a change in the economic climate?

It's not outrageous to fall short of a promise you never should have made; on the contrary, to make questionable commitments is unwise and blameworthy in itself. Consider an industry that has experienced its own crisis in recent years: real-estate–management firms boasted record high profits in 2005, with promises of ever-greater expansion in the future. During 2007 I worked in a massive, new complex with offices, retail space, and residential areas that had been planned at the height of real-estate mania. It was built on the expectation of steady increases in real-estate prices, but to this day only a fraction of its condos and offices have been sold or leased. The project remains a massive failure.

The firm that executed the project, their investors, their clients, and their employees were all deceived: in reality, the real-estate boom was a sham, and the project, which seemed like a sure bet, never had a chance. And so the consequences for their foolishness had to be met. Promises could not be kept; painful cutbacks and reorganization were needed to survive. Many were disappointed.

Strangely enough, I have never seen any outraged letters to the editor about asset managers losing their jobs. Everyone recognizes that there was simply too much real-estate–related activity at the time, pushing too many, often ill-conceived projects. Most also realize that to continue the illusion can only delay the recovery and readjustment to normality. If there are too many workers in real estate, some of them need to find productive work in other fields.

The same principles must apply to higher education no less than they do to real estate, whether we choose to recognize this or not. The only difference — and the reason busts appear to go easy on universities — lies in the political connectedness of most schools. When times are tough, the taxpayers are expected to eat the lion's share of costs (since university professors after all are "hired with an expectation of permanent employment").

More here




British High School exam results being 'inflated', says examiner

School exam results are being driven up by “grade inflation”, a leading examiner has admitted. Tim Oates, head of research at Cambridge Assessment, said that exam boards had bowed to political pressure by making questions more accessible for students and giving schools guidance about the way tests were marked.

He suggested that changes to GCSEs and A-levels could be leading to a rise in the number of students gaining the top grades. Last year, some 17 per cent of students scored three A grades at A-level, compared with only seven per cent in the mid-90s.

Mr Oates said publicly admitting the possibility of "subtle drift" in standards sounded like a "Ratner moment" for exam boards - a reference to Gerald Ratner whose infamous gaffe about the quality of his jewellery wiped an estimated £500m from the value of his company.

But he said it would be "profoundly dysfunctional" for examiners not to critically assess the reasons for rising results.

Writing in an article published by Cambridge Assessment, he said: “Giving the benefit of the doubt to pupils… can result in subtle grade inflation.

“Constantly enhancing the ‘accessibility’ of questions, the transparency of mark schemes and the precision of guidance can ease up the numbers gaining the highest grades.

“Changing the content to be more accessible to a wider audience than the previous educational elite can in turn move the content standards away from the precise requirements of elite higher education.”

The comments were made in an article designed to kick start a debate on why the number of top grades rises year-on-year.

Results published last summer showed the number of A-level papers graded A to E increased for the 27th year in a row.

More than a quarter of entries in England, Wales and Northern Ireland was awarded an A grade – double the number 20 years ago.

Critics have claimed that examinations have been “dumbed down” to make them easier to pass.

Mr Oates said exam boards – independent organisations with contracts to run GCSEs and A-levels – were under political pressure to make tests more accessible to students. This included moving to "modular" courses, which are broken up into bite-sized chunks that students can re-take to boost overall grades.

“Increasing access, updating content, switching to modular [tests] – and being as transparent as possible over mark schemes, grade criteria and guidance – have all been fervent pre-occupations of policy makers and the education establishment,” he said. “Awarding bodies have delivered on that agenda.”

SOURCE




British classroom anarchy, killers in school uniform and how a generation is being betrayed

Note for U.S. readers: The writer below uses the old British convention of referring to "public" schools when he means private schools. Government schools are "State" schools

The murder of 15-year-old Sofyen Belamouadden is an especially shocking gang crime because it was carried out in the midst of Victoria station, by [black] boys apparently wearing school blazers.

It is tragically easy to imagine the horrors of life in the sort of classrooms the murderers come from. We have grown accustomed to the existence of feral children - violent, amoral, unteachable and later unemployable - in many parts of Britain.

It is easy to identify their immediate victims, fellow teenagers who are bullied and occasionally killed. But beyond these, a much larger host pays the price: millions of children who want to equip themselves to lead decent lives. Indiscipline and violence are viruses, which infect all those around them. In classrooms up and down the land, they make it impossible for many teachers to teach and their pupils to be educated.

For every young gangster, there are 20 or 30 more children who, amid chronic disruption, are robbed of the opportunity to gain skills which alone can offer them a future beyond stacking supermarket shelves.

The sanction of exclusion exists, and is imposed in extreme cases. But in thousands of schools, in the name of 'social justice' and 'fairness', every teacher is expected to handle their quota of 'difficult' children. They are obliged to conduct classes in which the presence of disruptive boys and girls is taken for granted.

If teachers lose their tempers or fail to handle such pupils, this is deemed a symptom of professional failure. Such an approach is shockingly wrong. The interests of law-abiding, biddable children are daily damaged on a massive scale, to protect the supposed rights of the lawless minority.

Last week, I received a lengthy letter from a secondary school teacher, attesting to this state of affairs. It was anonymous, because identification would mean dismissal. 'Blending is a key feature of the state sector,' he writes. 'Pupils who cannot, and will not, behave appropriately are blended in with the other children. They call it inclusion. 'Teachers are expected to have their fair share of unmanageable louts and those who struggle to cope are labelled as poor teachers.

'This is manifestly unfair, because class teachers have no powers whatsoever to deal with the louts. They can only call for assistance, which is considered to indicate an inability to manage behaviour. You can predict levels of poor behaviour by looking at the academic results of a school.'

The Labour Government has miserably failed to raise state educational standards. It has spent hundreds of millions of pounds to create a massive edifice of supervision and bureaucracy. Far from supporting the teaching process, this sustains a reign of terror among school heads who must meet relentless, meaningless targets.

Worse, the educational establishment is fundamentally resistant to imposed discipline or sanctions against unruly children. It trains young teachers to suppose that anti-social behaviour is self-correcting, a view shared by no sensible parent.

I disliked school, as most of us do, and indeed was a badly behaved child. But I realise how vastly privileged was my private education, and that of my children. Fees bought excellent teaching. Much more important, we learned things because we were constrained within a rigorous framework of discipline. If we erred, we were punished. Serious excess meant expulsion - the sack - which is recognised in every middle-class household as a disgrace.

The real privilege of attending a public school is not to 'learn to talk posh' or even to enjoy lavish facilities. It is to acquire habits of self-discipline without which it is impossible for a human being to achieve anything in life, or even to relate to other people. One is taught that it is impossible to indulge every immediate impulse, and often necessary to do things one does not wish.

Of course some state schools and new academies foster this culture, and each year turn out thousands of well-behaved as well as educated adolescents. But they are a minority.

Many, if not most, are trapped in an endless struggle to avoid succumbing to mob rule. It is a miracle that they manage to teach their pupils anything at all.

I quote again from my teacher correspondent's bitter letter: 'My experiences have shown me that state education is being run by people who do not believe in discipline. They believe that unruly pupils will eventually reform themselves. They refuse to adopt rigorous policies.

'They have moved the definition of what constitutes "good" teaching. A lesson cannot be graded as "good" by Ofsted unless ALL the pupils in the class make good progress. If a single pupil misbehaves or refuses to work, the teacher is penalised.

'None of this makes for good teaching. Teachers become so obsessed with ticking all the boxes on the Ofsted checklist that they forget about the content.'

Most parents understand all this, and know what needs to be done. Only the Labour Party and the education establishment reject the obvious message.

We shall continue to fail in our efforts to match the new generation of, for instance, young Singaporeans until children willing to learn and obey rules are segregated from those who are not.

Call this, if you like, a quarantine process. We take it for granted that people suffering an infectious disease are set apart from the healthy for as long as doctors recommend.

In state schools, there is a sort of madness about the systemic rejection of such precautions. Month after month and year after year, a child or group of children is permitted to wreck the learning process for scores or hundreds of others.

Of course it is true that some of the wreckers deserve compassion - for the misery of their home lives, broken families or deprived circumstances. Those of us who live comfortable existences untouched by squalor, crime or violence know how fortunate we are. But the majority also has its rights.

In education as so much else, the Labour Government has ruthlessly subordinated the vital interests of most of the British people to the supposed welfare of minorities, some of them criminal.

The murder at Victoria station should serve as an alarm call, not merely about teenage violence, but about its consequences for much of our schools population. Until uncontrollable and unteachable children are separated from the rest, state education will continue to fail

It is hard to overstate the importance of what is at stake. Unless our state schools can produce much larger numbers of educated and disciplined pupils than they do today, not only will the individuals suffer, but this country will be unable to compete through the 21st century.

We live in an era dominated by technology and science. Yet science classes have become a privilege available overwhelmingly to fee-paying pupils.

In most state schools, basic skills to make possible such learning are lacking among teachers and pupils. Universities complain that many students waste their first year mastering essay-writing and other core techniques indispensable to fulfil degree courses, and which should be acquired before A-level.

If further evidence was needed of the insane social engineering conducted by those running Britain's education system, it came yesterday from Professor Steve Smith, President of Universities UK. he called for more university places to be given to students from poorer backgrounds, heedless of their inferior A-level grades. This supremely foolish man is demanding a further lowering of standards, in recognition of the ghastly failure of state schools.

The murder at Victoria station should serve as an alarm call, not merely about teenage violence, but about its consequences for much of our schools population. Until uncontrollable and unteachable children are separated from the rest, state education will continue to fail.

Unless teachers have power to command the attention of their classes, they cannot instill the learning for which schools exist.

Feral children merit pity, because their futures are bleak even if they escape likely years caged in cells. But much more sympathy is owed to millions of honest and ambitious teenagers who are today forced to share the cost of the gangsters' animality.

SOURCE





28 March, 2010

“No Child” stalls reading scores nationwide

The nation’s students are mired at a basic level of reading in fourth and eighth grades, their achievement in recent years largely stagnant, according to a federal report yesterday that suggests a dwindling academic payoff from the landmark No Child Left Behind law.

The report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, showed that fourth-grade reading scores stalled after the law took effect in 2002, rose modestly in 2007, then stalled again in 2009. Eighth-grade scores showed a slight uptick since 2007 — 1 point on a scale of 500 — but no gain over the seven-year span when President George W. Bush’s program for school reform was in high gear.

Only in Kentucky did reading scores rise significantly in both grades from 2007 to 2009.

For the third straight time, Massachusetts fourth- and eighth-graders received the nation’s highest reading scores. Fourth-graders scored an average of 234 on the 2009 test, compared with the national average of 220. Eighth-graders averaged 274, tied for first with five other states and above the 262 national average.

Governor Deval Patrick touted the results at an afternoon press conference. “This is a wonderful, wonderful reflection of all the hard work that has been done in classrooms and schools all across the Commonwealth,’’ Patrick said.

Patrick and Secretary of Education Paul Reville said that, despite the results, they remained concerned about a persistent achievement gap between students of color and white students and poor students and their peers from wealthier families.

No Child Left Behind, which Bush signed in 2002, aimed to spur a revolution in reading. The government spent billions of dollars to improve instruction and required schools to monitor student progress every year toward an ambitious goal of eliminating achievement gaps.

Yet an authoritative series of federal tests has found only isolated gains — notably including the District of Columbia’s long-troubled public schools — but no great leaps for the nation.

“We’ve had a real focus on reading, and we’re stuck,’’ said Susan Pimentel, a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the tests. The report, she said, “points to an issue, and we’ve got to as practitioners figure what’s going on. I think students aren’t reading enough. And I think they aren’t reading enough of the good stuff. That’s true in grade 4, and that’s true in grade 8, on up.’’

Last fall, the government reported sluggish gains in math in a companion series of federal tests. Taken together, the reading and math results are likely to be seized on by would-be reformers as evidence that a new approach should be taken. But what that should be remains an open question.

“Today’s results once again show that the achievement of American students isn’t growing fast enough,’’ Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement. “The reading scores demonstrate that students aren’t making the progress necessary to compete in the global economy. We shouldn’t be satisfied with these results. By this and many other measures, our students aren’t on a path to graduate high school ready to succeed in college and the workplace.’’

President Obama wants to raise standards and give educators more freedom to innovate, without abolishing the premise of No Child Left Behind that students should be tested every year and schools held accountable for failure. Teachers unions, critical of Obama’s plan, say educators should be given far more funding and other help to lift the performance of struggling students. Talks are underway in Congress on a rewrite of the law.

Nationally, the public average for fourth-grade reading scores remained 220 on the 500-point scale. D.C. test scores have been trending upward for some time, but achievement in the city’s schools remains far below the high marks of the surrounding suburbs. D.C. scores showed a surge to 202 last year from 197 in 2007. Virginia’s score was unchanged at 227. The national average for eighth-grade reading scores is 262.

D.C. schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee attributed some of the District’s recent gains to the creation of a two-hour “literacy block’’ in all elementary schools. That amounts to two hours every school day of uninterrupted focus on reading.

SOURCE




Winds of Change in the Windy City’s School System

Chicago witnessed one small victory for urban school reform and parental choice yesterday as the Illinois State Senate voted 33-20 to approve a pilot voucher program for low-income Chicago students currently attending the city’s worst performing schools. The School Choice Act, sponsored by Democrat James Meeks, provides children in Kindergarten through 8th grade state-funded vouchers to attend a private or parochial school in the city. Senator Meeks testified to the voucher program’s importance in providing low-income students a way out of the underperforming Chicago public schools.

“‘By passing this bill, we’ll give 22,000 kids an opportunity to have a choice on whether or not they’ll continue in their failing school or go to another non-public school within the city of Chicago. Just as we came up with and passed charter schools to help children, now is an opportunity to pass this bill so we can help more children escape the dismal realities of Chicago’s public schools,’ Meeks said.”

The Senate bill requires that the voucher amount be equal either to the average spending per public school student or equal to an enrolled student’s private school tuition costs, which ever is lower. Illinois currently spends an average $6,119 per public school student; but since the current average elementary parochial school only costs $3,234, the average per-pupil voucher amount will likely be lower than average per-pupil expenditure in public schools. If the bill is passed by the Illinois House, K-8 students currently attending a school ranked in the lowest 10 percent of the Chicago School District schools could receive vouchers for the 2011-12 school year, with enrolled students’ academic progress monitored for the following three years of the pilot program. If the voucher system is a success, Meeks hopes the program will expand to allow low-income students across the state a chance to escape failing schools and experience the socioeconomic opportunities afforded by a quality education.

Despite the voucher program’s apparent savings to taxpayers and assistance for low-income students, the Chicago Teachers’ Union was ready with routine complaints that the program will drain resources and talent from the city’s public schools. A union spokesperson stated that, “It will endanger schools that are already struggling.” However, allowing students and families to choose among public and private schools has the potential to actually assist public education. Empirical studies have demonstrated that there is academic improvement within public schools as a result of the competitive pressure placed on those systems by school choice programs.

If vouchers become a reality in Chicago, they will provide tens of thousands of families the opportunity to escape the underperforming public schools and pursue an educational path that best suits their needs.

SOURCE




One facet of a totalitarian state

The facets that define a totalitarian state are often hard to discern; there is always the risk of pushing the argument too far, evoking unsuitable analogies with the fascist governments of the last century. Nevertheless, a spade is spade, and this story of the persecution of a German family point to a dangerous state of affairs.

After the police came knocking, dragging their children off to school, Uwe and Hannalore Romeike and their three children applied for, and were thankfully granted, asylum in the US. Their crime? Educating their children in their home, rather than at school. Judge Lawrence O. Burman, a federal immigration judge in Tennessee, determined that they had a reasonable fear of persecution for their beliefs if they returned. He described the German Government’s actions as “repellent to everything we believe as Americans”.

Germany is not alone. In Sweden, a coalition led by a so-called Liberal party is getting tough on homeschooling, with the proposed introduction of a bill that would only allow home education under extraordinary circumstances. It would also allow the imposition of criminal sanctions on those parents that refused to supplicate to the will of the state.

And in the UK, the government is ignoring the Schools Select Committee in its call to make the registration of home-educated children voluntary. The Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) defends its position as follows: “we cannot understand the logic of making it voluntary”. I can help them answer their confusion: because these children are not owned by the state.

There is much talk of how under Obama the US is becoming a socialist dystopia. Sure, things are bad and getting worse, but as the asylum offered to the German home educators illustrates, they still have a fair way to fall before they hit the strictures on freedom infesting the Old World.

SOURCE





27 March, 2010

MA: Panel OKs school budget cuts, teachers protest

A crowd from a rally that drew hundreds of school employees tried rushing into Boston School Department headquarters last night, sparking a standoff with police, just hours before the School Committee slashed millions of dollars in spending for the next school year but without closing any schools.

More than a dozen police officers struggled for several minutes to pull the doors free of the crowd, in an effort to prevent anyone from entering the downtown Court Street building, where the School Committee chamber was nearing its capacity of 167 people. One man, as he tried to push his way through the doors, yelled, “We have a right.’’ A few moments later, an officer yelled to colleagues down the hallway, “We need help.’’ Eventually the officers slammed the doors shut and stood guard.

The confrontation came as the district faces its third consecutive year of severe budget cutting, while the state and the city struggle to rebound from the nation’s troubled economy.

Although the School Committee unanimously approved the $821.4 million budget, all seven members expressed regret about cutting school spending again. “We know these cuts are painful,’’ said the Rev. Gregory Groover, the board’s chairman.

Emotions are running even higher than in previous years because new efforts by the state and federal governments to overhaul public education have led the state to declare 12 Boston schools underperforming this month, causing Superintendent Carol R. Johnson to force teachers at half of those schools to reapply for their jobs.

The rally was organized by the teachers union and included community activists, parents, students, and members of other city unions such as bus drivers and custodians. “Our schools aren’t underperforming, they are underresourced,’’ Richard Stutman, the teachers union president, yelled to the crowd earlier.

Johnson said she tried to avoid cuts that would directly affect classroom learning. While the budget does not call for teacher layoffs, it will bar principals from replacing some teachers who retire or leave the district for other reasons.

One area taking a big hit is building maintenance. More than $5 million worth of repair projects, such as repainting dingy walls, will be put on hold. The budget also eliminates more than 80 custodial positions, about 20 percent of that workforce, nearly all through layoffs.

In a statement yesterday, Michael Lafferty of the custodian union linked maintenance in the schools to student health and safety. Several School Committee members expressed discomfort with losing so many custodians.

The financial outlook has improved slightly since Johnson unveiled her budget proposal early last month. She initially recommended, at the request of Mayor Thomas M. Menino, spending 1 percent less than this year’s total. Earlier this month, the mayor decided the city could afford to spend the same next year as it is spending this year.

That, however, still meant the district had to cut roughly $50 million because of increases in health care premiums and contractually negotiated pay raises.

After making a series of cuts, the district still confronted a $3.5 million spending gap this week, prompting the mayor to allow the district to increase next year’s budget by that amount.

The decision enabled Johnson to avoid the prospect of controversial school closings this fall. But she warned last night that a significant number of schools will have to close in the coming years. Enrollment has plummeted by thousands of students over the last decade, leaving roughly 4,500 empty seats scattered across the district’s 135 schools. “We have to address excess capacity if we are going to have any resources left,’’ Johnson said.

The budget now heads to the mayor, who will include it in his budget proposal to the City Council next month.

During public testimony before the vote, Manuel Rios Alers, a 17-year-old junior from the John D. O’Bryant School of Math and Science in Roxbury, spoke against cutting more than $500,000 from his school’s operating funds and also reducing custodial staff from the district. He said his school, where students must pass an academic exam for admittance, suffered leaks during last week’s torrential rain, causing mold. “If you keep cutting our schools, we will be in the gutter,’’ he said.

A classmate, Eftina Gjikuria, 17, held up an English book with most of its pages coming unglued from its binding and said, “I’m sad to say I’m in AP English, and this is what I get.’’

At the rally, police closed off traffic to a section of Court Street as the crowd grew and protesters banged drums, blared sirens, and honked horns. Some waved signs that said, “Budget cuts hurt kids’’ and “Underfunding equals underperforming.’’

Groover apologized to the attendees that many others could not join them inside, but emphasized that the School Committee had to abide by the law for seating capacity. Another member suggested the group take that energy to Beacon Hill to lobby for more money for the district.

Source




Unteachable pupils sent back to terrified British school staff despite assaults and sex attacks

Unteachable children are described in a dossier as a teaching union accused governors of not protecting staff. It is a shocking document which lays bare the realities of teaching in increasingly unruly schools.

One teacher reports the case of a 14-year-old boy who attacked her and sexually assaulted a female classroom assistant.

Another boy, this time aged only five, threatened to stab a member of staff with a pair of scissors and threw chairs in his reception class.

Most disturbingly, the culprits have all been returned to the classroom against the wishes of teachers - often after initially being excluded or expelled.

Nine 'unteachable' children are described in a dossier produced by the NASUWT union. Five were expelled by head teachers only to be reinstated by governing bodies. The union accuses governors of being more concerned with placating parents of troublemakers than protecting staff.

In the other four cases, head teachers themselves failed to take firm action, leaving classroom teachers in what they describe as an impossible position.

Chris Keates, NASUWT general secretary, said the dossier highlighted a 'deeply worrying' assault on teachers' authority. 'Governors seem to be taking the line of least resistance to placate the minority of parents rather than to protect the majority of pupils and their staff,' she said. 'If governors do not back head teachers' professional judgment in these matters then staff and school leaders cannot manage behaviour with confidence.

'Equally concerning is that, in the other cases, which were all serious incidents, the school took either no action or made the very weak response of temporary exclusion.'

One case of indiscipline even saw parents of fellow pupils removing their children out of fears they would be injured.

In all cases, the NASUWT union held a ballot for industrial action - refusing to teach the child involved - to force schools to protect staff from the troublemakers.

In most instances, the boycotting tactic resulted in the pupil being moved to a different school. In one, the youngster was moved to a specialist centre until they took their GCSEs.

The union said it dealt with an average of one case of a poor response to serious indiscipline a week but many were resolved without threats of industrial action.

Mrs Keates said the attacks, all in 2009, highlighted a growing trend for school decisions to go against teachers' interests.

Heads and governors are failing to use new legal powers to discipline children, she warned. Schools previously complained about independent appeals. 'Governing bodies have now overtaken independent appeals panels in the perversity of their judgments in relation to reinstating disruptive pupils,' Mrs Keates said.

'A very common feature reported to us by teachers is that when they raise behaviour problems in school they don't feel they are supported in maintaining discipline. 'They often cite that either they are held to blame for the poor behaviour by pupils or there is more concern for protecting the reputation of the school or placating parents.'

SOURCE




Australia: Getting black kids to go to school is the first challenge

But it is one that is not nearly being met. Excerpts below from comments by black activist Noel Pearson

SOMETIMES I just cannot understand how governments think when it comes to setting indigenous policies. Two of the five goals that all Australian governments are now striving to close the gap on indigenous disadvantage concern education.

It is probably useful to distil a complex policy agenda down to a handful of key goals, because some of these dashboard indicators can capture whether or not progress is being made across a broad policy range and gaps are closing.

But I have problems with the policy reasoning underpinning the two educational goals.

First the goal of doubling the year 12 completion rates for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students is strange. Of course secondary school completion rates are important, but in a strategic sense there other more fundamental prerequisite policy goals which, if solved, will automatically result in higher year 12 completion rates.

The strategically important goal is closing the gap on literacy and numeracy achievement by indigenous students. You solve this problem, you solve the year 12 completion rate problem.

There is a strategically important prerequisite to closing the gap on literacy and numeracy, and that is school readiness and attendance. You can't close the gap on literacy and numeracy unless you first close the gap on school readiness and attendance.

So if I were the policy-maker, I would establish school readiness and attendance as the target goal. And I would set a very brief timeframe for achieving it. School attendance is not rocket science: surely governments and indigenous communities can close this gap in short order.

The good thing about school readiness and attendance is that it is a tangible, actionable goal. What is needed to be done is clear. The benefits and flow-on effects of achieving school readiness and attendance are plain and palpable. Governments, educators and communities can't hide behind the elusiveness of a goal such as year 12 completions, which really describes the desirable outcome rather than a strategic goal.

You can hold people accountable for performance on school readiness and attendance in ways that you cannot hold people to account for an outcome such as year 12 completion rates.

Bureaucrats, politicians and communities are therefore let off the performance hook. They can say they're working on lifting year 12 completions while doing nothing decisive on school attendance and readiness.

Which brings me to my problem with a second education-related goal set by the Council of Australian Governments. They have established the goal of halving the gap in indigenous reading, writing and numeracy within a decade.

In many ways this is an obscene goal. It accepts a level of educational under-achievement that is unnecessary and avoidable. It condemns indigenous children to educational failure when better outcomes are achievable.

Given the social injustice that flows from educational under-achievement - low employment rates, higher rates of poverty, higher rates of social problems, higher imprisonment rates, poorer health and, ultimately, lower life expectancy - you would think that Australian governments committed to closing the gap on indigenous disadvantage would not adopt any policies that were needlessly low in their expectations. And yet, this is what they have done.

More HERE





27 March, 2010

MA: Panel OKs school budget cuts, teachers protest

A crowd from a rally that drew hundreds of school employees tried rushing into Boston School Department headquarters last night, sparking a standoff with police, just hours before the School Committee slashed millions of dollars in spending for the next school year but without closing any schools.

More than a dozen police officers struggled for several minutes to pull the doors free of the crowd, in an effort to prevent anyone from entering the downtown Court Street building, where the School Committee chamber was nearing its capacity of 167 people. One man, as he tried to push his way through the doors, yelled, “We have a right.’’ A few moments later, an officer yelled to colleagues down the hallway, “We need help.’’ Eventually the officers slammed the doors shut and stood guard.

The confrontation came as the district faces its third consecutive year of severe budget cutting, while the state and the city struggle to rebound from the nation’s troubled economy.

Although the School Committee unanimously approved the $821.4 million budget, all seven members expressed regret about cutting school spending again. “We know these cuts are painful,’’ said the Rev. Gregory Groover, the board’s chairman.

Emotions are running even higher than in previous years because new efforts by the state and federal governments to overhaul public education have led the state to declare 12 Boston schools underperforming this month, causing Superintendent Carol R. Johnson to force teachers at half of those schools to reapply for their jobs.

The rally was organized by the teachers union and included community activists, parents, students, and members of other city unions such as bus drivers and custodians. “Our schools aren’t underperforming, they are underresourced,’’ Richard Stutman, the teachers union president, yelled to the crowd earlier.

Johnson said she tried to avoid cuts that would directly affect classroom learning. While the budget does not call for teacher layoffs, it will bar principals from replacing some teachers who retire or leave the district for other reasons.

One area taking a big hit is building maintenance. More than $5 million worth of repair projects, such as repainting dingy walls, will be put on hold. The budget also eliminates more than 80 custodial positions, about 20 percent of that workforce, nearly all through layoffs.

In a statement yesterday, Michael Lafferty of the custodian union linked maintenance in the schools to student health and safety. Several School Committee members expressed discomfort with losing so many custodians.

The financial outlook has improved slightly since Johnson unveiled her budget proposal early last month. She initially recommended, at the request of Mayor Thomas M. Menino, spending 1 percent less than this year’s total. Earlier this month, the mayor decided the city could afford to spend the same next year as it is spending this year.

That, however, still meant the district had to cut roughly $50 million because of increases in health care premiums and contractually negotiated pay raises.

After making a series of cuts, the district still confronted a $3.5 million spending gap this week, prompting the mayor to allow the district to increase next year’s budget by that amount.

The decision enabled Johnson to avoid the prospect of controversial school closings this fall. But she warned last night that a significant number of schools will have to close in the coming years. Enrollment has plummeted by thousands of students over the last decade, leaving roughly 4,500 empty seats scattered across the district’s 135 schools. “We have to address excess capacity if we are going to have any resources left,’’ Johnson said.

The budget now heads to the mayor, who will include it in his budget proposal to the City Council next month.

During public testimony before the vote, Manuel Rios Alers, a 17-year-old junior from the John D. O’Bryant School of Math and Science in Roxbury, spoke against cutting more than $500,000 from his school’s operating funds and also reducing custodial staff from the district. He said his school, where students must pass an academic exam for admittance, suffered leaks during last week’s torrential rain, causing mold. “If you keep cutting our schools, we will be in the gutter,’’ he said.

A classmate, Eftina Gjikuria, 17, held up an English book with most of its pages coming unglued from its binding and said, “I’m sad to say I’m in AP English, and this is what I get.’’

At the rally, police closed off traffic to a section of Court Street as the crowd grew and protesters banged drums, blared sirens, and honked horns. Some waved signs that said, “Budget cuts hurt kids’’ and “Underfunding equals underperforming.’’

Groover apologized to the attendees that many others could not join them inside, but emphasized that the School Committee had to abide by the law for seating capacity. Another member suggested the group take that energy to Beacon Hill to lobby for more money for the district.

Source




Unteachable pupils sent back to terrified British school staff despite assaults and sex attacks

Unteachable children are described in a dossier as a teaching union accused governors of not protecting staff. It is a shocking document which lays bare the realities of teaching in increasingly unruly schools.

One teacher reports the case of a 14-year-old boy who attacked her and sexually assaulted a female classroom assistant.

Another boy, this time aged only five, threatened to stab a member of staff with a pair of scissors and threw chairs in his reception class.

Most disturbingly, the culprits have all been returned to the classroom against the wishes of teachers - often after initially being excluded or expelled.

Nine 'unteachable' children are described in a dossier produced by the NASUWT union. Five were expelled by head teachers only to be reinstated by governing bodies. The union accuses governors of being more concerned with placating parents of troublemakers than protecting staff.

In the other four cases, head teachers themselves failed to take firm action, leaving classroom teachers in what they describe as an impossible position.

Chris Keates, NASUWT general secretary, said the dossier highlighted a 'deeply worrying' assault on teachers' authority. 'Governors seem to be taking the line of least resistance to placate the minority of parents rather than to protect the majority of pupils and their staff,' she said. 'If governors do not back head teachers' professional judgment in these matters then staff and school leaders cannot manage behaviour with confidence.

'Equally concerning is that, in the other cases, which were all serious incidents, the school took either no action or made the very weak response of temporary exclusion.'

One case of indiscipline even saw parents of fellow pupils removing their children out of fears they would be injured.

In all cases, the NASUWT union held a ballot for industrial action - refusing to teach the child involved - to force schools to protect staff from the troublemakers.

In most instances, the boycotting tactic resulted in the pupil being moved to a different school. In one, the youngster was moved to a specialist centre until they took their GCSEs.

The union said it dealt with an average of one case of a poor response to serious indiscipline a week but many were resolved without threats of industrial action.

Mrs Keates said the attacks, all in 2009, highlighted a growing trend for school decisions to go against teachers' interests.

Heads and governors are failing to use new legal powers to discipline children, she warned. Schools previously complained about independent appeals. 'Governing bodies have now overtaken independent appeals panels in the perversity of their judgments in relation to reinstating disruptive pupils,' Mrs Keates said.

'A very common feature reported to us by teachers is that when they raise behaviour problems in school they don't feel they are supported in maintaining discipline. 'They often cite that either they are held to blame for the poor behaviour by pupils or there is more concern for protecting the reputation of the school or placating parents.'

SOURCE




Australia: Getting black kids to go to school is the first challenge

But it is one that is not nearly being met. Excerpts below from comments by black activist Noel Pearson

SOMETIMES I just cannot understand how governments think when it comes to setting indigenous policies. Two of the five goals that all Australian governments are now striving to close the gap on indigenous disadvantage concern education.

It is probably useful to distil a complex policy agenda down to a handful of key goals, because some of these dashboard indicators can capture whether or not progress is being made across a broad policy range and gaps are closing.

But I have problems with the policy reasoning underpinning the two educational goals.

First the goal of doubling the year 12 completion rates for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students is strange. Of course secondary school completion rates are important, but in a strategic sense there other more fundamental prerequisite policy goals which, if solved, will automatically result in higher year 12 completion rates.

The strategically important goal is closing the gap on literacy and numeracy achievement by indigenous students. You solve this problem, you solve the year 12 completion rate problem.

There is a strategically important prerequisite to closing the gap on literacy and numeracy, and that is school readiness and attendance. You can't close the gap on literacy and numeracy unless you first close the gap on school readiness and attendance.

So if I were the policy-maker, I would establish school readiness and attendance as the target goal. And I would set a very brief timeframe for achieving it. School attendance is not rocket science: surely governments and indigenous communities can close this gap in short order.

The good thing about school readiness and attendance is that it is a tangible, actionable goal. What is needed to be done is clear. The benefits and flow-on effects of achieving school readiness and attendance are plain and palpable. Governments, educators and communities can't hide behind the elusiveness of a goal such as year 12 completions, which really describes the desirable outcome rather than a strategic goal.

You can hold people accountable for performance on school readiness and attendance in ways that you cannot hold people to account for an outcome such as year 12 completion rates.

Bureaucrats, politicians and communities are therefore let off the performance hook. They can say they're working on lifting year 12 completions while doing nothing decisive on school attendance and readiness.

Which brings me to my problem with a second education-related goal set by the Council of Australian Governments. They have established the goal of halving the gap in indigenous reading, writing and numeracy within a decade.

In many ways this is an obscene goal. It accepts a level of educational under-achievement that is unnecessary and avoidable. It condemns indigenous children to educational failure when better outcomes are achievable.

Given the social injustice that flows from educational under-achievement - low employment rates, higher rates of poverty, higher rates of social problems, higher imprisonment rates, poorer health and, ultimately, lower life expectancy - you would think that Australian governments committed to closing the gap on indigenous disadvantage would not adopt any policies that were needlessly low in their expectations. And yet, this is what they have done.

More HERE





26 March, 2010

University of Ottawa Scolds Ann Coulter, Embraces Fidel Castro and his frauds

In his cautionary letter to Ann Coulter before her recently scheduled speech at the University of Ottawa, the institutions’ provost, Francois Houle, explained that: “Our domestic laws, both provincial and federal, delineate freedom of expression (or ‘free speech’) in a manner that is somewhat different than the approach taken in the United States.”

Canada’s laws also seem to “delineate” medical quackery and fraud somewhat differently from those in the United States. To wit: This very University of Ottawa, so hyper-sensitive to human rights and so vigilant against ethnic sensibilities that it proscribes Bing Crosby’s lines from Road to Morocco is also a long-time partner with Fidel Castro’s Stalinist regime.

In 1999 this chummy partnership between Canadian academics and Castroite apparatchiks gave fruit to the first vaccination against Meningitis B, or so we’re told by “news” agencies that have earned Havana bureaus, and spokespeople from the University of Ottowa, who co-owns the patent with Fidel Castro’s henchmen.

"Cuba has developed the world's first Meningitis B vaccine which is available in Third World countries but not in Europe or in the United States due to U.S. sanctions," dutifully reported Anthony Boadle from Reuters' Havana bureau right after Sicko’s first screening (oddly good timing for such a “scoop” by a Castro-sanctioned “news” agency, I’d certainly say!)

Of this 27 word sentence, by a news agency regarded as authoritative worldwide, exactly 14 words are true. Yes, this Castroite/Ottawa Univ. vaccine is not available in the U.S. and Europe -- but hardly because of ”sanctions.” In fact, in 1999, Bill Clinton's Treasury Department granted the pharmaceutical giant SmithKline Beecham a license to market the vaccine in a joint venture with Castro’s medical ministry -- pending FDA approval.

And why not? Upon it’s unveiling, Fidel Castro’s very own minister of public health, Carlos Dotres, had hailed the vaccine as ”the only effective one in the world!” Highly impressed, Bill Clinton's FDA chief Dr. Carl Frasch said it could annually prevent "1000-2000 cases" of the dreaded disease in the U.S. 110 U.S. Congressmen frantically signed a special letter to Secretary of State Madeline Albright beseeching her to allow this breach of the diabolical Republican-enforced embargo against Cuba , if only to “protect the lives of America’s children!”

That was 11 years ago. The reason the vaccine is STILL not available today in the U.S. and Europe is simply that, like so many other Castroite concoctions and proclamations dutifully trumpeted by “news” agencies who earn Havana bureaus, the vaccine is a farce and its sale a swindle. And, at least in this case, most civilized countries refuse to inflict upon their citizens a mortally dangerous fraud concocted by Fidel Castro in cahoots with the University of Ottawa.

That one of Canada’s most prestigious institute’s of higher-learning engages in joint research with the modern day heirs of Trofim Lysenko might seem amusing, except for all those human victims of (what essentially amounts to) medical testing on humans. Some Third World countries discovered this tragic swindle the hard way. "Brazil has wasted $300 million on a Cuban (in cahoots with Ottawa Univ.) vaccine that is completely ineffective,” wrote Dr. Isaías Raw, director of Sao Paolo’s prestigious Butantan Institute specializing in Biotechnology.

A study by Brazil’s Centro de Vigilancia Epidemiológica (Center for Epidemiological Research) from 1999 seconded Dr Raw: "The studies conducted on the use of the Cuban vaccine in children under 4 years old—the major risk group for hepatitis B—showed no evidence that the vaccine protected them against the disease. This vaccine should not be recommended.”

All current medical literature flatly asserts that despite countless attempts, "no effective vaccine against the Meningitis B has yet been developed." The pharmaceutical giant Novartis is currently testing one and claims to be close to its development.

Sadly for Fidel Castro, the medical establishment abounds with men and women who stubbornly cling to their professional ethics. Enlisting their cooperation presents challenges much more daunting than enlisting the cooperation of cuckolded news agencies, corrupt Canadian Universities and a rotund filmmaker obsessed with vilifying his country. A few years back Castro launched his "Doctor Diplomacy" wherein he started sending Cuban "doctors" to heathen lands (though their spouses and children were held hostage in Cuba) to heal the sick and raise the dead. This was coupled with "free" treatment of poor foreigners from the Caribbean and Latin American nations in Cuban hospitals. The scheme has gotten no end of gushy reviews in the MSM.

Some less prominent reviews might add perspective. Especially as these report much closer-range observations of the scheme along with follow-ups. Here's one from the newspaper The Jamaican Gleaner titled, "Eye Surgery Hopes Dashed; Patients Suffer Complications," which notes: "The survey included 200 patients (Jamaicans who traveled to Cuba for eye surgery) and of that group, 49 patients - nearly a quarter - experienced post surgery complications. According to Dr. Albert Lue, Head of Ophthalmology in Jamaica’s Kingston Public Hospital, the complications causing the patients impaired vision was corneal damage and damage to the iris due to poor surgical technique." "Since I come back, from Cuba," said George Foster, a 70-year-old Jamaican participant in the Cuban "Miracle Operation," "I can see from the right eye but I can't see from the left."

Brazil also got a birds-eye view of Cuba's vaunted “Doctor Diplomacy." "96 Cuban Doctors Expelled from Brazil” starts the April, 2005 story from Agence France-Presse. "Federal judge Marcelo Bernal ruled in favor of a demand by the Brazilian state of Tocantins’ Consejo Regional de Medicina (Regional Council on Medicine) that Cuban doctors be prohibited from practicing in their state.” Based on the results they’d achieved with Tocantins' residents, the judge referred to the Cuban doctors as “Witch Doctors and Shamans.” We cannot accept doctors who have not proven that they are doctors.”

The University of Ottawa, it appears, has no such qualms.



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Fla. Senate passes 'teacher tenure' bill

There is no reason why teachers should be an especially protected class. This might inhibit their Leftist political bias in future

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist said he approved of the Senate's passing an education bill making it easier to fire teachers and tying pay increases to test scores. The controversial "teacher tenure" bill Wednesday passed narrowly in the Senate, 21-17, in Tallahassee, the St. Petersburg Times reported.

Crist's approval and the Senate's early focus on education mean the bill, which still must move through the state's House, will probably become law, Speaker-designate Dean Cannon, R-Winter Park, said.

"This is a bill that really focuses on trying to help children and encouraging better teachers. It pays better teachers more, and that just seems like the right thing to do to me," said Crist.

No Democrats voted for the tenure measure, the Times said. Sen. Paula Dockery of Lakeland, a gubernatorial candidate, and two other Republicans voted against the tenure bill, saying it "disrespects all Florida teachers."

"The idea that teachers are solely responsible for a child's performance goes against everything we know about what makes children successful," Dockery said.

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Traditional science experiments 'disappearing' from British schools

Science experiments are disappearing from the classroom amid mounting concerns over pupil behaviour, crowded timetables and health and safety rules, according to research.

Almost all science teachers and lab technicians said they were now being prevented from staging certain practicals in biology, chemistry and physics lessons, it was claimed. The study – by Science Learning Centres, a network of teacher training colleges – said more than two-thirds of staff admitted axing experiments because of a lack of space in the curriculum. Four-in-10 blamed the demands of exams and assessment.

According to the study, some 28 per cent of teachers had been forced to drop classroom practical because of bad behaviour among pupils, while one-in-10 cited health and safety fears. It said that activities such as ripple tanks, dissection and microbiology – once commonplace in schools – were now becoming “endangered species”.

The survey, which questioned more than 1,300 teachers and technicians, found that pupils had fewer chances to conduct experiments as they moved up through secondary school.

Ministers have invested hundreds millions of pounds in programmes designed to boost the number of pupils taking science at GCSE and A-level. In the Budget this week, the Government announced extra funding to allow more students to study science and maths at university, suggesting that more highly-skilled professionals were needed to boost Britain’s economic recovery.

But experts fear that children are being turned off science at a young age because lessons are becoming increasingly safe.

Professor John Holman, director of the National Science Learning Centre, said: "Learning science without practicals is the equivalent of studying literature without books. “Experimental evidence is the mainstay of science and the UK has a very strong tradition of scientific practical work in schools. "It concerns me that, for a range of reasons, many teachers currently feel unable to dedicate as much time to practical work in the classroom as they would like to and today's students therefore have fewer opportunities for exploratory learning.

“While it is certainly not the case that schools are being forced to abandon all practical work, I am alarmed by this trend and struck by the obstacles that teachers say they are facing.”

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25 March, 2010

TX: Can poor test scores get a teacher fired?

Imagine if a computer could identify the weakest-link teachers – the ones who should be told it's time to get out of the classroom. It's not quite so simple, but a new policy in Houston allows teachers to be fired based on data that some experts say isolates a teacher's effect on his or her students' test-score gains.

Reform advocates say school districts should improve teacher quality in part by using such "value added" data. Dozens of districts, including Houston's, have already incorporated the concept into "pay for performance" systems. Education leaders in New York City and the District of Columbia are moving toward linking it to tenure or dismissals. But none has gone ahead as boldly as the Texas district.

"The worst teachers in a school really drag down achievement," says Eric Hanu shek, a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution in California. "The biggest tension is: How much do you rely upon objective statistical information from test scores, and how much do you rely on other measures of teacher performance?"

A number of parents backed the Houston decision at a packed February board meeting. But the local teachers union is planning a legal challenge, claiming, among other concerns, that the formula is not public and leaves teachers in the dark about how they're judged.

The district defends it as a tool to help principals ensure that each classroom has an effective teacher. No one has been let go yet under the new policy, but at the end of the school year, the data could be cited as one criterion for not renewing a teacher's contract.

The controversy highlights a broader debate over how to improve teacher evaluations – which are "largely broken," US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said recently before a House committee.

Secretary Duncan presented the blueprint of the No Child Left Behind overhaul to the House education committee Wednesday. The plan includes a number of provisions for improving teacher quality.

For all the potential flaws, linking teacher evaluations to student achievement data is a move in the right direction, says Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality in Washington. Under the status quo, she says, teachers tend to be fired only if they are abusive or break the law. Studies in a sample of districts across the United States have found that less than 1 percent of teachers earn an unsatisfactory rating on their evaluations. "We do not fire teachers because they aren't good at teaching math [or other subjects]," she says.

Even Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), is open to some use of student test data in teacher evaluations, but, she says, "there's the right way and the wrong way to do it." In Houston and New York, she says, "it's high-stakes 'gotcha,' as opposed to using data to inform [classroom] instruction."

The Houston AFT-affiliated union has multiple objections to the new policy. One is the time lag: The teachers don't find out how the formula scored them, based on their students' performance on two standardized tests, until the middle of the following school year. That timing is not very useful, they say.

"If you want to come up with a magic number ... and send it to me six months after I give the test and tell me, 'Oh, that was your goal, and – oops – you've missed it,' you haven't done anyone any good at that point.... You haven't helped the kids," says Gayle Fallon, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers.

The move also decreases the trust of the union, Ms. Fallon says, which suspected this kind of "slippery slope" when the data were first used for performance bonuses in 2007.

The Houston union's skepticism is legitimate, says Sean Corcoran, an assistant professor of educational economics at New York University who has been researching value-added methods. Factors such as many students moving in or out of the district during the school year, or even a distraction outside the window on test day, could make the numbers less reliable, he says. "Their high-stakes use is almost impossible, and I think anyone who thinks otherwise either doesn't understand these models or is willing to put aside a lot of uncertainty," he says.

Greg Meyers, president of the Houston Independent School District's Board of Education, defends the district's new policy. Using the data in making decisions about teacher-contract renewals is just a natural progression after Houston's forays into performance pay and other reforms, he says.

"We're probably one of the most data-driven districts in the country.... Teachers and students know which teachers are less effective. This will help pinpoint and quantify it," Mr. Meyers says.

The broader point is to use the data to target professional development, he says.

Groups such as the Education Equality Project – a national coalition that advocates closing achievement gaps among racial and economic groups – argue that if value-added data meet certain criteria and are gathered for several years, they can fairly tie student gains to the individual effect of teachers.

While some object to particular data systems, 55 percent of teachers nationally say that, in general, student growth over the course of an academic year is a "very accurate" measure of teacher performance, according to a survey released this month by Scholastic Inc. and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

SOURCE




Student loans get the Obamacare treatment

In Chicago, the legend goes, whenever Mayor Daley needed a quick infusion of cash, he would order a "street sweeping." After the evening rush hour, city workers would post signs warning of a street sweeping at dawn the next day -- any car parked on the street would be slapped with a ticket.

Congressional Democrats' version of "street sweeping" is nationalizing an industry and folding its profits into the budget, thus partly paying for some radical expansion of government -- health care reform in this case.

The budget reconciliation bill being used as a sidecar to the Senate health care bill also contains a federal takeover of the student loan industry. Judging by preliminary data from the Congressional Budget Office, the student loan provisions are similar to those in the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act -- a bill that passed the House this year, but faced a Senate filibuster.

The reconciliation version of the bill chops out much of the student aid, making the measure fairly profitable on paper. After all, government will now have a monopoly in an industry already being subsidized by other parts of government. Over the next decade, between reduced subsidies to private lenders and interest collected from students, the expected profit is $60 billion. Student aid would be increased by about $40 billion, leaving the U.S. Treasury $19.4 billion in the black thanks to this takeover. That profit gets counted toward the reconciliation bill's score from the Congressional Budget Office, and voila! more deficit reduction from the health care reform bill.

If only Democrats had thought of this trick back in the spring, they could have budgeted in the nationalization of other profitable industries. Throw the porn industry into the Department of Health and Human Services and nationalize Exxon Mobil, and your budget score looks even better. Why not put Goldman Sachs on the budget so that Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein, in a reversal of roles, would be working for Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner?

But the student loan game playing gets richer. The CBO revealed Thursday the bill would "establish a new program for lenders who were chartered before July 1, 2009, and are owned by a state under the control of a board including the governor and offered guaranteed loans prior to June 30, 2010."

That's an oddly specific description of a financial institution. That's because this program applies to exactly one lender: The Bank of North Dakota. The CBO explains, "Under the new program, these banks [sic] would be allowed to offer guaranteed student loans." In other words, all student lenders would be killed by the budget reconciliation bill, except for the biggest one in the state of Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad.

This sort of game playing is the hallmark of health care reform, which has included backroom deals with the drug lobby, parliamentary innovation, and budget tricks to make Enron accountants envious.

While nationalizing student loans may seem irrelevant to "reforming" health care, there is something fitting in pairing the two undertakings in one bill -- it's almost a foreshadowing. Student lenders have long fed at the federal trough, pocketing so many subsidies that Democrats were justified in asking why there needed to be a private sector in that industry at all.

This weekend, it's the drug companies, hospitals, doctors, and insurers who are latching more firmly at Leviathan's teat. How long before Congress decides to knock out the profit-taking middleman, and institute a single-payer system or even a national health system?

When we get wherever this "reform" is taking us -- when our deficits are ballooning and health care is scarcer -- we may remember the games, gimmicks, and scams used to pass it into law, and maybe conclude that evil means yield evil ends.

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British teachers suspended after pupil Sam Linton dies from asthma attack

They should be jailed for manslaughter. They didn't give a damn about the kid. They were too busy having one of their innumerable "meetings"

A headmistress and four other members of staff have been suspended from a school that faces possible legal action after a pupil died from an asthma attack.

Sam Linton, 11, was made to sit in a corridor at Offerton High School, in Stockport, struggling to breathe while no ambulance was called. His parents are considering legal action against the school and the council after Sam died in hospital two hours later in December 2007. An inquest jury found that the school’s neglect had been a significant factor in his death.

A spokesman for Stockport council said yesterday that the five staff had been suspended while an internal inquiry is carried out. Evelyn Leslie, the head teacher, and Jan Ford, the teacher who told Sam to sit in the corridor, are among those who have been asked to step down during the inquiry.

Sam had been wheezing continually and using an inhaler on the day that he died but staff failed to call 999. He was left to wait in a hallway until two other pupils found him and raised the alarm. By the time his mother arrived Sam’s lips had turned blue.

The three-week inquest at Stockport Coroner’s Court was told that valuable time was lost while Sam was made to sit in the corridor. The jury found last week that Sam died from natural causes but said that neglect at an “individual and systemic level” had been a significant contributory factor.

Sam’s father, Paul Linton, described the council’s move as “too little, too late”. He told The Times: “We are considering legal action against the school and the local authority.

“I would hope that the head teacher doesn’t get another job as a head at another school. Education-wise I couldn’t fault the school but on the policy for looking after a child that was ill they get a big fat zero.”

The jury found that staff had failed to implement the asthma policy, were not sufficiently trained to deal with asthma and that a healthcare plan was not in place. Information about Sam’s attacks was not shared among staff and they failed to monitor Sam’s condition on the day of his death, the jury said.

The school, which was judged “unsatisfactory” in its latest Ofsted inspection, refused to comment. A spokesman for Stockport council said that detailed evidence presented to the inquest and the verdict of the jury had led them to carry out an inquiry.

“While it has been some time since Sam’s death there has not been a period of inactivity,” he said. “Immediately following Sam’s death, the governing body reviewed the handling of pupils’ medical needs relating to asthma and other medical conditions, and has adapted systems and practices at the school.”

The council has decided three times not to hold a serious case review, saying that the case did not meet the necessary criteria.

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24 March, 2010

Teacher teaches aggressive kid an effective and appropriate lesson: Teacher gets fired

What's the kid going to make of that? You guess

A PRIVATE school teacher in the US has been sacked after encouraging several students to punch a five-year-old boy in the face as punishment for hitting another student.

KPRC-TV in Houston reported that the incident happened when Davarius Williams, 5, and other children from the Robindell Private School took a field trip to a restaurant last week. Davarius punched a female classmate during an argument and the teacher supervising the trip told other students to hit him back, Devarius' mother, Barbara Mobley, said.

"The teacher that was driving his particular van got him and his group together and said, 'When we get on the van, I want everybody to punch Devarius in the face because he punched the little girl in the face,'" Ms Mobley said.

Ms Mobley claimed at least a dozen children hit her son. "As each child got on the bus, she said, 'Go,'" Ms Mobley said. "They punched my son and went and sat down."

School director Chuck Wall said that the teacher was fired within 30 minutes of the complaint. "It was a big mistake. She should have never done it," Mr Wall said. "It was a very, very good teacher that we fired. "She had been with me for six or seven years now ... (she) had a moment of weakness, out of frustration, and dealing with a child she's had a problem with over the last several months."

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Official gender unfairness in colleges

The famous Title IX provision in the 1972 civil-rights legislation sounds quite sensible: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiv­ing Federal financial assistance.” In the pattern of feminist activism with which we have become familiar, however, what sounded like a reasonable attempt to en­sure fairness to individuals soon became a coercive instrument for enforcing decidedly unreasonable kinds of group rights.

Title IX’s first application was to high-school and college athletics. Since the premise of feminism is that men and women are alike apart from inconse­quential physical differences and arbitrary social construction, disparities in the numbers of each sex in any area must be the result of discrimination. College administrators realized that in order to forestall lawsuits and loss of federal money, they had to demonstrate “statistical proportionality”: that the participation of men and women in sports was proportional to their numbers in the student population. But women outnumber men at many colleges, and even with the prompting and funding that markedly increased female partici­pation in the wake of Title IX, women on the whole continued to show less interest in sports than men. Thus, perfectly viable men’s teams had to be eliminated in order to make the numbers proportional.

As mean and unjust as has been Title IX’s application to college sports, its proponents are now employing it for something even more pernicious: the attempt to achieve gender parity in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. And, as ever, the government is at the ready to do their bidding.

In a hearing held in October 2007 by a House subcommittee on research and science education, all five congressmen present — Republican and Democrat — accepted without reservation the premise that gender disparities in STEM faculties, particularly in engineering, physics, and math, are the result of discrimination. Expert witness Kathie Olsen, then deputy director of the National Science Founda­tion, declared that “our goal is to transform, institution by institution, the entire culture of science and engineering in America,” adding in a rhetorical flourish, “to be inclusive of all — for the good of all,” which can only sound like a grim joke to those who know the harm Title IX has done to men’s sports. But all the congressmen said amen. “What kind of hammer should we use?” demanded Rep. Brian Baird (D., Wash.). Title IX compliance reviews are already underway.

Hitherto relatively safe from the political correctness and diversity policing that have plagued the humanities, science is now under assault, as Christina Hoff Sommers illustrates in this important collection of articles by different experts on various aspects of the issue. “Title IX has unquestionably led to men’s participation in sports being calibrated to the level of women’s interest,” Sommers warns in her own contribution. “That level of calibration could devastate academic science.” In order to achieve proportionality in these fields, the numbers of men admitted to science programs may have to be reduced, while more women, likely with lesser qualifications, will have to be recruited.

Although the gender-equity movement in science has been active since at least the early 2000s, Lawrence Summers no doubt galvanized this new and noxious round of social engineering with his suggestion at a Harvard conference in 2005 that so few women rise to faculty positions in STEM in part because men have greater intrinsic aptitude in science and math, and also greater interest in these fields.

Feminists responded with convulsive outrage, and the next step was Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Poten­tial of Women in Academic Science and Engineering (2006), a report sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. The writers alleged “pervasive unexamined gender bias” in STEM, denied evidence for lesser innate ability in women, and recommended modifying the competitive ethos of academic science with a more nurturing atmosphere suited to women’s special brand of intellection — evidently oblivious of the contradiction this last point presented to feminists’ insistence that the sexes are alike.

Most of the authors in the present volume support Lawrence Summers’s side of the debate. Psychopathologist Simon Baron-Cohen notes differences in male/female mathematical ability, as shown, for example, in scores on the math portion of the SATs. Men score about 40 points better in the average ranges, and the gap widens at the high end, where 13 men to 1 woman score over 700 out of a possible 800. Baron-Cohen also details research on infants and small children that finds males better at “systemizing” and females at “empathizing,” tendencies that would naturally lead them toward different vocations.

Perhaps the most powerful entry in the book comes from psychologist Jerre Levy and research scientist Doreen Kimura, who directly refute the Bias and Barriers study, presenting a wealth of evidence to show “that genetic and hormonal dif­ferences between males and females are major causes of sex differences in behavior” and in “educational and vocational goals.” Short of “coercive force or manipulation of the hormonal environment of the fetus,” we cannot “equalize the numbers of men and women in all fields of science, engineering, and math.”

But Levy and Kimura also point out that, purported “hostile climate” notwithstanding, where interest and ability coincide, women have succeeded handsomely in some fields, such as medicine, veterinary medicine, and the life sciences (as opposed to math, engineering, and the physical sciences). Finally, the authors deplore the demand for a more nurturing atmosphere for women as “an insult to female scientists, and a serious danger to science itself.” (For another analysis of the ineptitude and unprofessionalism of the Bias and Barriers report, see Patricia Hausman’s article for Academic Ques­tions, “Feminizing Science: The Alchemy of Title IX,” available online.)

In his entry, developmental psychologist David C. Geary finds “overwhelming” evidence that evolution has produced hard-wired sexual differences. Neurol­ogist and psychologist Richard J. Haier details brain research that may account for male predominance in scientific fields, and calls for faithfulness to data, not ideology.

On the other side of the issue, psychologists Elizabeth S. Spelke and Katherine Ellison detail tests on infants and children that show the sexes having similar abilities in areas of cognition important to scientific work. And Rosalind Chait Barnett and Laura Sabattini outline the structural barriers women have faced in science throughout history.

The weight of the book, however, is on the side of sexual difference, and Som­mers writes that “the evidence for gender bias in math and science is weak at best, and the evidence that women are relatively disinclined to pursue these fields at the highest levels is serious.” Thus it is alarming to see that prestigious insti­tutions such as Harvard and MIT have already begun to implement gender-equity policies.

With his usual panache, Charles Murray predicts in his provocative if sometimes puzzling conclusion to the book that the accumulating evidence of innate group differences will within ten years destroy the “equality premise” that undergirds contemporary social science and underwrites political correctness and affirmative action. The change will come regarding men and women first, since the taboo against sex differences is somewhat weaker than that against race and ethnic differences. Murray declares that innate preferences dispose the sexes to different fields, and that at the high end of STEM especially, men will inevitably be the majority on science faculties and among Nobel laureates and Fields Medal winners due to their decided genetic advantages in intellectual and behavioral traits (although he spookily adds “until gen­etic engineering alters them”). Indeed, Murray fears that the implosion of the equality premise will lead to an over­reaction in the other direction, toward renewed discrimination, but he helpfully assures liberals that the acknowledgement of group differences could actually justify a demand for greater redistribution of wealth. Simon Baron-Cohen, for his part, despite his belief in consequential sexual differences, supports using social policies to produce greater equality in STEM. One senses the need for a larger, humanistic vision that could find meaning in life beyond egalitarianism, and Murray’s final note emphasizing individualism is a partial move toward that end.

Sommers herself clings to her commitment to what she has termed “equity feminism” in the classical-liberal tradition, as opposed to what she has elsewhere termed “gender feminism,” the identity-politics kind that unfortunately prevails. But even these designations are collapsing, as she is forced to describe feminist activism in science as the demand for “gender equity.” Still, as our society struggles to come to grips with what it has so long been forced to deny, this book is an invaluable contribution and should be in the hands of every department head in every university across the land.

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Ousted ROTC may go back to school

Stanford rethinks 40-year ban

It's college-application season, and GI Joe is hoping for an acceptance letter from Stanford. Nearly 40 years after the U.S. military's Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) scholarship program was banished from the elite California school, Stanford's faculty Senate earlier this month heard the case for bringing it back.

"Institutions like Stanford have an obligation to uphold this 200-year-old [tradition] of the citizen-soldier," said Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Stanford professor David Kennedy. Mr. Kennedy has teamed up with Clinton administration Defense Secretary William Perry, another Stanford professor, in the drive to restore ROTC 40 years after protests of the Vietnam War helped drive it off the campus. "We fear the implications of having a distant military, and a modest way to bring about civil societies is through ROTC programs," Mr. Kennedy said. "That is part of our argument."

The passions of the 1960s anti-war movement are a distant memory, but it's not clear whether other Ivy League universities — including Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Brown — will follow Stanford's lead in bringing back banished ROTC programs. Federal law, enacted in the 1990s, prohibits colleges and universities from receiving federal funding if they don't allow military recruiters or ROTC units on campus.

One modern complication is the clash between university nondiscrimination codes and the Pentagon's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, which bans openly gay men and women from serving in the ranks.

Harvard students now can participate in ROTC through the regional program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with students from six other Boston-area schools, but not on the Cambridge campus, John Longbrake, media director at Harvard, said in an e-mail. "There are not currently any plans to modify the arrangement," Mr. Longbrake wrote. "We will, of course, follow any federal policy changes with interest."

Yale's ROTC program is hosted by the University of Connecticut at Storrs, while California Institute of Technology students interested in ROTC courses must go to the University of California at Los Angeles. Similar off-campus arrangements have been set up for schools such as the University of Chicago and Columbia.

More here





23 March, 2010

The National Standards Distraction

Accountability and choice remain the best drivers of reform

The Obama Administration wants to standardize what is taught in American public schools, and there's nothing wrong in principle with setting benchmarks for what the average child should know by a certain grade. But national standards are no substitute for school choice and accountability, which are proving to be the most effective drivers of academic improvement.

With the Administration's blessing, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers have proposed a set of uniform K-12 math and reading standards for all states. Compliance will supposedly be voluntary, but Education Secretary Arne Duncan said states that support the effort will have a better chance of receiving Race to the Top money. And President Obama suggested that states that opt out risk losing millions of dollars in Title I grants for low-income students.

Not surprisingly, all but two states—Texas and Alaska—quickly expressed support for uniform standards. But over the past week, a half dozen or so others—as varied as California, Massachusetts, Virginia and Minnesota—have had second thoughts. Governor Rick Perry said Texans should determine what's taught in their state, while Massachusetts and California rightly say their standards are superior to what's been proposed.

The biggest challenge may be reaching agreement on what a national curriculum should include. In the 1990s, the Bush and Clinton Administrations advocated national history standards. But the process became dominated by educators with a multicultural agenda preoccupied with political correctness and America's failings. The Senate censured the history standards by a vote of 99 to 1. The recent brawl over the Texas social sciences curriculum suggests that what works in Nacogdoches isn't going to fly in Marin County, and vice versa.

Under the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, states are free to set their own standards, and it's certainly true that some have dumbed-down their exams to meet the law's requirements. The latest national standards effort is intended to correct this practice and ensure high-quality standards across all 50 states.

However, national standards won't tell us anything we don't already know about underperforming states. The U.S. already has a mandatory federal test in place—the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam (NAEP)—to expose states with weak standards. Mississippi may claim that 89% of its fourth graders are proficient in reading, according to the state test. But when NAEP scores show this is true of only 18% of fourth graders, Mississippi education officials aren't fooling anyone.

It's true that some countries with uniform standards (Singapore, Japan) outperform the U.S., though other countries with such standards (Sweden, Israel) do worse. On the 2007 eighth-grade TIMSS test, an international math exam, all eight countries that scored higher than the U.S. had national standards. But so did 33 of the 39 countries that scored lower. The U.S. is also commonly regarded as having the best higher education system in the world, though we lack national standards for colleges and universities.

National standards won't magically boost learning in the U.S., and if this debate distracts attention from more effective reforms, then public education will be worse off. State and local educators don't need more top-down control from Washington. They need the freedom and authority to close bad schools, recruit better teachers and pay them based on effectiveness rather than tenure.

Most important, families need more educational choices. Some 2,000 high schools are responsible for half of all drop-outs in America, and forcing those schools to compete for students and shape up or shut down is the main chance. Higher standards will be the fruit of such reforms, not the driver.

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Unions, Public Schools and Minority Children

Speaking a couple years ago about technology and education, Apple CEO and founder Steve Jobs said that technology wouldn't matter as long as you can't fire teachers. "I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way," he said. Jobs likened schools to running a small business that he said could never succeed if you can't hire and fire. Reasonable? I think so.

Would anyone question that there is no single thing more critical to a nation's future than educating its children? Yet, consider that 88 percent of our children get K-12 education in public schools and that 70 percent of the teachers in these schools have union protected jobs.

Gallup has been polling public opinion about unions since the 1930's. Last year, for the first time, less than half (48 percent) of those surveyed approved of unions. Fifty one percent said unions "mostly hurt" the U.S. economy and 39 percent said they "mostly help."

The percentage of the nation's private sector work force that belongs to a union has dropped precipitously. In the 1950's, over 30 percent belonged to unions. Today it's a little over seven percent. But in our public schools, the direction is completely opposite. In 1960, about 35 percent of public school teachers belonged to unions and today it's twice that at 70 percent.

Is it not counterintuitive that most Americans feel unions hurt us, that we allow increasingly fewer goods and services produced in our private sector to be controlled by unions, but we turn increasingly more of our most precious commodity -- our children and their education -- over to a union-controlled workforce?

In an article in the latest edition of Cato Journal, Andrew Coulson notes that, on average, compensation of public school teachers is about 42 percent higher than their counterparts teaching in non-unionized private schools. Yet, according to Coulson, research shows that private schools consistently outperform public schools. He attributes the higher average wages of public school teachers less to union collective bargaining and more to the political clout of unions to maintain the public school monopoly over K-12 education. Over 95 percent of the political contributions of the two national teachers' unions -- the NEA and AFT --- go to Democrats or to the Democrat Party. Their $56 million in political contributions since 1989 equals that of "Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Lockheed Martin, and the National Rifle Association combined."

The main beneficiaries of education alternatives are minority children. Yet, at the state level, unions provide a unified lobbying front to block such initiatives. A recent Wall Street Journal op-ed reported on the glowing success of charter schools in Harlem. "Nationwide the average black 12th grader reads at the level of a white eighth grader. Yet, Harlem charter students ....are outperforming their white peers in wealthy suburbs." Yet, in 2009 the New York teachers union successfully lobbied the state legislature to freeze charter school spending and now is pushing to limit penetration of charters in school districts.

Kids in Los Angeles' public schools are overwhelming Hispanic and black. According to the Los Angeles Times, "just 39 percent of L.A.'s fourth-graders are even basically literate." Yet, the Times attributed union lobbying to undermining a recent attempt by the L.A. school board to open failing schools to non-unionized charters.

Similarly, unions played a major role in recently killing the successful private school scholarship program in Washington, DC.

But there's a significant and promising sign that blacks are beginning to fight back. Rev. James Meeks, founder and senior pastor of the largest black church in Illinois, who is also a Democrat state senator, is taking on the unions. He has introduced a bill opening the door for vouchers for kids in Chicago's public schools.

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British students revolt as 150 are crammed into one tutorial

Tutorials -- as distinct from lectures -- are supposed to be fairly intimate events, with opportunites for interaction between teachers and students

Hundreds of engineering students at Manchester University have become the latest undergraduates to stage a revolt against the poor quality of teaching they receive. More than 200 have signed a petition against low standards on their course, which have included “tutorials” of more than 150 students taken by one academic and work returned after several months with no marking except one sentence and a tick.

At an angry meeting with senior academics, students have complained that some lecture notes were simply copied from textbooks.

The National Union of Students has approached David Willetts, the Conservative shadow universities secretary, to advise on the dispute.

Student “consumer militancy” over teaching quality — which has hit other leading universities including Bristol — is set to grow as universities implement Lord Mandelson’s budget cuts and sack staff. It will become more widespread if tuition fees rise as expected. The “revolt” at Manchester comes as Willetts considers the establishment of a new universities inspectorate, one of whose jobs would be to police teaching standards. Willetts is concerned that too many universities have simply demanded the right to charge higher tuition fees without giving any undertakings about improved teaching in return.

His proposed inspectorate would be set up by universities rather than the government and modelled on the Independent Schools Inspectorate which monitors private schools. Willetts said: “Universities have to focus on high quality education for their students. Now students pay thousands of pounds in fees they have a very consumerist attitude and we can all understand why.”

At Manchester, the vice-chancellor, Alan Gilbert, recently described the low level of student satisfaction with the university’s teaching as “totally unacceptable”.

Colin Bailey, dean of engineering and physical sciences, said students had raised issues on the quality of teaching. “[We] discussed possible solutions. This has resulted in addressing the quality of class notes, improving tutorials, improving communication, improving quality and timeliness of feedback.”

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22 March, 2010

Miss. prom called off over lesbian ruckus

One would have thought that once the school had called off the event, there was nothing left to litigate but litigation is apparently still going on. Can a school be ordered by a court to hold a social event? If so, the attendance would probably be very sparse, now that a private, invitation-only event has been arranged elsewhere

An attorney for the Itawamba County School District said in a U.S. District Court filing late Friday that the school board decided to call off the high school prom to settle the "very explosive and disruptive issue" of the district's ban on same-sex dates.

The filing by school board attorney Benjamin Griffith states that Itawamba Agricultural High School senior Constance McMillen "wishes to make the defendant district the site for a national constitutional argument over gay and lesbian rights."

McMillen, 18, petitioned the school district to allow her to attend the April 2 prom with her girlfriend at the school in Fulton, Miss. She also asked to be allowed to wear a tuxedo. Both requests were denied. When the American Civil Liberties Union wrote a letter giving the district until March 10 to reverse its decision, the school board canceled the event.

The ACLU filed suit in federal court the next day asking the court to reinstate the prom and declare the school board's behavior as a violation of McMillen's constitutional rights to free expression.

Griffith said the student's rights were not violated. "This is not an issue where anyone has been denied an education or suffered a constitutional deprivation," he wrote in the filing. "Rather, this is a social event that, in light of rapidly escalating circumstances, was disruptive to the school environment because people are on all sides of the issue."

An affidavit filed Friday in support of the school board by attorney James Keith claimed school board members have been been under "tremendous pressure" as a result of the controversy. "The school board was caught in a no-win situation as this matter developed," Keith wrote. "One board member received threats at his place of employment because of the stance he had taken on the matter. Board members have received emails, telephone calls and Facebook messages regarding this matter."

American Civil Liberties Union attorney Christine Sun called the argument "preposterous." "Long before this became an issue in the media they had told Constance that she could not bring her girlfriend to the prom," she said. "Really if was the school board's decision to cancel the prom that became the big news story."

While the demand letter from the ACLU drew some media attention, including an article by the Associated Press, the story spread internationally when the school board announced it would call off the dance. Since then, McMillen has appeared on numerous television shows to tell her story, including an appearance Friday on the nationally syndicated "Ellen DeGeneres Show."

The school board's response states that parents have organized a private prom at a furniture mart in nearby Tupleo. Now that the school district has withdrawn from the event, any constitutional claims are irrelevant, Griffith wrote.

More here




Don’t let feds control local education

A standardized national curriculum wouldn’t make California’s kids smarter or well equipped to compete in the global economy, or even better citizens. But a national, one-size-fits-all curriculum would be highly political, beset by special interest lobbying, and almost certainly diluted by teachers unions and education bureaucrats unaccountable to parents and voters.

Yet President Barack Obama, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, 48 governors – including Arnold Schwarzenegger – and a host of education “reform” groups are rushing headlong to embrace the Common Core State Standards Initiative. The coalition of state governors and state school superintendents last week released its draft reading and math standards for kindergarten through 12th grade.

The standards are billed as “voluntary,” but that's a joke. The Obama administration has already announced plans to make $14 billion in federal Title I funds and another $15 billion in future Race to the Top grants contingent on states adopting the national standards. In short, the standards would be as “voluntary” as reporting personal income to the IRS, regulating the drinking age or maintaining the speed limit. Just try to opt out and see what happens.

The standards are also supposed to be “flexible,” but it’s difficult to see how. The draft reading and math requirements include detailed, year-by-year prescriptions for every child, regardless of ability. A student who struggles with reading, writing or arithmetic would have an even tougher time keeping up, as teachers would face mounting pressure to cover all the material in federally sanctioned lesson plans. Of course, that assumes the final standards won't be homogenized and dumbed down to the point they would be considered "high standards" in name only. Judging by history, that's probably a bad assumption.

One thing's for sure: Transforming common core standards into a common curriculum would turn an already contentious policy issue into a brawl as bruising and divisive as the fight over health care reform. Where health care is about our bodies, education is about our children's minds.

Texas provides an idea of how the fight over a national curriculum might play out. The Lone Star State happens to be the second-largest textbook market in the United States. Thanks to California's budget woes, which preclude the state from buying new textbooks until at least 2016, Texas is poised to reshape the content of U.S. history books for the next decade or so. The State Board of Education, bitterly split along ideological lines, has been overrun with demands from every interest group imaginable to render history into a politically correct mishmash.

Ironically, Texas was one of two states that refused to join the CCSSI. (The other was Alaska.) Texas also sat out of the competition for a slice of the $4 billion in Race to the Top grant money. "Our states and our communities must reserve the right to decide how we educate our children and not surrender that control to a federal bureaucracy," Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, said in January.

California could learn something from Texas’ declaration of independence from the ever-widening federal dictates over education policy. When arguments about curriculum are hashed out at the state level, at least somebody can be held accountable. Federal government education bureaucrats and teachers union officials aren't accountable to voters or taxpayers.

An honest effort to create good standards would allow for extensive public input. Instead the CCSSI has given the public until April 2 to comment on the draft language and math standards. What's the hurry? Could it be the standards’ authors fear that a long public conversation would lead to changes reflecting the public's concerns?

Truly voluntary national standards would let states reject them without fear of punishment or sanction. Why should California, which has exemplary mathematics standards, submit to a document that puts political consensus above educational excellence? Why should Massachusetts, which experts generally acknowledge as having the best standards of any state, have to settle for less?

The problem with the proposed national standards is the same thing that bedeviled No Child Left Behind and nearly every reform since the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965: The remorseless needs of bureaucracy always trump the needs of children. Educators, parents and children deserve choices, not uniformly dismal dictates from Washington.

SOURCE




AUSTRALIA IS GETTING A NATIONAL CURRICULUM

Three comments below

Battle looms over cuts to history curriculum

As a 5th generation Australian who is mightily pleased to be an Australian, I don't think I can be accused of ill motives in what I am about to say but I do think that the teaching of Australian history can be overdone. It is a very praiseworthy history but it is small beer on the world scene. American, British and European history are far more important for study in schools

WRITERS drafting the national curriculum need to reduce the amount of Australian history taught - raising the spectre of another fight over what is cut when the document is finalised later this year. The chairman of the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, Barry McGaw, told the Herald that he was open to reducing the history content in response to concerns that it contains too much for teachers to cover. Professor McGaw said he was "open to any advice the history teachers want to give to us". "We need quite specific advice," he said. "They need to say what needs to come out."

The president of the Australian History Teachers Association, Paul Kiem, said feedback from around the country confirmed the draft curriculum was too content-heavy, particularly in years 9 and 10 when the bulk of Australian history was taught. "There has to be some culling," he said. "There needs to be a pause and discussion about what is significant knowledge in Australian history and what we expect people to know by year 10. "Australian history dominates years 9 and 10 and it is one area in which decisions will have to be made about reducing content or introducing options."

Drafters of the curriculum, which is open for public consultation until May 23, have so far satisfied a range of political interest groups by covering as much as possible within a framework of 80 teaching hours each year. Some also believe there will not be enough time to teach world history in the depth outlined in the draft curriculum. At present, NSW is the only state that tailors its curriculum to a specific time frame: 50 hours for history.

Those involved in the curriculum drafting have confirmed the history outline is overly ambitious and will need to be condensed, have topics removed or have core areas taught as electives. Teachers believe the curriculum authority is nervous about stirring up political tension over which topics it will remove.

The NSW Board of Studies and the state government have been silent on any contentious national curriculum debate issues this federal election year. Mr Kiem said his and other teacher organisations were frustrated at the silence of state and territory Labor governments. "It is a very significant problem," he said. "There is no transparency. No one is saying how many hours we will have to work with. "We have been saying for a long time that we need to get a response … about implementation and from universities about teacher training. If we don't get answers from state and territory governments, there will be inconsistent implementation."

Mr Kiem said he was concerned that the national curriculum authority was not open or flexible enough to offer core history curriculum in the form of options. "We are looking at a document that can be implemented flexibly," he said. "My impression with ACARA is that there is a generic template approach to designing the curriculum, the notion that all students will be studying the one history course. There is a real need to consider those implementation issues. What is needed is flexibility. How you do that is develop core and options."

A spokeswoman for the NSW Minister for Education, Verity Firth, declined to comment on details of the history curriculum. "From day one, the NSW government has supported the development of the national curriculum and we are currently examining the details of the draft," she said.

SOURCE




The grammar you teach when you are not teaching grammar

The gobbledegook below sounds like a face-saving way of admitting that the abandonment of grammar teaching was a big mistake

THE problem is huge: low levels of literacy among up to half of Australians. The solution: a new national school curriculum, literacy for the 21st century and, gasp, grammar. Some say dropping grammar in the 1970s began the slide to today's textese - "yng peeps cant rite proply". But many older Australians live with literacy levels lower than young people. The issue is the needs of people and the economy are changing and so is the curriculum.

Is boring old grammar the answer? Well, not really. It's a modern approach to grammar that's being introduced. And the ambitions are broad: lift children who slip through cracks in the education system to a level of reading and writing that reflects Australia's wealth.

Almost half of adult Australians have literacy skills lower than those needed to meet the demands of everyday life and work in a knowledge-based economy, Bureau of Statistics figures show. Scarily, nearly two-thirds of those whose first language is not English scored below the minimum.

Even so, compared with other countries, Australia rates well on high-school students' scores in reading, maths and science tests. The problem is that achievement differs across the country - and between the disadvantaged and the better off. Last year's national tests reveal nearly one in three year 9 students in the Northern Territory is below the minimum standard in reading, writing, spelling and grammar and punctuation - they do not have rudimentary literacy skills. In NSW, about one in 10 students is at this low level.

The draft national curriculum puts grammar, spelling and punctuation at the centre of English teaching and learning. But why now?

Grammar was cut in the '70s because of a view it didn't help students' writing, said Dr Sally Humphrey from the University of Sydney's linguistics department.

"It was like, 'We're just going to give you building blocks; we're not going to show you how it works in text."' The grammar starring in the new curriculum "isn't a set of rules for 'correct' use", she said, but "a set of resources or a tool kit" to be used according to the situation - whether it's texting, giving a presentation in class or writing a history essay.

"Each of those three situations would require different resources, different patternings of grammar, to do the job properly in that particular context," Dr Humphrey said. "We want to give kids the grammatical resources for being able to do lots of different things."

Reintroducing grammar was also part of an effort to strengthen the literacy of children from multilingual and disadvantaged backgrounds, said the lead adviser to the new English curriculum, Professor Peter Freebody from the University of Sydney. "Our teachers and our systems are geared to doing well for the mainstream," he said. Imagine that school results, including literacy, are shaped like a tadpole. The fat body, representing the bulk of students, does well or quite well. But there's a long tail of people left behind.

Professor Freebody said students didn't learn to read by year 3 and then just build content knowledge. Different kinds of texts demanded different understandings, he said, "and those things don't come free with the territory just because you're good at reading and writing when you're in year 3".

While grammar's return may sound like going back to the '50s, the modern educator's knowledge of grammar, and its use for teaching "reading and writing and enriching kids' understanding of content areas, that's not going backwards", Professor Freebody said.

The new curriculum was arranged into three strands - language, literacy and literature - with grammar an "integral component" of each strand.

It's about "letting kids in on the 'secret' of how good writers and good text producers do their work through the resources of language, through the resources of grammar - 'hey, this is how it's done!'," Dr Humphrey said. "And that's an equity issue … Kids who haven't got access to middle-class homes and middle-class ways of using language that are valued in the schools, they do need [the workings of language] made explicit."

The Australian Industry Group has highlighted the negative effect of low literacy and numeracy on productivity, safety and training. Group chief executive Heather Ridout said the new curriculum was "a long overdue step, so we're strongly supportive of it". Ms Ridout stressed the need for more specialist expertise in language across the board. "We don't just not have it in schools; we don't have it in TAFE, in the VET sector, and we don't have it in the workforce."

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Is the national curriculum overdue, or spoiled by political correctness?

By BRETT MASON (Senator Brett Mason is a former university lecturer and Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education and School Curriculum Standards)

A necessary and long overdue step in education reform in Australia or the further entrenchment of a politically correct agenda in our primary and secondary schools? Or, indeed, both?

These will be some of the questions that parents and others interested in the education of our children will be asking when considering the draft National Curriculum in English, Mathematics, History and Science, recently released for public consultation by the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority.

The idea that all Australian primary and secondary students, regardless of which state or territory they attend school in, should be studying the same things, at the same time in their academic progression, and according to the same standards, has been bandied around for years. It is no longer seen as controversial, and now enjoys broad public support. The devil, as is so often the case with Rudd government initiatives, will be in the detail – of both the finished Curriculum and its implementation.

With the draft National Curriculum now publicly available we can start forming an opinion on the former; and with the Rudd government’s past track record in implementing its lofty programs we are inclined to fear the latter.

While some aspects of the Curriculum, such as the greater emphasis on achieving practical literacy and numeracy, are welcome improvements, there are serious concerns about the direction the Curriculum drafters chose to take in a number of other areas, such as history and science. Perhaps the root problem with the draft Curriculum is ACARA’s decision to weave through all the subject areas three “cross-curriculum perspectives”, no matter how relevant these over-arching themes are to each subject. They are the “Indigenous perspective”, “a commitment to sustainable patterns of living”, and an emphasis on Asia and Australia’s engagement with the region.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with our primary and secondary students learning more about Aboriginal culture, the environment or the history of our region. It is, however, a question of weight, priorities and perspective as to how much, when and in what context students are required to absorb these themes. And the picture presented in the draft Curriculum does not look promising.

Thus, for example, in the Science curriculum, year 9s are to study traditional Chinese medicine, before being given their first opportunity a year later to look at the periodic table of elements, arguably the most important document of modern chemistry, which systemises and informs our understanding of the physical world around us.

Or take 4 year olds in preschool being taught the significance of ANZAC Day and Sorry Day at the same time, while having to wait until Grade 3 to learn about Australia Day and its meaning and place in our nation’s history.

Indeed, the Curriculum contains 118 references to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, culture and history (with Grade 5s studying “White Australia” and Grade 9s Aboriginal massacres and displacement). But there is only one reference to Parliament, and none to Westminster or the Magna Carta, the aspects of our political and cultural heritage that have made Australia perhaps the most peaceful, successful and prosperous democracy in the history of humanity.

If the new National Curriculum sounds like the return and the entrenchment of the “black armband” view of our history, you can be forgiven for being confused. Unlike its drafters, the Coalition – as well as a large majority of Australians - believe that, on balance and for all its faults, Australia’s history is a cause for celebration rather than constant breast-beating.

Here again we have all the ingredients of another Rudd government disaster in the making: a grand but not unattractive idea (the National Curriculum), a tight schedule (2011 is to be a pilot year involving a number of schools around the country), and little thought given to the practicalities of making it all work. There are no resources coming from the Federal government for all the additional teacher training and development required, while extra burdens will be imposed on those who have to deliver the initiative.

Primary school principals in particular are already worried about their capacity to deliver the science, history and math components according to the detail prescribed. We are already experiencing teacher shortages, particularly in areas like science, and the demands of the new Curriculum will merely exacerbate the problems while leaving others to pick up the pieces. For instance, it has been highlighted that only 16 universities in Australia train history teachers and 10 of these are in NSW. It will be necessary for universities to significantly adjust to meet this new demand, particularly given that the Curriculum mandates as many as 80 hours of history a year. Bear in mind that NSW, the only state that currently teaches history as a stand-alone subject, only sets aside 50 hours per year for teaching this subject in years 7 to 10.

Quite apart from the technicalities, the Australian Education Union and legions of individual teachers will in the end have a considerable influence on how the final product is translated for consumption in the classrooms. In the past this has proven to be a game of Chinese whispers where Australia’s mainstream often misses out in favour of elite preoccupations. In its 2007 Curriculum Policy Document, the AEU states, for example, that the first task of schooling should be to "assist in overcoming inequalities between social groups".

To that end, a curriculum entails "recognising that Australia is a multicultural society and that therefore students come to school with a variety of backgrounds, cultures, histories and values, all of which are equally valid" – a statement of cultural relativism that not many outside of the AEU head office would actually agree with.

Or that through a curriculum “students should gain an understanding of the role that the construction of gender has played and continues to play in society”, another exposition of political correctness of little obvious benefit to making our children better educated and productive citizens.

With a die-hard commitment to these sorts of values, parents could be forgiven for fearing that no matter how balanced the National Curriculum will be the ideologues in our education system will always find a way to teach what they want and how they want it.

Parents and other interested parties have just under three months to provide feedback on the draft; that is if they manage to access the information and navigate the rather user-unfriendly feedback website. Perhaps the "digital education revolution" should have started with the government. All we can do at this stage is make our voices heard and hope that a more balanced and mainstream vision of a National Curriculum will prevail.

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21 March, 2010

Despite Gains, Charter School Is Told to Close

It's probably achieving quite well for a ghetto school -- but such a classification would offend against the "equality" myth so must be ignored

Accountability is a mantra of the charter school movement. Students sign pledges at some schools to do their homework, and teachers owe their jobs to students’ gains on tests. But as New York State moves to shut down an 11-year-old charter school in Albany, whose test scores it acknowledges beat the city’s public schools last year, it is apparent that holding schools themselves accountable is not always so easy, or bloodless, as numbers on a page.

The principal, teachers and families of the New Covenant school have mounted a furious defense, citing rising achievement as well as their fears for the loss of a safe harbor from chaotic homes and streets, where teachers deliver homework to parents who are in jail to keep them involved, and the dean of students chases gang members from a nearby park. “We’re that turnaround school America has been waiting to see,” said Jamil Hood, the dean, who grew up in the Arbor Hill neighborhood where the school is located.

Nonetheless, a trustees’ committee of the State University of New York, which grants the school’s charter, voted last month to close it. The committee endorsed the findings of state evaluators who said that despite academic gains, New Covenant fell short of a key benchmark in English, suffered from high student and teacher turnover and was not fiscally sound. The full 17-member SUNY board will decide the school’s fate on Tuesday.

A commitment to shut or radically shake up failing schools is central to President Obama’s vision of education reform and explains in part the bear hug his administration has given charters, which are publicly funded but privately run. But the dispute in Albany exposes a delicate issue in the data-driven world of education policy: If a school improves, but not enough to meet high standards, should its value as a safe and nurturing community also be weighed?

“Everyone who ever closed a school knows it’s not easy,” said James Merriman, who closed five when he was executive director of the Charter Schools Institute, the regulatory agency that evaluates SUNY-authorized charters. Since 1999, SUNY, one of two statewide authorizers, has granted charters to 82 schools and closed seven. “If we are serious about not just incrementally, but substantially, improving achievement in the inner city, we need to stick to standards,” said Mr. Merriman, who is now chief of the New York City Charter School Center.

New Covenant narrowly avoided being closed last year. It was given a one-year reprieve and told to meet specific testing and financial targets. It hit its benchmark in math but missed in English. It was required to have 75 percent of third through sixth graders who were enrolled for at least two years demonstrate proficiency on the state language arts test.

Only 67 percent were proficient, up from 48 percent the prior year and 33 percent in 2006-7, the first year of the current principal, Jecrois Jean-Baptiste, who has put in place an ambitious turnaround plan with twice-weekly teacher workshops and 14,000 new books in classrooms. Over all, 65 percent of Albany students in grades 3 through 6 reached proficiency on last year’s English test.

Evaluators were also critical of student attrition: Of 118 children in third grade in 2005, only 30 remained last year as sixth graders. Mr. Jean-Baptiste said that was because charter middle schools in the area start in fifth grade, and parents wanted to enroll children before places disappeared. “We attract more than the amount of students we lose,” he said, adding that enrollment rose to 646 from 571 even with the threatened shutdown.

Occupying a handsome brick and gray-block building, New Covenant stands out amid many boarded-up houses. On a recent Monday, children in uniforms — some loosely interpreted — formed lines to walk to the cafeteria. Younger children asked Mr. Jean-Baptiste, 45, for a hug as he moved through the halls.

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"Reform” Of Education Reform

Mark up Obama’s new education policy as another change in the “Change!” promised during the campaign. Remember his call for universal access to college?

We will prepare the next generation for success in college and the workforce, ensuring that ... any young person who works hard and desires a college education can access it.

Actually, that was the quote that appears on the Google link to Candidate Obama’s education policy. If you follow that same link now what you find is:

We will prepare the next generation for success in college and the workforce, ensuring that American children lead the world once again in creativity and achievement....

After graduating high school, all Americans should be prepared to attend at least one year of job training or higher education to better equip our workforce for the 21st century economy....

Universal access seems to have been, well, somewhat attenuated. And now the new policy has been unveiled, as reported in the New York Times:

The Obama administration on Saturday called for a broad overhaul of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, proposing to reshape divisive provisions that encouraged instructors to teach to tests, narrowed the curriculum, and labeled one in three American schools as failing.

The article is fascinating, even aside from the NYT’s typical news story editorializing (“His plan strikes a careful balance...”). An interesting feature of this “overhaul” is that

President Obama would replace the law’s requirement that every American child reach proficiency in reading and math, which administration officials have called utopian, with a new national target that could prove equally elusive: that all students should graduate from high school prepared for college and a career.

Well, whoever said high school graduates must be able to read and write and add and subtract?

President Bush called the attitude embodied in President Obama’s new policy the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” I think he was wrong about the soft.

SOURCE




The new challenge for British universities is to unravel Labour’s mess

Years of bad schooling cannot be put right at an academic university by massaging the entry requirements

‘Legacy” is a word that has sneaked into political fashion. It has begun to replace “delivery”, which has proved to be so awkward. Labour grandees are often said to be considering their political legacies and I wonder what they really do believe they have bequeathed to the nation over the past 13 years. It is just conceivable that they imagine they have achieved something with education, education, education, as promised, but their educational legacy is a perfect blueprint for what not to do.

Take universities. You could not hope for a better example of how to get everything wrong. The Blair-Brown years have demonstrated that it is actually quite easy to bring down standards in universities, wreck the chances and dash the hopes of hundreds of thousands of teenagers and reduce employers to complaining publicly about the quality of today’s graduates.

Labour’s legacy to education is a disastrous combination of inflation and devaluation. They have inflated schoolchildren’s expectations, urging them to believe that 50% of young people should go to university. To meet such expectations, they have continued with the Tory initiative to inflate the supply of universities by giving the status to all kinds of tertiary education colleges and deflating the idea of what a university is. Meanwhile, they devalued the standards of A-levels to inflate the numbers of children who could pass them to go to more and more universities.

Naturally this became more and more expensive. Even though the government spent more and more, it was never enough, so universities were obliged to deflate their teaching and pastoral care to lower, cheaper levels. At the same time they devalued their degree standards to inflate the numbers of students passing and getting high marks. Meanwhile, students had to borrow more and more money from a government loan scheme to pay for these places, so some were forced to drop out and others graduated with terrifying debt loads. They now face the world as graduates in inflated numbers with inflated expectations, inflated debt, devalued degrees and deflated prospects.

The consequences are making themselves painfully felt right now. Last week the government was forced to announce that more than three-quarters of universities in England are to have their budgets cut for this September — some by nearly 14%. And the government’s Higher Education Funding Council for England warned that yet further cuts may be imposed later in the academic year. We can now watch for the cuts to be made in precisely the wrong places — such as the disgraceful axeing by King’s College London of its chair of paleography, the UK’s only chair in the subject.

These cuts come in a year that has seen a record 23% rise in the number of students applying to universities. Last week the Conservatives claimed that 2750,000 sixth-formers with good qualifying grades will fail to get into a university course this autumn. The head of Ucas, the universities clearing house, advised students who had not got into their chosen universities to forget about the clearing system and “to reappraise their aspirations” instead. That is a lot of disappointed sixth-formers in a generation that Labour has deliberately encouraged to see university education as both entitlement and necessity.

There can no longer be any doubt that A-levels have got much easier. The number of pupils getting three A grades, once a rarity even at top schools, is now one in six — twice as many as when Labour came into office. Reliable long-term research from Durham University shows that individuals of the same general ability level would now be expected to score about two A-level grades higher than they did 20 years ago. The result, as Tesco for one has pointed out, is that it is now hard for employers to differentiate between candidates. The same is true at university entrance: Imperial College London warned in 2008 that grade inflation had made A-level results “almost worthless” in choosing between university applicants.

For those who do get to university, debt is often a heavy burden. A study published last week found that 28% of students expected to accumulate debts of £20,000 at university. Meanwhile, the student loan system, supposedly monitored by the government, is an alarming mess. Last week a damning report from the National Audit Office (NAO) blamed both the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Student Loans Company (SLC) for failing to learn from last year’s mishandling of the grant application system. The head of the NAO questioned last week whether the SLC is actually capable of dealing with twice as many applications this year. What this means for students is long delays and constant anxiety. It is a disgrace.

After all this worry and sacrifice, new graduates are not rewarded by the expected good jobs and high salaries. Work is scarce and employers are sceptical about their qualifications and are saying so openly. The independent Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR) recently published a manifesto calling on all political parties to abolish the target of getting 50% of under-30s into university. Carl Gilleard of AGR said this target has affected degree standards and creates problems for employers of graduates because they cannot be sure of the value of certain degrees: “It does not help young people’s life chances or represent a good return on their financial investment. It does little for the reputation of our universities either.”

No doubt all this was done with high-minded intentions in the name of equal opportunities. But a university in the true sense of the word is not a place of equality.

It is a place of excellence. Academic excellence is elitist, of its nature. Years of bad schooling cannot be put right at an academic university by massaging the entry requirements or providing remedial classes. It is too late for that. As Chris Patten, the chancellor of Oxford University, said last week, diluting entry standards to make up for shortfalls in secondary education would soon mean we no longer had world-class universities.

What is so strange about Labour’s education policy is that it is at the same time both egalitarian and snobbish — egalitarian in insisting that all should have degrees and that higher education colleges are universities and snobbish in the old-fashioned belief that only a posh academic university degree really matters. And the tragedy of Labour’s education legacy is that is has done nobody much good.

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20 March, 2010

What works in education reform

At lunch yesterday I met Anders Hultin, CEO of Gems Education in the UK, which is associated with the highly successful Konskapsskolan school chain in Sweden. So I was getting some good tips about what makes Sweden's school voucher system work. I thought I might pass on a few of them to the Tory schools spokesman Michael Gove MP, who wants to engineer the same supply-side revolution here. Though he probably knows it all already, but just can't say it because of political correctness.

In Sweden, the average cost of a municipal education follows the choices of parents. Even if they send their kid to a private school, that budget – about £6,500 – follows. To get the money, private schools are not allowed to charge top-up fees, and there is no academic selection. But it's easy to get a licence to enter this system, and 1,100 new schools have sprung up because of it. Most, about 800 of them (Gove please note), are profit-making. Many are small schools but in big chains (some with turnovers of £100m and more), which actually have a successful model for organising and running schools, and take that successful brand to one school after another.

Nor surprisingly, this supply-side revolution, a deregulation of the school sector, has brought plenty of new investment. In the UK it might cost £25m to set up a new school. In Sweden, it costs the state nothing, because parents, teachers, companies and others raise the money they need – and usually work out ways to do things far cheaper than the state can. And it works. the new schools have 20% better educational outcomes.

There seem to be four lessons from all of this. (1) Make it easy for new people to come in and provide education. Standards, yes, but allow people to start small, maybe renting empty office or warehouse space, rather than insisting that everything has to be built and run as the state builds and runs it. (2) Allow profit making, because that is what drives the investment and the risk-taking. (3) Don't keep subsidizing failure, but reward success. (4) Let people spread their success. That is what makes the Swedish system work: it's about knowing how to deliver education effectively, and taking that expertise far and wide.

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Racist Scots

Not really surprising. The Scots have always hated the English

Edinburgh University was yesterday accused of 'anti-English' bias after discriminating against applicants from the South. Admissions rules posted on its website state that 'additional weighting' will be given to students from Scotland and the far north of England. The move aims to ensure 'local' applicants get on popular courses.

But headteachers at leading English public schools condemned the policy as 'potentially illegal and racist' and unfair to English families whose taxes support Scotland.

The move triggered suspicions that the university - whose past students include Prime Minister Gordon Brown - is trying to change the social make-up of its campus. It has traditionally been a magnet for students from aristocratic and society circles, attracting the reputation of being 'English and posh'.

One of the unhappy English headteachers is Richard Cairns, of Brighton College. He said only two out of 27 applicants to Edinburgh had so far been successful this year. Yet more than half of pupils have been given offers by other prestigious universities, including Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol and University College London. They include Jo Saxby, 17, who was welcomed by Oxford, Bristol and Exeter but rejected by Edinburgh, his second-choice, without even an interview. 'You feel completely helpless,' he said. 'It feels quite unfair to feel you are not being judged on merit.'

Mr Cairns, who used to teach in Scotland, said: 'I asked around schools in the South East. They have all had the same experience. Edinburgh has opted to turn in on itself in a manner that strikes me as potentially illegal and racist.'

The university - among the top 20 in the world and a member of the Russell Group of leading UK colleges - is understood to be the only UK institution to give priority to applicants from certain areas. Its website stated: 'We want to make sure that local applicants are not prevented from studying their chosen subject.' It added 'additional weighting' will go to students who live in Scotland, Cumbria, Northumberland, Durham, Teesside, and Tyne and Wear.

Andrew Halls, head of King's College School, Wimbledon, South London, said he had been 'quite struck' by the lack of offers from the university this year. 'Edinburgh has been ruthless and, at worst, is adopting a depressingly xenophobic approach. 'They are losing a lot of very able candidates who would love to study in Scotland.'

A spokesman for the university said: 'The percentage of English entrants has risen year-on-year over the past few years. 'In 2009, 41 per cent of UK entrants were from England.'

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Merit scholarships and conspiracies in restraint of trade

We spent last week visiting colleges that my son is thinking of applying to. The experience reinforced the impression I had earlier gotten from web pages—that what Harvard (and, mutatis mutandis, Vassar and ...) wants are students who decided, at age fourteen, that their highest priority for the next four years was doing whatever it would take to get into Harvard. It also raised an interesting puzzle. A number of the schools we visited claim to have very generous financial aid programs based on need, but no merit based scholarships at all. How and why?

Why the schools, collectively, would want such a policy is pretty clear. Bidding against each other for the very best students—which is what merit based scholarships amount to—is costly. From a financial standpoint, they are better off if they all refrain. From an ideological standpoint, I expect most of those involved in the process would rather spend their money on smart poor students than on very smart rich ones.

But what is in the collective interest of all is not necessarily in the private interest of each. Schools benefit by having extraordinarily good students—and even the Harvards and Vassars of the world do not have an unlimited supply of such. Brilliant students are fun to teach, which makes the school more attractive to potential faculty. They create intellectual excitement, which makes it more attractive to applicants. And, with luck, they end up with fame and/or fortune, some of which may get shared with their alma mater. If all the elite schools refrain from bidding for such they save a good deal of money, and lose only to the extent that some brilliant students who can afford Harvard decide to go to some less elite but more generous school instead—which should not be too much of a risk if the lack of generosity applies only to students whose parents can afford Harvard without financial aid. But if an individual elite school breaks ranks, it has the opportunity to push itself higher in the select company of elite schools.

The logic is very much the same as in an ordinary cartel agreement. All firms in the industry benefit by keeping output down and prices up, but each firm benefits even more if the others follow that policy while it cuts prices a little and expands output a lot.

Which raises an obvious suspicion—that what I am observing is indeed cartel pricing, that some subset of elite schools, containing schools that believe they are competing mostly against each other, have made an implicit agreement to refrain from competing for potential students who are both extraordinarily able and financially well off.

About twenty years ago, eight Ivy League schools were accused by the Justice Department of just such an arrangement—sharing information on student applicants, agreeing not to offer merit based scholarships, avoiding competition for the best students. The controversy was settled by a consent agreement, in which the schools agreed to a variety of things, including ending the annual meetings at which they, along with 15 other schools in the Northeast, discussed the financial aid applications of students that had been accepted by more than one of the schools. My observation of current financial aid policy suggests that at least some of the schools involved may have continued, or resumed, the same practices, probably in a less visible form.

Assuming that is what is going on, what are the implications–aside from the possibility of future collisions with the Justice Department? The obvious one is that wealthy schools will be a little richer, and wealthy parents of very smart kids who want to go to those schools a little poorer; off hand I don't see anything particularly bad (or good) about that.

The less obvious one is that the position of elite schools, at least the ones refusing to compete for top students, will be a little less secure. A few years ago, when my daughter was looking at colleges, one of the ones she seriously considered was Saint Olaf. One thing that struck us in the process was an email from their admissions officer, informing us that by applying a little earlier our daughter could be considered for a merit scholarship. Saint Olaf was, and is, a school a little below the level of Harvard, Vassar, and the like—and trying to work its way up.

A second thing that struck us about that particular interaction is relevant to my earlier post about the desire of elite colleges for students whose academic records all fit the same pattern—the desire for a cookie-cutter elite. The reason the admission officer gave for sending the email was that our daughter was home schooled, and Saint Olaf had found that home schooled students were sometimes very well qualified, hence potential recipients of merit scholarships.

That was very nearly the opposite of the reaction we were getting from other schools, whose attitude was that they were willing to consider home schooled students but not at all sure how to handle their applications, and would much prefer that such applicants do their best to obtain conventional credentials by taking some graded courses somewhere, anywhere, before applying. It was the admission officer at Saint Olaf who told us that what blew them away was the list our daughter included in her application of books she had read—four hundred of them.

All of which suggests that the indirect effect of the policies of the elite schools may be to open up American collegiate education to a little more competition. Which might be a good thing.

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19 March, 2010

Limited apology ends defamation suit brought by far-Left professor at CUNY

Leftists can't take being mocked or criticized

An unusual defamation suit by a professor against an emeritus professor has ended -- without the $2 million payout that the plaintiff had sought, but with a statement by the lawsuit's target that the plaintiff is not a terrorist. Both sides are claiming victory in a case that raised questions about the freedom of academics to attack union leaders. But the plaintiff says that the issue is the right of faculty leaders to stand up to unrelenting personal attacks.

The suit was filed in 2007 over comments made by Sharad Karkhanis, an emeritus professor at Kingsborough Community College who publishes The Patriot Returns, an online newsletter that features regular, caustic criticism of the City University of New York's faculty union. According to the newsletter, the Professional Staff Congress, which is an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, is a poorly-run union that focuses too much on leftist politics to be effective on behalf of its members.

One of the issues in the lawsuit was comments Karkhanis wrote about Susan O'Malley, an English professor at Kingsborough, who was at the time a member of the union's executive board. The comments focused on O'Malley and her push to protect the job rights of Mohammad Yousry, who was fired from CUNY and who was convicted (in a controversial case that some believe was unfair) of supporting terrorist activities and of Susan Rosenberg, a CUNY instructor who served jail time for her role in the Weather Underground. In several references, Karkhanis mocked O'Malley for her efforts on behalf of these individuals, whom he dubbed terrorists, and questioned why she was so focused on them. In comments he says are satire, he referred to O'Malley's "Queda-Camp," to her desire to "bring in all her indicted, convicted and freed-on-bail terrorist friends" to college jobs, and so forth. He wrote that she "does not worry about the 'ordinary' adjunct -- but she is worried about convicted terrorists."

The tough tone is the style of the newsletter, which calls Barbara Bowen, the president of the union, "Dear Leader," after the North Korean dictator.

As justification for seeking $2 million in damages, O'Malley said that she was being accused of being a terrorist. While she has said that her reputation was being slandered, others have said that the suit set a dangerous precedent for academic freedom in that a faculty member was being attacked in the courts for his criticism of a powerful figure (even if in this case the powerful figure was a union leader, not an administrator). One blog was formed to defend The Patriot Returns by academics who said they were staying anonymous to avoid being sued by O'Malley.

As part of the settlement, Karkhanis has issued a statement in his newsletter in which he says that he does not believe O'Malley to be a terrorist. Since Karkhanis has maintained that he never believed her to be a terrorist, but was engaged in satire, he maintains this is no defeat. The statement says: "We do not believe Professor Susan O'Malley to be a terrorist, and deeply regret if she, or any of her associates, understood us to have labeled her as such. We are sorry if anything published in The Patriot Returns has been interpreted in such a way. We do not believe that anything published in The Patriot Returns has exceeded the bounds of permissible speech, but express our profound sorrow if Dr. O'Malley sustained any damage to her reputation or suffered any emotional pain or suffering as a result of these statements."

The lawyer representing Karkhanis, Mark E. Jakubik, also published a statement in the newsletter, arguing that this is a full victory for his client. "The settlement did not involve an admission of liability or wrongdoing by Dr. Karkhanis. To the contrary, as is clearly iterated in the statement, we continue to believe that none of the material published in The Patriot Returns that was at issue in the lawsuit was defamatory or otherwise actionable for any reason. Second, there is no financial aspect to the settlement, and Dr. Karkhanis is not required to make any payment whatsoever to Dr. O'Malley or anyone else. Third, Dr. Karkhanis remains free to publish The Patriot Returns without prior restraint. In sum, we believe that, given the terms upon which Dr. Karkhanis agreed to resolve this matter, the settlement represents a significant victory for free speech and academic freedom, and The Patriot Returns will continue to stand as an unabashed defender of those values."

In an interview, O'Malley said that the case "was never about money" so that she did not view the settlement as anything but a victory. She said that she sued after being attacked for years, and after being attacked in ways that not only were personally hurtful, but that limited her ability to lobby in Albany on behalf of faculty interests. "Everywhere I would go, they would say 'Oh, you are the one being attacked all the time,'" she said.

The repeated attacks, which she said represented the thinking of conservative faculty members, were not satire, she said, because it was never clear what was satire and what was not. Further, she said that the attacks were "an attempt to silence me," so her suit was not an attack on free expression, but a defense of it. She said she was legitimately concerned about being branded a terrorist and thought her name might end up on a government no-fly list. She said that she returned to Kingsborough -- after being on leave to perform various faculty governance roles -- and found that many faculty members didn't know her, but had read about her in the newsletter.

Ultimately, O'Malley said, she hoped that the case might "create some good case law" about what can be done "when people are spreading lies" online. But she said she felt she had won a victory in that, since she sued, she hasn't been attacked in the same way. "I just wanted it quiet for a while," she said.

SOURCE




The soft bigotry of low expectations, blackboard jungle edition

As I noted here, the Obama administration's Department of Education has announced that it will crack down on "civil-rights infractions" in public schools, including alleged disparities in the disciplining of white and black students. The notion behind this initiative is that black students are disproportionately subjected to discipline they don't deserve.

That doesn't seem to be the case in the Philadelphia public school system, however. There, as Abigail Thernstrom and Tim Fay report, it appears that African American students frequently harass and attack Asian students without consequence.. The problem is especially pronounced at South Philadelphia High School. There, according to Thernstrom and Fay,

assaults ]by blacks on Asians]have occurred in the cafeteria line, in bathrooms, in stairwells, on school buses, and elsewhere. The incidents ran the gamut from verbal abuse, physical intimidation, blocking doorways, cutting in line ahead of Asian students in the cafeteria, use of anti-Asian racial epithets, and more serious physical abuse including shoving, kicking, and punching--sometimes at the hands of more than one assailant. Advocates have accused school officials, including school Superintendent Arlene Ackerman and Principal LaGreta Brown (both black) of indifference to the plight of Asian students in their charge.

On one occasion,

black students reportedly began to hunt for Asians, checking classrooms were they might be found. A group of apparently organized black students reportedly rushed the stairwells to the second floor where many Asian students were located. Security camera footage from the lunchroom showed a group of 60 to 70 students--most of them black--surging forward with a smaller faction attacking a small group of Asian students.

Another time, after the school was "locked down,"

school officials decided to have classrooms dismissed one-by-one, and contacted police to provide extra protection outside the school. The ranks of the police thinned, however, when some had to respond to another emergency, and by the time a group of Asians were heading home they were insufficiently protected. Escorted out of the school by the principal (perhaps only for a short way--another disputed fact), the Asian students spotted blacks lying in wait; they made a futile attempt to run from trouble. In the ensuing attack, one Asian student's nose was broken, and as many as 13 ended up needing treatment at the local hospital.

If the Obama administration really cared about civil rights enforcement in the context of public education, it would be acting to ensure that minority students, such as Asian-Americans, have access to a public education free of intimidation, and certainly free from violence. It would not be discouraging school officials at places like South Philadelphia High School from maintaining what little discipline may exist by threatening to launch an investigation if blacks students are disciplined in large numbers.

Unfortunately, in the view of Obama's civil rights enforcers, some races seem to be more equal than others.

JOHN adds: Anyone who seriously thinks that the big problem in our public schools is discrimination against violent African-American students has had zero contact with such schools--or, one might say, with reality--in recent decades. I doubt that even the Obama administration is that out of touch. What we're seeing here is a political payoff at the expense of students of all races, nothing more.

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A spineless British council allows a State school to be taken over by aggressive Muslims

A headmistress forced from her job after a campaign by two Muslim governors to give Islam a greater presence in a state school is entitled to £400,000 damages, the Court of Appeal has ruled. Erica Connor, 57, left the New Monument primary school in Woking, Surrey, because of stress after she was accused of Islamophobia. A deputy High Court judge ruled in March last year that Surrey County Council had failed in its duty to protect her and to intervene when the actions of the governors created problems. He awarded her £407,700 damages. The council had appealed against the ruling, claiming it was not liable in law and had not acted negligently in dealing with the problem.

Lord Justice Laws, giving a ruling on Thursday, said that Mrs Connor, who was promoted to head of the school in 1998, had suffered psychiatric damage and had to stop work in 2005 and retired a year later on ill-health grounds. The school had a 80-85 per cent Muslim intake and problems began in 2003 when Paul Martin, a Muslim convert, was elected a parent governor and Mumtaz Saleem was appointed as a local education authority governor. Mr Martin started making allegations about anti-Muslim comments by members of staff, which led to an investigation by Mrs Connor. She found that all the staff denied the allegations, which she said had demoralised them. An official review also found no evidence of deliberate racism or religious bias but said the governing body had become dysfunctional. The High Court had been told Mr Martin tried to stir up disaffection in the community against the school and Mr Saleem was verbally abusive in school meetings.

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 situation changed when the two men were elected as governors. Judge John Leighton Williams ruled in the High Court 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.

When Mr Martin was removed from the board of governors in June 2005, he wrote a letter of complaint saying it was because he had been raising complaints of institutional racism within the school. A few days later a petition was circulated calling for Mrs Connor’s removal from the school and containing “defamatory and offensive remarks”, the appeal judges were told.

Lord Justice Laws said the High Court judge was right to find there had been negligence on the part of the council. He said it was an unusual case — “partly because of the council’s lamentable capitulation to aggression”.

Lord Justice Sedley said: “Surrey County Council found itself faced with the unenviable task of responding in an equitable fashion to an inequitable campaign designed to capture a secular state school for a particular faith which happened to be that of a majority of the families whose children attended the school.” He said the council had gone wrong by trying to compromise rather than protecting the head, the staff and the school.

“The picture that emerges from the careful and thorough [High Court] judgment is of a local education authority which had allowed itself to be intimidated by an aggressively conducted campaign to subvert the school’s legal status, a campaign which was plainly destabilising the school and placing the headteacher under intolerable pressure.”

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18 March, 2010

Obama's Plan to Cripple Education Reforms

To date, the only area in which we have found ourselves in agreement with President Obama was over his announced intention to enforce strict and elevated education standards and move toward paying teachers based on merit. Now, Obama has retreated from his position of principle and embraced a mealy-mouthed compromise designed to placate school administrators, teachers unions and their political acolytes at the expense of educational standards.

Over the weekend, Obama announced a series of changes in the No Child Left Behind Law, most of which will weaken it and might even cripple the efforts to raise school standards. The law -- and most education terminology -- is coded with euphemisms and generalities that must be translated, so let us help to provide a codebook.

The New York Times reports that Obama's plan would "use annual tests along with other indicators" to measure achievement in the nation's schools. What are the other indicators? The Times says they include "pupil attendance, graduation rates and learning climate."

This proposed change will totally undermine the central principle of No Child Left Behind: that schools be judged by objective indices of student performance. By factoring in attendance rates, the changes give credit for putting warm bodies in seats. By focusing on graduation rates, they permit schools to push up their ratings by passing out good grades to incompetent students. And by looking at the "learning climate," the changes would inject subjective and vague criteria that would permit failing schools to disguise that fact.

While it is not always good to base measurements of performance only on tests of reading and math, these examination scores at least afford independent, objective indications of student ability. By permitting fudging through these new subjective or self-vindicating standards, Obama undermines the whole concept of educational reform.

The Times indicates that Obama wants to find the "5,000 chronically failing schools" while also identifying the 10,000 to 15,000 excellent ones and the 80,000 schools in between. This quota system ignores two abysmal facts: Under No Child Left Behind, one school in three was found to be failing, and there has been no appreciable increase in either reading or math scores for the past decade.

By sweeping the problem of bad schools under the rug through a numerical quota (or goal) and subjective criteria for measuring performance, Obama lets the legacy of failing public schools continue while parents are dosed with the soothing syrup of reassurance.

Obama also wants to shift the focus from forcing students to achieve proficiency at each grade level to "measuring each student's academic growth regardless of the performance level at which they started." In other words, Obama wants to allow students who cannot read, write or do math with appropriate ability to be coddled as long as they are improving. When will we learn that flexible standards that bend to accommodate those who cannot meet them do the disadvantaged no good and plenty of harm?

Two parts of the proposed reforms make sense. He would replace the emphasis on teachers' academic credentials with a focus on evaluating how their pupils are doing and would intervene in otherwise proficient schools where disadvantaged students are falling far behind the bulk of the pupil population. But these two saving graces are not enough to redeem a program designed to restore the good old days of flattering self-evaluation in education and reassuring, if phony, good news to feed to parents and the community.

Until now, Obama has stood firm on the subject of education reform, resisting efforts to cripple the Bush standards. Now he has retreated even from this position to the detriment of our children.

SOURCE




Fat Cat California Teachers Union Misses the Education Mark

The California Fair Political Practices Commission released a report last week detailing the fifteen most influential special interest groups in the state. Over the course of the last ten years, these fifteen groups—consisting of unions, Indian tribes, and corporations—spent over $1 billion on lobbying, candidates, ballot measures, and other political activities. In a state as large and influential as California, it’s not hard to imagine millions of dollars being expended on directing its course—especially when multiple ballot measures every election pit one interest group against another.

But among the top fifteen big spenders, one special interest group particularly stands out: the California Teachers Association (CTA). In the last decade, the CTA has spent over $200 million on lobbying and political activities—almost double what the second highest-spending lobbying group spent.

Unions have become the dominant political influence in California. At the mere hint of any threat to their power structure, the union-financed political machine fires up and intimidates all opposition. The hubris of the unions is such that during a legislative budget committee hearing last summer, one union leader threatened, “We helped get you into office and we’ve got a good memory.”

The CTA’s spending is especially noteworthy when one considers the issues it spends its members’ dues on. Most of the CTA’s 325,000 members probably assume that their dues are used only on education-related matters. But the CTA has branched out into all sorts of political battles beyond education funding.

Although it would seem logical that a teachers union would only focus on education issues, a look at the CTA web site reveals the true goal of this progressive union. According to the CTA mission statement, the union exists to “protect and promote the well-being of its members; to improve the conditions of teaching and learning; to advance the cause of free, universal, and quality public education.” That sounds like a perfectly ordinary goal for a teachers union.

But the mission statement goes on to explain that the union also exists to “ensure that the human dignity and civil rights of all children and youth are protected; and to secure a more just, equitable, and democratic society.” Ensuring “human dignity and civil rights,” as well as a “more just, equitable and democratic society” is far beyond the scope of simply lobbying for teachers’ salaries or more school supplies.

Since 2000, the CTA has spent over $38 million on lobbying the state legislature. A look at the legislation the CTA is lobbying in the current legislative session shows a focus on more than school-related matters.

The CTA is actively supporting Senate Joint Resolution 9, legislation calling upon Congress and the President to repeal the “discriminatory” Don’t Ask Don’t Tell military policy. It also lobbied to pass Senate Bill 572, which declares May 22 Harvey Milk Day in California, in honor of the homosexual activist from San Francisco.

Apparently universal healthcare has become a priority for the teachers union as it supported Senate Bill 1, legislation that would extend Medi-Cal coverage to illegal immigrants’ children. And the CTA isn’t just supporting, but is co-sponsoring Senate Bill 810, which would implement a single-payer government-run healthcare system in California. The CTA lobbied against a Republican-sponsored healthcare reform measure that would have provided greater competition in health insurance by allowing out-of-state carriers to sell plans in California

Even more telling than the legislation it supports, is the legislation the CTA opposes, including Senate Bill 370, which would have prevented voter fraud through voter identification requirements.

The CTA has also invested a great deal of time and money into the marriage issue. It supports Assembly Joint Resolution 19, calling on Congress and the President to repeal the “discriminatory” Defense of Marriage Act. It also lobbied on behalf of House Resolution 5 and Senate Resolution 7, which both expressed the legislature’s belief that Proposition 8 was an “improper” revision to the state constitution. In 2008, the CTA was among the biggest donors to the No on Proposition 8 campaign, pouring more than $1 million into the effort.

And if there were any doubt about the political party with whom the CTA most identifies, their $6.5 million dollar donation—the largest donation to any political party from the special interest groups—clearly signifies the union’s commitment to the Democrat Party.

Pay check protection is crucial to transforming California and diminishing the influence of unions. Union members who don’t agree with the aggressive social agenda of their unions are forced to pay dues spent on political campaigning that may violate their beliefs and standards. In the meantime, the CTA will continue to flood Sacramento with its money and influence—at the expense of those they supposedly represent.

SOURCE




Lazy British teacher lets boy die -- but no penalty



A boy of 11 who suffered an asthma attack at school was left dying in a corridor because a teacher was allegedly too busy to call an ambulance. Doctors believe Sam Linton could have been saved if he had received treatment sooner. Instead, he was left alone and gasping for breath because, it was claimed, his form tutor, Janet Ford, 46, refused to help him because she was in a meeting.

The teacher - who has not been suspended - allegedly told two of Sam's concerned friends to 'go away'. He was taken to hospital when his mother picked him up from school, but died hours later. Last night Sam's devastated parents, Karen and Paul Linton, launched a furious attack on staff at Offerton High School in Stockport after an inquest jury ruled their son was the victim of systemic failings and neglect. Mrs Linton, a company managing director, said she and her husband, a double glazing engineer, would take legal action against Stockport council.

She said: 'I am angry, very angry. When I arrived (at school), Sam was worse than I have ever seen him before. 'As soon as I saw him, I knew it was serious. He had a grey tinge to his skin and his mouth was blue. I had never seen him like that before in all of the 100 or so attacks he'd had. 'The fact that no one called an ambulance during the hours that Sam was suffering from a prolonged asthma attack is truly astounding and very troubling for all parents. 'When you send your child to school you believe they will be looked after and cared for.'

The inquest heard that, despite suffering from asthma all his life, Sam was a keen footballer and had a black belt in tae kwon do. On the day he died in December 2007, Sam was seen struggling for breath during the lunch hour. However, he appeared to recover, before suffering a full asthma attack in a lesson with Miss Ford at 2.15pm. After the lesson, Miss Ford telephoned the school's student services department, who were responsible for first aid, and was told to send him to them when he got his breath back and his symptoms had calmed down. She failed to do so, and went into a meeting. Sam was found at the end of the school day gasping for air on a bench by friend Paris Rafferty, who was so concerned she interrupted Miss Ford.

However, the court heard that Miss Ford told Paris to 'go away', adding: 'I know Sam is there and he will have to wait.' Instead, Paris went to find Sam's older brother, Jacque, then 13. Jacque told Miss Ford she needed to call an ambulance, but the teacher refused. Even though Sam could not walk unaided, she told Jacque to take him to the staff room and call his parents.

Mrs Linton took Sam to Stepping Hill Hospital, Stockport, at 5.20pm but he died two hours later in the presence of his parents. Dr Charlotte Doughty, who treated Sam, told the hearing that he may have survived had an ambulance been called earlier. She said: 'The people I have seen die from asthma attacks are the people who have delayed their attendance to hospital.'

Giving evidence, Miss Ford denied the pupils' accounts of events but admitted being 'vague' on school policy, which said an ambulance should be called if a pupil's condition did not improve within 10 minutes. ''In hindsight, I would have done things differently,' she added.

Giving their verdict of neglect, the jury listed 12 separate failings on the part of the school, ten of which 'caused or significantly contributed to' Sam's death. These included failing to put in place an adequate asthma policy or sufficiently training staff to help children with the illness. The jury was asked to consider whether Sam had been unlawfully killed, but dismissed this verdict, which means it is unlikely anyone will face a criminal prosecution.

A Stockport Council spokesman confirmed no one had been suspended following Sam's death, but added: 'We are now considering the inquest verdict and the recommendations of the coroner.'

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17 March, 2010

Reaching for the SKY

South Korea focuses on quality over reducing class sizes

Within South Korea, the three most prestigious universities are Seoul National University, Korea University, and Yonsei University. Collectively, they are referred to by the acronym SKY.

Graduating from a SKY university often leads to a prestigious job with a high salary --especially if the graduate is in the field of education. Opinion polls show that South Koreans view teachers as high-status professionals who make greater contributions to society than any other profession. I recently visited the SKY universities to learn why SouthKoreans feel this way.

"In Korea, we have a Confucian tradition of respecting teachers," said LimCheolil, associate professor of education at Seoul National University.

Beyond tradition, South Korea actively raises the status of teaching as a profession by doing two things. First, it makes entry to teacher training very selective. Teachers are recruited from the top 5 percent of each high-school graduate class. Second, teachers are paid generous starting salaries of 141 percent of GDP per capita, which is significantly above the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average of 95 percent.

Making teacher training selective and paying teachers high starting salaries attracts the strongest candidates to the teaching profession,which is important because teacher quality significantly impacts student outcomes.

South Korea is able to pay teachers high starting salaries because it employs relatively fewer teachers than other nations. As a result, the student-teacher ratio in South Korea is 30:1, compared to the OECD averageof 17:1.

It's a smart tradeoff because studies show that teacher quality has significantly more impact on student outcomes than class size. Dollar fordollar, it's better to attract a small number of outstanding teachers with high starting salaries than to attract a large number of mediocre teachers with lower starting salaries --even if that means having a high student-teacher ratio.

In education-obsessed South Korea, the potential for earning a lot of money as a teacher is great. For example, 46-year-old math instructor and cram school tutor Woo Hyeong-cheol makes $4 million a year teaching Web-based classes. His salary is higher than most of the top professional baseball players in South Korea. And he's just as famous.

Teaching is more than just a high-status profession with a high starting salary in South Korea; it's also one of the most stable careers. Lee SangMin, assistant professor of education at Korea University, said: "After the economic crisis in 1997, most Koreans considered stability as the most important thing when choosing a job. Therefore, many university students pursue teaching positions in elementary, middle, and high school."

Lee Sungho H., professor of education at Yonsei University, agreed: "The most critical reason for being a teacher is job stability. Teachers are guaranteed retirement at age 62. In addition, teaching provides fringe-benefits such as summer and winter vacations, a fixed daily time schedule,and a good pension."

South Korea's high level of respect for teachers is an exemplar for other nations that want to improve student outcomes.

SOURCE




How the Campuses Helped Ruin California’s Economy

All across the country there were demonstrations on March 4 by students (and some faculty) against cuts in higher education funding, but inevitably attention focused on California, where the modern genre originated in 1964. I joined the University of California faculty in 1966 and so have watched a good many of them, but have never seen one less impressive that this year’s. In 1964 there was focus and clarity. This one was brain-dead. The former idealism and sense of purpose had degenerated into a self-serving demand for more money at a time when both state and university are broke, and one in eight California workers is unemployed. The elite intellectuals of the university community might have been expected to offer us insight into how this problem arose, and realistic measures for dealing with it. But all that was on offer was this: get more money and give it to us. Californians witnessing this must have wondered whether the money they were already providing was well spent where there was so little evidence of productive thought.

The content vacuum with filled with the standby language of past demonstrations, and so there was much talk of “the struggle,” and of “oppression,” and—of course—of racism. “We are all students of color now” said Berkeley’s Professor Ananya Roy, and a student proclaimed that this crisis represented “structural racism.” (Why not global warming too?) Berkeley’s Chancellor Birgeneau called the demonstrations “the best of our tradition of effective civil action.” Neither Chancellors nor demonstrations are what they used to be. The nostalgia for the good old days surfaced again in efforts to shut the campus down by blocking the entrance of UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that the old “shut it down” cry was somewhat misplaced when keeping it fully open was what the present demonstration was about, but then this was not an occasion when anyone seemed to have any idea of what they were trying to achieve.

One group at UCLA stumbled into the truth, though it was a truth they did not understand. At Bruin Plaza a crowd chanted “Who’s got the power? We’ve got the power.” In its context this was just another slogan of a mindless day, but the reality is that those people do indeed have the power, and routinely use it in a way that makes them the author of their own troubles. Let me explain.

Unemployment in California is still rising. It just went up from 12.3 to 12.5%, nearly three points above an already bad national average. This horrendous figure is the source of California’s budget problem. The huge loss of tax revenue is compounded by greatly increased unemployment outlays. If we look at the few other states that have unemployment figures well above the national average, there are obvious explanations. Michigan is at 14.6 because employment in its major industry (automobiles) has collapsed. Nevada, at 13.0, is dependent on discretionary cash at a time when there isn’t any. But California is too big to be dominated by one industry, and its plight can only be explained by the state’s having grossly mismanaged its affairs.

In 2007 Raymond Keating formulated a Small Business Survival Index, which is a composite of various aspects of the climate for business in a particular state: business and personal taxes, regulations, mandates, and so on. In that index California ranked 49 among the 50 states. Rhode Island ranked just above California, and its unemployment rate is 12.7. At the bottom of the Index is D.C., and its unemployment rate is 12.1.

In the component parts of the SBSI index, California ranks worst of 51 (including D.C.) on top personal tax rates, worst on top capital gains tax rates, 42 on corporate taxes, 43 on health insurance mandates, 46 on electric utility costs, 47 on workman’s compensation costs, rock bottom again on state gas taxes, 45 on state and local government five year spending trends, and 47 on state and local per capita government spending. It also ranks 49 among the states on the US Economic freedom index, and it has the highest state sales tax rate too: where some states have an income tax but no sales tax, and others have a sales tax but no income tax, California has both, AND it has the highest rates in both.

In short, California is a disaster for business. The state has piled up so many taxes, regulations and mandates that businesses are leaving the state. Just this week I learned that a spare part order for my Lennox fireplace is delayed because Lennox is moving this division of its business to Tennessee. Wealthy individuals are also fleeing the state to avoid the country’s highest tax bracket. When both wealth and wealth creation leave the state, tax revenues leave with them.

How has this happened? As everyone knows by now, California has a dysfunctional legislature. Already in 2003—well before the current national crisis, and when the national unemployment rate was only 5.9%—California was bankrupt, and spending was so out of control that a Governor was recalled. The legislature enacts every politically correct whim that comes into its head, loading on one mandate and regulation after another. Cap and Trade could not pass nationally, but the California legislature proudly passed its job-killing global warming bill.

That is why the state now has a budget crisis of staggering proportions, and why university students are seeing those large fee hikes. But why is the California legislature so irresponsible, not to say goofy? Well, California is extremely rich in state university campuses: the UC and CSUC systems alone amount to 33 campuses, about a third of them mega-campuses of 30-35 thousand students, with another 10 around 20,000. The mega-campuses completely dominate the Assembly districts they are in, and their large concentrations of students and faculty skew the district electorate not just to the left, but to the devoutly politically correct but hopelessly unrealistic left. Virtually all of them routinely send Democrats to Sacramento. College towns with more modest sized campuses play their part too, but mega-campuses make their districts so one-sided that in the last election UC Berkeley’s Assembly seat had no election even though it was vacant: the Democratic nominee still ran unopposed. Where there is real competition between the parties the two sides keep each other honest and realistic, but when Assembly seats are so inevitably left that there is no contest, there is nothing to stop the side that has automatic electability from sliding into fantasy. Those districts provide the margin that allows an immature leftism that has lost contact with reality to control the state legislature and ruin the business climate of the state.

The irony here really cries out for attention: a large state university system needs a free market economy that hums along in top gear so that the revenue needed to support it can be generated. But California’s two unusually well developed state university systems provide enormous local voting power in many Assembly districts for a bitterly anti-capitalist ideology that sabotages the California economy. The campuses are shooting themselves in the foot. The power that those students and faculty chanted about is indeed theirs, and if they used it to elect sensible assemblymen and state senators their problems would be solved by the healthy business climate that would result. The votes that they actually cast are the source of their troubles.

Only one idea for solving the funding crisis was floated on March 4. It was to repeal the state’s requirement that taxes can only be raised by a two thirds vote, so that taxes can be raised yet again and more money made available to the campuses. In other words, let’s make the funding crisis even worse, by driving out of California even more wealth and wealth creating capacity, and raising the unemployment level even more. “California is not a tax-heavy state,” said Assemblyman Joe Coto, whose office is right next door to San Jose State University, which enrolls 31,000 students. And that raises the question: how much longer will the California citizenry want to support a system of higher education that keeps its legislature stuck on stupid? It’s not a question for this state alone.

SOURCE




More than half of final British High School exams sat at private schools are graded A

More than half of A-level examinations sat at independent schools are graded A, new figures indicate.

They also show the extent to which fee-paying and selective schools dominate the best grades at A level, and the extent to which intensive coaching can help students to achieve top marks.

The figures, from Cambridge Assessment, one of the main examination boards, were released as a survey showed that pupils from independent schools were expected to do exceptionally well in achieving the new A* grade at A level this summer. A survey of A-level marks at 20 schools, conducted by the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference of leading independent schools, found that between almost a third and two thirds of students were expected to achieve A* grades. Half of students sitting A levels in further mathematics at several of the most selective independent schools, for example, had already achieved high enough marks to guarantee A* grades.

Students who sat maths Alevel modules in January, and who received their marks late last week, will be awarded A* grades if they achieved at least 90 per cent in each of their A2 modules. They must also have scored at least 80 per cent overall, including at AS level.

The Cambridge figures also showed that more than one in eight A-level candidates now achieve three A grades. Yet of this group, more than a quarter went to grammar schools — which teach fewer than one in ten of the school population. At the same time, more than a third of students achieving straight A grades were from independent schools, which educate just 13 per cent.

The Cambridge figures showed that, overall, the number of A-level candidates awarded an A grade rose by about one percentage point every year between 2006 and 2009. There was a corresponding increase in B grades, and a fall in papers graded C, D, E or U.

At City of London School for Boys, 67 per cent of students sitting further maths have already achieved an A* grade in maths. A similar proportion did so at Magdalen College School, Oxford, while between 60 and 65 per cent did so at Manchester Grammar School, whose High Master, Christopher Ray, conducted the survey.

Candidates studying further maths are likely to be among the brightest candidates. The figures suggest students from leading independent schools will continue to win disproportionate numbers of places at the most selective universities.

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16 March, 2010

Free Speech on Campus, Depending on Who’s Speaking

In what is yet more evidence that universities have become, at least where campus free speech is concerned, as Harvard’s wise Abigail Thernstrom has described them, “islands of repression in a sea of freedom,” the University Of California, San Diego has been undergoing collective apoplexy over some incendiary racial slurs made by students involved in an off-campus fraternity party and in a subsequent broadcast from the school’s radio station. The discovery of a noose and a roughly-fashioned Ku Klux Klan hood on campus only helped stoke tensions and inflame rage at the perceived racism.

Coinciding with celebrations for Black History Month, the February 15th ghetto-themed party was advertised on Facebook as the “Compton Cookout,” with the suggested dress involving over-sized T-shirts, gold chains, and other stereotypical wear of “thuggish” black men; women were advised to dress like “ghetto chicks” and be ostentatious, boorish, and combative. More outrage was added to the evolving controversy when days later Kris Gregorian, editor of satirical student publication the Koala, with a long history of insulting minority groups, impoliticly suggested on the school’s TV station that members of UCSD’s Black Student Union who loudly protested the party’s theme were “ungrateful niggers.”

Though black, Hispanic, Muslim and many white students and administrators immediately leveled blame at white fraternity members, Koala writers, and other purported racists lurking on campus, it turns out that a comedian with the improbable (not to mention derogatory) stage name of Jiggaboo Jones, an African-American himself, had actually orchestrated the party for some 250 people as part of a promotional event, something he had done at other West Coast locations. But the damage had been done, and self-righteous members of the UCSD campus stampeded on one another to profess their outrage, indignation, and shock at the loutish behavior of and “state of emergency” created by a small group of students involved at a private party held off-campus.

Members of the Black Student Union wasted no time in drafting a 6-page memo for school officials (who eagerly embraced them), in which they itemized a veritable encyclopedia of demands by which, it was felt, the racist climate could be modified, with the “aim to move the university past hurtful incidents and improve the campus climate by enhancing diversity on the campus, in the curriculum and throughout the UC San Diego community.” Cries of “institutionalized racism” and a “toxic environment” at UCSD were heard. Because the BSU felt that African-Americans were being “racially demoralized,” those demands included, among others, establishing ethnic studies programs, a “rewrite the Student Code of Conduct,” presumably meaning a speech code that would proscribe certain speech deemed inappropriate by the code’s creators, and, ominously, a mandatory “diversity sensitivity requirement for every undergraduate student.”

While calling for further investigation into the specific incidents that had sparked the outrage, and promising to identify and punish the perpetrators, embarrassed school officials also met with angry minority students, promised to increase efforts at diversity, pledged more minority faculty hiring and student enrollment, set up psychological counseling facilities, met with community leaders and state officials, and even flew in Berkeley’s law school dean, Christopher Edley, to help arbitrate the situation. The president of the University’s Associated Students also took the breathtakingly audacious step, with the apparent approval of school officials, of not only closing down the student TV station but freezing funding for all 33 on-campus student publications, not just the offensive Koala. The danger of racist expression meant that all expression would be curtailed—at least until a way could be found to defund the offending publication and TV station.

For Tara Sweeney, senior program officer at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a Pennsylvania-based advocacy group that defends campus speech controversies and has contacted the UCSD administration in the past and in relation to these events, the constitutional issue is very clear: Publishing or otherwise expressing “a parody, no matter how objectionable to some, is in no way tantamount to ‘harassment.’”

The hypocrisy of campus speech control is also evident at UC San Diego, since the extent to which officials will tolerate errant speech apparently depends on which group is uttering it. When white frat boys, with an evident dearth of social tact, make fun of black people—a clearly protected, “under-represented,” campus victim group?no one on campus seems to have had the slightest difficulty in denouncing the vile expressions as blatant racism—indeed, as essential hate speech that might well be criminally punishable. School administrators have not come to the defense of the Koala or its editor with the argument that the views expressed, though vile, were protected, not unlawful, speech; they also have not publicly announced, as they did in 1995 regarding another student publication, that university officials should not and can not be in the business of censoring student-run publications.

Voz Fronteriza, a UCSD Chicano-oriented student publication published by MEChA, self-described as “shamelessly leftist” and intended “to advance anti-imperialist movements and/or any struggle for the self-determination of oppressed/exploited people throughout the world,” in 1995 grotesquely cheered after the death of a Latino Immigration and Naturalization Service officer; even worse, the publication urged the murder of other Latino officials, deemed by the thoughtful editors to be “race traitors.” Interestingly, when those outrageous sentiments came to light, UCSD’s Vice Chancellor Joseph W. Watson was adamant that Voz Fronteriza, despite the odious nature of its content and the potentially “hurtful” language, had the “right to publish their views without adverse administrative action,” since, he correctly pointed out, “student newspapers are protected by the first amendment of the U.S. constitution.” Watson was even more emphatic and direct, issuing a statement that UCSD, in fact, was “legally prohibited from censuring the content of student publications,” something it apparently has forgotten since.

Nor have UCSD officials sought to suppress or even condemn other inflammatory on-campus speech when it comes from other protected minority groups. Amir-Abdel Malik-Ali, for instance, the black former Nation of Islam member, convert to Islam, and cheerleader for Hamas and Hezbollah, who has been a ubiquitous, poisonous presence on the UC Irvine campus, has also appeared at UC San Diego as a guest of the Muslim Student Association. Malik-Ali never hesitates to vilify and defame Israel, Zionists, Jewish power, and Jews themselves as he weaves incoherent, hallucinatory conspiracies about the Middle East and the West. In a February 2004 speech Malik-Ali “implied that Zionism is a mixture of ‘chosen people-ness [sic] and white supremacy’; that the Iraqi war is in the process of ‘Israelization’; that the Zionists had the ‘Congress, the media and the FBI in their back pocket.’”

Malik-Ali used a February 2005 event to proclaim that “Zionism is a mixture, a fusion of the concept of white supremacy and the chosen people . . . You will have to hear more about the Holocaust when you accuse them of their Nazi behavior,” he warned, after railing against Zionist control of the press, media, and political decisions of the American government.

Speaking from a podium with a banner reading “Israel, the 4th Reich” in May 2006, Malik-Ali referred to Jews as “new Nazis” and “a bunch of straight-up punks.” “The truth of the matter is your days are numbered,” he admonished Jews everywhere. At other of Malik-Ali’s incendiary lectures, displays and posters regularly depict the Israeli flag splattered in blood and the Star of David shown to be equating a swastika, punctuated with numerous hysterical references to a “Holocaust in the Holy Land,” “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” “Zionism = racism,” and the oft-repeated blood libel against Jews that “Israelis murder children.”

But tellingly, no officials in the UC system have tripped over themselves to denounce Malik-Ali’s venomous speech and shut down those organizations which sponsored it and those publications that reported about it. They did not set up counseling sessions for Jewish students who might have been “intimidated,” “harassed,” or made to feel “unsafe” on campus as a result of hearing that they were the new Nazis, that the Jewish state was the chief impediment to world peace, that Jews control the media and Washington, and that Jews, who are committing genocide on the innocent, long-oppressed Palestinians, deserve to be murdered. Campus leaders did not reach out to civic leaders and other external stakeholders to help heal the wounds that this hate speech may have caused within the Jewish student body, nor did they bring in high-profile experts who could moderate between Muslim student groups and Jewish students made to bear these oppressive attacks on their religion and people. Mandatory “sensitivity” classes were not set up so that non-Jewish students could be forced to have positive attitudes towards Israel and Jews. And Jewish students did not submit a list of demands for on-campus Jewish art galleries, Israel studies programs, more Jewish faculty, special accommodations in recruiting and applications, or campus-apologies and repentance for spewing forth hateful, insulting, and odious speech.

None of this took place precisely because campuses today have a startling double standard when it comes to who may say what about whom. Either because they are feckless or want to coddle perceived protected student minority groups in the name of diversity, university administrations are morally inconsistent when taking a stand against what they consider “hate speech,” believing, mistakenly, that only harsh expression against victim groups needs to be moderated. When other groups?whites, Christians, Republicans, heterosexuals, Jews, for example?are the object of offensive speech, no protection is deemed to be necessary.

So while campus free speech is enshrined as one of the university’s chief principles, experience shows us that it rarely occurs as free speech for everyone, only for a few. But if we want speech to be truly free, to paraphrase Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., then we have to embrace not only speech with which we agree, but also that speech with which we disagree, that speech that we hate.

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“Reagan test” exposes current textbooks’ flaws

If you want to know just what your kids are learning from their history books, all you have to do is apply the "Reagan test," says Professor Larry Schweikart. As the Texas textbook battle continues to simmer, Schweikart says the first thing he does to determine whether a book is politically slanted is to go to any section discussing President Ronald Reagan. What you'll find there, he says, will tell you everything you need to know, he says.

Schweikart says the majority of books he’s examined credit former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev with ending the Cold War, and not Reagan. That's “a joke,” Schweikart says. “I lived through the Reagan years, I remember.” “The reason why textbooks get to where they are is because this is the world view of (a) the people who write the text books, (b) people who edit the text books, and (c) people who publish them,” the history professor says.

Schweikart says the textbooks' authors bring an inherently liberal viewpoint to their work. “They all tend to come from New York, Boston, Washington and Philadelphia,” giving them a “drastically” different viewpoint from the rest of America, he says.

Aside from bias, there are factual errors as well. One book -- Call to Freedom: Beginnings to 1877 (Holt, 2003) -- states on pages 53-54 that Christopher Columbus was "the first European explorer to land in the Americas." But Norseman Leif Ericson actually arrived hundreds of years earlier – a fact that is stated on page 18 of the same book.

How about the Louisiana Purchase in 1803? The same textbook says that the Louisiana Purchase extended America to the Mississippi River, when it actually expanded all the way to the Rocky Mountains.

Another text, The American Nation: Beginnings Through 1877 (Prentice, 2003), states that the city of New Orleans was settled by the French in the 1600s. But didn’t actually happen until 1718.

With this in mind, parents may be inspired to start digging into their own children’s books to see what’s inside. And experts say that's a great idea. Gilbert T. Sewall, Director of the American Textbook Council, says: “The facts are often used to create an interpretation or reality that simply is at the very least controversial and may be dead wrong.”

Dr. Frank Wang, one-time president of Saxon Publishing, says there are serious “quality control” problems. Wang cautions that many books are thrown together on a tight schedule by a group of freelance writers, leaving them with little time or pride of authorship. He’s spotted errors touching on everything from the Statue of Liberty to the Korean War.

Sewall is also aware of the mistakes. “The problem with textbooks," he says, "is missing information, or distorted information.”

SOURCE




This lunacy about Latin makes me want to weep with rage

How can we understand our world unless we understand the ancient world first, asks Boris Johnson. I am a much more amateur Latinist than Mayor Johnson but I share his feelings about the importance and utility of Latin. Just for starters, it is a must for any lover of classical music. To understand what is being said in the wonderful "Stabat Mater" by Pergolesi is to double one's enjoyment of an already great work -- JR

Being an even-tempered fellow, and given that we have already put up with so much nonsense from the Labour Government, I find there are very few ministerial pronouncements that make me wild with anger. We have learnt to be phlegmatic about the mistakes of a government that has banned 4,300 courses of human conduct, plunged this country into the deepest recession in memory, and so skewed the economy that 70 per cent of the Newcastle workforce is in the pay of the state. But there are times when a minister says something so maddening, so death-defyingly stupid, that I am glad not to be in the same room in case I should reach out, grab his tie, and end what is left of my political career with one almighty head-butt.

Such were my feelings on reading Mr Ed Balls on the subject of teaching Latin in schools. Speaking on the radio, Spheroids dismissed the idea that Latin could inspire or motivate pupils. Head teachers often took him to see the benefits of dance, or technology, or sport, said this intergalactic ass, and continued: "No one has ever taken me to a Latin lesson to make the same point. Very few parents are pushing for it, very few pupils want to study it."

It is nothing short of a disaster that this man is still nominally in charge of education, science, scholarship and learning in this country. He is in danger of undoing the excellent work of his predecessor, Andrew Adonis, and he is just wrong. Of course he doesn't get taken round many Latin classes in the state sector. That is because only 15 per cent of maintained schools offer the subject, against 60 per cent of fee-paying schools. But to say that "very few" want to study the subject, to say that there is no demand for Latin – it makes me want to weep with rage. The demand is huge and it is growing, and I don't just mean that the public is fascinated with the ancient world – though that is obviously true, and demonstrated, for instance, by the success of Robert Harris's Cicero novels.

There is a hunger for the language itself and, thanks to the efforts of a small number of organisations and volunteers, Latin is fighting its way back on to the curriculum. The Cambridge Classics Project did a 2008 study that found that no fewer than 500 secondary schools had started teaching Latin in the past eight years. That is a fantastic thing. Those schools deserve support.

What do they get? The tragic and wilful ignorance of the Secretary of State – and in the face of such wrong-headedness it is hard to know where to begin. I suppose it is too much to hope that Balls would accept the argument from utility – passionately though I believe it to be true. Latin and Greek are great intellectual disciplines, forcing young minds to think in a logical and analytical way. They allow you to surprise your family and delight your friends by deciphering inscriptions.

They are also a giant universal spanner for other languages. Suppose your kid scrapes her knee on holiday in Italy. You are much more likely to administer the right first aid if you know that caldo means hot rather than cold – as you will, if you know Latin. Suppose you are captured by cannibals in the Mato Grosso, and you find a scrap of Portuguese newspaper in your hut revealing that there is about to be an eclipse; and suppose that by successfully prophesying this event you convince your captors that you are a god and secure your release – I reckon you would be thankful for your Latin, eh?

And even if you reject any such practical advantages (and, experto crede, they are huge), I don't care, because they are not the point. The reason we should boost the study of Latin and Greek is that they are the key to a phenomenal and unsurpassed treasury of literature and history and philosophy, and we cannot possibly understand our modern world unless we understand the ancient world that made us all.

If Ed Balls is still unconvinced, then let me make one final point, and remind him that in his supposed anti-elitism he is being viciously elitist. Like me, Ed Balls was lucky to be educated at a wonderful fee-paying school where they taught us Latin. For the past 30 years children from such schools have dominated the study of classics at university. They have a ladder up to follow great courses, under brilliant men and women, at some of the best universities in the world – and to go on to good jobs. How mad, how infamous, that a Labour minister – a Labour minister – should seek to kick that ladder away for children less privileged than him.

Ed Balls should remember that some of the greatest socialists of the past 100 years were classicists, from Denis Healey to Geoffrey de Ste Croix, the formidable Marxist historian and author of The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World. What would Ste Croix have made of a government that actively tried to restrict the study of a great and profitable discipline to the bourgeoisie? He would have denounced it as an act of class war, and he would have been right.

It is thanks to the efforts of hundreds of dedicated teachers and volunteers that the tide is now turning. This Government places insane obstacles in the path of all who want to teach Latin in the maintained sector. Labour refuses to recognise Latin as a language for Ofsted purposes, and even though 60 Latin teachers are retiring every year, the Government will find funding for only 27 teachers a year to graduate with a PGCE enabling them to teach classics. That is 27 for the entire country.

In spite of these restrictions, and in spite of all the snootiness of Ed Balls, the enthusiasts are winning. For the first time in decades there are now – in absolute numbers – more state schools than private schools that teach Latin. Ed Balls should be proud of that achievement. He should celebrate it, and encourage it in the name – if nothing else – of social justice.

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15 March, 2010

Obama to Boost Civil Rights Enforcement in Schools

Trying to get blacks into advanced classes on the basis of their skin color! That's crazy enough. Crazier is the idea that they are going to stop black kids from dropping out. The kids concerned know they can't handle the lessons. What is going to change their opinion about that? Is Obama going to pay them to sit in class?

The federal Department of Education wants to intensify its civil rights enforcement efforts in schools around the country, including a deeper look at issues ranging from programs for immigrant students learning English to equal access to college preparatory courses.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan was to speak Monday in Alabama to outline the department's goals. Duncan was there to commemorate the 45th anniversary of "Bloody Sunday" — the day in 1965 when several hundred civil rights protesters were beaten by state troopers on Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge during a voting rights march.

"Despite how far we've come as a country over the last 45 years, we know there are still ongoing barriers to equal educational opportunity in this country," Duncan told reporters before his speech.

The department is expecting to conduct 38 compliance reviews around 40 different issues this year, said Russlynn Ali, assistant secretary for civil rights in the Education Department. "For us, this is very much about working to meet the president's goal, that by 2020 we will regain our status in the world as the number one producer of college graduates," Ali told The Associated Press.

Although the investigations have been conducted before, the department's Office of Civil Rights is looking to do more complicated and broad reviews that will look not just at whether procedures are in place, but at the impact district practices have on students of one race or another, and if student needs are being met.

In his prepared remarks, Duncan highlights several jarring inequities: At the end of high school, white students are about six times more likely to be college-ready in biology than black students, and more than four times as likely to be prepared for college algebra. Other statistics he will highlight in Selma:

— A quarter of all students drop out before their graduation, and half of those come from 12 percent of the nation's high schools. Those roughly 2,000 schools produce a majority of the dropouts among black and Latino students.

— Black students without disabilities are more than three times as likely to be expelled as white students, and those with disabilities more than twice as likely to be expelled or suspended — numbers which Duncan says testify to racial gaps that are "hard to explain away by reference to the usual suspects."

— Students from low-income families who graduate from high school scoring in the top testing quartile are no more likely to attend college than the lowest-scoring students from wealthy families.

"This is the civil rights issue of our generation," Duncan said, adding that the Office of Civil Rights has not been as vigilant as it should have been in the past decade.

In addition to the reviews, the department will also be sending guidance letters to all districts and post-secondary institutions receiving federal funding. Ali said the topics cover everything from food allergies to law enforcement procedures for victims of sexual violence and equitable education spending.

The Education Department will work with districts and states to find a voluntary resolution if a violation is found. In extreme cases, Ali said funds could be withheld or ended.

Duncan's visit sparked some controversy among some black politicians who were upset that the Education secretary picked Robert E. Lee High School — a school named after the Confederate general and where its principal at the time had opposed King and the 1965 voting rights march — to hold his news conference. Democratic Rep. Alvin Holmes of Montgomery had objected, but Duncan refused to move to another location. Agency officials said that the school is now majority black and that its current principal was 2 years old at the time of the march.

Instead, Duncan added a school to his visit — Martin Luther King Elementary School — and met with fifth-graders there. He also met with Holmes and another black lawmaker, Democratic Rep. Thad McClammy of Montgomery. The education secretary did not comment on their discussion, but Holmes said he explained to Duncan that it "wouldn't be right" to visit only Lee and not a school in a predominantly black neighborhood.

McClammy said Duncan asked why Alabama legislators oppose charter schools — a measure by Republican Gov. Bob Riley to create charter schools was killed recently in House and Senate committees. McClammy said he told Duncan, an advocate of charter schools, that more assurance is needed that such schools will be available to all and not become private schools for whites.

Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP's Washington bureau, said he has seen more collaboration and communication with civil rights organizations under the Obama administration, along with a renewed focus on ensuring the civil rights tenets of No Child Left Behind are being enforced, among other measures. "They have been very deliberate about enforcing our nation's civil rights laws in the area of education," he said.

Others said they are still waiting for stepped up enforcement to take place. "We haven't seen anything yet," said Raul Gonzalez, director of legislative affairs of the National Council of La Raza. "But I can tell you there's a lot of hope in the civil rights community that we are going to get some really good enforcement around a variety of issues, including education."

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Group Work = Group Think

Collaboration, or working in groups, is a favorite pedagogical strategy of hung-over graduate teaching assistants, soviet indoctrinators, educators with advanced degrees, and social studies teachers too dumb to do anything else. Unfortunately, by what I saw at the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) conference here in Atlanta, most social studies teachers are either wicked indoctrinators or too dumb to know that they are carrying out the wishes of the Dr. Evils in education, i.e., those with Ed.D.s who are administrators, curriculum devisers, and education professors.

Teachers seem to love “group work.” It gives them a sense of power over children and allows them to catch up on Facebook or their nails. I have college students coming to class expecting to spend class time sitting in little groups to discuss their “feelings.” Today, students don’t expect to learn—especially from a teacher or professor.

Instead, they expect to “do” as in “doing social studies” as I learned by spending two days at the social studies educators’ annual conference. To demonstrate one way social studies is “done” in Georgia a class of eleventh-graders was marched on stage and divided into little groups. The song “Home on the Range” was played for them and they were asked to answer questions about the “feelings” this song evoked in them, and then in various victims and victimizers associated with the settling of the American West—miners and mine owners, blacks and whites, Native Americans and whites. The young scholars then proceeded to collaborate, and believing themselves “critical thinkers,” came up with the correct answers! Of course, the bright, young geniuses knew that Native Americans would feel “sad” or “angry.”

Glenn Beck should have been at this conference. He would have been able to add a lot to his special last Friday.

While much has been said about politically correct material, little attention has been paid to such emotionally coercive teaching strategies. I saw how it is applied to middle school students as a teacher shared teaching tips for getting tykes to sympathize with illegal immigrants. She used the adult-level propaganda piece Enrique’s Journey in her class to discuss drug abuse, domestic violence, and out-of-wedlock pregnancy. It’s a book that has appeared on reading lists for some of the best private schools in Atlanta—including Christian high schools.

Over the years I’ve seen college students’ ability to reason, analyze, and weigh evidence deteriorate. But this is to be expected when they barely have a minute to themselves, when their material is selected to promote a political agenda, when their teachers bombard them with games and electronic gimmicks, and then put them into groups where the ring leader will cajole them into adopting the correct attitudes. I’ve found college students afraid to think outside the box of “tolerance” and “diversity.”

Educators use group work because it lends itself to promoting “social justice.” The most threatening thing to a teacher would be a teenager who had read the documents of the founders and the documents they had read, going back to the ancients. First, the teacher in all likelihood is too dumb to understand such documents as the Federalist Papers. He has in all likelihood not been required to read them in education school. Instead, he has been required to take classes in emotionally crippling teaching strategies. (There is a reason that the Dr. Evil-educators in North Carolina wanted to eliminate the teaching of American history before 1877 in high school.)

They have to start with the malleable Americans—young children. So see all those kids “doing” social studies? They’re not “engaged” or having fun. They’re doing the bidding of Dr. Evils, who are using them as subjects to take over the world.

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French students invade UK universities to get better deal

UNIVERSITIES are facing a Gallic invasion as French students abandon their own institutions for degrees in Britain. More than 13,000 full-time students from France — enough to fill an entire university — have enrolled on British courses. They now make up the largest group of overseas students after the Chinese, with 3,194 freshers accepted on undergraduate courses last September.

The attraction of life across the Channel has been partly driven by dissatisfaction with standards at France’s state universities. However, it appears that England’s “study now, pay later” student loan system for tuition fees has also encouraged take-up. The UK is now the most popular foreign destination for French students, followed by Belgium and the United States. Numbers have risen each year since the introduction in 2006 of tuition fees that do not have to be repaid until after graduation. Last autumn’s intake was up by 18% on the previous year.

Some of the most ambitious students are using prestigious institutions in Britain, such as University College London, Oxford, Imperial College London and the London School of Economics, as a back door into France’s highly selective and independent grandes écoles. “Instead of paying for two years of prépa to prepare for the tough entrance exams to the grandes écoles, some students do a three-year degree in Britain and apply for the small number of places we have for first degree holders,” said Christine Escafit of the Grenoble Institute of Technology. “It takes a year longer but they do not have to reach the same high level to get in, as prépa is very competitive.”

British university courses that include a year at a grande école are also a draw for French students. David Chreng, 20, a Parisian studying chemistry at Imperial College, will spend the final year of his four-year degree at one of France’s leading grandes écoles. “By the end of the year I will obtain a diploma from Polytechnique Paris and a prestigious degree from Imperial,” he said.

The influx of French students at Imperial has had a typically Gallic cultural impact, with regular wine and cheese tasting sessions and organised bakery trips.

In total 8,770 undergraduates from France are studying in Britain and 4,320 postgraduate students. A further 4,000 students are on exchange courses.The University of Kent in Canterbury — one of the closest British institutions to French shores — is particularly popular, with 265 French students enrolling there last year, 165 on politics courses.

Funding issues weigh heavily on some scholars’ minds. Students from Britain and the rest of the European Union can borrow the £3,225 annual tuition fee and do not have to repay it until the April after graduation or until their earnings reach £15,000, whichever is later. Other EU countries have refused to collect repayments through their tax systems. However, court orders for non-payment can be enforced in other member states if the defaulters can be traced by the Student Loans Company.

Roxanne Jourdain, 18, a chemistry student at Imperial who comes from a village in the French Alps, said British universities often had greater international recognition than their French counterparts. “I don’t think it is any more expensive to go to the UK,” she added. “Tuition here is £3,000 a year but the fees at a private prépa are similar and the most prestigious grandes écoles can cost up to £7,000 a year.”

Student unrest and lecturers’ strikes over President Nicolas Sarkozy’s proposed reforms of French higher education are also fuelling the flight across the Channel. Students at the Sorbonne missed four months of lectures last year because of demonstrations against Sarkozy’s plan to allow the overcrowded and underfunded state universities to seek private finance.

The unrest was a deciding factor for Victor de Buisson, 19, from Lyons, who is studying computing at Imperial. He said: “I just got fed up with the French system. Striking is a big problem. In the Sorbonne last year they decided to make students take the exams without being taught properly. Friends of mine who go there hate it. In France it’s nothing to do with thinking — it’s about cramming facts into your brain.”

Chreng predicts more French students will seek a British higher education as word spreads about the opportunities, especially the links between universities and industry and the chance to do summer internships. “I found it challenging to go abroad, study in another language and have to build a new life in London,” he said. “But I do not regret my decision.”

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14 March, 2010

TX adopts more conservative social studies standards

The Texas State Board of Education agreed to new social studies standards on Friday after the far-right faction wielded its power to shape the lessons that will be taught to millions of students on American history, the U.S. free enterprise system, religion and other topics. In a vote of 10-5, the board preliminarily adopted the new curriculum after days of charged debate marked by race and politics. In dozens of smaller votes passed over the three days, the ultra-conservatives who dominate the board nixed all but a few efforts to recognize the diversity of race and religion in Texas.

Decisions by the board -- long led by the social conservatives who have advocated ideas such as teaching more about the weaknesses of evolutionary theory -- affects textbook content nationwide because Texas is one of publishers' biggest clients. As part of the new curriculum, the elected board -- made up of lawyers, a dentist and a weekly newspaper publisher among others -- rejected an attempt to ensure that children learn why the U.S. was founded on the principle of religious freedom. But, it agreed to strengthen nods to Christianity by adding references to "laws of nature and nature's God" to a section in U.S. history that requires students to explain major political ideas. They also agreed to strike the word "democratic" in references to the form of U.S. government, opting instead to call it a "constitutional republic."

In addition to learning the Bill of Rights, the board specified a reference to the Second Amendment right to bear arms in a section about citizenship in a U.S. government class and agreed to require economics students to "analyze the decline of the U.S. dollar including abandonment of the gold standard."

Conservatives beat back multiple attempts to include hip-hop as an example of a significant cultural movement that already includes country music. "We have been about conservatism versus liberalism," said Democrat Mavis Knight of Dallas, explaining her vote against the standards. "We have manipulated strands to insert what we want it to be in the document, regardless as to whether or not it's appropriate."

Republican Terri Leo, a member of the powerful Christian conservative voting bloc, called the standards "world class" and "exceptional."

Over the past three days, the board also argued over how historic periods should be classified (still B.C. and A.D., rather than B.C.E. and C.E.); whether or not students should be required to explain the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its impact on global politics (they will); and whether former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir should be required learning (she will). Numerous attempts to add the names or references to important Hispanics throughout history also were denied, inducing one amendment that would specify that Tejanos died at the Alamo alongside Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie.

A day earlier, longtime board member Mary Helen Berlanga accused her colleagues of "whitewashing" the standards and walked out of the panel's meeting in frustration. Berlanga voted against the standards on Friday. Berlanga also bristled when the board approved an amendment that deletes a requirement that sociology students "explain how institutional racism is evident in American society."

The three-day meeting that began Wednesday was the first since voters in last week's Republican primary handed defeats to two veteran conservatives, including former board chairman Don McLeroy, who lost to a moderate GOP lobbyist. Two other conservatives -- a Republican and a Democrat -- did not seek re-election. All four terms end in January. McLeroy, a 10-year board veteran, has been one of the most prolific and polarizing members. The devout Christian conservative has been adamant on several issues, including that the Christian influences of the nation's Founding Fathers are important to studying American history.

In Texas alone, the board's decisions will set guideposts for teaching history and social studies to some 4.8 million K-12 students during the next 10 years. In almost six hours of public testimony on Wednesday, the board heard repeated pleas that the Christian heritage of the U.S. be reflected in the new standards as well as other requests that students learn more Hispanic examples of prominent historic figures.

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British private schools attack Government interference

Independent schools will launch an attack this week on Government interference in how they are run and what they teach. The Independent Schools Council has drawn up a manifesto demanding that the party that wins the election strips away the unprecedented layers of regulation that have been imposed on the sector. It will say that the independence of schools is being worn away by Government interference, threatening their successful running and undermining the characteristics of private education that parents value.

At its annual conference next week it will call for Contactpoint, Labour's database of all children in England, to be scrapped; the controversial new vetting and barring scheme, which regulates who is deemed to be suitable to work with children, to be slimmed down; and school inspections to be streamlined. "Our excellent results are down to our independence and our ability to do things differently," said David Lyscom, the chief executive of the Independent Schools Council (ISC). "But over the last few years we have seen that independence whittled away in all sorts of areas.

"The irony is that while promoting the idea of 'independence', the current Government has operated in the opposite direction. "We share the concerns of the state sector that layer upon layer of regulation has been added. These layers conflict and overlap and make the running of a school very, very difficult." As The Sunday Telegraph revealed in December, the deluge of new regulations dictates to schools everything from the height of site walls to the specific wording of school policies, to what has to be taught to toddlers in private school nurseries.

The ISC will also criticise the Charity Commission's interpretation of the new law which requires schools to prove they provide a public benefit if they are to continue to benefit from lucrative charitable tax breaks. Its rulings have concentrated on private schools' provision of bursaries for the poor and little else. "What the Charity Commission is trying to do is tell schools how to run themselves in terms of how many bursaries they have to offer and whether they are 100 per cent or not," said Mr Lyscom.

Claims from the left that private school elitism is undermining social mobility in the UK will also be challenged. "The whole debate on social mobility is based on a false premise – that only 7 per cent of children go to independent schools," said Mr Lyscom. "Even that figure means a lot of families but our research shows that 14 per cent of adults have had part of their education in the independent sector. "This is a big and significant minority that cannot be dismissed as rich kids in posh schools. We have 1,250 schools that range from the big-name institutions to very small local schools that charge £5,000 a year. "We have been very successful at giving individual children, whatever their background, an excellent start in life, equipping them with the right sort of skills to get them good results, get them to university and on to life. It is not about privilege."

Drawn up by the eight associations that make up the ISC, the manifesto is the first produced by fee-paying schools. It comes as the Conservatives promised that the state sector would be allowed to mirror independents by setting up "state prep schools". The "free school" policy, which encourages parents, voluntary organisations and groups to establish their own state-funded schools, would move away from the uniformity of primary and secondary schools teaching fixed age ranges. Instead, "state prep schools" catering for children from seven to 13, for instance, would be allowed to be set up.

Michael Gove, the shadow children's secretary, said: "In the private sector they keep children at prep schools until the age of 13 before they move to secondary. "As a result, they have a particularly tailored form of specialised teaching in an intimate environment which allows these children to soar. "Why shouldn't we have state preps that allow children to stay in such an environment until they reach the age of 13? "If it is right in the private sector, why wouldn't it be right in the state sector? We will give parents that choice and teachers that opportunity to innovate."

The Tories have already said they would instruct the Charity Commission to adopt a broader vision of what constitutes public benefit, including partnerships with state schools.

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Australia: Old-style teacher investigated for challenging the self-esteem gospel

A TEACHER accused of verbally abusing students by telling one he should die believes he is being punished because modern kids are too sensitive. Former Doncaster Secondary College teacher Edward Wolf, who has 40 years' experience in education, said when he moved from an Altona school to the Doncaster school, he believed the children had an air of "self-entitlement" and the student and parent population was like "Footscray with money".

Mr Wolf, who is facing misconduct charges before a Victorian Institute of Teaching disciplinary panel, said he used firm words with unruly students who disrupted class or left the classroom without permission. He denied telling misbehaving Year 10 pupils they were "idiots", but admitted telling one troublesome boy to "shut the f--k up" and another that "just because your dad wanted to get his rocks off, I have to deal with you".

Mr Wolf admitted kicking a student's table from under her feet because she refused to take them down from the desk when her dress and raised legs were "immodest". He also admitted telling a boy named Dyson, who refused to stop banging on a wall during class, to "do what your name says - die, son".

"Considering what they have said to me and other teachers, I don't see them as that sensitive," Mr Wolf said. "If you give it, you should be able to take it. Teachers only have words as a means to work with students and if those words are efficacious, then in that context I consider them appropriate."

Mr Wolf, 61, who wants to retain his teaching registration, said he now realised there was an emotional impact to his strong language. "I am aware that students are now very much more sensitive than they have (been) in the past," he said.

Several alleged incidents of coarse or highly personal language occurred from 1998 to 2008. The panel heard this week that Mr Wolf became angry when a group of Year 10 students left his class without permission in 2008. One male student, now 18, said Mr Wolf started abusing him and two other students when they returned to the room, but the boys knew they had mucked up. "Personally, I did not take it to heart, it was just a teacher lashing out. In one ear, out the other," one student told the hearing. Another said: "We were very rowdy, we were hard to control. We, one time, took it too far and Mr Wolf snapped."

The VIT panel will hand down its findings on a date to be set.

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13 March, 2010

Texas textbook troubles

In my own field of work, university education, there are a great many who scoff at the idea of privatization, something that is exactly how a free society should handle all education from primary to post graduate schools. There is no excuse for government to be responsible for educating young people or anyone else for that matter. Not only is it destructive of educational impartiality to entrust schools to governments–only if there is variety can impartiality be at least approximated–but the threat of out and out indoctrination is most real when one monolithic agency, with the power to coercively collect funds for its operations and conscript its students, runs “education.”

Yes, thousands of professor and teachers want the government to be in charge but after this has been accomplished, as it has for a couple of centuries throughout America and elsewhere, there is no escaping the turf fight that takes over educational policy, especially when it comes to such courses as history, civics, and even biology and the textbooks teachers are required to use in them.

In a free and open society there will be a great variety of ways that people, even the most highly educated ones, will see the country’s history, especially when it comes to politics and economics, as well as whatever other disciplines study. Few Americans could miss the current fracas about whether, for example, the New Deal was a valuable or destructive policy of the federal government. Yes, even Prohibition, with its bloody history, has its defenders. A good many scholars and citizens in general find themselves in different camps about the civil war, so much so that there is much controversy even about whether it should have as its name “Civil War” or “The War between the States.” Innumerable other topics covered in various elementary, high school and college courses are fraught with controversies among sincere minded citizens and scholars–no one could miss the battles fought over the nature of biological evolution.

The idea that one can simply override all this with some kind of governmental policy–as it is being tried right now in Texas where there is a fight brewing among those who have their agendas concerning what should be taught to students in all sorts of subjects–is absurd. One need not be a subscriber to post-modernism–with its claim that there is no objective reality at all and the world as all in the eye of the beholder (be this in history, English literature, philosophy, or government studies)–in order to admit that there are many seriously divergent educated opinions and beliefs in what is the truth of the matter in a discipline. And in a free society the way this is supposed to be dealt with and acknowledged is by making it possible for all of them to compete in the marketplace of ideas without even a whiff of government intrusion (i.e., censorship).

No such marketplace can exist, however, if government education dominates, as it does everywhere in the country. The United States of America is practically not much different from the old Soviet Union or the current North Korea when it comes to how young people are being educated–they basically get some politically palatable stories, some banal compromises reached within the halls of government, instead of the outcome of scholarly and academic conferences where the different sides of the various controversies are presented and from which scholars return to their classrooms throughout the academic landscape and proceed to teach what they earnestly believe students should learn. What some of them will teach will dismay, even outrage, certain others; although often teachers know well and good how to give different sides a fair presentation and thus make it possible for their pupils to arrive at answers of their own.

But this cannot go on with government ordering what is to be taught and what the textbooks must contain. The wielding of political power in the field of education is no less insidious than it would be for government to run the profession of journalism, the publication of books and magazines, and so forth. None of that is acceptable in a genuine free country. Nor should government-run schools be.

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Obama's New Anti-Civil Rights Civil Rights Policy

Yesterday, in Does Obama’s “Stimulus” Discriminate Against Minorities? (yes, according to the administration’s definition of discrimination), I noted (referencing this earlier post) that the liberal solution to “structural inequalities” is to regard “all employment policies or practices ... that have a disparate impact as by definition discriminatory by virtue of their disparate impact alone.” Now, according to laudatory articles today in both the Washington Post and New York Times, the Dept. of Education’s Office of Civil Rights is about to launch an all-out attack on the nation’s schools based on that warped view of “civil rights.”

In the Times, reporter Sam Dillon obviously shares OCR’s view that the nation’s schools are rife with discrimination because

[a]t the end of high school, white students are about six times as likely to be ready to pursue college-level biology courses as black students, and more than four times as likely to be ready for college algebra, department officials said. White high school graduates are more than twice as likely to have taken advanced placement calculus classes as black or Latino graduates.

Dillon notes that the OCR has been swimming against the current in its effort to enforce civil rights, undermined by its own complicity with violations during the Bush area but also by barriers put up by other opponents of civil rights, such as the Supreme Court.

As it seeks to combat discrimination in schools and universities more aggressively, the administration will be acting in an area in which some Supreme Court rulings in recent years have brought more ambiguity. Federal policy for decades had aimed at compelling school districts to end racial inequality, for instance.

But in examining longstanding desegregation efforts in the Seattle and Jefferson County, Ky., schools in 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that school authorities could not seek to achieve or maintain integration through measures that take explicit account of a student’s race, a decision that seemed to reverse the thrust of four decades of federal policy.

The new OCR, in short, will not be deterred by the old, discredited view that “civil rights” recognizes the rights of individuals not to be burdened by the government based on their race, despite the Supreme Court’s continuing (if tenuous) dedication to that quaint notion.

Under its new, Obama-appointed leadership, OCR is about to step up its “compliance” efforts. This new effort, predictably, will not limit its attention to “procedures” — which I take to mean whether actual students have been treated fairly — but with results. ““Now we’ll not simply see whether there is a program in place,” Russlyn H. Ali, the new assistant secretary of education for civil rights, told the Times, “ but [we will] also examine whether that program is working effectively.”

And in Obamaland, working “effectively” means not an absence of discrimination but the presence of proportional results. Thus when Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announces new enforcement action in the coming weeks, as the Post reports today, “to ensure that students have equal access to a college-prep curriculum, advanced courses, and classes in math and science,” it is quite clear that he doesn’t really mean “equal access”; he means proportional results, as confirmed in an interview Ms. Ali gave the Post.

Ali said in an interview Friday that “we are weaving equity into all that we do” and that her office would examine potential cases for evidence of discrimination through “disparate impact” against certain classes of students on the basis of race, ethnicity, sex or disability.

Ali said the department plans to initiate 38 compliance reviews this year. There were 29 initiated last year, she said, and 42 in 2008. But she said the depth of the reviews will be “much greater than in the past.”

Since school districts will do whatever is necessary in order to be in “compliance” with the new “civil rights” directives from Washington, it is inevitable that many students across the country will now be excluded from Advanced Placement courses, etc., because of their race, i.e., because other students were included because of their race.

It is thus the height (or depth) of irony that Secretary Duncan will announce this new anti-civil rights “civil rights” policy today in a speech at the Edmund Pettus bridge near Selma, Alabama, site of one of the epic confrontations during the era when civil rights meant civil rights. And it is sad that he and the worshipful reporters covering the event don’t even recognize the irony.

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Hopeless mathematics teaching in Australian schools

THE Group of Eight [universities] has declared mathematics education in Australia is in crisis. A six-point rescue package for maths and related disciplines recommends better dialogue between mathematics and teaching faculties to improve the mathematical competence of teachers. At the same time, it accepts an increasing number of students will be taught secondary school mathematics at university through expensive "enabling" programs. These will require "systematic organisation" and new funding initiatives.

A groundbreaking review of the mathematics and statistics disciplines at school and university by the Go8 found "the state of the mathematical sciences and related quantitative disciplines in Australia has deteriorated to a dangerous level, and continues to deteriorate."

The review was compiled by a committee of the nation's senior mathematicians headed by former University of Sydney vice-chancellor Gavin Brown. It found that in 2003 the percentage of Australian students graduating with a major in mathematics or statistics was 0.4 per cent, compared with an OECD average of 1 per cent. Between 2001-2007 the number of mathematics major enrolments in Australian universities fell by approximately 15 per cent. In contrast from 2002 to 2006 the number of applicants to mathematics degrees in Britain increased by two-thirds.

Professor Brown told the HES yesterday an attitudinal study which found only 33 per cent of year 8 mathematics students said they enjoyed maths - compared to an international average of 54 per cent - had "frightened" him. "This finding sticks out like a sore thumb," he said. "It suggests that the subject is taught reasonably well at technical level but not at the excitement level, and it's probably because many of the teachers are being asked to teach outside their own areas of expertise. They've never been passionate about the subject."

Professor Cheryl Praeger, Winthrop Professor in the school of mathematics and statistics at the University of Western Australia, told the HES that "very bright" students were entering Go8 universities inadequately prepared for university mathematics because of the poor state of maths tuition in schools. "Many will be learning their high school maths at university," she said. "We have to provide for them." She warned Australia risked becoming a Third World country if it failed to move quickly to arrest the decline in mathematics.

The chief executive of the Australian Research Council, Margaret Sheil, said she shared the concerns of the Brown review and had made mathematics one of the targeted disciplines for the next round of the federation fellowships. But she observed that statistics, which was important for new developments in biology, health and economics, was in an even worse state. She said universities could play a leadership role in arresting the decline at school level, because "strong and vibrant mathematics departments create opportunities to train strong and vibrant mathematicians, and that spins off into teaching."

The chairman of the Go8 Chair, University of Western Australia vice-chancellor Alan Robson, welcomed the review and its recommendations, which focused on equipping primary school teachers with mathematical skills and identified the need for remedial maths courses at the tertiary level.

The Go8 has renewed its push for a new higher education policy architecture focused on targeted funding to strengthen the top research institutions and render them more internationally competitive. The Go8's executive director, Mike Gallagher, will warn a higher education congress in Sydney today against attempts to emulate research universities across the sector. He will stress the need for more cost-effective forms of higher education supply, such as teaching only institutions, amid expanding domestic enrolments.

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12 March, 2010

Texas educators take aim at ‘left-wing’ curriculum with opt-out plans

Country and western music, the leadership of the Confederate General Stonewall Jackson and the work of America’s most powerful gun lobby will all have to be taught in Texas schools if conservatives prevail at a highly charged meeting of the state’s board of education. A total of 48 of the 50 states have signed up to a plan being promoted by the White House for new, higher national educational standards but Texas and Alaska have opted out, in order to keep control of what is taught in their state-funded schools.

The effects will be felt far beyond Texas, because of its dominant influence over US textbook publishing. According to one estimate, 90 per cent of all American schools use the books approved by Texan officials. Social studies texts are likely, therefore, to give new prominence to Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” and the role of Christianity in US history. With more than a thousand school districts serving 4.5 million pupils, the Texas Education Agency is the second largest body of its kind in America, after its California counterpart, and by far the biggest to be overseen by elected conservatives.

Don McLeroy, chairman of the Texas Board of Education, is a Creationist who believes that the world was created 10,000 years ago and claims that history has vindicated Senator Joseph McCarthy, the instigator of the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s. Dr McLeroy, a dentist, will not be able to stand for re-election in November but says he intends to use his remaining time in office to leave his mark on the Texas curriculum.

An amendment he proposed in January complained that the curriculum was “rife with leftist periods and events” including President Roosevelt’s New Deal and President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society legislation — watershed achievements for Democratic governance in the 20th century. Expected to come into force in May, the measure would require Texas high school students to be able to “describe the causes . . . of the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association”. Mrs Schlafly is a prominent antifeminist, while the Heritage Foundation is a conservative think-tank that, like the gun lobby, helped to spearhead opposition to progressive reforms during President Clinton’s two terms.

Other amendments expected to be approved this week would require schools to teach the career of Stonewall Jackson, the most successful Southern field commander in the Civil War, as a study in effective leadership; to drop all mention of Ralph Nader, the consumer-rights advocate; and to assert the superiority of free enterprise over other economic systems.

The Texas Conservative Coalition said that the group was confident Dr McLeroy’s amendments would pass, thanks to the board’s eight-strong conservative majority. Any changes to Texas textbooks will stay for ten years before the next round of revisions.

Dr McLeroy, who has also said he believes that mankind and dinosaurs once cohabited on Earth, has objected to the teaching of Chinese literature in Texan schools. “You really don’t want Chinese books with a bunch of crazy Chinese words in them,” he said in 2008. “Why should you take a child’s time trying to learn a word that they’ll never use again?”

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VA: Senate passes plan to expand charter schools

The Virginia Senate on Tuesday passed Gov. Robert F. McDonnell's proposal designed to expand the number of the state's charter schools. The Democratic-controlled Senate passed the bill 27 to 12. It had already won approval in the Republican-led House of Delegates.

The bill is a weakened version of the Republican governor's initial proposal, but he declared victory. "I applaud the Republicans and Democrats who came together today to help Virginia schoolchildren, especially those who are at-risk and disadvantaged, gain more educational opportunities,'' McDonnell said in a statement.

McDonnell declared charter schools a top priority in his first legislative session. He has praised President Obama for his support of charters and hopes it will help the state receive millions of dollars through the federal Race to the Top grant program. Charters are freer to experiment with schedules and curricula than regular public schools. Since Virginia began allowing charter schools 12 years ago, only three have opened. A fourth is set to open in Richmond in the fall.

Sen. Stephen D. Newman (R-Lynchburg), who sponsored the bill, said the proposal would send a signal that Virginia wants to move forward on education reform. "Virginia has a past that is one that we cannot be proud of on public education, and we should never, never, never go back," Newman said.

The bill gives the state Board of Education a role in advising prospective providers on their applications before they go up for approval before local school boards, but local boards would retain ultimate authority to approve such schools.

McDonnell's office had worked behind the scenes to negotiate a compromise with groups that represent teachers, school boards and superintendents -- all initially opposed to the bill -- to return some power to the local boards and ease concerns about the state having final control over applications.

But the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus remained opposed to the bill, arguing that such schools would help only a few select children. "These bills are saying, 'Let's not educate all the children of all the people,' '' Sen. Yvonne B. Miller (D-Norfolk) said. " 'Let's select a few people and educate them very well.' This is a very bad bill. Based on our history, we should be ashamed of ourselves to even introduce such legislation."

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Kansas City votes to close nearly half its schools to cut costs

This appears to affect inner city schools rather than the suburbs

Faced with a cash crisis and decline in standards, nearly half of the schools in Kansas City, Missouri, are to close in one of the most drastic cuts inflicted on the US education system. At a meeting attended by screaming parents, the Board of Education in the city of more than 450,000 people voted by 5-4 to close 28 of the 61 schools and cut 700 out of 3,000 jobs, including 285 teachers’ posts.

School systems in the US are cutting costs and closing facilities because of the recession and deficits. The school district in Kansas City runs a $12 million (£8 million) monthly deficit.

The city received $2 billion in the 1950s to help it to desegregate its schools. With the money, it was able to build such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool. The motive was to stop “white flight” from the city centre to the suburbs — a phenomenon caused by the desegregation ruling.

Now, however, fewer than a third of younger children in the city are able to read at or above the standard expected for their age group.

The plan to shut the schools is designed to save money and focus on improving the others but it has caused dismay among many parents and the board members who voted against the closures. “The public education system is aiding and abetting in the economic demise of our school district,” said Sharon Sanders Brooks, a councilwoman. “It is shameful.”

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British university graduates condemned to 'coffee shop jobs'

The majority of university degrees condemn graduates to menial jobs “serving coffee in Starbucks", according to a leading businessman. Good degrees from leading universities were the only qualifications with serious currency in the jobs market, it was claimed. Simon Culhane, chief executive of the Chartered Institute for Securities and Investment, said many teenagers would be better off taking a gap year before directly entering the industry of their choice.

The comments come just days after the Association of Graduate Recruiters, which represents 750 major employers, called for the Government to abolish its target to get half of all school-leavers into higher education. The group said that Labour’s “artificial” target had devalued degrees and pushed too many students onto substandard courses.

Mr Culhane said: “Today’s graduates have a tough time. “There are simply not enough jobs, which is why too many graduates are either serving coffee at Starbucks, or the equivalent, or have entered the employment market in jobs for which they are over-qualified.” He added: “Many aspiring students – and their parents – should be, and are, asking themselves if a degree is worth it.

“The answer may be politically incorrect and unwelcome, but if a key reason for an individual wanting to take a degree is to get ahead, then unless they are studying a relevant, vocational qualification at a top university and expect to obtain a 2:1 or better, they would be well advised to take a gap year and then enter the industry of their choice.”

The Chartered Institute for Securities and Investment is the largest professional body for investment banking and securities. But last year, City firms hired half the number of graduates they employed in 2008 because of the economic downturn.

Despite the slump in jobs, competition for university places has already reached a record high. It is feared that almost 200,000 applicants could be turned away from courses this September after demand for places surged by a quarter.

His comments follow remarks by Lucy Neville-Rolfe, an executive director at Tesco, who said British school leavers have basic problems with literacy and numeracy and have major “attitude problems”. Mrs Neville-Rolfe, an Oxford graduate and former civil servant, said students’ attitudes to their appearance, work, authority and discipline were poor.

The 56 year-old, one of the most powerful and well paid women in British business, said despite many A Level students and university graduates not being able to read or write or understand maths, more were achieving better results.

She also attacked students who felt that it was their right to gain employment. "They (students) don't seem to understand the importance of a tidy appearance and have problems with timekeeping," she said in a speech to the Institute of Grocery Distribution's conference on skills on Wednesday. “Some seem to think that the world owes them a living. The truth is that a certain humility and an ability to work hard are important for success. “More broadly, a society where people don't feel the need to work to gain material possessions will not be a stable or successful society."

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11 March, 2010

FRC Calls on U.S. Senate to Reject Legislation Containing Federal Education Mandates

Far-reaching Bill Threatens Faith-Based Education

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 4247, the Preventing Harmful Restraint and Seclusion in Schools Act. The bill's purpose is to ensure that teachers do not use physical, mechanical or chemical means of restraint against students. The bill significantly increases federal oversight of schools that receive federal funding, including many Catholic parochial schools and independent private schools, and it has been strongly opposed by the Council for American Private Education and the American Association of Christian Schools.

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins released the following statement about H.R. 4247:

"This bill is another example of misguided federal legislation. It increases federal paperwork and oversight to the point that there could be substantial interference with faith-based education. "Teachers generally care for their students. Should they be punished because a few teachers overstep already accepted guidelines for how teachers and students can interact? A federal mandate is unnecessary.

"Further, if Congress is so concerned with the well-being of students, why did it shut down the Washington, D.C. school choice program, which gave underprivileged students the ability to attend successful private schools instead of failing union-run public schools in the District?

"If Congress is concerned about student safety, it should begin by removing 'Safe Schools Czar' Kevin Jennings from office, not adding to his federal oversight of education. Kevin Jennings, as the founder of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), played an integral role in promoting homosexuality in public schools. His history demonstrates disregard for our obligations to safeguard the health and well-being of the student population. He is unfit for the post to which he's been assigned, and he should be removed at once."

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The University of Notre Shame

by Mike Adams

It’s understandable that student newspapers at public universities are left-leaning. The advisors of the papers are usually left-leaning and they often have a left-leaning administration leaning on them. So their coverage of issues like abortion and homosexuality is often skewed. But private religious universities once provided a safe haven for those who wished to express views not approved by the immoral minority. It’s tough to comprehend the extent to which they have fallen prey to political correctness in recent years.

The Observer, the student newspaper at the University of Notre Dame, has shown that our nation’s Catholic universities no longer provide an escape from the politically correct orthodoxy running rampant on our nation’s public campuses. And the paper has shown a remarkable contempt for intellectual honesty – not to mention the Ninth Commandment.

The Observer declined to print a column that defends Church teachings on homosexual activity, which was written by Charles Rice - a Notre Dame Professor of Law. Rice has written a regular column with the Observer for nearly two decades.

At 996 words, Professor Rice’s column is a little long. At first, Observer Editor Matt Gamber used the column’s length as an excuse for non-publication. The excuse sounded credible but, after doing a little research, I’ve concluded that his excuse is an outright lie.

When Barack Obama came to speak at Notre Dame, Professor Rice wrote an 1172-word column, which harshly criticized his appearance as at odds with the school’s principles. Note to Matt Gamber: An 1172-word column is longer than a 996-word column. That much is as clear and obvious as the Bible’s teachings on homosexuality.

But, now, Matt Gamber is saying that the subject matter of homosexuality could best by handled by printing opposing views on the subject. But why must a student newspaper at a Catholic university censor Professor Rice in the absence of some “opposing viewpoint”? And what are the implications of this new policy?

* If Professor Rice decides to write a column opposing polygamy, will the Observer withhold its publication until someone submits a pro-polygamy column?

* If Professor Rice decides to write a column opposing incest, will the Observer withhold its publication until someone submits a pro-incest column?

* If Professor Rice decides to write a column opposing adultery, will the Observer withhold its publication until someone submits a pro-adultery column?

* Finally, if Professor Rice decides to write another column opposing abortion, will the Observer withhold its publication until someone submits a pro-abortion column?

The answers to my four hypothetical questions follow: No, no, no, and no. And the reason for the pattern is simple: The Observer carves out a special “opposing viewpoint” exception for homosexuality because the Observer is intensely homophobic. And the reason for the intense homophobia manifested by Matt Gamber and the Observer is also simple: Homosexuals are less tolerant of criticism than any other portion of the American population, including feminists and Muslims.

But the consequences of homosexual intolerance are not as simple. They are twofold: 1) Homosexual intolerance tends to result in the suppression of contrary views, and 2) Such intolerance tends to make others fearful of talking to homosexuals. In other words, homosexual intolerance actually promotes homophobia.

The present situation at Notre Dame is damaging to both sides of the debate. The Observer should allow Professor Rice to present his views (as unthinkable as it may seem to present the views of the Catholic Church at a Catholic university). Then, they may decide whether the views of the opposition warrant publication.

I believe the other side should be presented after Professor Rice’s column is printed if someone at Notre Dame actually thinks the Holy Bible is unclear on the issue. If they do, the Notre Dame community will wind up with a greater appreciation of the truth via its juxtaposition with falsity.

But the prior restraint of the views of Professor Rice is not defensible. While not a technical violation of the First Amendment – Notre Dame is a private school - it is an assault on both Catholicism and common sense. And it leaves many Catholics wondering whether there is any safe haven in this land that once placed religious liberty above political correctness.

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Hamburgerology comes to Britain

Maccas is now handing out High School diplomas

Work experience for many teenagers involves making endless cups of tea or opening mountains of post, with no more reward than a week off school. But they will get the equivalent of a GCSE if doing a placement at McDonald’s from today, in recognition of their newly found skills.

The fast food multinational has for years been the butt of jokes about providing dead-end jobs flipping burgers and mopping floors. Yet it now has power to award its own qualifications, which include a diploma in shift management equal to an A level. It takes on 10,000 apprentices a year, thought to be more than any other company in Britain, and trains them in hospitality skills, and basic English and maths.

Now teenagers successfully completing a ten-day work experience placement, plus a lesson in school either side, will be awarded a BTEC level 2 in work skills accredited by Edexcel, one of the country’s biggest exam boards. This is the equivalent of a GCSE at grade B or C, and the first time a national qualification has been given for work experience. Academics said this devalued GCSEs, but praised the company for offering proper work placements during the recession. About a million young people are currently not in education, employment or training, and there are fears this could affect the job prospects of a generation.

The work experience is not guaranteed: pupils aged 14 upwards will have to fill out an online application form and submit themselves to interview by their local branch. Those who succeed will spend ten days being mentored by a “buddy”, working with them in every area of the restaurant. While not left in sole charge of cooking burgers, they will help for example by “preparing lettuce”, and will get to operate the drive-through window and handle money. They must also complete a work book, and attend an induction on safety, hygiene and food nutrition, and will have an “exit” interview at the end of the placement.

David Fairhurst, who is head of human resources at McDonald’s, did work experience — “many years ago” — at his grandfather’s store in Wigan. He said: “I learnt a lot of things, such as attention to detail and how to get along with colleagues when you were the boss’s grandson. Yes we will turn people down [for work experience], absolutely. We’re looking for people who’ve got the attitude to serve customers. “The students have a role to play in taking work experience more seriously than has been the case before. We have strict guidelines on supervision, every day they will have a buddy working alongside them.

“They will serve at drive-through windows, operate the till, prepare drinks from machines, and help to clear tables. It’s a big step for young people, it takes confidence to deal with customers. “We not just trying to recruit these people, we’re exposing them to the work of work, as we don’t want a lost generation of young people with no experience of the workplace.”

Mr Fairhurst defended the qualification from criticism, saying: “They’re with us for 80 hours, and do two lessons before and afterwards at school. In academic terms, 80 hours is enough for a Btec certificate — it’s a lot of time in terms of school.” He added: “The vast proportion of young people are disappointed about what they’re asked to do on work experience, either making tea or it’s unstructured or the company is surprised to see them turn up and don’t know what to do with them.”

A survey published today by Populus, for McDonald’s, found that more than half of young people believe there are not enough quality work placements available. One in five who had completed work experience felt their host employer had not planned for them well enough.

Professor Alan Smithers, director of the centre for education and employment research at Buckingham University, said: “The positive view of this is it might make work experience better for young people participating, but it’s absurd trying to value it in the terms of a GCSE. “Essentially, it’s what the experience does for young people’s future lives that matters. Schools and awarding bodies are being pushed into a situation of issuing qualifications for everything.

“There isn’t enough work experience to go round, and some schools have to resort to simulated work experience, or work-related experience such as writing about work. “Having ten days somewhere is a step forward, but making it equivalent to a GCSE is devaluing qualifications of that level, and could colour the way people view GCSEs in general.”

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Australia: Education Dept. gives bullying bureaucrat a free ride

A PRIMARY school principal in Brisbane's southeast is under investigation for bullying, after Education Queensland appointed him despite him being shifted from two other schools following similar complaints. Teachers passed a no-confidence motion against a principal in the Redlands area at the beginning of the school term, which was soon after his deputy walked out.

Education Queensland has confirmed an investigation is underway.

The principal was also disciplined after an incident in a previous school where he allegedly raised his hand to strike a female staff member. Following his removal, The Courier-Mail understands he was placed in head office at Education Queensland before he was sent to the Redlands school, where he's remained for at least six years.

It comes only days after Premier Anna Bligh backed a national Say No to Bullying day, but yesterday Education Minister Geoff Wilson refused to comment on the department's decision to appoint a principal with a history of bullying. "Staffing issues at individual schools are dealt with by the Department of Education and Training," he said in a statement. "I expect them to investigate all cases thoroughly and to adhere to all processes and protocols when doing so."

Education Queensland did not respond to concerns the department was aware of the principal's record when they appointed him at his current school. 'The department can only act if a formal complaint is made. Staff are encouraged to contact their executive director to do so," Human Resources assistant director Craig Allen said. "The performance management process is in place to ensure all staff are treated justly and fairly in the workplace." Mr Allen said bullying was not tolerated.

The Courier-Mail believes the schools' executive director Paula Anderson has been contacted about the matter. The investigation started yesterday.

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10 March, 2010

If Schools Discriminate Against Blacks, Do They Discriminate In Favor Of Asians?

Asians get "disproportionate" results too

In the post immediately below I discussed the Obama Dept. of Education’s view that lower minority graduation rates and lower participation in advanced placement courses, etc., reflect a pervasive problem of civil rights violations in our nation’s schools.

In that regard, however, consider the penetrating question asked by George Leef:

American colleges and universities are delighted to have minority students. They’re usually specially recruited and often given favorable treatment by the administration and professors. Some minority students work hard, perform very well, and graduate with honors. So why is it that graduation rates for minority students tend to be low? Is it because schools haven’t learned how to teach them? I don’t think so. The explanation is that on the whole, those students enter college with far lower basic academic skills (which can seldom be overcome just with a remedial course or two) and less academic engagement.

If you doubt that, ask yourself if the very high graduation rate among Asian students is because schools are “good at teaching them,” or because those students generally have high skills and motivation as they enter college....

Good question. If the “underrepresentation” of some minorities in advanced school courses and programs means the schools are discriminating against them, does the “overrepresentation” of Asians mean the schools are discriminating in favor of them?

Isn’t it posible, that is, that students and their families might be more responsible for how students perform than their schools?

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High educational standards best achieved by parent power

MASSACHUSETTS AND RHODE ISLAND were two of the 16 finalists named this week in the Obama administration's "Race to the Top" competition for a share of $4.3 billion in education "stimulus" funds. Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced the finalists on Thursday; those that made the cut have agreed to embrace policies favored by the administration, such as higher caps on charter schools and tying teachers' raises to performance.

Central to the administration's approach to education is its drive for uniform national standards in reading and mathematics. The White House announced last month that it intends to "require all states to adopt and certify that they have college- and career-ready standards . . . as a condition of qualifying for Title I funding." Duncan has reserved $350 million to assist states that consent to common curriculum standards; those that don't will be barred from seeking Race to the Top grants.

The argument for national standards seems straightforward. The No Child Left Behind law enacted in 2002 required the states to establish their own academic standards, but most of them -- under pressure from teachers' unions and school administrators' associations -- set the bar quite low. In a 2006 report, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation concluded that most states' standards were "mediocre-to-bad . . . They are generally vague, politicized, and awash in wrongheaded fads and nostrums. With a few exceptions, states have been incapable (or unwilling) to set clear, coherent standards." The only way around the states' aversion to high standards, the Obama administration and others have concluded, is to impose uniform national standards, using the federal purse as leverage.

But if the goal is to have more American students get a successful education, it is far from clear that imposing a single set of benchmarks from above is the best strategy for getting there.

For one thing, the political resistance to rigorous academic standards that has been so effective at the state level is likely to be effective at the national level. The teachers' unions and administrators' organizations that oppose higher performance mandates are at least as influential on Capitol Hill as they are in the statehouses. The Cato Institute's Neal McCluskey points out that the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, the American Association of School Administrators, the National Association of Elementary School Principals, and the Council of Chief State School Officers all make their national headquarters in Washington, DC. Whether in the states or in Washington, McCluskey writes, "the political system is stacked against high standards and tough accountability."

Moreover, the very nature of American society -- a nation of 300 million that comprises a multitude of ethnic, religious, social, and ideological traditions -- argues against the imposition from above of one-size-fits-all education standards. There is no uniform answer to the question of what parents want most from their children's education. "The greater the diversity of the people falling under a single schooling authority," McCluskey observes, "the greater the conflict, the less coherent the curriculum, and the worse the outcomes."

Anyone who called for legislation to establish mandatory national standards for television programming or restaurant menus would be laughed at: No one thinks the government is competent to decide what shows they can watch on TV or what they can order for dinner when they eat out. Is it any less risible to think that government knows best when it comes to your children's education?

Rather than centralizing even more government authority over education, genuine reform would move in the opposite direction. It is parents -- not local, state, or federal officials -- who should control education dollars. School and state should be separated, with schools being funded on the basis of their ability to attract students and teach them well. The primary responsibility for children's education should be vested in the same people who bear the primary responsibility for their feeding, housing, and religious instruction: their mothers and fathers.

More government control is not the cure for what ails American schools. The empowerment of parents is. No teachers' union, no school board, no secretary of education, and no president will ever love your children, or care about their schooling, as much as you do. In education as in so much else, high standards are important -- far too important to hand off to the government.

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Russia's super-rich take advantage of recession to storm Britain's private schools

Note that the article below adheres in part to the old British practice of calling private schools "public" schools



While recession-hit Brits are forced to scrimp to send their children to private school, Russia’s super-rich are cashing in on the chance of an elite education. Louise Carpenter meets a woman who is grooming the offspring of oligarchs for England's upper classrooms.

She tells me that at first, when she turned up at the school gates, the other parents were wary: she looked too expensively pulled together, too exotic (the cheekbones are an immediate giveaway), but more than anything, she looked and sounded very Russian, and like a very, very rich Russian at that.

She sighs: 'I look like a damn model, which doesn't help me at all. The perception is always wrong. I am a very grounded person – and I don't even wear make-up. For the past 10 years, I have worked 16 hours a day as an international property broker. I am a single mother and I've worked in Moscow and Manhattan and I was very, very successful, so successful that in the end I set up my own company. I sleep only six hours a night and I start work very early every morning. Everything I have I have earned through hard work. My generation of Russians had to. There was no inherited wealth.'

In the next few years, if Dina Karpova's business plans come to fruition, there will be many more like her at the gates of our best public schools. While recession-hit British families remortgage their homes, sell off the family silver and consign themselves to five years of staycations to ensure their children can be privately educated, Karpova is helping her rich Russian business contacts move in on the British market.

Russian children pitching up at public schools is a growing phenomenon. Harrow, Westminster, Winchester, Shrewsbury, St Mary's Ascot – these are just some of the institutions in the sights of Karpova and her team. Where once a school's foreign 'quota' might have been filled mostly by children from China, South Korea and the Emirates, registrars are now seeing an increase in inquiries from Russians.

Karpova herself is a lesson in how a new generation of motivated Russians got rich. The daughter of two government nuclear physicists, brought up in a closed city, she trained as an aerospace engineer, specialising in life-support systems in space. She narrowly missed becoming one of a few female Russian astronauts because of her height. 'I'd love to go back into that field,' she says. The decision to go into property broking – a profession that has made her very rich – was made only because the fall of the communist regime destroyed the scientific fields for which she was trained.

Ten years on, with the advent of the global financial and property crisis, she is reinventing herself again. Jaded by the declining quality (by her standards) of Russian schools and universities, no sooner had she moved to London than the calls started coming in from Russian business contacts, many of them oligarchs, although that is not a term Karpova likes to use. ('How many oligarchs are left any more? I think the idea of an oligarch is kind of shaky now.')

Whoever her clients are, they are still very rich and their questions were the same: Which schools are the best? How can we get our children in? What is the procedure? "I said to my assistant, 'I haven't got time for all of this," ' Karpova remembers. 'And she said, "Why don't you start a website?" and what with the property market collapsing anyway, it just went from there."

Given that even the most well-adjusted British child is prone to griping about boarding school food, crammed dormitories, lack of privacy and compulsory chapel, it seems extraordinary to think of pampered Russian children living in such cheek-by-jowl conditions.

But according to Karpova, that is precisely the point: 'The education system in England is incomparable with what you find in other countries, Russia included. You have had hundreds of years of perfecting that system. It was based on when Britain was a colonial superpower and the message was, 'The world is yours!' I do think the spirit goes back to this time when English public [private] schools were trying to create world leaders to rule the colonies. It is not about wealth, it is about the spirit of taking part, of having a broad all-round outlook.'

Russians, she says, love our crumbly old buildings with history behind them. It reminds them of the long-gone tsarist lifestyle, a heritage they are now looking to reclaim. Karpova stops short of saying it, but the implication is clear: if you want to create a world leader, send your child to the kind of school with a history of creating them. And what will happen to them afterwards, I ask. "Well, I hope they will go back to Russia," she says. "I want them to give something back to my country. I hope my son will go back. We owe it to our country, if not to ourselves."

It is well known that the top schools operate a 10 to 15 per cent 'foreign' policy and that there are agents all over the world attempting to place the children of rich families whose applications are, as Karpova says, 'lumped in this pile'.

Whether a Russian child would be given a place otherwise intended for a British child is a hazy area. Karpova is adamant that the leading schools such as Westminster – there is currently only one other Russian boy there – can afford to stick to their marginal foreign quota. The other less prestigious schools are much more receptive to filling up with anybody who can pay the fees, even if they can't speak much English.

Paradoxically, these are precisely the schools that Karpova is sniffy about. "A child that I haven't been able to prepare, who will not make it to the top schools, will probably end up at a school surrounded by eastern Europeans and other Russians and Asians, and they won't get an experience of British culture at all. I think it is OK and fair that foreign kids have to perform better than their British counterparts, because that is why we come here."

Karpova, in Russia at least, has a head start. Her clever idea has been to recruit a British educational consultant called Charles Bonas, who runs a London-based 'super-tutor' and mentoring agency. His work is with children based in Britain, many with foreign parents, but also with many very wealthy English families preparing for rigorous entrance tests. As a result, Bonas knows the admissions process and cultures of all the leading schools inside out.

Nevertheless, how on earth are Russian children who barely speak English when they arrive able to be propelled to the top of the pile? This is the question a forthcoming Channel 4 documentary, The Russians Are Coming, attempts to answer – although it does so only partly successfully, due to what Karpova says is the inherent problem of her clients' privacy and their fear that their children will appear to have been 'over-tutored' and thus undeserving of a place.

Karpova is shown in the film in all her splendour, being immensely diligent and gentle with the children. She clearly has, as she says herself gesticulating madly with her hands, "a brain out here". At one point, we see her striding about in elbow-length patent gloves, hair flying, a head-turning combination for any public school headmaster.

We see her with 11-year-old stepbrothers Natan and Vassili and their father, a Russian billionaire businessman referred to only as 'Boris', during a tour of Stowe. Who is Boris, I ask Karpova. "Can't comment," she says. Is he an oligarch? "Can't comment. Can't say anything about him. The problem with what I do is that publicly my clients always want to put space between me and them. We have to be very careful."

There is a knock on the door and in putters Charles Bonas. In contrast to Karpova's exoticism, Bonas appears to have walked off the set of Jeeves and Wooster. He is small, balding and well-spoken, with an education at Harrow and Oriel College, Oxford; Karpova could not wish for a more authentic specimen of the English public school system to sell to her billionaires. It immediately becomes clear that Bonas lives in the house too. Perhaps they are a very unlikely couple? Karpova shakes her head violently. "No, no!" she asserts. "Charles is guardian to my son. He stays here when I am abroad."

This year, Karpova has about 10 children going through "the process". (Bonas snaps at me when I call it 'grooming'.) They will either be children coming over for the last two years of prep school – 'always the best way of doing it,' Karpova says – or applying for their main (secondary) school. It's a rough 60/40 ratio of boys to girls. Each child is carefully monitored by Bonas and his tutors. There are about 100 of these – teachers, writers, poets, scientists, post-graduates, doctors – 'anybody with a huge amount to offer a child'.

Many Russian children need extra tuition, provided by Bonas and this team, especially in English and in critical thinking, which Bonas says is peculiar to the English system. Some need weekly tuition, others will have a crash course in the holidays, every day, all day. (Prices for mentoring start at £600 a term and basic tuition rates are £50 an hour.)

Whatever the ability of the child, Karpova and Bonas are constantly evaluating progress throughout the term and researching appropriate future schools. 'It is a very, very hard job to go back to the parents when the school is saying, "He's perfect, he's fantastic" and we're seeing that actually he's not that perfect, and when in two years he's got to go and compete with the cream of the crop if his maths is not that great,' Karpova says.

They get to grips with the curriculum, they go to parents' evenings, they liaise between parents and teachers, they study past papers. They explain to the Russians the academic standing of a school such as, say, Harrow and they try to explain the merits of single-sex education for girls, unheard of in Russia. ('No luck yet in getting that across,' Karpova says.) And if Karpova gets to know a child very well and thinks they are being channelled into the wrong school, she speaks up.

'I had one extremely wealthy client who had a very artistic child. He was desperate for the child to study business but I explained there was no interest there. The man said, "How much will it take for you to do as I say?" and at that stage I pulled out. I want the children to be happy.'

A big part of their job is working out the subtle differences between the schools, and then matching the right school to the right child. 'I'll take Charles's opinion of a school,' Karpova explains, 'but I'll also take the opinion of at least three other people. It drives him insane.'

'That's a very communist approach,' Bonas says. 'Where the Russians score is that apart from those who want to be near Heathrow, their applications can cover a wide geographic area, whereas English families think in terms of an hour's drive. Our schools are centres of excellence. It is very difficult, if not impossible, for a child to talk his or her way into somewhere. If you haven't got a really good report from your prep-school headmaster or mistress, if you haven't done particularly well in the pre-tests, and you haven't got other things to offer, such as sport, music, drama, you are not going to get in.'

While Natan and Vassili come over very well on film – they are very game in trying to speak English to the headmaster of Stowe – there is an unfortunate sequence in which they are taken to a stately home in Dorset. This is part of a wider English Mentors programme, to which Bonas contributes, intended to help integrate foreign children into society instead of just leaving them in completely alien boarding schools like lambs to the slaughter. Academic prowess is all very well, Bonas says, but if a child hasn't got the confidence to speak up in an interview or shake a headmaster's hand with pride, he will not win the place.

The film shows a process of 'social integration' that Karpova endorses (which the Russian families also pay for). In Dorset, the brothers are instructed how to shoot and play polo. They have never ridden before, and eye the ponies nervously as Karpova tells them, 'If you play polo you will become… how shall I put it?… part of high society.' It is a toe-curling moment. The boys are then given guns, and also shown how to make a bed with hospital corners. The albeit well-meaning intention of social integration gives the film an unfortunate subtext: that in reality, however good our schools are, the new rich Russians, so at pains not to be seen as 'nouveau', are just as taken with the idea of their children hobnobbing with the aristocracy.

Surely, I say to Bonas, no head teacher will give a hoot about children boasting those sort of skills. They are completely irrelevant to an application. 'Not at all!' he says quickly. 'I can see that it might look a bit contrived, but the boys love history and they loved the house with all its old books. It is so important that a child from abroad fits into a school. Basically head teachers are looking for confident children who will get a lot out of boarding, and I say to the children we look after, "I will be just as happy when I hear you've had your first Sunday lunch with an English family as I will when you get your first academic success." It's about giving them life skills and confidence. It never ceases to amaze me how brave these children are.'

But what about the parents? 'Look,' Bonas says, 'a lot of these Russian clients aren't particularly socially conscious at all. Certainly the family on the film couldn't be more disinterested in social advancement. For other families, would it help if they looked down an intake list and saw a viscount's son there? Perhaps a bit, but not much. Teaching them basic manners, etiquette, deportment – we're not trying to turn these children into little lords. It is actually just giving them the sort of ground rules and life skills that every­body needs.'

Karpova is keen to clarify what the Russian families want. 'When I say they want to mix with "the best of British families", I mean the best in their field, whatever that is,' she says. 'Wealth has nothing to do with it, it is the culture.'

Despite her 10 years in the west, Karpova is still very Russian. It is there in everything she says, in the way she blatantly identifies power in talent and beauty. It is a refreshing change to the unspoken codes of the English, although she says that she is slowly learning those too. 'You English are so polite,' she says, 'and so humble. You don't see that humbleness in Russia at all. Not at all!'

In the film, we see her son, Ivan, fluent in English, become impatient with her because she does not understand the word 'oar' (he is an avid rower at Westminster and she does not understand that either). 'Darling, not all of us had the privilege of being educated at Westminster,' she tells him by way of defence.

I ask her about the cultural divide the success of her business will create between Russian parents and their children. She pauses. 'It is very interesting. But what happens is that the child pushes the family to learn more, to understand the culture more. It is a struggle but I believe it is very important that children do not lose touch with their families.'

Karpova will not tell me her age, but my guess would be mid-thirties. She became pregnant and married very young, while at college, left the father before the birth of her son (he went on to become a very wealthy businessman), divorced and married again – this time an American – only to divorce him too. When Ivan tried to track down his father, they found out that he had disappeared five years ago and that his family now presumed him dead. Suicide? I ask. Karpova shrugs. Murder? She shrugs.

With all the security issues attached to working with billionaires, it can't have been an easy film to make. Karpova certainly does not need the publicity. She tells me she met the documentary's director through a mutual friend: 'I have these enticing things about me,' she explains almost with a sigh. 'The way I look, the way everybody thinks I'm a rocket scientist, the way I was in the Russian Olympic biathlon team for skiing… I did this film because I'm fed up with Russian women always being portrayed as hookers or money-grabbers. There are a lot of us who are very beautiful and very clever and very hard-working with it.'

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9 March, 2010

Va. Attorney General: Colleges Can't Ban Discrimination against homosexuals

Virginia's attorney general has advised the state's public colleges that they don't have the authority to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation, saying only the General Assembly has that power.

The letter sent by Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli to state college presidents and other officials Thursday drew swift criticism from Democrats and gay rights activists.

Cuccinelli said the legislature has repeatedly refused to exercise its authority. As recently as Tuesday, a subcommittee killed legislation that would have banned job discrimination against gay state employees. "It is my advice that the law and public policy of the Commonwealth of Virginia prohibit a college or university from including 'sexual orientation,' 'gender identity,' 'gender expression,' or like classification, as a protected class within its nondiscrimination policy, absent specific authorization from the General Assembly," Cuccinelli wrote.

The Republican advised college governing boards to "take appropriate actions to bring their policies in conformance with the law."

Jon Blair, chief executive officer of the gay rights group Equality Virginia, said Cuccinelli's "radical actions are putting Virginia at risk of losing both top students and faculty, and discouraging prospective ones from coming here."

C. Richard Cranwell, state Democratic Party chairman, said Virginia's colleges and universities were more than capable of setting policies that work for them "without meddling from Ken Cuccinelli."

The attorney general said his letter merely stated Virginia law, which prohibits discrimination because of "race, color, religion, national origin, sex, pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions, age, marital status, or disability," but makes no mention of sexual orientation. Cuccinelli said the criticism was coming from people who have been frustrated in their attempts to change the law. "None of them suggest our reading of the law is wrong. It's people who don't like the policy speaking up because it's their opportunity to go on the attack," he said.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia legal director Rebecca Glenberg said colleges are bound by U.S. Supreme Court decisions not to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.

A spokesman for the Family Foundation of Virginia, which has opposed expanding state anti-discrimination policies to protect gays, said the criticism of Cuccinelli's action is unwarranted. "My understanding is all he's done is essentially ask the universities to follow the law," spokesman Chris Freund said. "It's a little perplexing to see people respond the way they have."

Virginia's last two Democratic governors, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, signed executive orders barring state agencies from discriminating in hiring, promotions or firing based on sexual orientation. Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell, who took office in January, removed protections based on sexual orientation from his anti-discrimination order. As attorney general in 2006, McDonnell said Kaine exceeded his constitutional authority by extending protections to gays.

SOURCE




American schools turning to a four-day week

At great inconvenience to many parents and with no clear idea of its impact on learning

A small but growing number of school districts across the country are moving to a four-day week, in a shift they hope will help close gaping budget holes and stave off teacher layoffs, but that critics fear could hurt students' education. State legislators and local school boards are giving administrators greater flexibility to set their academic calendars, making the four-day slate possible. But education experts say little research exists to show the impact of shortened weeks on learning. The missed hours are typically made up by lengthening remaining school days.

Of the nearly 15,000-plus districts nationwide, more than 100 in at least 17 states currently use the four-day system, according to data culled from the Education Commission of the States. Dozens of other districts are contemplating making the change in the next year—a shift that is apt to create new challenges for working parents as well as thousands of school employees.

The heightened interest in an abbreviated school week comes as the Obama administration prepares to plow $4.35 billion in extra federal funds into underperforming schools. The administration has been advocating for a stronger school system in a bid to make the U.S. more academically competitive on a global basis.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Education said in an email that she couldn't comment on four-day weeks in specific districts. But "generally, we are concerned about financial constraints leading to a reduction in learning time."

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, was critical of the shift. "The budgetary pressure makes doing more reform more difficult," she said in a statement.

Some schools, meanwhile, say they are turning to the four-day schedule as a last resort. In North Branch, Minn., school Superintendent Deb Henton said her 3,500-student district, facing a $1.3 million deficit, is simply out of options. "We've repeatedly asked our residents to pay higher taxes, cut some of our staff, and we may even close one of our schools," she said. "What else can you really do?" Despite a "lot of opposition" from parents, she said, the district is set to adopt a four-day week for next school year.

A new law in Georgia allows schools a choice between a 180-day school year "or the equivalent." Hawaii officials last October introduced 17 mandatory "Furlough Fridays" for state public schools. In Minnesota and Iowa, districts are drafting proposals for their state boards of education in hopes of implementing four-day schedules next school year. In the rural Peach County, Ga., district, a four-day week this school year helped school officials save more than $200,000 last semester, trimming costs for custodial and cafeteria workers and bus drivers as well as transportation expenses and utilities, said system spokeswoman Sara Mason.

The district is on track to save 39 teaching positions and $400,000 by the end of the school year, helping to narrow a $1 million shortfall in the district's $30 million annual budget. "The savings so far have been phenomenal," said Ms. Mason, adding that she has fielded calls from officials at a dozen other Georgia schools considering making the switch.

Teachers who still work the same number of hours over four days, instead of five, generally don't see a reduction in salary. But staff who can't make up the lost time, such as bus drivers and cafeteria workers, are often hard-hit, losing as much as 20% of their pay.

The four-day school week isn't new. But until recently, it has been used mostly by small, rural districts. A few rural Colorado school districts implemented four-day calendars in the 1980s for financial reasons, and now about a third of the state's 178 districts operate on a four-day calendar. The system is currently most prevalent in Western states, where districts with four-day weeks in some cases comprise a quarter of the schools.

Four-day weeks have been in place for decades in states like New Mexico, Idaho and Wyoming and initially came about as states were looking to combat growing energy prices. Last week, Pueblo School District 70 in Colorado said it would adopt the schedule next school year for its roughly 8,000 students.

The shift has drawn scrutiny from some education and parents groups who say the shorter week hurts students academically and complicates child-care efforts. "There's no way a switch like that wouldn't negatively affect teaching and learning," said Tim Callahan, spokesman for the Professional Association of Georgia Educators, which is discouraging schools in the state from exploring four-day weeks.

Monte Thompson, superintendent of Gore Public Schools in Oklahoma, where the system is in its first year, said teachers have to do a "dog and pony show to keep kids' attention" for the extra hour and 40 minutes spent in class from Tuesday to Friday. "I get why schools have moved toward this, but I don't think finances justify hurting the kids educationally," said Mr. Thompson, who became the superintendent after the system was implemented. He said Gore schools are saving about $35,000 with the change, but will revert back to five days in the next school year.

The schedules have struck a nerve with some working parents who have had to revamp child-care plans. Christina Long, a mother of three girls who attend North Branch, Minn., schools, said she will also have to rethink her career plans in light of next year's academic calendar. "I'd always said I would go back to full-time once my youngest was in school," said Ms. Long, who works part-time around her youngest daughter's school schedule. "Next year was supposed to be that year, but now I don't know what I can do job-wise with that four-day schedule."

In Georgia's Peach County, the community has stepped up to assist parents who've been put in a bind by the Tuesday to Friday school schedule. Two different Boys and Girls Club sites and a church are offering affordable child care and tutoring, respectively, on Mondays for between $10 and $15....

SOURCE




British university targets have 'devalued' degrees

Labour’s drive to boost the number of teenagers going on to university has “driven down standards” of higher education, according to Britain’s biggest employers. In a stinging pre-election attack, the Association of Graduate Recruiters said the “artificial” growth in undergraduates had created problems for organisations who can no longer differentiate between courses. It also warned that targets designed to increase the number of students from poor backgrounds risked being met at the expense of maintaining high academic standards.

The group – which represents 750 public and private sector organisations including Tesco, PricewaterhouseCoopers, BP, the Crown Prosecution Service and even the Cabinet Office – called on the Government to scrap its long-standing commitment to get at least half of people into university by their 30th birthday.

Business leaders said the goal – first set a decade ago – should be abolished to allow universities to focus on “quality not quantity”. They also called on institutions to give students lessons in basic skills amid fears that too many graduates lack customer awareness, teamwork skills or the ability to communicate with colleagues.

The comments come amid growing controversy over university admissions. In the last decade, the Government has encouraged more school-leavers to strive for higher education. Tens of millions of pounds has been spent on roadshows and publicity campaigns to tempt more sixth-formers into applying and universities have been given benchmarks to raise the number of students recruited from state schools and deprived backgrounds. Almost 400,000 more students are in university this year compared with 1997.

But a sharp increase in the number of applications in 2010 – combined with a freeze on places due to public spending cuts – risks leaving hundreds of thousands without a course this September.

The AGR said that Government’s “artificial” target to raise student numbers had failed to serve the needs of teenagers or British industry. In a report, billed as a pre-election manifesto, the AGR said: “The introduction of a target to get 50 per cent of all under-30s into higher education by 2010 has driven down standards, devalued the currency of a degree and damaged the quality of the student university experience. “Growing numbers of students are studying degree courses which lack rigour in below-average institutions.

“This does not help young people’s life chances or represent a good financial investment. It also creates problems for graduate employers who can no longer be sure what the value of certain degree courses and institutions is. “The focus must shift back to quality rather than quantity, while the offering must adapt to meet the needs of a wider range of backgrounds and abilities.”

Since 1997, the overall number of 18- to 30-year-olds with a degree has increased marginally to just over four-in-10. But a study earlier this year from the Government’s Higher Education Funding Council for England showed a sharp rise in the proportion of teenagers going straight into university from school or college. Some 30 per cent of 18- and 19-year-olds went on to higher education in the mid-1990s compared with 36 per cent by 2010 – an increase of a fifth.

AGR members – which also include BAE Systems, the Bank of England, Goldman Sachs, the National Audit Office, Network Rail and the Royal Mail – collectively recruit 30,000 graduates a year. Its study – “Talent, Opportunity, Prosperity” – backed proposals from universities to introduce a “report card” to give students a detailed list of their achievements alongside raw degree classifications. The existing system of first, second and third-class degrees fails to give employers a realistic picture of graduates’ abilities, it said.

It also called for the gradual phasing out of the cap on tuition fees to allow universities to charge what they like by 2020. Families should be encouraged to save for higher education through a national savings scheme, the AGR said. The study suggested that safeguards should be put in place to encourage students from poor backgrounds to apply but insisted that university admissions should be judged on merit.

This follows concerns from private school leaders that institutions are being put under pressure to make lower grade offers to sixth-formers from poor-performing state schools. Carl Gilleard, AGR chief executive, said: “Yes, we want to see as many young people as possible progress to higher education, but, crucially, only on the basis of academic ability and achievement. Yes, we must widen participation - but not indiscriminately.”

A spokesman for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills said: "The economy needs more - not less - highly skilled young people. "We have never suggested that 50 per cent of the population should go directly from school to a conventional three-year degree. Many of these people will already be in the workforce, which is why we set out the need for more flexible modes of study. "Our universities have maintained a world-class reputation for excellence at a time of rapid expansion and we continue to have high levels of graduate employability and consistently high employer and student satisfaction.

"The Government has commissioned an independent review of higher education funding and student finance chaired by Lord Browne. The panel is currently gathering evidence and we will not pre-empt the findings of the review."

David Willetts, the Conservative shadow skills secretary, said: “This is a useful report. I completely agree with the attack on the artificial 50 per cent target. People should go to university when they believe they have the ability to benefit from it – not to meet some top-down target set by Labour ministers.”

But student leaders branded the conclusions “offensive”. Wes Streeting, president of the National Union of Students, said: “The AGR does not seem to appreciate how much its own members benefit from our higher education system. “It is in the long term interest of our economy that the number of highly skilled graduates entering our workforce continues to increase.”

Sally Hunt, general secretary of the University and College Union, said: “The future for the UK is at the forefront of a high-skilled knowledge economy and we won’t get there with less graduates.” [The general secretary of the University and College Union doesn't know the difference between "less" and "fewer"? She has revealed more than she intended, it would seem]

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8 March, 2010

A corrupt system

An email from Scherie Gaitor of BookishBabe.com below

I find it to be highly interesting in that you highlight the philosophical corruption of the education systems within the Western world. I come from a long line of educators. My grandmother was a teacher who had her own preschool. My aunt and mother are educators, who unfortunately have lost their jobs. My mother, trained as a high school business teacher was laid off last year. The school was ran (or not ran) by an incompetent principal who was arrested for beating his girlfriend. No, he was not fired, in fact he kept his job and pretended like nothing ever happened. By the way, this whole event was covered in the local newspaper.

My mother had to deal with unruly students. Her authority, as well as other teachers at this school was undermined by the domestic abuser principal. But, the superintendent of the school district got a $35,000 bonus!! Even though he retired from another school district, somewhere in Ohio from what my mother told me. For the record, this superintendent did nothing regarding the incompetent, woman beating principal. My mother told me that none of the students respected him, although he tried to present himself as being "cool". He was regularly referred to as the "wife beater".

I wanted to direct your attention to an article about the Detroit Public School System. I have to say that when I read this article, I thought it was a joke. The school board president is a functioning illiterate. Link here

My mother's job search has been unsuccessful. She wanted to be a teacher because she thought she could impart knowledge. The corruption runs deep throughout the school systems in the United States. I believe it's inherent in government schooling. I don't think my mother understands this. She is still a supporter of public education. She lost her job because she lacked seniority. The certification process is a big joke. For the record, my mother already has a Bachelor's degree in Business Administration. She wasted two years and thousands of dollars in loans. Yet a man like Otis Mathis, who can't even write English is a school board president?

I apologize for this long email. I just had to get it off my chest. I'm 32 years old and I am concerned for the future of the U.S. and for the West in general. We have lost the real meaning of Western culture. We all benefit from the trappings of Western society. But how in HELL can we maintain it if the intellectual framework has been deliberately destroyed. Are we following in the foot steps of Ancient Rome? I'm still trying to answer that question.




Simptums of D-Troit Publik Edjecashun



Here's a new slogan for Detroit public schools: get an education or you'll end up like, well... like the president of the city school board [above].

It's bad enough Detroit's schools are currently graduating a pathetic 1 out of every 4 students. But now, the Detroit News is wondering what kind of example the public school board's leadership is setting when it sends out emails like this one:

Do DPS control the Foundation or outside group? If an outside group control the foundation, then what is DPS Board row with selection of is director? Our we mixing DPS and None DPS row's, and who is the watch dog?

And this one sent to supporters just a few days ago:

If you saw Sunday's Free Press that shown Robert Bobb the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, move Mark Twain to Boynton which have three times the number seats then students and was one of the reason's he gave for closing school to many empty seats.

The author of these emails is DPS board president Otis Mathis, a life-long resident of Detroit and public secondary school and higher-ed graduate. Mathis acknowledges he's a "horrible writer," but shouldn't a lack of basic skills like writing disqualify someone to lead the city's board of education?

In another city, these revelations might be grounds for disqualification. But Mathis is liked and defended by many of his peers, who cite his collegiality, lack of defensiveness and leadership as more important than his writing skills.

I'm sure Mr. Mathis is a likeable guy. However, his is just one of many cases in the public sector where standards have been thrown out the window. Why is it consistently ok for quality standards--the same standards demanded by the private sector--to be ignored in public positions?

Would a publication like Townhall (or any other that took itself seriously) ever hire me if I actually wrote in language like that of the title of this post? Why then would it be ok for the public education system to--a system the nation regularly relies on to EDUCATE our children?

And shouldn't the president of the board set some kind of personal standard for public education? It'd be like having a manufacturer who has no basic knowledge of his company's products. Public or private sector: we need to demand standards of quality!

SOURCE




Villaraigosa shocked at celebration of O.J. Simpson, RuPaul, Dennis Rodman at L.A. Black History Month



I doubt that the teachers intended to make a mockery of black history month -- though they did, of course. I suspect that it was the work of far-Leftist teachers who really do think that O.J. Simpson and the others are good role models

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa expressed shock over allegations that three teachers at a South Los Angeles elementary school encouraged students to celebrate O.J. Simpson, Dennis Rodman and RuPaul during Black History Month. The teachers have been suspended as the L.A. Unified School district investigates. According to officials, children at Wadsworth Avenue Elementary School were carrying pictures of the men at a parade Friday on the school playground.

"I am shocked and outraged by the actions of these teachers at Wadsworth Elementary School," Villaraigosa said in a statement. "These teachers undermined the school's well-intentioned celebration, and they did so at the expense of elementary school students. Their actions were not only cynical, but did a terrible disservice to the students, their families and all of the teachers who work hard on a daily basis to build trust and a productive learning environment."

Los Angeles Unified School District spokeswoman Gayle Pollard-Terry said Supt. Ramon C. Cortines learned about the incident Tuesday and had the teachers, who are white, pulled from their classrooms for the duration of an investigation. The suspension is without pay for the first three days. "The superintendent believes there are better choices," Pollard-Terry said. Other students were carrying pictures of President Obama and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The teachers have not been identified and could not be reached for comment. District officials did not provide specific details about what the teachers did, saying the investigation was still ongoing. Some community leaders aren't satisfied with the suspensions and are calling for the dismissal of the instructors, who teach first, second and fourth graders. "I just can't fathom what these teachers were thinking of except to make a mockery of African American history," said Leon Jenkins, president of the Los Angeles branch of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

L.C. "Chris" Strudwick-Turner of the Los Angeles Urban League likened the episode to a series of racially provocative incidents at UC San Diego, where a Feb. 15 off-campus party mocked Black History Month. "These kinds of things build on each other," she said. "When something like that happens in [San Diego] and there is no immediate consequence, that emboldens others. That's why I was glad that LAUSD took them out of the classroom right away."

[Updated at 1:38 p.m.: Pollard-Terry said Simpson appeared on the approved list of Black History Month figures, which dates back to 1985. But the names of Rodman and RuPaul, among others, were added in pencil when teachers were selecting which prominent African Americans their classes would honor in the parade. The school principal did not see the list, which Cortines called a lack of oversight, said Pollard-Terry.]

She said the three teachers were believed to have suggested at least some of those names for the list.

The district dispatched a human relations and ethnic diversity team Wednesday to help the school prepare lessons that are "more appropriate for Black History Month," she added.

Strudwick-Turner said the Los Angeles Urban League has been told by people who attended the parade Friday that the teachers had been asked to instruct their classes on a notable African American and that they had selected Simpson, Rodman and RuPaul.

The mayor said in his statement that he hopes the situation will be resolved. "I urge the Los Angeles United School District to take swift and appropriate action with respect to the teachers involved. We cannot stand for such myopic behavior by those whom we entrust to teach and inspire the next generation," he said.

SOURCE




More class size nonsense in Britain

With good discipline even class sizes of 60 can be satisfactory -- except perhaps for the very young. See here and here and here and here and here

Thousands of primary school children are being taught in supersized classes of more than 40 pupils, according to figures. At least 210 state school teachers were regularly leading lessons of at least 41 children last year, it was disclosed. In addition, around one-in-eight children in England are in classes of more than 30, despite fears pupils struggle for attention in huge lessons.

Opposition MPs seized on the disclosure, saying that Labour had failed to keep a promise made in 1997 to significantly cut class sizes. It follows figures published last year that showed the UK had some of the biggest lessons in the developed world. Only six other countries place under-11s in larger groups, it was revealed. Pupils in eastern European nations such as Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and Russia were among those enjoying smaller classes.

David Laws, the Liberal Democrat schools spokesman, said: "It's shocking that there are thousands of young children being taught in these huge classes. "Massive classes are difficult for teachers to control and children who are struggling can lose out on the extra help they need."

Michael Gove, the Conservative shadow schools secretary, said: “Parents want schools built on a human scale where heads know the names of their children. “The Government has been going in the wrong direction.”

Labour introduced legislation in 1997 making it illegal for under-sevens to be taught in large classes. According to the latest figures, some 460,000 under-11s in England – one-in-eight – were taught in groups of more than 30 last year. Some 10,070 were in classes of at least 41 pupils, it was revealed. The worst area was Manchester, where 1,367 were in huge lessons, while 1,267 were affected in Stoke-on-Trent. Hertfordshire, Hull and the London borough of Merton also had hundreds of children in large classes.

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: "Over the last 10 years we have massively increased the number of adults teaching children. “Over 98 per cent of infant classes are under the statutory limit and the average size is 26.2. “We expect local authorities and schools to take their legal responsibility to limit class sizes very seriously. There can be no excuses for any infant class that is unlawfully over the legal limit.”

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7 March, 2010

Middle school student suspended for REJECTING pill

And these brainless loons are the ones teaching kids!

The parents of a Kentuckiana seventh grade student say their young daughter was suspended from school for doing exactly what she's been taught to do for years - to just say no to drugs. The girl did not bring the prescription drug to her Jeffersonville, IN school, nor did she take it, but she admits that she touched it and in Greater Clark County Schools that is drug possession.

Rachael Greer said it happened on Feb. 23 during fifth period gym class at River Valley Middle School when a girl walked into the locker room with a bag of pills. "She was talking to another girl and me about them and she put one in my hand and I was like, ‘I don't want this,' so I put it back in the bag and I went to gym class," said Rachael.

The pills were the prescription ADHD drug, Adderall. Patty Greer, Rachael's mother, said she and her husband are proud of their daughter for turning down drugs, just like she's been taught for years by DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) instructors at school. "I'm proud her conscience kicked in and she said, ‘No, I'm not taking this. Here you can have it back,'" Patty Greer said.

But just saying no didn't end the trouble for Rachael. During the next period, an assistant principal came and took Rachael out of class. It turned out the girl who originally had the pills and a few other students got caught. That's when the assistant principal gave Rachael a decision. "We're suspending you for five days because it was in your hand," said Rachael.

After hearing the news, Patty Greer went to school officials. "He said she wrote it down on a witness statement and she had told the truth, he said she was very, very honest and he said he was sorry he had to do it but it was school policy," said Patty Greer.

According to Greater Clark County Schools district policy, even a touch equals drug possession and a one week suspension. "The fact of the matter is, there were drugs on school campus and it was handled, so there was a violation of our policy," said Martin Bell, COO of Greater Clark County Schools.

We wanted to know what would have happened if Rachael had told a teacher right away. Bell said the punishment would not have been any different. District officials say if they're not strict about drug policies no one will take them seriously.

"That's not a good policy," said Patty Greer. "We're teaching our kids if you say no to drugs you're going to get punished, it's not right."

Greater Clark County School district officials would not tell us how many other students were involved, but they did tell us there were other suspensions and some students were moved to an alternative school.

SOURCE




Britain to fire some of its most eminent professors

PLANS by two leading universities to dismiss renowned academics to implement Lord Mandelson’s spending cuts have sparked worldwide protests by thousands of scholars. King’s College London has caused the greatest outrage with a proposal to sack David Ganz, Britain’s only professor of palaeography and one of the world’s most eminent experts in ancient handwriting. Thousands of academics — led by professors from the American universities Harvard and Stanford — have signed petitions and joined Facebook groups to save Ganz and his department.

At the University of Sussex, plans to shed 115 jobs, including cutbacks in languages, history and science, have sparked student occupations of a campus building and international anger led by Princeton.

King’s and Sussex have announced the deepest cuts so far to cope with the £1 billion reduction in higher education funding announced by Mandelson, the first secretary of state. Last month, Mandelson attacked his university critics, saying lecturers “think they have a right to be set in aspic”.

By this weekend, the Facebook group campaigning to save Ganz had attracted 6,273 members, while a separate petition had 7,493 signatures. The Daily Princetonian newspaper wrote: “Faculty members [at King’s] will be let go not because they have ceased to research or teach effectively, but because their fields ... don’t spin money. “Similar measures are under way at another once excellent institution, Sussex.”

Protesters against Ganz’s proposed redundancy include Jeffrey Hamburger, professor of German art and culture at Harvard. He called the plan “nothing short of a disaster”.

Two senior researchers in computational linguistics, Shalom Lappin and Wilfried Meyer-Viol, are among 125 King’s staff told they are likely to lose their jobs. Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard, said of the plan: “To give the boot to a scholar like Lappin is an act of madness.”

At Sussex, the 115 staff scheduled to lose their jobs include Naomi Tadmor, a senior history lecturer. The university told her of her fate while she was in Israel for her mother’s funeral. Sussex is to stop teaching English history from before 1700 and all pre-1900 European history. Other courses facing the axe include undergraduate degrees in foreign languages.

Sussex said: “We have a strategy of growth, seeking additional income from non-public funds and making targeted savings in areas that have the largest gap between income and spending.”

King’s said: “This is not a bunch of management consultants parachuted in, this is the heads of schools and their teams coming up with proposals — and they are academics.”

Ganz declined to comment on his future, but said: “It would be a brave parent who would send a child to university in the reign of Mandelson.”

SOURCE




Australia: Row over barbecue as primary school opts to offer halal sausages

A ROW over sausages has a school community sizzling amid competing claims of bigotry and animal cruelty. What was supposed to be a welcome-back barbecue for students at Coburg West Primary School has turned into a debate over the Islamic halal method of preparing meat.

Members of the school's Parents and Friends Association believed they were being inclusive when they ordered halal-only sausages for last month's barbie. But some parents thought it was political correctness gone mad to offer only halal meat.

Parent Diane Rees said yesterday that she was outraged when told by the PFA that "we have to buy halal because we have some Muslim children in the school". "I said to the principal, 'I think you're discriminating against the majority of the school and appeasing the minority by only serving halal,' " she said. "It's not fair on my children that they can't eat at the school."

Ms Rees said she wasn't anti-Muslim - her concern was over the way animals were killed under the halal method, which involves a knife cut to the jugular veins and carotid arteries in the neck. "They take two long minutes to die and I think that's bloody cruel," she said.

But Australian Federation of Islamic Councils president Ikebal Patel said research showed that, done properly, halal was a quick and humane slaughter of animals. "I think they are using the issue of some halal sausages at a barbecue, for God's sake, to bring out their own xenophobic bigotry," he said. "It was very thoughtful of the parents and friends association to try to cater for Muslims. I think they (the critics) need to get real and get a life on this one."

School principal David Kilmartin, who has been in the job for only a month, said halal-only barbecues were not school policy and the PFA had been told to provide a choice of meat in the future. "I don't think it was done with any malice. I'm assuming there would have been requests from Muslim families to have halal meat," he said.

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6 March, 2010

RI: Teacher firings ripple past Central Falls’ border

Inside the front door to Central Falls High School, across the street from a boarded-up building, an archway is adorned with an unambiguous boast: “Through these halls pass the world’s best faculty and students.’’

It is a motto that rings false for the local school board, which recently voted to fire all of the school’s staff in a stunning move that made Central Falls a lightning rod in the polarizing debate over improving the country’s education system.

Even President Obama weighed in, holding up the Feb. 23 vote to fire all 93 teachers, administrators, and support staff as a painful but potentially necessary move.

“It was one thing when a rival town said something bad about your school,’’ said JoAnn Boss, a Spanish teacher at Central Falls High and a 1982 graduate. “But to have the president say something, it’s really been a crushing blow to the kids. It’s a devastating time for them.’’

The battle taking place in Rhode Island has resonated in Massachusetts, where state and local education leaders recently received legislative approval to take more drastic measures to improve schools, including forcing teachers to reapply for their jobs. Massachusetts officials are expected to release a list today of about three dozen underperforming schools.

Central Falls Superintendent Frances Gallo recommended the firings after teachers did not agree on issues of extra work and pay related to a state-mandated overhaul. “Somebody has to do this for the children,’’ said Gallo, who has led the district for three years. “Their voice was not heard, and now they’re all being hurt by it.’’

Teachers, however, have accused Gallo of intransigence and union-busting after the state demanded that the six worst-performing schools in Rhode Island, including Central Falls High, be overhauled. Faculty members will continue to teach for the rest of the school year and can reapply for their jobs, but no more than 50 percent can be rehired under state guidelines.

The teachers union offered a counterproposal Tuesday that moves toward Gallo’s conditions, including a longer workday. In response, Gallo has agreed to resume negotiations. However, the superintendent said last night, the decision to fire teachers will not change unless an agreement is reached.

In Central Falls, a largely Hispanic city north of Providence where 19,000 people are squeezed into 1.3 square miles, the mill work vanished long ago, only 48 percent of high schoolers graduate in four years, and more than a quarter of its families live below the poverty level. Only 7 percent of 11th graders reached proficiency in math.

Boarded-up tenements are common, the main park is marred by X-rated and other offensive graffiti, and many of the narrow, crowded streets in the state’s smallest and poorest city are riddled with potholes. But it’s also a place with an astonishing variety of ethnic influences, including restaurants with roots in Mexico, Cape Verde, Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic.....

To Gallo, who has been an educator for nearly 40 years, the students and not the time clock are the paramount consideration in a district that has been under state financial control since 1991. “When I came here, they asked me to begin a reform effort to change a failing system,’’ Gallo said. “Those who constantly settle for mediocrity or less - that’s the difficulty, and we must constantly strive for better.’’

Although poverty plays a role in poor performance, Gallo said, she separates what occurs in the “safe haven’’ of the classroom. “It’s about attitude from everyone, parents, children, teachers, custodians, everyone,’’ Gallo said. “I’ll never give up. It’s a we-can-make-it attitude. Isn’t that the old American dream? Put on your boots and get marching.’’

More here




Great Moments in Higher Education

"San Francisco high school students, just months out of middle school, can start earning San Francisco State college credit this fall through a ninth-grade ethnic studies course," reports the San Francisco Chronicle. Apparently this is not a joke:

The program is designed for students who might not otherwise be considering college as an option, said Jacob Perea, dean of the School of Education, who runs the Step to College program at San Francisco State.

"We're not really looking for the 4.4 (grade point average) students," he said. "We're looking for the 2.1 or 2.2 students."

Students cannot fail the class. They either receive a "pass" grade or are withdrawn from the course if it appears they cannot pass, Perea said.

"All we do is give them an opportunity," he said. "I do believe that (the ethnic studies) course is a course set up so the kids will come out of there with the kind of information that a freshman here taking an ethnic studies course will have."

The content of the courses offered in the Step to College program are reviewed by CSU faculty to ensure that they're equal to any offered at the university.

What does it tell you about the California State University system that its classes are equal to those offered high school freshmen?

On a more serious note, however, this may suggest a way out of California's budget mess: Why not abolish high schools, fire all their unionized teachers, and send kids straight from middle school to CSU?

SOURCE




California disqualified from receiving federal school funds

California was disqualified Thursday from receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in school reform funds when federal education leaders announced that 15 other states and Washington, D.C., are in the running for billions in federal grants. The money at stake is the first round of $4.35 billion that the Obama administration plans to give states to spur reforms. California officials plan to apply for a second round of funding but were unsure exactly how to improve their chances.

To make California a contender for the Race to the Top program, politicians rewrote laws, giving parents the ability to demand aggressive changes at struggling schools and allowing districts to link teacher evaluations to test scores.

The competition was set up to encourage states to take on reforms supported by the Obama administration. These included lifting caps on charter schools, using data to track the progress of students and teachers, and shutting down or replacing the staff at low-performing campuses.

Federal officials would not say why California or any other state fell short. But according to federal guidelines, California would have lost points because fewer than half of the state's school districts and unions agreed to a package of reforms signed into law in January.

Even though California could have received up to $700 million, some teachers union leaders sounded slightly relieved. They had opposed, for example, basing evaluations on standardized tests they say are flawed. "There wasn't a great deal of support," said Marty Hittelman, president of the California Federation of Teachers. "I won't say that I'm in sorrow of California losing it."

Others who had pushed hard for the legislation, including Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles), expressed disappointment. "While the reforms we passed did move our state forward, they did not go far enough because other states were more competitive," Schwarzenegger said.

State officials had not planned exactly how to use the money, but California's exclusion is another financial blow in a state confronting a continuing multibillion-dollar budget crisis. School districts up and down the state are confronting teacher layoffs, increased class sizes and fewer electives; protests against budget cuts were held on campuses throughout the state Thursday.

The money would have particularly helped the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second-largest system. Because many other districts chose to sit out the competition, some analysts anticipated a share for L.A. Unified as large as $100 million. Those funds could not have been applied directly to the district's $640-million deficit -- the money had to be used for specific reform efforts -- but they would have helped significantly.

Several of the finalists lack collective bargaining rights for teachers, such as South Carolina and Louisiana. And in Kentucky, all school districts signed on. In a news briefing Thursday morning, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that states without collective bargaining rights for teachers were not given special treatment.

Applicants' ability to execute favored reforms carried weight, said officials close to the decision-making process who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

So a state such as Louisiana, which converted more than half of New Orleans' schools to charters in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, would presumably have an advantage. Louisiana is "doing so many of these things that Race to the Top is asking schools and school districts to do," said Paul Vallas, superintendent of the Recovery School District in New Orleans. "Our actions are speaking as loud as our words."

More here





5 March, 2010

Our New LGBTQIA Center

by Mike Adams

Last month, I heard some really bad news. It seems the State of North Carolina is about to lay off 3000 more employees in the midst of a massive budget shortfall. But that wasn’t the only bad news I got last month. I also got this email from a representative of our university’s new LGBTQIA Resource Center:

I just wanted to remind everyone about the showing of Milk tomorrow night. This will be the innaugral [sic] event for UNCW's LGBTQIA Resource Office, and also a fundraiser for Wilmington's Domestic Violence Shelters and Services. The film will be shown at 7:00 p.m in Lumina Theater and admission is free. So please come see this important, and Oscar Award Winning film.

Thanks,
Amy Schlag
Program Advisor
UNCW GLBTQIA Office

If you’re like me, you probably have a few questions for Amy Schlag. I’ve listed some of mine below and answered them whenever possible:

1. Why can’t you spell the word “inaugural?” The answer is that Amy is an English professor at UNCW. By the way, she is a White English professor, not a Black English professor like Maurice Martinez.

2. What is the meaning of all the letters in this veritable alphabet soup of liberal victim-hood? The answer is “gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, questioning, inter-sexed, and ally.” For the record, I had to write Amy to ask her the meaning of “A”. I thought it might stand for androgyny or, perhaps, something to do with the buttocks. We already have the feminists reclaiming the c-word in The Vagina Monologues. I don’t want to hear a bunch of LGBTQI people reclaiming the a-word. That’s one monologue I can do without.

3. Why is your new center called “LGBTQIA” in the text of the invitation and “GLBTQIA” in your signature? Is there a power struggle going on between the “Gs” and the “Ls”? Is it likely to become as contentious as the struggle between the “crips” and the “bloods”? I mean, can’t we all just get along?!

I think there are a number of questions to be raised with the new LGBTQIA (or GLBTQIA) Resource Center leadership. But I don’t want any miscommunication of my ideas. So I’m going to call Maurice Martinez, the professor of Black English in the UNCW Watson School of Education for help. Maybe he also teaches Queer English, which can help me get my point across with the new queer center, or queer new center. Who knows, after I learn some Queer English, I might even be able to get a job teaching in the public school system!

But, in the meantime, I plan to write Chancellor Rosemary DePaolo with a few questions. Some examples follow:

1. We have an African American Center, a Women’s Center, EL Centro Hispano, and now a LGBTQIA (or GLBTQIA) Resource Center. Have you ever considered starting a Conservative Professor Resource Center? It wouldn’t cost much money. You could just stick me in a cage in the middle of the campus and let the liberal professors walk by and gaze in wonder. They could even arrange field trips for students in the Watson School of Education. Professor Martinez’ students could ask him profound intellectual questions like “Who dat in the cage?” and “Why he be staring at me like dat?”

2. Are you concerned that the last name of the Program Advisor for the new UNCW LGBTQIA Office will be deemed highly offensive to some “Gs” - and perhaps mildly offensive to some “Qs” – assuming they also like “questioning” authority? After all, a few years ago, a local teacher got into trouble because she used the term “niggardly,” which sounds like an offensive epithet. Aren’t you worried that the name “Schlag” will raise a red flag – as opposed to a rainbow flag – because it sounds like the word “fag”?

3. Finally, just how many more thousands of state employees will we have to lay off before you realize we are broke and cannot afford any more of these damn centers, Dr. DePaolo? In other words, when will you stop bankrupting our state in order to make it look more like San Francisco than North Carolina? Translation in straight White English: Have you ever considered leaving to become chancellor of San Francisco State University?

Indeed, there are so many state employees out of work I think we should show the film Toast after we show the film Milk. The least we can do for our unemployed-in-the-name-of-diversity is to kiss them after we have screwed them in the name of tolerance and inclusion. A film named after their fate would be a nice tribute. Plus, we could have a fund-raiser for domestic violence since it has been on the rise in the wake of recent layoffs!

It is no surprise that Rosemary DePaolo stated publicly that she wanted UNC-Wilmington to be the North Carolina equivalent of William and Mary. But there’s no way that will ever happen. At William and Mary a left wing president came in and removed the cross from the chapel and replaced it with the Sex Workers Art Show. The alums got angry and the president was, for lack of a better word, toast.

At UNC-Wilmington the DePaolo administration has yanked Christmas off our tree and Good Friday off our calendar. In its place we have a new queer resource center or, should I say, queer new resource center. Yet, unlike many others in this state, DePaolo still has a job. Pardon the straight white English but we ain’t no William and Mary. We’re just a bunch of sissies

SOURCE




Attack on 'biology-based' restrooms sparks backlash

Pro-family activists target repeal of state's Human Rights statute

The issue over whether schools in Maine will be required to allow "transgender" students to pick which restroom – boys or girls – they feel like using is prompting another look at the state law on which the restroom dispute rests: the Maine Human Rights statute of 2005. WND reported a day ago that members of the Maine Human Rights Commission voted 4-1 to hold a public hearing on the guidelines that have been proposed for schools before moving forward.

Their own lawyer told commission members requiring all students to use "biology-based" restrooms and locker rooms in the state's schools is illegal and cannot be allowed to continue. "Schools cannot discriminate against sexual identity or gender identification. Schools therefore cannot segregate students based on sexual orientation and identity," commission legal counsel John Gause said yesterday.

Now Maine pro-family activists say the vote to delay a decision is a smokescreen and they are aiming higher than just stopping the guidelines. They want a repeal of the Human Rights statute.

Steve Martin is the host of the Aroostock Watchmen Radio Program and he's hoping the people of Maine will notice what the commission legal counsel is saying and take action in the fall. "Hopefully the people will hear what the commissioners are saying and rise up and vote out the officials who put these unelected people into their positions. I'm hopeful that the people will put people back in the Maine state legislature who support decency and common sense," Martin said.

Paul Madore of the Maine Grassroots Coalition said the public meeting and any future public hearings are to make the people think they're being heard. "We have to keep in mind that the proposed guidelines were mostly drafted by radical homosexual organizations. The commission sought the input of these radical homosexual groups on purpose and there was no impartial and objective source of information," Madore said. "So the future hearing is a dog and pony show to create a lot of communication confusion," Madore said.

Martin agreed that any public hearing will be for public appearance. "The legal counsel's statements that the proposed guidance is already being used is evidence that this process is window dressing," Martin said. "They want to show that the public was listened to, but they're not going to listen to us unless we ratchet up the pressure in other ways," Martin said.

There even are questions on the commission itself. Commissioner Kenneth Fredette believes the consequences for opening public restroom facilities to people of the opposite biological gender is one that hasn't been considered. "It's a very emotional issue and the statute that was passed by the legislature and affirmed by the voters of the state of Maine was done very broadly and what they're doing is trying to figure out what the statute means," Fredette said. "It was a poorly worded statute that the people of Maine voted on back in 2005," Fredette said.

Fredette also believes the people of Maine likely didn't foresee transgendered restroom use as a result of the statute and that the commissioners pushing the guidance are not likely to be the ones to live with the results. "The consequence is to be borne by other people who are in the bathroom. My daughter might be shocked by the experience of having someone who is biologically a male come into the bathroom while she is in the process of using the bathroom," Fredette said. "I don't know how that will affect her and I don't think we need to be putting students at risk for that kind of a situation," Fredette said.

Fredette believes that the commission is involved in lawmaking and that lawmaking isn't the commission's function. "The commission shouldn't go anywhere from this point because this is an issue that is more properly addressed by the Maine legislature," Fredette said. "We are talking about an issue that is going to affect every school in Maine and every student in Maine. That's more properly addressed by those people we've elected or by the people of the state of Maine, not five unelected commission members," Fredette said.

Madore believes that the possible April or May public hearing is mostly for show, but Maine's parents and families still have an option open to them. "I think that a lot of what happens depends on the people. However, I think that eventually the effort to stop the implementation of these radical policies is to campaign for a repeal of the 2005 law. We have to take direct aim at that law," Madore said.

Martin agrees that repealing the 2005 law is the best course of action. "It may come to that. We have no other course of action to take but to repeal the 2005 law," Martin said. "We think the support of the people of Maine is out there and that the people are willing to put themselves on the line and repeal these laws," Madore said.

The current push started over the commission decision last year that found a school in Orono, Asa Adams School, discriminated against a boy by denying him access to the girls' restroom. The ripples from the ruling now are being felt. According to documents obtained in the state, the University of Maine already is expressing alarm.

A letter from the university office of equal opportunity noted, "There will likely be cases in which allowing a transgender student to participate in gender-segregated sports in accordance with the gender identity or expression will raise legitimate concerns about fairness in competitive interscholastic sports. …" The letter pointed out "unintended consequences," such as "a transgendered individual's participation on a gender-segregated team could result in the NCAA's treating that team as a mixed team. This would have a number of serious consequences including potentially impacting the institution's compliance with Title IX."

Currently, Colorado, Iowa, Washington state, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco have rules, policies or laws dealing with transgender restroom accommodations. The Maine rules would make Maine the first state in the U.S. to adopt the policies for elementary and secondary school students and the first to extend the rules to private and sectarian schools.

This is not the first time the argument has arisen. WND previously reported when the city council of Tampa, Fla., voted unanimously to include "gender identity and expression" as a protected class under the city's human rights ordinance, leading some to fear the council has opened the city's public bathroom doors to sexual predators masquerading as protected transsexuals.

A statement from the American Family Association explained, "Tampa Police arrested Robert Johnson in February 2008 for hanging out in the locker room–restroom area at Lifestyle Fitness and watching women in an undressed state. The City of Tampa's 'gender identity' ordinance could provide a legal defense to future cases like this if the accused claims that his gender is female."

WND also reported on a similar plan adopted by fiat in Montgomery County, Md., which opponents said would open up women's locker rooms to men who say they are women. The issue also has come up in Colorado, where Democrat Gov. Bill Ritter signed into law a plan that effectively strikes gender-specific restrooms in the state. And city officials in Kalamazoo, Mich., only weeks after adopting a "perceived gender" bias plan, abandoned it in the face of massive public opposition.

SOURCE




School budget cuts 'would lead to bigger classes', say British headteachers

And what's so terrible about that? Although all teachers seem to think otherwise, it has repeatedly been shown over the years that large classes do no harm

Threatened public spending cuts will lead to larger class sizes and fewer staff in state schools, according to leading headteachers. A reduction in budgets of just two per cent would also force many schools to slash the number of GCSE and A-level subjects available for teenagers, it was claimed. The warnings were made ahead of the Association of School and College Leaders’ annual conference in London on Friday. School budgets are currently protected until March 2011 when the current spending round ends.

Ministers have insisted that “frontline” services will be maintained but have hinted that savings would be made elsewhere. Speaking after the pre-budget report, Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, said that in the current financial climate it was “right that we expect everyone to find efficiency savings and schools must play their part”.

But ASCL, which represents the majority of secondary school heads in England and Wales, insisted that even a small cut in budgets would have a major impact. The union surveyed 200 members to test the effect of a “hypothetical” two per cent reduction in school spending. Almost two-third of headteachers said the most likely outcome would be an increase in class sizes, as staff were either made redundant or vacancies were left unfilled.

Around 21 pupils currently share the average class in English secondary schools, compared with 26 in state primaries. According to research, almost of half of head teachers said a small budget cut would lead to a reduction in the number of new books, classroom aids and teaching resources, while 47 per cent said it would delay the purchase of updated computer equipment. A further half of heads also warned that a two per cent cut would force them to slash the number of subject options available for pupils aged 14 to 19.

Addressing the conference on Friday, John Morgan, the ASCL president and head of Conyers School, near Stockton-on-Tees, will say: “I don’t see any efficiencies here. “These are cuts to frontline activities that will inevitably have a direct impact on the [Government’s] own priorities of raising standards and breaking the link between deprivation and low attainment. “Stopping the endless cycle of new initiatives, and the grand implementation schemes that inevitably go along with them, would go a long way towards preserving frontline services in schools and colleges.” He said money should be saved by cutting expensive Government initiatives.

Mr Balls said: “Headteachers are right to say that a two per cent cut in schools funding would mean fewer teachers and teaching assistants and larger class sizes. "That’s why the pre-budget report announced that, while making tough savings at the centre, funding going direct to schools will rise in real terms for the next three years. "This is a tougher settlement for schools than they have been used to in the last decade, but the combination of rising funding and tougher expectations on efficiencies means schools will have the resources they need to meet the frontline cost pressures they face. “This will mean we can maintain the record numbers of teachers and teaching assistants and deliver on our guarantees to pupils and parents, such as one-to-one tuition and catch up support for children falling behind."

SOURCE





4 March, 2010

The fall of America's universities

Since 2004, the world's top 200 universities have been ranked annually by the Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings. Recently, the U.S. has been losing representation on the list while Asia has been gaining. In 2008, the U.S. had 37 universities in the top 100 and 58 in the top 200. In 2009, that dropped to 32 and 54, respectively. Between 2008 and 2009, Japan went from ten universities in the top 200 to eleven, Hong Kong went from four to five, South Korea went from three to four, and mainland China maintained its position with six.

Having visited nearly half of these Asian universities and having seen their large number of research facilities, I am not surprised when I read about Asian nations making enormous investments in their universities.

I am surprised, however, when I read about funding reductions for U.S.universities. For example, the University of California —long regarded as the nation's leading public university— recently suffered an $813 million reduction in state financing. Disinvestment is also happening to universities in Michigan, Washington, Arizona and many other states.

Budgets are being cut from state-supported universities primarily because states are facing budget shortfalls of historic proportions. However, short-sighted state politics like this will lead to long-term consequences. For example, state budget cuts force universities to raise tuition, cap enrollment, and cut academic programs. These changes result in a smaller number of graduates, which in turn results in a shrinking skilled workforce. The U.S. needs a growing skilled workforce—not a shrinking one—to compete in the global economy.

Currently, the U.S. has the best universities in the world. They attract the best students from around the world. After graduating, these non-U.S.students often stay in the U.S. to work, helping to fuel the nation's innovation and economic growth. However, when U.S. universities decline in quality and lose their elite status because of budget cuts, bright students from around the world will seek universities in other nations.

The goal of Asian nations is to create world-class universities that surpass U.S. universities. They have "every prospect of success," argued Yale University President Richard C. Levin in a recent lecture, titled "The Rise of Asia's Universities." Levin also stated that rising Asian nations "all recognize the importance of an educated workforce as a means to economic growth and the impact of research in driving innovation and competitiveness."

Speaking at the inaugural Asian Roundtable of Presidents of Universities of Education, Xu Jialu, director of the College of Chinese Language and Culture at Beijing Normal University, said that China needs to produce massive numbers of innovative people if it is to continue its robust economic growth. He added, "In Chinese education, the development of a creative mindset and abilities among students is urgently needed."

Asian nations are making enormous investments in their universities in order to produce massive numbers of innovative people who can contribute significantly to economic growth.

In the current issue of Foreign Policy, Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Fogel predicts that China's GDP will reach $123 trillion by 2040 partially because of "the enormous investment China is making in education." He also predicts that the U.S.'s share of global GDP will be roughly one third that of China's.

Without increased investment in universities, the U.S. will no longer have the best universities in the world, will no longer be the world's innovation leader, and will no longer have the world's largest economy. It's time for the U.S. to increase—not reduce—university funding. As Benjamin Franklin put it, "An investment in knowledge pays the best dividends."

SOURCE




Time Magazine Says We're Failing Our Schools because of Unions

Add Time to the growing list of teacher-union critics. (See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

In a recent column, Joe Klein writes that New York's United Federation of Teachers (UFT), "a storied crew," is blocking efforts to win $700 million in federal Race to the Top education funds - " the issue is charter schools, with a substantial dollop of teacher accountability thrown in." Klein continues:

The UFT's slogan is "A Union of Professionals," but it is quite the opposite: an old-fashioned industrial union that has won for its members a set of work rules more appropriate to factory hands. There are strict seniority rules about pay, school assignment, length of the school day and year. In New York, it is near impossible to fire a teacher - even one accused of a crime, drug addiction or flagrant misbehavior. The miscreants are stashed in "rubber rooms" at full pay, for years, while the union pleads their cases. In New York, school authorities are forbidden, by state law, to evaluate teachers by using student test results... No, teachers' unions are not the only problem here. Troglodytic local school boards [link my own] and apathetic parents are just as bad. But the unions, and their minions in the Democratic Party, have been a reactionary force in education reform for too long.

Ironically, the idea of public charter schools was largely popularized by the late Albert Shanker, who launched New York teachers union in 1960. The idea was to create more innovative, teacher-run schools where educators would want to work, and where students could learn.

SOURCE (See the original for links)




School trips 'axed' for thousands of British pupils

Thousands of pupils are missing out on traditional school trips as new Government rules tie teachers to the classroom, MPs have been told. Attractions and study centres have reported a “significant reduction” in the number of bookings following changes to teachers’ contracts imposed last year. One expert also said that parental fears over child safety meant many young people were becoming “entombed” in the home instead of being allowed out to play.

Under new rules, schools are effectively barred from asking teachers to cover for absent staff. Heads are supposed to pay for supply teachers instead of ordering existing staff members to step in when colleagues are leading trips. The move was introduced in September to ease teachers’ workloads.

But the Commons schools select committee was told on Wednesday that many schools are simply cancelling outings altogether instead of raiding stretched budgets to pay for supply staff. Giving evidence to MPs, Robert Lucas, chief executive of the Field Studies Council, a charity running 17 education centres, said 100,000 children regularly attended residential and daytime courses but numbers had dipped in the last six months. “A lot of our residential courses seeing the unintended consequences of the workforce reform,” he said. “We have got 17 centres in the UK – most of them in England – and all of them are reporting significant reductions in bookings; groups that are cancelling because of rarely cover.”

New teachers’ contracts state that they will “rarely cover” for missing colleagues. The changes affect foreseeable absences such as jury service, school trips and training courses. It means that if a teacher is out of school for the whole day – or part of the day – other teachers can only "rarely" step in to take their classes.

But Mr Lucas quoted teachers who said some geography groups had no fieldwork during the first three years of secondary school because of the changes. Other teachers led trips during the holidays and weekends to get around the rules, he said.

Sir Mike Tomlinson, the former chief inspector of schools, said the issue was “proving to be a matter of concern”. In evidence to MPs, Sir Mike, who is also chairman of the National Science Learning Centre, in York, said: “Rarely cover is having an impact. “There’s direct evidence from teachers and there’s direct evidence in terms of the number of courses we’re having to cancel. Even if the teachers have signed up, they are being told ‘no’. “There are head teachers who say ‘there will never be a teacher outside of my school during term time’.”

MPs staged the latest hearing five years after it published a report calling for improvements to the quality of school trips. Barry Sheerman, the committee’s Labour chairman, quoted a study from Natural England that suggested the number of children visiting any green space had halved in a generation. “For many children in this country, an out-of-school trip is the one chance they have to get out of their local environment,” he said. “But five years later it looks as though outdoors learning has decreased rather than increased.”

Anthony Thomas, chairman of the Council for Learning Outside the Classroom, a charity established last year to promote school trips, said: “You are seeing a decline in youngsters actually using parks and playgrounds. “We are becoming entombed with our homes. Part of it is about security – parents worried about youngsters – and part of it is about the inclination of youngsters themselves.”

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: “There’s absolutely no reason why schools should stop providing planned school trips or visits because of rarely cover provision as advance arrangements should already have been put in place. “Rarely cover would only ever apply if the teacher taking the children to the event is then unforeseeably absent and alternative cover had to be provided. The guidelines on this are crystal clear. “Rarely cover is there to ensure that teachers do just that – rarely cover – allowing them to be freed from tasks which do not require their professional skills and expertise, and to focus on teaching.

“Learning outside the classroom should be an integral part of every child's education and personal development, and provision for it should be included in school calendars and timetables.”

SOURCE




Australia: New mathematics curriculum a feeble tool calculated to bore

By BURKARD POLSTER AND MARTY ROSS

On Monday, after almost two years of work, a draft of the new Australian national curriculum was released. As maths lecturers deeply dissatisfied with the state of Australian education, we were keen to see what would emerge. Keen, but pessimistic. We were concerned about the almost total lack of involvement of mathematicians in the writing process and unimpressed by the background documents, which displayed a disturbing ignorance of mathematical culture.

Our doubts have unfortunately been confirmed. We are convinced that implementing such a curriculum will do little to improve the woeful state of Australian mathematics education.

The substance of the draft, which covers prep to year 10, is in the year-by-year syllabus, with an "elaboration" of each point: the syllabus point indicates "what" is to be taught; the elaboration suggests "how" it is to be taught. The syllabus itself is divided into three streams: number and algebra, statistics and probability, and measurement and geometry.

These artificial divisions, while necessary, have led to an unnecessary dissolution of the syllabus; every part of every stream is addressed in every year. The few concepts in the statistics syllabus, for example, are continually drip-fed over 11 years. There is simply no reason for "data" to be collected and analysed over and over again.

A more central problem with the syllabus is what is emphasised and what is de-emphasised, or omitted entirely. To illustrate, consider the approach to calculators and technology. We shouldn't need to say it, but pushing buttons on a calculator is not doing mathematics: it may (rarely) be a "how", but is never a "what". Yet, "calculator" appears time and again as a core concern of the syllabus. By comparison, reasoning involving proof - the one compelling argument for teaching mathematics - is reduced to elaboration, just another method of getting to a (usually boring) fact. This technology ramming extends to advocating the use of calculators to introduce adding in prep, a suggestion so appallingly misguided it beggars belief.

The technology fetish goes hand in hand with another major problem with the draft curriculum: a preference for "practical" mathematics at the expense of more fundamental and ideal concepts.

As a consequence, number (mainly arithmetic) crowds out algebra, measurement crowds out geometry, and statistics swamps everything. This emphasis on supposedly useful mathematics is seriously misguided. The result is an unbalanced, ugly, bitsy, pseudo-applied curriculum. It will constitute woeful preparation for students continuing maths beyond year 10, and we predict it will bore the pants off everyone.

We have many specific objections to the draft curriculum. Here is but a sampling. We cannot see why times tables have been shoved out to make room for "multiplication facts", nor why multiplying by 7 alone is omitted from the year 4 syllabus, nor why the 11 and 12-times tables are never even implicitly referred to. We wonder why "theorem" - the central concept in mathematics - only ever appears with "Pythagoras", and why the proof of this one theorem is merely an elaboration. We wonder why pi and real numbers and irrational numbers barely get a mention.

We also wonder why there is a pandering to indigenous Australians while the major Chinese and Arabic contributions to mathematical wisdom are ignored. Why isn't Euclid or any mathematician (other than Pythagoras) ever mentioned by name? So much for presenting mathematics as a human endeavour.

Attempting to sell mathematics by imposing an artificial concreteness, by inflating the importance of calculating bank interest, is simply farcical.

Just as children best learn to read by experiencing the joy of great stories, they best learn mathematics by experiencing its beauty and the joy of mathematical play. But in this curriculum there is little sense of the fun and the beauty of mathematics. Not a hint of infinity, of the fourth dimension, of Moebius bands, of puzzles or paradoxes. Why? If mathematics can be taught as ideas, as something beautiful and fun, then why is it not being proposed? Because it is difficult to do. To teach real mathematics makes demands on the teacher, and it is risky.

What is proposed is little more than a cowardly version of current curriculums, a codification of the boring, pointless approach - which is "safe" but which has already failed a generation of students.

The draft curriculum begins by declaiming the beauty and intrinsic value of mathematics, and the elegance and power of mathematical reasoning. But as a means of unfolding all this before our students, the proposed curriculum is a feeble tool indeed.

SOURCE





3 March, 2010

Obama offers cash to get rid of useless teachers

President Obama on Monday said the U.S. must get a handle on its high-school dropout crisis even if it requires firing principals and teachers at failing schools - a move vehemently opposed by the nation's largest teachers union.

Mr. Obama said his administration will dole out $900 million in "turnaround grants" to fledgling schools that take radical steps to improve as part of an effort to ensure the U.S. turns out the highest proportion of high-school graduates in the world by 2020. At stake, he argued, is America's global leadership in the 21st century.

During his address to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Mr. Obama praised a decision last week by a school board in Rhode Island to fire the faculty and staff at Central Falls High School, where only 7 percent of 11th-graders passed state math tests. But that move - along with much of Mr. Obama's turnaround plan - was harshly criticized by the American Federation of Teachers, a Washington-based affiliate of the AFL-CIO, which endorsed Mr. Obama's presidential bid in 2008. "We know it is tempting for people in Washington to score political points by scapegoating teachers, but it does nothing to give our students and teachers the tools they need to succeed," AFT President Randi Weingarten said.

Ms. Weingarten pointed to a 2009 report by Rhode Island's education commissioner that blamed challenges on leadership instability and not deficiencies among the staff.

Last year Mr. Obama listed education as one of three big issues he wanted to tackle, along with health care and global warming. But global warming legislation is stalled and health care is on rocky ground, leaving education one promising area in which he might be able to make quiet bipartisan progress.

Over the next five years, 5,000 of the nation's worst-performing schools will be eligible for assistance under the administration's turnaround grants program. To receive the funds, participating schools must either replace their principals and at least half of their staff, close and reopen under new management, close for good or completely transform themselves. "We know that the success of every American will be tied more closely than ever before to the level of education that they achieve," Mr. Obama said at the event hosted by America's Promise Alliance, an advocacy group headed by former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his wife, Alma.

Before taking drastic steps such as ordering mass layoffs, Mr. Obama said governments should first work with principals and teachers to "find a solution." "We've got to give them a chance to make meaningful improvements," he said. "But if a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn't show signs of improvement, then there's got to be a sense of accountability."

Mr. Obama's proposal comes on top of $3.5 billion his administration has committed to addressing failing schools, particularly high schools with graduation rates below 60 percent. He noted that more than half of those who fail to graduate are blacks and Hispanics.

Mr. Powell's organization is sponsoring a 10-year campaign, dubbed "Grad Nation," to ensure that 90 percent of current U.S. fourth-graders graduate high school on time.

Though he cautioned that government cannot do it alone, Mr. Obama said the public sector does have a responsibility when it comes to education. "Government can help educate students to succeed in a college and a career. Government can help provide the resources to engage dropouts and those at risk of dropping out," he said. "And when necessary, government has to be critically involved in turning around the lowest-performing schools."

SOURCE




Canada: Something's seriously wrong at York University

Next week, York University will once again open its halls and classrooms to "Israel Apartheid Week," so-called. This year as every year, militants and activists will use the taxpayer-funded facilities of York to vilify the Jewish state. Well, that's free speech, isn't? Everybody gets to express his or her point of view, no matter how obnoxious, right?

No, not right. Not at York. At York, speech is free -- better than free, subsidized-- for anti-Israel haters. But for those who would defend Israel, York sets very different rules. In advance of York's annual hate-Israel week, the campus group Christians United for Israel applied to use university space to host a program of pro-Israel speakers.

The university replied that this program could only proceed on certain conditions. It insisted on heavy security, including both campus and Toronto police -- all of those costs to be paid by the program organizers. The organizers would also have to provide an advance list of all program attendees and advance summaries of all the speeches. No advertising for the program would be permitted -- not on the York campus, not on any of the other campuses participating by remote video.

These are radically different and much harsher terms than anything required from the hate-Israel program. The hate-Israel program is not required to pay for its own security. It is free to advertise. Its speakers are not pre-screened by the university.

The pro-Israel event, scheduled for this past Monday, Feb. 22, was cancelled when the organizers declined to comply with the terms. A university spokesman told the Jewish Tribune that it insisted on the more stringent requirements on pro-Israel groups "due to the participation of individuals who they claim invite the animus of anti-Israel campus agitators."

The logic is impressively brazen: Since the anti-Israel people might use violence, the speech of the pro-Israel people must be limited. On the other hand, since the pro-Israel people do not use violence, the speech of the anti-Israel people can proceed without restraint.

Over the past days, however, the university appears to have realized that this "We brake for bullies" policy on speech might present some PR problems. So now it seems they have reverted to a bolder policy: flat-out denial. I called York on Thursday for comment on the incident. York's smooth chief communications officer was out for the day. So apparently was his deputy. I got instead an audibly nervous substitute. I asked: Is it York's policy to allow thugs to decide what may be said on campus, and what can't? He insisted that, no York had the same rules for all.

"Are you telling me," I asked, "that York imposes precisely the same requirements on all student groups?" "All student groups that request university space, yes."

I said: "I'm going to print that answer in the newspaper. It's going to be kind of embarrassing if you are quoted as saying something blatantly untrue. Do you want to modify your statement in any way?" The spokesman said he would stick with his "precisely same requirements" quote.

I offered one more chance to amend the answer. Pause. And then burst forth a flood of amazing flack-speech reprising Chevy Chase's legendarily incoherent performance in Spies Like Us. What he meant, he said, was that it was the "process" and the "protocols" that were the same, leading to a "needs-based assessment" of each particular case. Hemina, hemina, hemina.

The truth is this: York students are treated "the same" only in the sense that every student is equally exposed to the utterly arbitrary ad hoc decision-making of a fathomlessly cowardly university administration.

It was not always this way. One of the speakers invited to the pro-Israel event, Daniel Pipes, spoke at York in 2003. Violence was threatened then too. Local militants distributed leaflets urging the disruption of Pipes' talk. But York's then-president Lorna Marsden refused to allow thugs to veto academic speech. She provided the police presence to ensure that Pipes' talk could proceed unmolested, although admittedly in a tense atmosphere that might have daunted someone less personally courageous than Pipes. But the current York administration lacks Marsden's commitment to freedom.

Even when public speech is not an issue, Jewish students at York experience ethnically and religiously based intimidation and even violence. On the rare occasions when the university disciplines anyone for such incidents, it takes care always to penalize both the Jewish targets of harassment and the anti-Jewish culprits. The motive again is not fairness, but fear.

Something has gone seriously wrong at Canada's third-largest university. You can find a list of York's board of governors here. If so minded, maybe you should contact them and ask them what they will do to correct York's betrayal of the values of a free society.

SOURCE




Australia: A grave consequence of government inaction over bullying in their schools

They've got "plans" about bullying but that is just hot air. Reading between the lines, the aggressors were black or ethnic, and they cannot be touched, of course. That would be "racist"

A YOUNG boy has suffered terrible injuries while fleeing a bully who threatened to kill him and his school did nothing to prevent it, his mother says. Eight-year-old Blair Retallick is in intensive care after fleeing a tormentor on a school bus and running into the path of a four-wheel drive outside a Townsville school on Monday.

Patricia Retallick said her son was the target of a long-running campaign by school bullies and had been kicked, spat on, bitten, punched and verbally abused. But nothing was done despite her many complaints to Bohlevale State School and the bus company, she said.

Blair remains in the Townsville Hospital with injuries including a fractured skull, a bruise to his brain, and a lacerated liver.

Mrs Retallick said Blair and her other children, including a daughter aged five, had been targeted by bullies on the school bus for some time. She said her approaches to the school achieved nothing, nor did her complaints to the bus company running the school service. "He was having an altercation with a child on the bus and it flowed out as the bus stopped," she told the ABC. "He was running as the boy was saying to him 'I'm going to kill you' and he ran straight into the path of a car as he was running away from the boy."

She said witnesses, including other children on the bus, had reported the tormentor's kill threat, and said kids from other families had also been bullied on the bus but nothing had been done. "It shouldn't have happened. It should have been dealt with," Mrs Retallick said. "The majority of families on that bus have had issues with those kids on that bus." Mrs Retallick said she raised the bullying issue with the school as recently as Monday morning, just before her son was injured.

The incident comes just a week after the Queensland Government said it would create the a new alliance to tackle violence in schools. The announcement came after a government report found schools were not properly checking if their anti-bullying programs were working. In a statement, Education Queensland's North Queensland region director Mike Ludwig said it was premature to speculate on the cause of the accident. Counselling had been offered to the family, he said. [It's the government that needs the counselling]

Mrs Retallick said she wanted action, including better systems to report bullying. "There needs to be changes with the education department on how we can report these things," she said.

She said Blair could be in hospital for up to a month. "It's unknown at the moment. Some of his injuries are so extensive that anything could happen and it could change in the blink of an eye," she said.

Monday was supposed to have been the last day her children caught the bus to school. The family was planning to move to New South Wales and the ongoing bullying had been a factor in the decision to move, Mrs Retallick said.

SOURCE





2 March, 2010

Not Your Parents' PTA

We've written a number of times about Minnesota's Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TiZA), a charter school that appears to be Muslim in all but name, and is closely affiliated with, if not an alter ego of, the radical Muslim American Society. The American Civil Liberties Union is engaged in litigation against TIZA, in which the ACLU alleges that the school unconstitutionally promotes religion at taxpayer expense. That litigation has gotten quite bitter.

Our friend Kathy Kersten has done more than anyone else to shed light on TIZA and its relationship with the Muslim American Society through her columns in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Now, relying on court records, she details allegations of threats made against those who have provided information about the school's operations:

In January, the ACLU sought a protective order, telling the court that intimidation by TiZA was discouraging potential witnesses from appearing. ...

Elmasry is one witness who sought such protection. In January, he testified about TiZA's financial entanglement with the Muslim American Society of Minnesota at a Minnesota Senate subcommittee hearing on charter school lease aid. Shortly thereafter, Elmasry says in an affidavit, he was informed by a friend and TIZA parent that TiZA authorities had called a parent meeting, where they showed a video of Elmasry's testimony. Then, according to the parent's account, Asad Zaman, the school's director and an imam -- or Muslim religious leader -- accused Elmasry of talking to the Minnesota Department of Education and "selling" his "Iman," meaning his Islamic faith, according to Elmasry's affidavit.

Elmasry was frightened, he says. "It is well-known in Islam that a Muslim who rejects his or her faith is committing an act punishable by death," according to his affidavit. "There are many accounts of Muslims taking matters into their own hands and killing people they believe have sold or rejected their Islamic faith or Iman." ...

TiZA denies that a threat was intended, according to documents filed with the court. "Even if the Court accepts the comment alleged by Elmasry," the school maintains, "such remarks have significance only when issued by a proper Islamic judge, of which Elmasry and Zaman are not."

Well, that's reassuring.

Elmasry is not the only fearful witness. Edwards, who left her job at TiZA in 2009, also hesitates to testify about what she saw and heard during her years there.

During her tenure, she says in an affidavit, she saw "no real distinction" between the operations of TiZA and the Muslim American Society, with which the school shares a building. For years, "I watched [school officials] lash out in order to control those around them, and to retaliate against anyone who spoke poorly of the school, or otherwise challenged their authority." According to her affidavit, Zaman suggested that "we could just kill you" after becoming upset when she "challeng[ed] his authority."

Kathy's conclusion is apt: "we have to pinch ourselves to remember that we're talking here about a Minnesota public school -- financed with our tax dollars."

SOURCE




Swedish State takes custody of 7-year-old over homeschooling

Now human rights organizations reviewing 'state-napping'

Social workers have been visiting a Swedish couple whose son was "abducted" by government agents last year because he was being homeschooled, but that's not necessarily a good sign, and now two major rights organizations are exploring options to reunite the family.

The Home School Legal Defense Association and members of the Alliance Defense Fund have been advising Christer and Annie Johansson on the "state-napping" of their son, Dominic, 7, from an airliner as the family was preparing to move to India last year. "HSLDA and the Alliance Defense Fund are jointly advising the family and exploring all available avenues to help reunite Dominic with his family," the HSLDA said in a published statement.

"Swedish social workers have recently visited Christer and Annie and inquired about their current ability to take care of Dominic. According to a Swedish lawyer who spoke with HSLDA anonymously, these visits do not necessarily indicate the possible return of Dominic to his parents. Rather, this attorney said, Swedish social services intends to force the parents into 'complete subjugation and compliance with the system.'"

WND reported late last year when the Administrative Court of Stockholm affirmed the state custody of Dominic, who was taken from the airliner by uniformed police officers on the orders of social workers even though there was no allegation of any crime on the part of the family nor was there any warrant. At the time, Michael Donnelly, director of international affairs for the HSLDA, called the court decision "deeply disturbing." "The hostility against homeschooling and for parent's rights is contrary to everything expected from a Western nation," he said.

The HSLDA confirms the family's options are being reviewed. The parents are allowed to see their son for 60 minutes every fifth week. "At times referred to as a 'social utopia,' Sweden is completely antagonistic toward homeschoolers and, in reality, anyone who deviates from what the Swedish government defines as 'normal.' The government's quest for conformity produces troubling side effects: the criminalization of actions – such as a parent's decision regarding the best form of education for his child – that ought to be the hallmarks of a free, democratic society," the HSLDA said.

"Taking children from their parents over minor differences in approaches to medical care (e.g. choosing not to vaccinate or delaying minor dental treatments) and for homeschooling is completely at odds with the basic human rights which all Western democracies should reflect," the HSLDA said.

The organization is offering a webpage of information on how to support the family and linking to a petition advocating the return of Dominic to his parents. On the petition's forum page, a Canadian wrote, "I am appalled that this happened in a country as open, modern and inclusive as Sweden! I cannot understand it." An Australian called it "an abuse of power at the expense of a child." From Florida came the comment, "This is frightening!!!! … Please reverse this tragedy."

The attack on homeschoolers appears to be part of a trend in some Western nations, including Germany. WND reported only a few weeks ago when a German family was granted asylum in the United States because of the persecution members would face if returned to their home country.

The case in Sweden developed when the boy, from Gotland, was forcibly taken into custody minutes before he and his parents were due to take off to start a new life in India, Annie's home country.

In an online statement at the time, Johannson said, "While we may do things differently than most Swedes, we have not broken any laws and we have not harmed our son. We decided as a family that we wanted to move to India where we could be near my wife's family. But the government has taken over my family, and now we are living in a nightmare. I fear for the life of my wife under this torture and for the well-being of my son who has only been allowed to see his parents for a few hours since he was taken. The government is alienating my son from me, and I am powerless to do anything."

"What you have here is a socialist country trying to create a cookie cutter kid," said Roger Kiska, an Alliance Defense Fund attorney based in Europe. "This kind of thing happens too often where social workers take a child and then just keep him."

SOURCE




EDUCATION ROUNDUP FROM AUSTRALIA

Four current stories below

Brainwashing of children by Chairman Rudd and his helpers

White guilt and climate hoax to be taught as fact in all Australian schools

SCHOOL children will learn about climate change and Sorry Day under the Federal Government's draft national curriculum. The new document, launched by Prime Minsiter Kevin Rudd and Education Minister Julia Gillard at the Amaroo School in Canberra, outlines the education plans for kindergarten to Year 10 English, maths, science and history students to replace state and territory standards next year.

Mr Rudd described it as a back-to-basics approach to teaching and learning, with grammar and arithmetic a focus. "What we are on about is making sure the absolute basics of knowledge, the absolute basics of education are taught right across the country," he said.

However, the draft also suggests five-year-olds discuss community commemorations such as Sorry Day and 15-year-olds explore the link between carbon dioxide and global warming.

Opposition education spokesman Christopher Pyne has slammed the 242-page document as a disaster waiting to happen. "We have a seemingly over-emphasis on indigenous culture and history and almost an entire blotting out of our British traditions and ... heritage," he told said. "I am deeply concerned that Australian students will be taught a particular black armband view of our history without any counterbalancing."

Professor Stuart MacIntyre, who oversaw the history stream of the draft curriculum, dismissed Mr Pyne's complaint. "I think anybody who looks at the curriculum online will have great difficulty in finding any armbands," he said. "One of the ways we (avoid this), of course, is to set the peopling of Australia, both by the original inhabitants and then by European settlers, in a comparative perspective."

Head science adviser to the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, Dennis Goodrum, said one theory that wouldn't feature in the document was creationism. "The evolution theory is a cornerstone of science based on evidence and observation," he said. "Intelligent design is not ... in this particular curriculum because it is not science." But Professor Goodrum said global warming would be raised and investigated.

Ms Gillard acknowledged some teachers would need retraining to deliver the new curriculum successfully. "All schools ... invest in professional development to teach teachers about the curriculum," she said. "Obviously, that effort will be moved from teaching about state-based curriculums to teaching about the Australian curriculum."

Australian Education Union federal president Angelo Gavrielatos criticised Labor for rushing the process and not announcing how much the rollout would cost. "With implementation of the national curriculum due to commence next year, we are most concerned that there is still not any plan with an associated budget," he said.

Australian Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young called on the government to reveal how much money would be allocated to the curriculum in May's federal budget.

Family First senator Steve Fielding said it must not cost taxpayers an exorbitant amount to administer.

The draft national curriculum, available online for public consultation until May 23, will also be trialled by 150 schools during the same period.

SOURCE

Give Britain its due or we'll can it: opposition

THE federal Coalition has threatened to scrap the new national curriculum, saying it places too much emphasis on indigenous and Asian perspectives at the expense of British and European culture. Its education spokesman, Christopher Pyne, said the curriculum was "unbalanced".

"While there are 118 references in the document to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people and culture, there is one reference to Parliament, none to 'Westminster' and none to the Magna Carta," he said. "Grade nines will consider the personal stories of Aboriginal people and examine massacres and 'indigenous displacement', without any reference to the benefit to our country of our European heritage and the sacrifice of our forebears to build a nation. The early signs are that the black armband view of history is back."

Mr Pyne said a Coalition government would review the curriculum. "If we find the review confirms our very serious doubts then we'll scrap the national curriculum and we'll start again because it would be better for students to have the curriculum that they have now under the states than for them to have an unbalanced curriculum that will do them more harm than good," he said.

In an interview with the Herald, the federal Education Minister, Julia Gillard, said she was worried by the threat. "When you've seen the opposition fight up hill and down dale to wreck [the] national curriculum and to wreck MySchool, then it does send a shiver up your spine about what they may do in the future." ....

Helen Walton, of the Federation of Parents and Citizens' Associations of NSW, said her organisation was happy with the increased focus on family, community and Aboriginal history.

More HERE

Political correctness invades the science curriculum

As The Australian reported on Saturday, it’s not until Year 10 that science students will have any exposure to the periodic table of elements – potassium, hydrogen, all that stuff you used to learn rote-form back in the good old days. But there’s some waffly nonsense about non-western views of science, including Chinese medicine, and Aboriginal ideas of farming and land management.

Worst of all is the proposal to teach Aboriginal Dreamtime stories as part of the science stream. With due deference to the Rainbow Serpent, this is spiritualism not science, and every bit as wrong as the calls from Christian hardliners for the utter rubbish that is “creation science” and “intelligent design” to be taught alongside evolution and natural selection.

The greatest test of the curriculum will be the extent to which it can restore some basic old-fashioned principles of literacy, grammar, spelling – all the stuff that went out of fashion in the 1970s when everyone was simply encouraged to set their minds free and use their imagination, even if you could barely understand a word they had written.

The approach being taken with everyone’s favourite dysfunctional state government here in NSW stands as a warning against the mediocrity which has infected teaching in recent times.

While not everyone can, or should, attend university, there’s something desperately unambitious about the NSW Board of Studies decision to modify the second-tier NSW English Studies course to remove Shakespeare, but allow the “study” of rubbish movies such as The Matrix and the irritatingly twee television show Seachange.

If we are going to dumb down what is already a basic English course then maybe we should introduce a new subject called an Introduction to Remedial English – like a Dummy’s Guide to Dummy’s Guides.

At least we are not seeing this approach from Julia Gillard, who will have won plaudits from many parents yesterday – and probably upset the teachers unions – by arguing yesterday that too many Australian kids no longer have a basic grasp of reading and writing.

To judge the draft curriculum for yourself, go to the ACARA website - www.acara.edu.au – and follow the links.

SOURCE

Hatred, violence in Australian schools' classrooms



STUDENTS injured almost 3000 public school teachers in the past two years, an Education Department report obtained by The Advertiser shows. The Occupational Health and Safety Incident/Accident Report shows students were "deliberately" responsible for 98 per cent of the 2957 injuries reported by teachers from January 1, 2008, to December 31, 2009. Bruising and superficial injuries made up more than half the reported incidents with 3 per cent of incidents resulting in workers' compensation claims.

The figures raise further concerns for the safety of teachers, following a violent attack this week on a teacher at a northern suburbs primary school. According to police, the teacher was on yard duty at Swallowcliffe Primary School at Davoren Park, when a brick was thrown at her, hitting her in the back of the head. As she lay on the ground suffering from shock, the attackers then stole her office keys and, later, some cash.

Concerned parents said the school went into "lockdown" over the incident, with students finally allowed to go outside during recess and lunch yesterday. Students were also offered counselling after the attack.

South Australian Education Union president Correna Haythorpe said the "startling" report showed that teachers were increasingly being put in dangerous situations. "The figures paint a picture of rising levels of violent incidents that teachers are facing," she said. "Teachers expect to go to work to teach, not to be assaulted or injured."

The attack is the latest in a spate of violent incidents in schools this month. Last week, an Underdale High School pupil was punched in class by two youths posing as students.

In Brisbane earlier this month, Elliot Fletcher, 12, was fatally stabbed in the chest by a fellow student in the school toilets of St Patrick's College. But the Education Department played down any suggestions of a rise in violence in schools, describing this week's attack as very serious but a "one-off incident".

Education Department deputy chief executive Jan Andrews said police investigations were continuing and she expected the attackers, when found, to be charged. She added that they were currently checking the "accuracy" of the leaked report and that the majority of incidents were "minor". "We encourage teachers to report all incidents," she said. "The incident reporting rate has increased and that is something we are happy about," she said.

Swallowcliffe Primary School principal Assunta Alfano was yesterday unavailable for comment. But a parent of a Year 5 student, who wished to remain anonymous, said the school had been plagued by safety concerns.

SOURCE





1 March, 2010

From ‘No Child Left Behind’ to ‘Too Big to Fail’

Obama's idea for "reform" is more centralization. He's essentially looking to bail out failing public schools in the same way he bailed out AIG and the automakers. Real accountability -- that is, accountability to taxpayers -- and choice are nowhere to be found

By Ben Boychuk [bboychuk@heartland.org]

President Barack Obama has bailed out banks, mortgage lenders, and automakers. Now, with his proposed overhaul of No Child Left Behind, he wants to bail out failing, union-dominated, government-run schools. That’s a strategy for encouraging failure. Just as bad businesses should be allowed to dissolve or restructure and let better ones take their place, bad schools should be replaced by better ones. Real, universal choice—not more federal mandates and centralization—is the way to make that happen.

The president outlined his ideas for revamping No Child Left Behind the other day at the National Governors Association meeting in Washington, DC. “If a university, state, or school district begins preparing educators to teach to higher standards, we’ll give them the support that they need,” Obama said. “And to make sure that we’re delivering for our kids, we’re launching a competition to reward states that join together to develop the highest-quality, cutting-edge assessments required to measure progress; and we’ll help support their implementation.”

Although the president uses words such as “competition,” “innovation,” and “cutting edge,” it’s not clear he is using the dictionary definitions of those words. What was clear from Obama’s remarks is that he intends to centralize education decisions even more. Under the Obama plan the federal government would dictate what schools may teach, or they’ll be denied their share of $14.5 billion in Title I money intended for poor and minority districts.

Obama’s proposals resemble the same old top-down requirements that have burdened schools for years without raising student achievement. Taxpayers in every state, whether they benefit or not, pay for programs such as Title I. And although it’s true that federal money always comes with strings attached, Obama’s “reforms” would explicitly require states to comply with the new rules or never see a dime of their tax money again.

That isn’t so different from other Obama administration policies. The president’s $4 billion Race to the Top program told states what did and didn’t count as education innovation. If state legislatures didn’t comply, they would lose out on federal funds.

Obama’s new twist is that the federal government would certify public schools’ curriculum, for the first time ever. Understand what that means. Federal bureaucrats would dictate what children will read and how long they will read it. Local school administrators would become mere federal apparatchiks, regardless of who signs their paychecks. Locally elected school boards would be obsolete. Parents would have fewer and fewer choices for educating their kids.

For all of the talk about “accountability,” the only accountability that matters—elected officials’ accountability to taxpayers—would simply fade away.

Meantime, as the president, federal education officials, and Congress weigh how to nationalize the schools most effectively, they’ve just finished off the District of Columbia’s popular and effective Opportunity Scholarship Program. Students in the DC voucher program have shown consistently high marks on standardized tests and have enjoyed greater safety than their peers in DC’s failing schools. An evaluation published in February by the U.S. Education Department pronounced the program a success, noting a $7,500 scholarship was more cost-effective than the $15,000 DC public schools spend per pupil.

Unfortunately for 1,900 low-income, predominantly African-American children who were the program’s main beneficiaries, vouchers are the bête noire of powerful, politically connected teacher unions, so the program had to be killed.

That’s a shame, and not just for the kids who will be consigned to dangerous, “too-big-to-fail” public schools. The DC Opportunity Scholarship Program offered a model for real reform and individual empowerment. Obama could have embraced and encouraged other states to adopt similar scholarship programs. Instead, he intends to give even more power to bureaucrats and teacher unions. That’s a bailout that will cost the nation for decades to come.

Article received by email. Ben Boychuk is managing editor of School Reform News




Billy Graham trumped by Bill Ayers as conservative college drifts Left

There’s hardly an evangelical who doesn’t know about Wheaton College. Alma Mater of the Reverend Billy Graham, Wheaton boasts a student body of superior intellect and an education rivaling much of the Ivy League. Wheaton College graduates can boast of presidential speech writers and Speakers of the United States House of Representatives along with doctors and executives and professors and missionaries and pastors across the globe.

But Wheaton is different. Founded by an anti-slavery father and son, Jonathan and Charles Blanchard, Wheaton was established as a chain in the Underground Railroad to help runaway slaves. Wheaton’s distinctive has always been to educate students not only with knowledge but with wisdom. All truth is God’s truth. The knowledge of God brings greater understanding, not less … the acknowledgement of Him brings order from chaos in science, mathematics and economic systems. To be a Christ follower can bring the highest of intellectual pursuits, not the Bible thumping ignorance Hollywood would portray.

So imagine the dismay of many to learn that, in an effort to educate its students, Wheaton has moved to the left, so much so that in a survey by the Wheaton Record, 60 percent of its faculty voted for President Barack Obama, the most pro-abortion, pro-homosexual agenda, spiritually confused president the nation has ever elected.

How can this be? Perhaps much of it can be attributed to a movement widely embraced by the campus known as “social justice.” In its truest form, justice is synonymous with Christian teaching. Why else would Christians through the ages have left the comfort of their home and culture to go to remote villages and treat the sick and preach the “good news” of a universal savior, Jesus Christ. Why would the William Wilberforces and the American abolitionists have sacrificed so much to eliminate the slave trade? Why would most hospitals trace their beginnings to founders compelled by their faith to treat the sick? Soup kitchens … homeless shelters … inner city missions the same? Why if not for the cause of justice?

But as is often the case for the Left, words are co-opted and meanings changed. To be “gay” is to be homosexual. To abort a baby is to exercise “choice” and to exercise “social justice” is to identify the oppressed and the oppressors and define all of history past and present as a series of injustices. Whites oppress blacks … even 6-year-old white children are intrinsically racist. Big business oppresses the working man…even business owners who are honest and generous. To be successful in business is to oppress and the score must be evened to obtain justice. Heterosexuals oppress homosexuals with no allowance for moral objection. According to this definition of “social justice,” the oppressor and the oppressed must be identified and actions taken accordingly.

In the current document known as the “conceptual framework” of the education department at Wheaton College which must be endorsed by each of its faculty, the thinkers cited include among others, the father of the social justice movement, Brazilian Marxist, Paulo Freire and former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers. Just a glimpse at Freire’s foundational treatise “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” will clearly display his sources: Marx, Lenin and revolutionary murderers Mao Tse Tung, Fidel Castro and Che Guevera (see, “Pedagogy of the Oppressor,” March 28, 2009, in National Review by Sol Stern).

Professor Bill Ayers, co-founder of the Weather Underground, wanted the violent overthrow of the United States Government. Now elevated as a teacher of teachers, Ayers publicly states he has no regrets for his violence and only wished he had done more. The overthrow of the capitalist society was the goal of all these men and violence was their method. Today’s radicals condense their rage into college curricula under the guise of “social justice.” The method is more cunning, but the goal no less sinister.

Why would Wheaton College embrace such a philosophy? “…these are people you can learn from because they’re going to teach us Christians that maybe we have some blind spots here, that we’ve been oblivious to certain areas of injustice,” said President Duane Litfin.

Dr. Jillian Lederhouse, chairman of the department of education defended the conceptual framework by saying “we don’t teach our students to be afraid on an ideology as long as we give them a critical perspective. We do not have a list of people we do not read. Our goal is to produce a thinking Christian teacher.” And that is as it should be in an institution of higher learning, except for one thing. Lederhouse went on to admit that the people who were foundational to Wheaton’s conceptual framework were all on the far left.

There is deep concern by Wheaton graduates over the current trajectory at Wheaton. They are lobbying the board and the administration to make the deep changes necessary to pull Wheaton back from academic fads that threaten its future and guide it back to its true foundations, the wisdom of the ages displayed beautifully at the entrance to the campus: “For Christ and His Kingdom.”

SOURCE




Independence for schools within months of Tory win

Hundreds of the best state schools will be allowed to break free of local council control within months under Conservative plans being outlined today. They will be able to convert into semi-independent academies [charter schools] as early as September this year if the Tories win the General Election, it is revealed. The move would allow England’s most successful schools to expand or take over poor performing schools nearby.

The announcement will be made at the start of a week in which the Tories will attempt to set the educational agenda ahead of the General Election. On Wednesday, Michael Gove, the shadow schools secretary, will address the first parents and teachers seeking to set up their own primaries and secondaries as part of the Tories’ “free schools” system. Under plans, organisations angered by poor standards of state education will be given powers to establish schools to address local demand.

And tomorrow, the Conservatives will outline proposals to toughen up the teaching of mathematics and science – subjects seen as vital to the creation of a highly-skilled future workforce needed to drive the economy.

The announcements will be made as the parents of 600,000 children prepare to find out today which state secondary school they have got into this year. As many as one-in-six are expected to miss out on their first choice while around five per cent will be rejected from up to six schools. The Tories claim Labour has failed to create enough decent school places – forcing thousands of families to accept unpopular comprehensives often miles from their home.

Mr Gove will announce that a new education Bill will be published within days of a Conservative government sweeping away restrictions on the creation of new schools. It will remove the power of councils to “veto” the opening of academies – independent state schools run free of local bureaucrats. The Bill – expected to become law by the end of July – would allow top schools to win academy status before the start of the next academic year. It will also grant struggling schools similar powers to become academies under the leadership of top head teachers to drive improvements.

The announcements will be made in a speech to the heads of more than 150 outstanding schools in Westminster. Mr Gove said: “Unless we act now our children will lose out in the global race for knowledge. If we win the election, we will act within days to raise standards. “We will immediately change the law so we can set hundreds of good schools free from political interference. We will enable them to reopen as academies this September. “We will also immediately let them take over struggling schools so we can get great heads and teachers into struggling schools. It is vital that we rapidly create a new generation of independent, smaller state schools run by teachers who know the children's names. “We cannot afford another five years of falling down the international league tables for education.”

SOURCE







Primarily covering events in Australia, the U.K. and the USA -- where the follies are sadly similar.


TERMINOLOGY: The British "A Level" exam is roughly equivalent to a U.S. High School diploma. Rather confusingly, you can get As, Bs or Cs in your "A Level" results. Entrance to the better universities normally requires several As in your "A Levels".


MORE TERMINOLOGY: Many of my posts mention the situation in Australia. Unlike the USA and Britain, there is virtually no local input into education in Australia. Education is mostly a State government responsibility, though the Feds have a lot of influence (via funding) at the university level. So it may be useful to know the usual abbreviations for the Australian States: QLD (Queensland), NSW (New South Wales), WA (Western Australia), VIC (Victoria), TAS (Tasmania), SA (South Australia).


There were two brothers from a famous family. One did very well at school while the other was a duffer. Which one went on the be acclaimed as the "Greatest Briton"? It was the duffer: Winston Churchill.


The current Left-inspired practice of going to great lengths to shield students from experience of failure and to tell students only good things about themselves is an appalling preparation for life. In adulthood, the vast majority of people are going to have to reconcile themselves to mundane jobs and no more than mediocrity in achievement. Illusions of themselves as "special" are going to be sorely disappointed


Perhaps it's some comfort that the idea of shielding kids from failure and having only "winners" is futile anyhow. When my son was about 3 years old he came bursting into the living room, threw himself down on the couch and burst into tears. When I asked what was wrong he said: "I can't always win!". The problem was that we had started him out on educational computer games where persistence only is needed to "win". But he had then started to play "real" computer games -- shootem-ups and the like. And you CAN lose in such games -- which he had just realized and become frustrated by. The upset lasted all of about 10 minutes, however and he has been happily playing computer games ever since. He also now has a degree in mathematics and is socially very pleasant. "Losing" certainly did not hurt him.


Even the famous Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci (and the world's most famous Sardine) was a deep opponent of "progressive" educational methods. He wrote: "The most paradoxical aspect is that this new type of school is advocated as being democratic, while in fact it is destined not merely to perpetuate social differences, but to crystallise them." He rightly saw that "progressive" methods were no help to the poor


I am an atheist of Protestant background who sent his son to Catholic schools. Why did I do that? Because I do not personally feel threatened by religion and I think Christianity is a generally good influence. I also felt that religion is a major part of life and that my son should therefore have a good introduction to it. He enjoyed his religion lessons but seems to have acquired minimal convictions from them.


Why have Leftist educators so relentlessly and so long opposed the teaching of phonics as the path to literacy when that opposition has been so enormously destructive of the education of so many? It is because of their addiction to simplistic explanations of everything (as in saying that Islamic hostility is caused by "poverty" -- even though Osama bin Laden is a billionaire!). And the relationship between letters and sounds in English is anything but simple compared to the beautifully simple but very unhelpful formula "look and learn".


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


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


A a small quote from the past that helps explain the Leftist dominance of education: "When an opponent says: 'I will not come over to your side,' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already. You will pass on. Your descendents, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time, they will know nothing else but this new community.'." Quote from Adolf Hitler. In a speech on 6th November 1933


I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age.

I imagine that the the RD is still sending mailouts to my 1950s address!


Discipline: With their love of simple generalizations, this will be Greek to Leftists but I see an important role for discipline in education DESPITE the fact that my father never laid a hand on me once in my entire life nor have I ever laid a hand on my son in his entire life. The plain fact is that people are DIFFERENT, not equal and some kids will not behave themselves in response to persuasion alone. In such cases, realism requires that they be MADE to behave by whatever means that works -- not necessarily for their own benefit but certainly for the benefit of others whose opportunities they disrupt and destroy.


Many newspaper articles are reproduced in full on this blog despite copyright claims attached to them. I believe that such reproductions here are protected by the "fair use" provisions of copyright law. Fair use is a legal doctrine that recognises that the monopoly rights protected by copyright laws are not absolute. The doctrine holds that, when someone uses a creative work in way that does not hurt the market for the original work and advances a public purpose - such as education or scholarship - it might be considered "fair" and not infringing.


Comments above by John Ray