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31 May, 2005

VERMONT CATHOLIC COLLEGE MOCKS CATHOLIC DOCTRINE

A Catholic college in Vermont is getting an openly-homosexual dean, according to a story in 'Out in the Mountains,' Vermont’s “voice for lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, [and] transgender people.” The story, written by Stacey Horn, says that “Professor Jeffrey Trumbower, a gay man and a Unitarian, has been appointed dean of St. Michael’s College, a Catholic school established in 1904 by the Society of Saint Edmund, a French order of Catholic priests. “Trumbower, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Divinity School, currently chairs the Religious Studies Department at St. Mike's, where he has been on the faculty for 16 years. Though he is not the first non-Catholic to be dean of the college, he is the first openly gay man in the position….

“According to search committee chair and political science professor Bill Grover, ‘We were very fortunate to have two terrific people [apply] and Jeff rose to the top.’ Grover said that religion was not a factor in choosing the dean and that the committee wanted a candidate who would ‘fit with the overall mission of the college.’ Of Trumbower, Grover said, ‘He's going to be a terrific dean….’ “Trumbower came to St. Mike's in 1989, after completing his dissertation. He was not familiar with the area before he came, and when he arrived, he ‘started going to the church at the head of church street. I resonated with that community and realized that I was home spiritually.’ Trumbower met his partner here in Vermont. They have been together for ten years. “Jeff Trumbower… will assume his new position as dean of the Catholic college of St. Michael's on July 1.”

The teaching of the Catholic Church on homosexuality is as follows:

"Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained. Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.’ They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved" (Catechism, no. 2357).

Source



OFFICIAL RACISM IN RETREAT: WORKING CLASS WHITES NOW BEING HELPED TO GET PH.D.S TOO:

In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the legality of affirmative action in college admissions. But the political controversy surrounding affirmative action, and the limits placed on its use by the Supreme Court as well as by various state entities, has had a major impact on graduate education, according to a report released Wednesday. According to the report, from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, many of the groups that support minority Ph.D. students have broadened their programs to include other students as well. As a result, the report warns that the cohort of new Ph.D.'s - and in turn the cohort of new professors in the years to come - may lack the racial and ethnic diversity many colleges want for their faculties.

The foundation's report has two main parts. One part summarizes data showing how few Ph.D.'s are awarded to black and Hispanic students. In 2003, the report notes, one in three Americans was black or Hispanic, but only one in nine American citizens who received Ph.D.'s that year were black or Hispanic. The data in the report largely come from the studies conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and released in December. While the data are not new, the foundation also conducted interviews and research on programs to diversify the graduate student population. The foundation studied efforts by the government, foundations and individual universities, and found retrenchment and shifts just about everywhere - money for minority Ph.D. students getting cut. Programs intended to improve diversity in doctoral education have shifted decisively away from financial support, focusing more on efforts to recruit and prepare students for graduate study," the report said.

At the federal level, the report noted that the Education Department and the National Science Foundation have both abandoned fellowship programs for minority doctoral students, the NSF doing so under the threat of a lawsuit. At the university level, the report said, "almost every program surveyed has modified its structure, its eligibility requirements, or even its name following recent legal challenges to university minority support programs."

While the interviews with program managers found that most of them continued to have strong commitments to diversifying graduate student populations, it found that even where policies hadn't been overhauled, people are reluctant to draw attention to their efforts. Program managers said that they had been urged "to maintain low public profiles," the report said. The foundation acknowledged that in many cases, fellowships that were once for minority students still exist, but are now open to low-income students from all racial and ethnic groups.

More here

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

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

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

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30 May, 2005

PUBLIC SCHOOL COLLAPSE IN PASADENA, CALIFORNIA

Note from a Pasadena resident: The City of Pasadena reportedly has the highest rate of private school attendance of any city in the U.S. Note the stats below which indicate that only as few as 20 and 22 students in two schools pending closure come from the surrounding neighborhoods; the rest are bussed in from minority neighborhoods. The entire public school system has been effectively abandoned by the middle class as ineffectual. So all the 1960's reforms have created nothing but a two-tiered system -- which is what was supposed to be avoided. In the 1970's Pasadena's school system was slapped with a bussing order which resulted in "white flight" and "public school flight." Pasadena's public schools continued to reflect some of the lowest test scores in California as noted at end of the article below. More funding won't change any of that

To cut costs, the Pasadena Unified School District Board of Education has zeroed in on Linda Vista and San Rafael elementary schools in Pasadena and Altadena's Loma Alta Elementary School as the top candidates for closure. Officials want to close at least three schools over the summer, at least temporarily, to help bridge a $9.2 million budget deficit, and board members narrowed the list to six schools late Thursday. The board named three other elementary schools, Field in Pasadena and Burbank and Noyes in Altadena, as less likely candidates. Officials said they will consider closing more than three schools if the district's budget crunch worsens. "It's not a school closure issue, it is what is the future of this district,' board member Bill Bibbiani said Friday. "We need to see this change as an opportunity to look at our staffing patterns, our busing patterns and truly rightsize this district.'

The board hasn't yet considered several key factors, including the actual savings generated by each closure or how transportation costs would be affected, but the majority of the seven-member board is leaning toward closing Linda Vista, San Rafael and Loma Alta. Trustees have backed away from earlier discussions about closing Washington Middle School. Parents, students and teachers have held rallies and packed meetings over the past few weeks since Washington was mentioned as a possible candidate. Instead, board members now say they would like to find ways to increase the number of students at Washington rather than shutting it down, so more electives could be offered.

The PUSD needs to cut $9.2 million from its nearly $200 million spending plan by June 30. Closing three elementary schools would save an estimated $1 million, but about $2.7 million in cuts still must be identified. Closing a middle school the size of Washington would save an estimated $1 million to $1.4 million, officials said. District officials have repeatedly stressed that the closures would be temporary, but that they expect to close another one or two campuses next year. In addition to state budget cuts, the district has been steadily losing students. State funding is based on average daily attendance.

Parents said they need more advance notice than they are being given to plan for their children's education. Others criticized what they see as too many cuts that affect the classroom and not enough at district headquarters. For most of the board members, the density of students in a school's immediate neighborhood is one of the most important factors in selecting schools for closure. San Rafael and Linda Vista, both in affluent west Pasadena, have few students from the surrounding area because most of the children there attend private schools. "I will not vote to close a neighborhood school,' Bibbiani said. He said he wants to look at staffing and busing patterns, including a switch from west-to- east busing to north-to-south routes to reduce the length of bus trips. Most of the students at the three campuses are bused from other areas. Only 22 San Rafael students live in the adjacent neighborhood, and 200 are bused from Northwest Pasadena. At Loma Alta, all but 91 of the 376 students are bused from the Northwest. At Linda Vista, 20 of the 417 students are from the neighborhood....

Board members said standardized test scores are also a consideration, but one that's further down the list. Of the six campuses being considered for closure, Burbank, Loma Alta and San Rafael rank in the bottom 30 percent of elementary schools in the state on standardized tests. Field and Linda Vista performed better than half the elementary schools in the state, and Noyes outperformed 60 percent. Three PUSD schools not on the list for potential closure rank in the bottom 10 percent in the state, and three others rank in the bottom 20 percent.



Forcing NC families to pay for higher education for illegal immigrants' kids - dead for now

Post lifted from The Locker Room

Per The Charlotte Observer:

A bill to give undocumented immigrants in-state college tuition appears dead after being blasted by talk radio and emerging as the focus of North Carolina's growing debate over illegal immigration. ...

An 18-year-old girl in Eastern North Carolina just graduated as valedictorian of her high school class. Her grade-point average was 4.53. She was president of the Science Club, active in school activities and won academic honors while working part time.But when she came to this country from Mexico in the fourth grade, she and her family entered illegally. So despite her achievements, she's not eligible for lower tuition. ...

"Does it make sense to have the smartest kid at a high school putting ketchup and onion on a hamburger somewhere at a job?" said Chris Fitzsimon, director of N.C. Policy Watch, a progressive Raleigh think tank.

Ridiculous. Don't tell anyone, but a degree from a UNC institution is not the deciding factor in someone's life - and a degree from one of the state's (or the nation's) private institutions of higher education is nothing to sneer at. If the girl shows that much academic promise, she is already equipped to succeed - and if she chooses the college route, private colleges would love to have her, and no doubt she could find many scholarships and loans to help out. I bet My Rich Uncle could be particularly helpful.

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

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

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

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29 May, 2005

ATTACK ON ACADEMIC MERIT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF OREGON

An early draft of a five-year "diversity plan" for the University of Oregon has drawn a firestorm of criticism from faculty, prompting administrators to distance themselves from the proposal. The draft plan, billed as a "long-term vision for diversity," called for the university to hire up to 40 faculty members by 2012 to teach courses in a "cluster" of diversity-related topics, including race, gender, gay and disability studies. Under the plan, academic departments that hew closely to the university's diversity goals when hiring would be given "priority in the funding of new positions."

The plan also would mandate that faculty up for promotions or tenure be evaluated on their "cultural competency" — the ability to successfully work with people from all cultural backgrounds. Traditionally, research, publications and teaching have been the key elements of a tenure review. The draft plan suggests that the university set aside more funding for hundreds of new "diversity-building scholarships" for minority undergraduates over the next five years, as well as new fellowships for graduate students aimed at those from "under-represented" backgrounds. A key goal, the draft plan continues, is to double the number of black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American students attending the university in the next five years.

Under the plan, student curriculum requirements could also change, possibly with the inclusion of a "gender and sexuality requirement." "Many people were upset with the content in different ways; the plan was sort of an Orwellian, totalitarian plan," said Michael Kellman, a chemistry professor at the university.

Sources at the university said the draft plan drew immediate condemnation from department heads across the campus, some of whom had little or no knowledge of the proposal before it was posted on the university's Web site. University officials declined to comment directly on the plan, which was overseen by Dr. Gregory Vincent, the university's vice provost for institutional equity and diversity, who last week announced his departure for a similar post at the University of Texas, Austin. But in a letter to members of the faculty senate's diversity committee, University President Dave Frohnmayer acknowledged public concerns with the plan. "We need to step back from specific details, to be mindful of alternative viewpoints, and to develop a sense of urgency in recognizing the problems we face," Frohnmayer wrote. "I also emphasized the need ... to engage faculty, staff and students who believe they have not properly been involved in this dialogue."

For years, Oregon's flagship public campus has struggled to attract diverse faculty members and students. The dust-up over the plan is the latest in a series of race-related incidents to roil the campus. Earlier this month, 150 people rallied to protest alleged racial discrimination and harassment at the school's highly ranked College of Education. Last week, a senior at the university filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education over the school's policy of reserving 10 slots of selected math and English courses for minority students, in an attempt to increased individual attention from faculty.

Chicora Martin, the university's director of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender education and support services, was part of the work group that put the plan together. She said the controversy provoked by the plan's first draft has created a welcome chance to talk about the current state of diversity on campus. "We want to make a welcoming campus around issues of diversity," she said. "I think you need to have a plan for that."

More here



And a comment on the Oregon imposition adapted from The Locker Room

Attn. AAUP: This is how a real threat to academic freedom sounds

The American Association of University Professors continues to operate with ideological blinders on with respect to academic freedom... As the group's homepage shows, the group sees two sources of threats to academic freedom here: those posed by "national security" and those presented by what the AAUP calls "the so-called 'Academic Bill of Rights'" (a note for the scholars: when you introduce something as "so-called," placing whatever it is so called within quotation marks is redundant). The first concern is understandable; the second, purely political — the Academic Bill of Rights, after all, is based on definitions that originated within the AAUP to define academic freedom. It's just that the AAUP has since abandoned its all-encompassing definition of academic freedom as its leadership in pursuit of SOME IDEOLOGIES ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.

That prologue is necessary for this: As best I can tell, the AAUP had nothing to say about a plan recently attempted by the University of Oregon that would have been a radical restructuring of the university's tenure and hiring policies — issues a naif would assume would have the AAUP's full attention. Here's what the subcriber site The Chronicle of Higher Education had to say about the plan:

...The draft plan, which was released this month, called for changing tenure and post-tenure reviews to include assessments of professors' "cultural competency." It also called for hiring 30 to 40 professors in the next seven years in several diversity-related areas, including race, gender, disability, and gay-and-lesbian studies. ...

"I was hired to teach chemistry and do research," said Michael Kellman, a chemistry professor. "I wasn't hired to be evaluated and even interrogated about cultural competency, whatever that is." In a letter to the president, David B. Frohnmayer, 24 professors called the draft plan "frightening and offensive." They complained that it would spend too much money on "diversity-related bureaucracy."

Mr. Frohnmayer said in an interview on Thursday that administrators had "taken a step back from the draft plan, given the extent of the response." "We're wedded to the objectives of the plan, but not to particular steps in any lockstep way," he said. "We're a community that lives to move with a greater sense of consensus."

The plan foresees increasing diversity by changing "the ethnic makeup of the freshman class, the racial and gender balance of tenured faculty, accessibility for the disabled, and the range of perspectives shared in campus classrooms around issues of sexual orientation, gender identity, religious differences, and other characteristics that make up the campus community."...

Not that this requires any particular insight to say, but I think this will not be the last we hear about such a move. I think Oregon has just shown us the next tyrannical step of the diversity movement. I think Oregon has just shown us the next tyrannical step of the diversity movement. I wouldn't be surprised if Texas is next; after all, the Oregon plan's "chief architect ... Gregory J. Vincent, vice provost for institutional equity and diversity at Oregon, is moving to the University of Texas at Austin to become vice provost for inclusion and cross-cultural effectiveness."

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

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

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

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28 May, 2005

SCHOOL POLICE -- A BIT MIND-BOGGLING FOR AN AUSTRALIAN

When I think back over my peaceful country schooling -- where the biggest excitement was a dragonfly at the window -- this sounds like another planet. But I guess it's just another continent that makes the difference

For the third time in six weeks, police broke up a Jefferson High School brawl Thursday that students say was fueled by racial tension. Officers from the Los Angeles School Police Department used pepper spray and batons to quell the fight, which involved about 25 students on the South Los Angeles campus. The police arrested three students and detained more than 20 others, authorities said.

The incident reportedly began when two students argued about a cellphone. Students said that altercation sparked larger fights between black and Latino students across the campus. "It started in the cafeteria, and then it spread out to the PE field, to the auditorium, to the hallways, everywhere. I saw some people run out of the classrooms just to get into the fight," said Salvador Ingles, a 17-year-old senior. "Like with the last two fights, it happened that brown people, they go to one side, then black people go to the other side, and then they both collide."

School officials also reported two separate fights at Los Angeles High School, Thursday. The brawls attracted several hundred onlookers and prompted a brief campus lockdown while two students were detained. No serious injuries were reported. "I'm told there were some racial overtones" to the violence, district spokeswoman Susan Cox told the Associated Press.

The melee at Jefferson High School began about 12:40 when two Latino students argued about the phone, officials said. Administrators ordered a lockdown of the campus, and students were released from school about 600 at a time two hours later. The school nurse treated dozens of students for minor abrasions, and two students who were not involved in the fight were treated for hyperventilation. Six officers received minor injuries.

The fight occurred on the eve of a planned Day of Dialogue that district officials scheduled after similar brawls April 14 and April 18. Although students and parents have complained that the fights have had heavy racial overtones, Jefferson Principal Norm Morrow denied those assertions Thursday. "It had nothing to do with race," he said of the brawl. "The majority of our kids are good kids. We've got to get people to understand that some kids aren't here for the right reason."

Nevertheless, Morrow said that the campus was experiencing problems and that he expected many parents would keep their children home today. "I don't blame them," he said. "You don't want kids coming to a place where there are fights every day." After making that statement, however, Morrow paused and said fights did not occur at Jefferson every day.

He said that classes would be limited to half-day today and that the Day of Dialogue would go on. The event, he said, would involve professionals from local government and federal law enforcement discussing with students the reasons for the fights.

More here



ANTISEMITIC BRITISH ACADEMICS CAVE IN

UK academics have voted to overturn a boycott of two Israeli universities accused of complying with anti-Palestinian polices. Members of the Association of University Teachers had previously decided to sever all links with Bar-Ilan and Haifa universities. The academics' body now says it is time to "build bridges" between those with opposing views and support peace moves.

The debate has caused bitter argument among academics and others worldwide. The council of the AUT was reconvened in central London after 25 members - the required number under the union's rules - complained about the original vote, held in Eastbourne last month. Opponents of the boycott had complained that the debate had been curtailed and that the accusations were unfair.

Dr David Hirsh, from Goldsmiths College in London, welcomed the latest vote, saying: "A boycott is a tokenistic gesture which does more harm than good. "The need for hard work, building links with Palestinian and Israeli academics, is less glamorous but much more important."

Pro-boycott activists accuse Haifa of mistreating politics lecturer Ilan Pappe for defending a graduate student's research into controversial areas of Israeli history. The university denied this and threatened legal action against the AUT.

More here



SOCIOLOGY AS HATE-SPEECH

A Brooklyn College professor who called religious people "moral retards" was elected to head his department this month - sparking a campus uproar. E-mails expressing alarm that Timothy Shortell was now chairman of the sociology department circulated among students last week on the school's Midwood campus. Shortell has written in an online academic publication that the devout "are an ugly, violent lot. In the name of their faith, these moral retards are running around pointing fingers."

"I'm horrified by the ideology of Prof. Shortell," said Eldad Yaron, a Brooklyn College senior. This person has control right now on the content of many classes every student will take. Just imagine how fair and balanced these classes will be." Daniel Tauber, president-elect of the school's student government, said he was worried that Shortell and other faculty members would breed religious intolerance at the diverse college. "I would like to see professors in high positions who don't believe religious people are moral retards," Tauber said.

Shortell's remarks - which included lines such as "Christians claim that theirs is faith based on love, but they'll just as soon kill you" - elicited a multifaith backlash among university groups. "He's intolerant," fumed Alex Selsky of the school's Hillel chapter, a Jewish campus organization. "With this kind of unreasonable thinking, I don't know how he can be elected to head of a department." Kevin Oro-Hahn, director of the school's InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, said he hopes the university can "move beyond mere rhetoric in the pursuit of truth."

A college spokesman said there's little CUNY officials can do. "Whether one agrees with Dr. Shortell's comments, this is an election as mandated by university guidelines," he said. "His comments are public, but this is the decision of the sociology department." Shortell didn't return calls to him at his office. Brooklyn College, which has more than 15,000 students, observed its 75th anniversary this year. It was named one of the top 10 best values among undergraduate institutions in the country by the Princeton Review.

Source

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

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

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

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27 May, 2005

POLITICAL BIAS IN ACADEME

Three views below:

We hear a lot these days about the importance of diversity in ensuring that ideas are heard fairly. But the individuals who are most insistent about this are interested only in racial and sex diversity. Intellectual and ideological diversity is not what the enforcers of political correctness on campuses and other sectors have in mind.

This magazine has helped pioneer evidence of how politically unbalanced most college campuses have become. Most recently (see our January/February 2005 issue) we presented the findings of University of California economist Daniel Klein, who found that the ratio of Democrats to Republicans in social sciences and humanities faculty nationwide is at least 8:1. At universities like Stanford and Berkeley it is 16:1 in favor of Democrats.

Twenty-five years ago, the ratio was less skewed, at 4:1. In the future it is going to be even more skewed. Among the young junior faculty at Stanford and Berkeley, there are now 183 Democrats, and just six Republicans--a 30:1 tilt. As today's older professors retire, political lopsidedness will grow even more extreme.

After years of denying the ideological uniformity of colleges, this accumulated evidence has now caused many academics to shift to claiming that the lack of political diversity on campus doesn't matter. It doesn't affect what gets taught, they say.

But in a recent panel discussion at the American Enterprise Institute, two experts warned that academic one-sidedness matters very much indeed, and is clearly having harmful results. We present their statements below, along with an extract from one professor's recent pointed analysis of this subject.



Anne Neal
President of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni

There are now countless stories (and large volumes of hard data) about political pressure in college classrooms, and faculty hostility to non-liberal viewpoints. When confronted with this evidence, what did the higher education establishment do? Did it conduct its own surveys to see if the claims were valid? Did it try to determine whether the education of students was being impaired? Did it affirm its commitment to the robust exchange of ideas? No. It offered the classic institutional dodge: Deny the facts and attack the accuser.

Roger Bowen, president of the American Association of University Professors, stated that political affiliations are of little consequence in the classroom. Professor of political science David Kimball asserted that "any concerns about indoctrination are overblown." John Millsaps, a spokesman for the University of Georgia, insisted "we have no evidence to suggest that students are being intimidated by professors as regards students' freedom to express their opinions and beliefs."

My organization, which represents college trustees and alumni, wanted to move beyond anecdotes and test the claim that politics was not affecting the classroom. So we commissioned the Center for Survey Research and Analysis at the University of Connecticut to undertake a scientific survey of undergraduates in the top 50 colleges and universities, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report. We went right to the student population who are directly affected, who have no reason to misrepresent what is happening there, and asked them about their experiences.

What did we find? Forty-nine percent of students stated that professors frequently inject political comments into their courses even if they have nothing to do with the subject. When we asked students if they felt free to question their professors' assumptions, almost one third said they felt they had to agree with their professor's political view to get a good grade.

We also explored whether students were being exposed to competing arguments on today's issues. Forty-eight percent of all students reported that presentations on political issues seemed completely one-sided, and 46 percent said professors used the classroom to present their personal political views. Forty-two percent said reading assignments represented only one side of a controversial issue.

The students voicing concerns are not a small minority--nearly half reported abuses of one kind or another. And they are not just conservatives: a majority of the respondents consider themselves liberals or radicals. Moreover, the majority of the students we surveyed are studying subjects like biology, engineering, and psychology--where there is no reason for politics to enter the classroom in the first place. It does anyway: Fully 68 percent of all students heard their professors make negative classroom comments about George Bush, versus 17 percent who were exposed to criticisms of John Kerry.

One simply cannot deny, after these findings, that faculty are importing politics into their teaching in a way that affects a student's ability to learn. This should trouble us all. Responsible academic freedom involves not only the professors' prerogatives, but also the freedom of students to learn free of political indoctrination.



David French
President of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

Faced with clear evidence that colleges lack ideological diversity, many campus apologists say "So what?" At FIRE, which represents students in academic freedom battles, we face the question "so what?" every day. And I can assure you the problem of ideological uniformity on campus goes far beyond the fact that many red-state suburban kids now get their views attacked in the classroom. Ideological uniformity in higher education has led to daily, systematic deprivation of the civil liberties of students and professors.

First, ideological uniformity has led to the suppression of dissenting speech. I'm not talking about extreme expressions of dissent; I'm talking about things such as an "affirmative action" bake sale sponsored by that notorious radical organization, the College Republicans. I'm talking about students who question whether an academic department should show Fahrenheit 9/11 in all classes before the election to persuade students to vote for Kerry.

These aren't isolated cases. In 2004, FIRE received more than 500 credible complaints of deprivation of civil liberties on campus. We surveyed the speech policies of the 200 leading universities and found freedom-squelching speech codes at 70 percent of those schools. In the last four years, as many as 50 universities have made attempts to eject evangelical student organizations, or to restrict them so thoroughly as to effectively rob them of their distinct religious voices. At many campuses, students are subjected from the moment they arrive to mandatory "orientations" and diversity training designed to shock many of them out of the views they bring from home.

At FIRE, we have people from across the ideological spectrum on our staff and on our board. And even the most dyed-in-the-wool liberal on our staff will acknowledge that 80-85 percent of our cases involve suppression of speech by the Left.

We're reaching a tipping point. The higher education establishment will either open itself back up to the full marketplace of ideas, or it will see its ivy-covered walls battered down by force--whether class action litigation or extreme legislation. We have reached the point where the self-regulation of higher education is no longer credible.

Universities say it's people like me, red staters who grew up in middle-class suburbs, who need their views challenged. In my experience, the exact reverse is true. I went to a Christian undergraduate school and then went to law school at Harvard, and I can tell you that the professors at my Christian college were more open to challenges to campus orthodoxy than my professors at Harvard Law School.

When I applied to teach at Cornell Law School, an interviewer noticed my evangelical background and asked, "How is it possible for you to effectively teach gay students?" If I had not given what I consider to be, in all modesty, an absolutely brilliant answer to the question, I don't think I would have gotten the job. I sat in admissions committee meetings at Cornell in which African-American students who expressed conservative points of view were disfavored because "they had not taken ownership of their racial identity." An evangelical student was almost rejected before I pointed out that the reviewer's statement that "they did not want Bible-thumping or God-squading on campus" was illegal and immoral. Academics who say "so what?" need to realize that ideological uniformity leads to restrictive speech codes and the suppression of Constitutionally protected speech on campus. It leads to the exclusion of people of faith from campuses. It twists hiring and admissions and classroom discussion.

No campus official should define what is orthodox in politics, religion, or law. Yet that happens every day to thousands of students. It is a deprivation of their civil liberties, and it will stop sooner or later, one way or another. The real question is: Will the academy wake up and begin to put its own house in order, or will it act like Dan Rather--delaying reform until an entire culture has revolted, then shuffling off into oblivion muttering about a right-wing conspiracy?



Fred Siegel
Professor of history at New York City's Cooper Union

Academia, taken as a whole, has become dominated by freeze-dried 1960s radicals and their intellectual progeny, who have turned much of the humanities and social sciences into a backwater. In 1989, when Eastern Europeans were reclaiming the ideals of human rights and political freedom, students and faculty on the Stanford campus were marching with 1988 Presidential candidate Jesse Jackson shouting "Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture's got to go." Up the road, Berkeley--dominated by its university--announced it was adopting Jena in communist East Germany as a sister city, this just a few months before the wall fell.

Academics have been getting it wrong over and over again. Criminologists were convinced that crime couldn't be cut; sociologists were sure that welfare reform couldn't work because it didn't go to the root causes of poverty; and Sovietologists were certain that the USSR of the 1980s had matured into a successful, even pluralistic society. As for radical Islam, the consensus view of the Middle Eastern Studies Association was that the danger to America came from a "terror industry" conjuring up imagined threats in order to justify American aggression.

But even as academia's batting average has declined, its claim to superior knowledge has expanded. The old ideal of disinterested scholarship, or at least the importance of attempting to be objective, has been displaced. In 2003 the University of California's Academic Assembly did away with the distinction between "interested" and "disinterested" scholarship by a 45-3 vote. As Berkeley law professor Robert Post explained, "the old statement of principles was so outlandishly disconnected to what university teaching is now that it made no sense to think about it that way."

The reality, as Post recognized, is that many professors now literally profess. Far from teaching the mechanics of knowledge, they are in fact preachers of sorts, spreading a gospel akin to that of Howard Dean. For professors part of grievance studies departments, like "Indian" poseur Ward Churchill, there was never any expectation of objectivity. They were knowingly hired as activists and are now puzzled as to why this has become a problem for some of their students and the larger public. After all, what they preach is built into the very orientation students are given when they arrive on campus. New students at many schools are quite literally given a new faith.

In the absence of intellectual competition (other than the disputes between left and lefter), academia will continue to get it wrong. This might be of limited concern if not for the fact that the sheltered students who emerge from this one-party state are left bereft of any means of negotiating with reality once they engage in politics as adults. Instead of being given the background knowledge of American institutions they need to make judgments as citizens, they are fed attitudes. Credulous undergraduates fall prey to priestly performers who claim to be initiating them into the subterranean mysteries. Those who buy into this worldview are left both insufferably pretentious and substantively silly.

Source

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

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

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

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



26 May, 2005

Teacher Neutrality Is Hogwash

We have all been told over the years that government school teachers are supposed to be objective, to help students search for truth, and that the school is supposed to be an extension of the family, upholding what the traditional family believes. Most of us who have learned anything about the nature of government education know that such statements are an utter farce.

Many parents, however, for one reason or another, have their children in government schools and are forced to struggle through what seem to be never-ending problems in their quest to make sure their children's faith and beliefs are not tampered with by those schools--so-called. I will cite one example.

In one northeastern state, which due to possible legal ramifications for the parents, must remain unnamed, a father is standing in opposition to what the "educational" system is trying to foist upon his youngster in the name of "education." How many places around the country this scenario is being repeated can only be guessed at.

The problem started earlier this school year, when one of the youngster's teachers sent home to parents a letter stating that she was going to be showing several R-rated movies to the class of 14-year-olds this student was in. The movies were described as "documentaries." In reality, they were nothing more than liberal propaganda films by Michael Moore. The father of the student immediately complained, stating that he would not allow his youngster to be part of a captive audience, having to watch sexually explicit scenes and other very questionable material in some of the movies on the teacher's list. The teacher responded by suggesting to the father that he should allow his youngster to learn more than what is being taught in the home. So much for the "school" being an extension of the family!

At one point, the teacher decided she was going to show her class the movie "Bowling for Columbine" which was to be presented to the class as an anti-gun "documentary" and not the liberal propaganda that it really is. The father petitioned the teacher to have his youngster not have to watch this film, and, initially, the teacher flat-out refused his request. Having gotten nowhere with the teacher, the father took his complaint not only to the school's principal, but to the town's mayor as well. The movie was not shown.

After all this, the father thought and hoped the furor might die down and that the teacher would go back to her supposed job of teaching. Suffice it to say, he was in for a rude awakening, as are many parents that try to deal with a government education system that is long on propaganda and short on education.

It seemed, however, that this teacher's penchant for showing R-rated films to minors had not abated. The father ended up having his youngster removed from this teacher's class on two occasions because she was showing the kids films with full frontal nudity. As a Christian parent, the father found this disgusting, but, apparently, the vast majority of parents in that government school system had no problem with what went on--showing that, in many instances, the government "education" system has done an excellent job in desensitizing several generations as to what is proper and right and what is not.

Then, as her crowing achievement for the year, this teacher decided she would make her class learn about Islam and Buddhism, and others of what she labeled as "alternative faiths." The father wondered, and naturally so, since it was against the school's rules for his youngster to profess or display, in any way, personal Christian faith in school, why there should be such a tolorance for "alternative faiths" when there was none for the Christian faith. Good question. It was never answered.

The father, with the help and guidence of his pastor, wrote a letter requesting that his youngster be excused from this class and he had hoped the teacher might provide an alternative assignment. She did not. What she did instead was to tell the student that, even though the class went against the family's Christian beliefs, she intended to hold the student responsible for the father's refusal to allow participation in the class. So this student, who has been on the honor roll in all classes, may well end up with a tarnished academic record because of this one liberal teacher. Simply heartwarming isn't it? Makes you want to go out and shout the glories of the government school system from the rooftops doesn't it?

At that point, the father sought some legal information. He contacted a group that informed him that the government school does, indeed, have the right to teach this kind of stuff which he has objected to, but that he, as a Christian parent, also has the right to opt out if he wishes, in instances where he feels his youngster's spiritual welfare is at stake. However, because the father has opted to have his student removed from this particular assignment the teacher is going to make darn sure the student suffers academically for the father's decision. Such situations, when they come to light, should really make people question the agenda of the government school system (and, folks, it ain't education). Then, when "those people" come back to us, telling us they want to raise our property taxes yet again so they can provide more "quality education" for our children, we should have a ready response for them--and that response should be "Hogwash!"

Source



PRESSURE TO PASS CHEATS IN AN AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITY

A lecturer's allegations of plagiarism at the University of Western Sydney have left her in an invidious position - approve the results or don't get paid. The lecturer, who teaches at the university's College of Law and Business, said she could not approve student results for the university's commerce course in Hong Kong until the university dealt with plagiarism claims. But contracts issued to staff working on the college's offshore programs give management the right to withhold payment until staff approve marks and complete all the paperwork. "No one [at management level] seems to think this is a clear case of improper pressure on the unit co-ordinator to submit 'acceptable' results," said the lecturer, who declined to be named for fear of losing her job. "Otherwise, like me, you will not be paid."

She told the college's senior management she thought three of the eight students taking her subject had cheated. She received the students' work on April 29, two months after the course had finished, and only after she had made repeated requests to see the results. On May 6, the college's head of international programs emailed her: "Enough is enough. I am not going to engage in an endless exchange of emails. Can you please advise whether or not you will be in a position to present marks for these eight students at the next marks meeting." The lecturer replied that she could not "unless the conduct of the course has been investigated".

A spokesman for the university, Mikhael Kjaerbye, told the Herald the university had agreed at a marks meeting on Friday to investigate the plagiarism allegations. "There will be a full investigation," he said. "We take this seriously . the student academics misconduct policy will kick in." The students involved had in the meantime been given a pending grade. Mr Kjaerbye dismissed claims that teachers had been pressured into approving adverse results to get their pay. "They get paid when they present their report," he said. "It doesn't matter what the results are. This does not affect the payment." He said the lecturer concerned was aware of her contract's stipulations. "She's a lawyer, she signed the contract and the contract's very clear," he said.

The lecturer has also officially complained that the course was taught incorrectly by the Hong Kong-based tutors. She said the tutors ignored her feedback material and instead let students know how they were doing in their assignments by ticking appropriate boxes on printed assessment sheets. She said this was inappropriate for law units. Moreover, the university had breached its own assessment policy, she said, by failing to give students feedback during the course and allowing them to submit assignments almost two weeks after sitting the final exam.

An investigation by the Herald has revealed serious flaws in the management of many university offshore programs. The investigation also found many students had cheated in the English proficiency exams which universities require many foreigners to sit before they can enrol. Peter Armstrong, an Australian lecturer based in China, told the Herald last week his contract with the provider of a respected Australian university's intensive English course was suddenly cancelled last year, after he tried to clamp down on cheating, plagiarism, unexplained absences and poor work. "The Chinese side took the view that the students had paid a lot by local standards and should be allowed to remain in the program no matter what," Mr Armstrong said. "When I raised my concerns to the Australian side, they didn't want to hear about it. It seemed they were quite happy to retain any poor students for the sake of profit."

Source

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

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

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

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



25 May, 2005

SMART BRITISH KIDS LET DOWN BY STATE SCHOOLS

Thousands of comprehensive schools are still failing Britain’s most able children, Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, has been told. Research, commissioned by a key government adviser, shows that pupils rated among the brightest prospects at primary school go on to under-achieve at GCSE, The Times has learnt. Some do only nearly half as well as their peers in good schools. The most politically explosive finding was of a direct relationship between the number of bright children in a school and individual achievements.

The study highlights the scale of the challenge facing Ms Kelly in tackling poor secondary schooling, particularly in deprived urban areas. It emerged as the latest edition of The Times Good University Guide shows that universities plan to devote huge sums of money trying to satisfy government demands that they widen access to students from poor backgrounds.

The research, by David Jesson, of York University, used government data to track the progress of 28,000 children who scored the highest marks in national curriculum tests of English and mathematics at the age of 11. They represented the top 5 per cent from more than half a million pupils in England who take Key Stage 2 tests in primary schools each year. Professor Jesson found that nearly 6,000 pupils who took the tests in 1999 were admitted to 167 selective grammar schools and 5,800 went on to 223 high-achieving comprehensives. The remaining 16,500 went into 2,407 comprehensives, many in urban areas, with lower achievement. When the same students took their GCSEs last summer, many had effectively been lost because schools failed to push them to reach their potential.

Professor Jesson found that success rates declined in line with the numbers of bright children in a school, and dipped sharply when there were fewer than five. Where 20 pupils from the most able 5 per cent were clustered together in a year group, each achieved an average of nearly seven GCSE passes at A* and A grade last year. But where there was just one child from this group in a school, he or she passed fewer than four GCSEs at these grades. This is likely to have a severe impact on prospects for university admission. The children’s performance at A level will be followed to establish how many of those who could be expected at 11 to be candidates for Oxford, Cambridge and other top universities actually achieve the necessary grades.

An analysis of results in 2002 showed that comprehensive students had only a 5 per cent chance of getting three A grades, the standard expected at Oxbridge and many other elite universities. Nearly 20,500 18-year-olds achieved three A grades. But of the 110,000 who took A levels in comprehensives, only 5,821 reached this standard. This compared with 3,394 out of 18,265 (19 per cent) among sixth-formers who took A levels in grammar schools. At independent schools, 7,565 gained three A grades out of 32,873 candidates (23 per cent).

Professor Jesson found that individual pupils in high-achieving comprehensives scored slightly better at GCSE than those in grammar schools. This suggests that provision for the most able children within schools, rather than selection, at 11, is the critical issue.

More here



ILLITERATE CALIFORNIAN KIDS MUST NOT FAIL TO GRADUATE

Particularly if they are black

Requiring students to pass California's high school graduation exam could be postponed further at the state's lowest-performing schools under legislation by the Senate's majority leader. The measure by Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, is among dozens of bills facing tests this week in the Assembly and Senate appropriations committees. The graduation exam was part of former Gov. Gray Davis' efforts to ensure that high school graduates master math and language requirements. Originally, students were supposed to have passed the test to graduate in 2004, but the state Board of Education pushed the requirement back two years, making the class of 2006 the first one forced to pass the test to get a diploma.

Many students already have taken the exam in anticipation of the requirement kicking in. They can start taking it as sophomores. Romero's bill would suspend the test requirement for about 375 of the state's lowest-performing high schools until the state superintendent of public instruction certified that students at those schools had adequate teachers, instructional material, counseling and tutoring. The schools would have to file an annual report spelling out how they were attempting to gain certification. "I'm not proud to be carrying this bill," Romero said. "It's not a bill I would wish on anybody, but I feel compelled to carry it because I see what's happening in my own district. The exam has an extraordinarily high failure rate among low-income school districts."

Richard Riordan, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's outgoing education secretary, said he also opposes the bill and predicts the Republican governor will veto it if it reaches his desk. "Unless you start holding people accountable, starting with children and adults who teach children, you never get anywhere," said Riordan, who is resigning and will be replaced next month by San Diego schools superintendent Alan Bersin.

More here

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

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

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

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

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



24 May, 2005

PARENTS CREATE A SAFE CHRISTIAN SCHOOL SO CALIFORNIA OFFICIALS ARE TRYING TO DESTROY THAT

And I thought minority cultures were supposed to be sacrosanct!

Early last school year, an African American high school student entered a first-grade classroom where she was volunteering as a teaching assistant. The first-graders, children of the Russian and Ukranian immigrant community around North Highlands, had had little contact with people of color. Their first response, say two administrators who supervise the schools, was fear. They screamed and cowered in a corner of the classroom. This wasn't supposed to happen. When Grant Community Charters, which runs the elementary school, began two years ago, it was envisioned as a charter school program that would provide work force training to the multiethnic youth of Del Paso Heights.

It became something quite different: A system of five public schools, from kindergarten to high school, where nearly all the students are white in a school district that is 37 percent white. Of the charter schools' 1,380 students, so far only 28 are in a vocational program. Those are also the only children not from Slavic immigrant families. The students are mostly evangelical Christians, and three of the schools are housed in churches. For many students, the school day begins with voluntary prayer.

Though the starkness of their situation may be unique, the Grant schools face a dilemma common to many charter schools. Because charters are public schools developed with a specific community's interests in mind, the students they attract tend to be less diverse than their neighborhoods as a whole, a uniformity that could conflict with the intent of state and federal anti-discrimination policies.

Grant Community Charters began as a collaboration between the Grant Joint Union High School District and the community, the sort of effort charter schools are designed to allow. Grant created a single school two years ago, which from the beginning served an overwhelmingly Slavic population. Then in August 2004, Grant created a charter high school and took over three other schools that had been run by another charter operator that collapsed and also principally enrolled Slavs. The schools are scattered. Futures High and two elementary schools are in North Highlands. One elementary school is in Rio Linda and another is on Jackson Road, west of Bradshaw Road in the Elk Grove Unified School District. The elementary schools are collectively known as the Grant Community Outreach Academy and do not have individual names.

Grant district officials acknowledge they sometimes have struggled between the Slavic immigrants' expectations for the schools and what U.S. law permits. The schools' short history has been turbulent:

* Although state law and Grant Community Charters' founding documents require the schools to attempt to reflect the racial makeup of the districts they serve, the schools do not - nor has much attention been given to this concern.

* The African American real estate developer who started the schools left the schools' board of directors this year after it was clear their focus had shifted.

* The schools' academic performance ranks in the bottom 10 percent statewide, lower than any other schools in the neighborhoods they serve. If their scores don't improve dramatically when the charter expires in 2008, state law could require them to close.

* An outside study faulted the schools last year, when they were under different management, for their religious content. Some parents still view the schools as religious, although Grant officials say they are not.

More than 100,000 Slavic immigrants have moved to the Sacramento region over the past decade. The 2000 census identifies more than 7,200 people of Russian or Ukrainian ancestry living in the Grant district.

Eileen Rishard teaches at the Jackson Road site. She said she tries to keep her students' culture intact. "I play Tchaikovsky in the morning," she said, standing in her classroom. "This is my newest addition." She opened a cabinet to reveal a ceramic tea set. "This tea set is from Armenia."

But Lynn Massetti, a second-grade teacher at one of the North Highlands schools, said she thinks the immigrant parents could be erring in shielding their children from the mainstream public schools. "You can't be scared and hide," she said.

Teachers and parents said the families wanted to get out of district public schools, which they perceive as dangerous. "We know big high schools are very bad," said Mikhail Novikov, who immigrated in 1990. Novikov is an administrative assistant at the charter high school. His seven children went to Rio Linda High, before the charters existed. "Many parents were very afraid," he said. From the street, the charter schools don't much resemble typical schools, but they do provide comfort for many parents. Three of the schools are on church campuses, which is common and legal for charters. One is at the former McClellan Air Force Base. Inside, though, classrooms look similar to those throughout the state.

Most of the Slavic families enrolled are religious refugees, according to school staff. "I genuinely believe they feel this is a safer campus for their children," said Valerie Buehl, a fourth-grade teacher at one of the sites. "They're very devout, and all the other children here are the same."

Florin Ciuriuc, executive director of the Slavic Community Center of Sacramento, which was involved in the creation of the charter schools, describes some of the schools as "sort of private." One of his children attends the charter elementary at McClellan Park. Though he said he respects the separation of church and state, Ciuriuc said he thinks discipline is maintained at the schools because the day can start with prayer. "A lot of what has to do with schools is prayer," Ciuriuc said.

Randy Orzalli, the Grant administrator who supervises the schools, says no prayer occurs at the schools, but parents are able to take students to daily prayers nearby. Orzalli said one of the challenges of running the schools has been trying to impress on Ciuriuc and others the importance of separation of church and state. "A lot of parents wanted a private religious school," Orzalli said. "Not only are we not interested in that, it's not legal." The law also requires charter schools to attempt to be racially representative of the communities they serve. The Grant charter high school is 94.8 percent white, and the elementary schools are 99.1 percent white. The Grant district is 37 percent white. Elk Grove Unified, where one of the charter schools is located, is 32 percent white.

Orzalli said the schools' homogeneity is a direct consequence of the reason children enroll: to learn English in a welcoming environment. But he said the ultimate goal is to integrate the children into the mainstream. Parents picking up their children at the Jackson Road school said their main concern is what they see as the moral depravity in mainstream public schools. They feel the charter schools allow them to preserve their values. "The cultural and moral counts more than the educational," said Miroslav Vysotsky, the father of two children at the school.....

More here



ANYTHING FOR MONEY IN AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITIES

Australian universities were seriously jeopardising their international reputations by placing profits before academic quality, the architect of one the world's leading English language testing systems has warned. David Ingram, a Melbourne academic who co-developed the International English Language Testing System almost 20 years ago in England, yesterday attacked universities for misusing his system. He said this had ultimately led to a serious drop in academic standards. Professor Ingram said the problem was caused in part by "irresponsible action on the part of some universities which were willing to sacrifice quality for money".

"Too often, teaching staff, either out of sympathy for the students or from pressure from marketers or administrators … push students through, whatever the students' levels of performance," he said. "In doing so, they show little regard for the welfare of the international students entering their programs, and for the long-term negative impact such scant regard for quality will have on their ability to attract students and, consequently, on their revenue."

Professor Ingram, who served as the testing system's chief examiner in Australia for 10 years and is now the executive dean of Melbourne University's Private School of Applied Language Studies, said he did not dispute the findings of a Herald investigation, which pointed to widespread problems associated with the influx of non-English speaking full-fee-paying students over the past decade. One in five students now enrolled at Australian universities is from overseas, most having gained access after sitting the English proficiency test. Professor Ingram defended the integrity of the test, saying it was the universities' inappropriate use, interpretation and application of the test's results that had led to many non-English speaking students being accepted into courses beyond their capabilities. This, in turn, had led to an overall drop in academic standards. He said his criticism applied to most Australian universities because they accepted students with a proficiency level below his recommendation of 7.0 on the test. Most universities accept overseas students if they achieve an overall score of 6.0 for undergraduate programs and 6.5 for postgraduate programs.

Professor Ingram acknowledged that a fall in Federal Government funding had forced universities to accept overseas students with inadequate language skills. However, he said the universities themselves needed to compensate for this by providing more support and language-skill programs to ensure academic standards were maintained. A study on entry procedures conducted by Professor Ingram at Griffith University in 2001-02 found widespread unease among academics who said they felt obliged to push international students through "and would pass them if they could make any sense at all out of what they wrote". Professor Ingram said the findings were "quite depressing". He said he had come across two PhD candidates from overseas who were "barely coherent" in English, yet had completed postgraduate degrees at two of Australia's most respected universities. They had been exempted from sitting the language test to gain entry. "All I was able to assume was that, undoubtedly in the false belief that they were being supportive, their supervisors had helped the students write their theses or had turned a blind eye to the fact that someone else was helping them."

Source

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

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

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

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



23 May, 2005

ANOTHER RACIAL COVERUP

A series of fights broke out today at Taft High School ahead of a scheduled visit by Mayor-elect Antonio Villaraigosa, and school officials disputing claims by parents and students who said the brawls appeared racially motivated.

As many as 17 patrol cars and an LAPD helicopter were dispatched to the Ventura Boulevard campus about 10 a.m., a Los Angeles Police Department spokeswoman said. Taft Principal Sharon Thomas said there were three separate fights among ninth-graders lining up to take standardized tests in a multi-purpose room. Six students were detained for questioning and the others were sent to their home rooms, she said.

Sandra Torres, 18, a senior, said she saw a number of students hop a fence onto campus and run toward a group of students. "They started beating up on anybody they came across. There must have been 50 people involved. Ten people were hurt with bloody noses (and) lying on the ground. "It was a lot of violence," she said. "I was scared."

Thomas and Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Roy Romer said the fights were not between Latino and African-American students, despite what many students reported. "It was a limited thing," Romer said. "It was not racial." Villaraigosa, appearing with Romer during a news conference, reiterated district officials' comments that the violence was not racially motivated.

But Erika Robles, 17, a junior, said the fighting occurred between African-American and Latino students. About 40 parents rushed to the campus, many of them called by students using cell phones. Carletha Lee, whose nieces and nephews attend the campus, said the district and the mayor-elect were not being candid with parents. "You can only stomach so much, the fact that (Villaraigosa) is downplaying a serious situation.... He wants to discount this as a simple fight between students. We clearly know this is not the case," she said.

Source



ARIZONA SCHOOL PROTECTS CHEATS AND ATTACKS WHISTLEBLOWER

It all started last year, when the now 56-year-old teacher allowed a student to take an exam a day earlier than his other students. The student then sent an e-mail message to about 50 students, with the answers to the exam, Dorson said. No explanation or apology was ever received, he said. This year, when the student, whose name the district has withheld, was in the running for a prestigious scholarship awarded by the Flinn Foundation, Dorson said he could not support that. The Flinn is a well-respected scholarship awarded to Arizona students for use at the state's public universities. Students are judged strongly on moral character, in addition to scholastic achievements.

Dorson's road to resignation began when he went to the school's administration and said someone should speak up about last year's cheating incident, Dorson said. It was then, Dorson said, that he was told by the administration to be quiet, that if he spoke out about it he would be fired. Contrary to rumors about the controversy, Dorson said it never crossed his mind to contact the Flinn representatives directly; he just wanted someone to deal with the situation. He was only trying to protect the district, not cause trouble, he said.

In the weeks that followed, no one from the administration responded to Dorson's request, he said, which finally prompted him to say, "enough." He wrote a letter of resignation in February and the board immediately approved it. "I think there are people that wanted me gone," Dorson said.

Foothills High School Principal Wagner Van Vlack said he could not comment on the situation. "I'm reluctant on a moral ground to comment in a story that doesn't get to the moral truth," he said, adding that he could not comment because it is impossible to get to the whole story because of privacy laws and certain information that could not be disclosed.

In the months following Dorson's resignation, students, parents and teachers have supported their favorite teacher and have called upon the board to look into the matter. More than 60 people attended a May 10 board meeting, many of whom spoke in support of Dorson. "People throughout all of metropolitan Tucson know and love this individual, the man whom you do not value," said Ann Moynihan, as she spoke to the board. Moynihan, whose son is a student of Dorson, said that soon after her son joined his classroom she began to notice a difference in him, something she credits to the tremendous teaching skill of Dorson. "He puts the fire to the tinder," Moynihan said......

Zamkinos said she fully understands the reasons Dorson is leaving, and admits there is a cheating problem that is not being addressed within the district. School officials have said they take cheating very seriously and deals with each situation accordingly. One way students are cheating is by text-messaging exam answers to each other's cell phones, Zamkinos said. According to the district's student discipline policy, forgery and cheating are "prohibited student conduct."

Kareem Hassan, another student of Dorson, said that "the main issue is not whether or not Dorson is the best teacher in the world, but that the school can't even follow its own policy regarding cheating." Cheating should be taken seriously, something Hassan said is not happening within the district. Hassan said the administrators are not promoting integrity when they can't stand behind one of their own when a teacher is trying to make sure a student is punished for not having integrity. "He was essentially forced to resign," Hassan said.....

Dorson could, however, face an investigation and possible teaching certification removal by the Arizona Board of Education. On May 6, a Catalina Foothills administrator reported an alleged violation of the Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act, said Lisette Flores, chief investigator for the board. Flores would not say who reported Dorson. She said, only, that it was regarding the matter of Dorson sharing the discipline of the student who cheated. Dorson said he was shocked when he received a phone call from a newspaper reporter telling him about the report. He was stunned that no one from the district told him first, he said. "They have confused dissent with loyalty," he said. "The emphasis has been on keeping things quiet."

More here

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

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

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

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

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



22 May, 2005

MISSING MEN ON CAMPUS

(At the college level, I think it mainly means that fewer men than women are willing to waste their time and money on a crap education. At lower levels I think it means that black males are much more likely to drop out than black females -- mainly for "attitudinal" reasons)

Harvard President Lawrence Summers, still doing damage control over some ill-chosen comments about women in the sciences, dug into his university's deep pockets this week and found $50 million to spend on improving the lives of women on his campus. Those 10-year investments in mentoring and child care are to be applauded. But don't come away from Summers' gifting with the wrong idea: On most campuses, the problem is with men, not women.

More than 57% of the freshly robed graduates parading across podiums this graduation season will be female, up from 43% in 1970. In Minnesota this year, women outperformed men in every degree category, earning more than two-thirds of the master's degrees and more than half the doctorates. That's good for the girls, but what about the boys?

The trends are almost universally grim. A Yale University report released this week shows that boys are getting expelled from preschools at more than four times the rate girls are. Given the impressive benefits that high quality preschools bestow on students, that's a problem. Nothing seems to improve much in elementary school, where boys quickly fall behind girls, especially in verbal skills. Not all boys, to be sure, but a disproportionate ratio. When boys are slow to pick up reading skills,educators are quick to conclude they suffer from some medical deficiency. Boys are twice as likely to be diagnosed with learning disabilities and four times as likely to be put on attention-deficit medication.

In middle school, that modest verbal gap from elementary school doubles in size. By ninth grade, the problem can't be hidden. That's when students begin a college-preparation sequence of courses that demand high verbal skills. No surprise that boys are a third more likely to drop out of high school. Many boys rally by the junior and senior years of high school. But by then girls have won most of the academic awards and school leadership roles. All that makes the girls attractive recruits for colleges.

Fixing the missing-male problem will take effort - something akin to the effort undertaken by parents and educators to make girls more successful in the classroom. Until that happens, audiences can only look up at the graduates promenading across the platform to receive their diplomas and wonder: Where are the men?

Source



CANADA DUMBING DOWN TOO

Ontario has unveiled a kinder, gentler math curriculum it hopes will stem the rising tide of high school dropouts. The government has made sweeping changes to Grade 9 math, in the more hands-on applied stream where staggering failure rates have been linked to a growing number of dropouts since the tough new four-year high school program began in 1999. Starting this fall, Grade 9 students in applied math will be expected to master nearly one-third less material while getting more practical lessons. As well, teachers will get more tips on how to make math relevant to teens.

Gone are subjects teachers deemed too abstract for many Grade 9 applied students, such as analytical geometry, the study of the steepness of "slopes" and lessons on the algebra needed to plot a parabolic curve. When marking, teachers will be encouraged to give more weight to a student's overall comprehension of math concepts, rather than simply follow a lengthy checklist of individual skills. As well, the new course will dovetail more smoothly with Grade 12 math studies for pupils interested incommunity college and the skilled trades.

And appearing in Grade 9 is the occasional reference to feet and yards instead of metres, for students who may be headed for a job in construction, where many measurements are still done in imperial units. "It's a phenomenal improvement. The big, big deal was to get less content crammed into the curriculum, and they've done that. It's huge," said Stewart Craven, math co-ordinator for the Toronto District School Board.

Rather than "dumb down" the curriculum, Craven predicts the changes actually enrich students' learning by removing a clutter of abstract concepts he said had no business in Grade 9 applied math in the first place. Many have called Grade 9 applied math the biggest roadblock to graduation for Ontario teens, because it was too similar to the more abstract academic course for those headed to university.

Fully 90 per cent of the material was the same in both courses, and teachers complained many applied students found the material too difficult. An alarming three-quarters of applied students failed to meet provincial standards on the latest Ontario-wide Grade 9 math test, compared to just one-third of academic students.

More here

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

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

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

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21 May, 2005

INDIANAPOLIS PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE A TICKET TO THE BOTTOM

James Johnson isn't sure if his father ever finished high school but thinks "he probably didn't." Johnson himself dropped out of John Marshall High School (now a middle school) after ninth grade. Why? "Girls. Baby. Fast money. Hard-headed. I'm only telling the truth." As for Johnson's 18-year-old son? He just dropped out, too, after finally reaching his senior year. Johnson now is obtaining his GED at age 41. From what he can tell, when it comes to finishing high school, "All the men don't."

Yes, the men don't. More black males are dropping out than graduating from high school. Just 326, or 25 percent, of about 1,300 black males who entered IPS high schools in 1998 graduated four years later. Perhaps the 1,000 or so young black men who left moved to other school districts. More likely, they dropped out. Indianapolis Public Schools is the fifth-worst in the nation in graduating black males, trailing only Cincinnati, New York City, Cleveland and Chatham County, Ga., according to a 2004 study by the Schott Foundation for Public Education. Only 38 percent of black males graduated from Indiana's high schools in 2002. Just 42 percent of America's black males in the class of 2002 earned diplomas. Those numbers help explain why only 603,000 black males were attending college while nearly 800,000 were serving prison time in 2000. As Schott Foundation President Rosa Smith says, this is "educational genocide."

In Indiana and the rest of the nation, white males graduate at significantly higher rates than blacks. That's not true in IPS. Only 183 white males -- or 23 percent of the freshmen entering IPS high schools in 1998 -- graduated in 2002. About 600 young white men probably dropped out. They're like Manual High School freshman David Kline, who says, "None of my family has graduated." David, like his father and brother, has had a run-in with the law and landed in juvenile hall. He expects to follow their example by dropping out. His plans? "I'm in a band. I'm a lead vocalist. We've already played at (venues). I mean, our band's already getting big."

Here's the reality: White male dropouts are five times more likely to serve prison time than the national average, according to Bruce Western of Princeton University. About 37 percent of black male dropouts are likely to end up incarcerated.

The academic gap for males, both blacks and whites, appears to be widening. Men made up 43 percent of the college student population in 2000 versus 58 percent 36 years ago, according to Pell Institute senior scholar Tom Mortenson. For growing numbers of college-age women, it means more difficulties in finding equally educated -- and financially stable -- men.....

In many Indiana families, education still isn't viewed as the gateway to a better life. Which helps explain why the state ranks 46th in the nation in the educational attainment rate of its population. Schools haven't done their part in helping males adapt to the reality of a knowledge-based economy. Boys find few male role models in schools; nationally, women make up 75 percent of the teaching ranks.... Males accounted for 425, or 59 percent, of the freshmen entering Northwest High in 2001. Four years later, they made up only 48 percent of the 2005 senior class....

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UPDATE ON THE KLOCEK AFFAIR

Klocek’s suspension violated DePaul’s own policies guaranteeing academic freedom as well as its contractual promises of basic due process. Klocek was suspended without a hearing, which DePaul policies say can only be done in an “emergency.” Though DePaul now claims that the argument created the “emergency” conditions necessary for an immediate suspension, the university waited a full nine days before acting against Klocek—hardly the response of a school in the grip of an “emergency” situation.

“If DePaul professors aren’t worried about this situation, they should be,” remarked Greg Lukianoff, FIRE’s director of legal and public advocacy. “Due process is most important in cases like Klocek’s in which facts need to be sorted through and in which punishment can be severe and career-ending. By refusing Professor Klocek a hearing at such a crucial juncture, DePaul threw its stated commitments to basic procedural rights out the window and missed an opportunity to discover what actually took place.”

On March 24, 2005, FIRE wrote DePaul’s president, Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider, on Professor Klocek’s behalf. FIRE asked the university to honor its own commitments and reminded DePaul that “[i]f every person had the power to punish those who expressed ideas they found offensive, we would all soon be reduced to silence.” President Holtschneider responded, saying this was not a matter of academic freedom and that “the university acted to address threatening and unprofessional behavior.” He also noted that Klocek had refused to pursue the university’s grievance process. This response contradicts Dean Dumbleton’s original justification for the school’s punishment. Furthermore, the grievance process available to Professor Klocek does not have the authority to restore his position.

FIRE’s French remarked, “While DePaul may now argue that the issue is one of professionalism, its public statements at the time of Klocek’s punishment make it clear that Klocek’s real crime was offending students during an out-of-class discussion of a controversial and emotional topic. Academic freedom cannot survive when professors who engage in debate on controversial topics are subject to administrative punishment without even the most cursory due process.”

More here

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

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

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

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20 May, 2005

EDUCATIONAL CHOICE: SHOWDOWN IN FLORIDA

On June 7, the Florida Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that could decide whether Florida continues to lead the nation in true education reform or joins the ranks of states where "reform" means business as usual. The question the justices will be asked to decide is whether the state constitution prohibits the state from giving scholarships to parents whose children are stuck in failing public schools so they can transfer those kids to private schools of their choice.

Opponents claim the program results in impermissible "aid" to religion because it allows scholarship recipients to send their children to religious as well as nonreligious private schools.

A major problem with that argument, however - and one school choice opponents have steadfastly refused to squarely address - is what implications that argument has for Florida's three dozen other social and educational aid programs that, just like Opportunity Scholarships, allow participants to freely choose among religious and nonreligious providers. On the education side alone, more than 200,000 Floridians receive publicly funded scholarships through a variety of state aid programs, all of which permit scholarship recipients to attend religious schools if they choose. This includes more than 100,000 college students using Bright Futures and other higher education scholarships, nearly 15,000 K-12 students attending private schools through the McKay Program for Students with Disabilities, and 12,000 K-12 students in the Corporate Tax Credit program.

Moreover, starting this fall, anywhere from 90,000 to 150,000 pre-K students are expected to enroll in the new universal pre-kindergarten program, and, like Opportunity Scholarship recipients, they will enjoy a full range of religious and nonreligious options.

Besides educational aid, many state and local agencies contract with organizations such as the Salvation Army to provide a wide range of services including prison counseling services, drug rehabilitation, and aid to the homeless. Likewise, religious hospitals receive public money through the Medicaid program. Does that count as "aid" to the churches that run those hospitals? Fortunately, the answer to that question is "no."

Florida has a long history of neutrality when it comes to allowing religious organizations to participate in all manner of social and educational aid programs. Why doesn't it count as aid to religion when a Bright Futures scholarship recipient decides to attend a school like Hobe Sound Bible College or Florida Christian College? It's because the "aid" is to the student, not the particular school he or she happens to attend. Same thing with Medicaid; even though state money ends up going to a religious institution, the aid is to the patient who chooses that hospital, not the hospital itself or the church that runs the hospital.

The same is true of Opportunity Scholarships. When the state gives parents an educational lifeline - when it gives them, for the first time in their lives, a choice of where to send their children to school - that is aid to those parents and their children. It is not aid to whatever schools they happen to choose.

School choice is the civil rights issue of the 21st century. Nothing more starkly divides the haves and the have-nots in this country than the question of who has the ability to ensure educational excellence for their children by choosing where they go to school, and who must simply take whatever their local public schools have to offer, no matter how clearly inadequate. Florida is on the right side of that debate and the right side of history. While many states promise all students a high-quality public education, only Florida delivers by saying to parents, "If we can't get the job done, we'll give you a scholarship so you can find someone who will." Now that is accountability.

The Opportunity Scholarship program is a true education reform that has already enriched the lives and future prospects of hundreds of children. And, as verified by a new Harvard study, it is also a means of injecting into education a little healthy competition - something from which public schools have been all but immune until now.

Source



BRITISH PARENTS SLOWLY GIVING UP ON STATE SCHOOLS

Particularly in London

More parents are turning their back on the state system and choosing to educate their children privately, as record numbers of independent students go on to university. While the overall number of pupils attending independent schools has dropped for the first time in a decade, figures published yesterday show that girls now outnumber boys at independent day schools and that the number of privately educated British children is up. The implication that parents do not trust the state system coincides with several leading universities revealing that they would take more state pupils provided they could charge the highest rate of tuition fees.

Although dozens of schools charge fees of more than 20,000 pounds a year, 620,000 children - or 7 per cent of all school pupils - are now privately educated, according to the latest census by the Independent Schools Council. Although the total numbers attending ISC schools are down by 3,250 pupils from 504,830 in 2004, the combined drop in overseas pupils and the end of the assisted places scheme equates to a real rise of 1,837 more British pupils attending private school. Jonathan Shepherd, the general-secretary of the Independent Schools Council, said that more girls now attended day school than boys for the first time since 1982, and that although overall numbers have dropped 0.6 per cent, this was against a demographic dip of 1.2 per cent.

More importantly, Mr Shepherd insisted that with a record 92.2 per cent of independent school-leavers going to university, rising to 95 per cent among girls, the ISC had found no evidence of universities discriminating against them. "We continue to take a number of people in our schools from disadvantaged backgrounds, so it would be a tragic irony if by giving them help they find another hurdle at university," he said. "However there is no evidence, apart from anecdotal here and there that this is happening. The evidence is on the contrary that more of our students are going on to university than before."

In 1997 the Government abolished the assisted places scheme, which had helped to pay the private school fees of around 100,000 pupils from less well-off families. Now, just under a third receive some form of assistance with fees, usually in the form of bursaries. More worrying, Mr Shepherd said, was that 60 per cent of A grades at A level in modern languages were achieved in private schools, a trend that was "uncomfortably high" and reflected in both sciences and engineering.

But it is precisely because of this, said Priscilla Chadwick, the leader of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference, that universities cannot afford to discriminate. "A lot of students are doing a majority of subjects which universities value enormously, in sciences and languages, and these in particular contribute to the admissions to universities," the principal of Berkhamsted Collegiate School in Hertfordshire, said.

Although the 1.5 per cent drop in boarders was "disappointing", it was blamed largely on the 10 per cent drop in pupils from China, Hong Kong, Russia and the US who had been put off by the doubling of visa fees. That rise was in addition to flights home and the average annual cost of boarding fees of 19,000 pounds, which included an average fee increase of 5.8 per cent for last year alone.

In London around 20 per cent of parents send their children to private school, compared with a national average of seven per cent. At Westminster School, Tristram Jones-Parry, the head master, has said that in the past few years applications from girls has risen from 180 to 240. "They have become more aware that these days you don't just float into a decent university. You need top grades at both A level and at least five or six A* grades at GCSE, and I think girls are becoming aware of that at an earlier age," he said. Twenty-five years ago, the male-female ratio at university was 60:40, but in recent years that has changed to 56 per cent female, to 44 per cent male.

Source

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

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

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

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19 May, 2005

A LOST RACE IN INDIANAPOLIS

Indianapolis Public Schools operates some of the worst dropout factories in the nation. Hundreds of students each year quit school, most landing in dead-end jobs or prisons. In some families, dropping out has become a way of life with neither parents nor children completing high school. IPS claims an official graduation rate of 90 percent. District administrators, however, admit the number is lower -- shockingly lower.

IPS Board President Kelly Bentley, in a meeting with editorial writers, pegged the district's graduation rate at 28 percent. A Star Editorial Board analysis found a 35 percent completion rate for the class of 2004. National and local researchers report IPS graduation rates ranging from 28 to 47 percent, depending on the formula used. Manual High School Principal Ken Poole admits that "what we're doing right now is not working." It's not for lack of trying.

* Manual freshmen who didn't make it out of middle school until age 16 -- and other at-risk students -- are put under the watchful eye of Shirl Miller-Smith, who keeps tabs on their grades and attendance as the "mother hen" of the Alpha Program.
* To keep students from skipping class, they're put to work tending children in Manual's all-day kindergarten.
* Social workers scour neighborhoods to find students who haven't shown up for class. Occasionally, they pick them up and drive them to school.

Yet, on average just 125 -- 27 percent -- of the 450 freshmen who enter Manual in a typical school year progress to their senior year on time. One freshman, David Kline, who turns 16 this month, already declares, "I'll finish this year out and then that'll probably be it."

Manual's "promotion power," or ninth- to-12th grade attrition rate, is the worst in the state. In fact, all five IPS high schools promoted less than 60 percent of their freshmen to seniors on time. IPS fares worse than school systems in New York City, Detroit and Chicago. "This is the first district I have seen where all high schools are doing this poorly," said Robert Balfanz, a Johns Hopkins University researcher who analyzed the data for The Star.

More here



FRENCH EDUCATION BEING DESTROYED BY ISLAM

France's educational system appears headed towards meltdown. An article by Olivier Guitta in the May 9th Weekly Standard reports that a leaked study conducted between October 2003 and May 2004 under the auspices of France's inspector-general of education, Jean Pierre Obin, describes an educational system that is cracking under the strain of a growing, non-assimilating Muslim population.

Orbin sent ten inspectors to examine 61 schools in 24 school departments, most of which were located in ethnically segregated neighborhoods. The inspectors found two consistencies in these schools: an increase in Muslim religious expression and an across-the-board denial, from classroom to regional administration, that the incursion of Islam into the classroom is creating serious problems for students.

Orbin found that Muslim students regularly boycott classes that concern Voltaire, Rousseau and Moliere, whom the students accuse of being anti-Islamic. The students also protest the Crusades and frequently deny the Holocaust. Orbin's report cites Muslim students' refusal to use the "plus" sign in mathematics because it looks like a crucifix; Muslims boycotting class trips to churches, cathedrals and monasteries; and forcing wholesale changes in school lunch fare to accommodate their religious and cultural practices. The report mentions a teacher who keeps a copy of the Koran on her desk for reference when controversial historical issues arise. Obin's investigators also found that most Muslim students refuse to participate in sports such as swimming, "the girls out of modesty, the boys because they do not want to swim in girls' water or non-Muslim water."

Unsurprisingly, one of the problems faced by the schools cited in the Orbin report is rampant anti-Semitism. In these schools, the term "Jew" has become an insult, even among the youngest students. Orbin's investigators reported that teachers generally ignore this problem, attributing it to "the youth culture," instead of addressing it head-on. Jewish students and those students thought to be Jews are increasingly being assaulted by Muslim students. Because of this, many Jewish students are forced into switching schools or hiding their identities.

Predictably, the biggest losers in the schools where Islam has made inroads, are women. Female students are intimidated by young Muslim men assuming the role of religious police who forbid them to play sports, wear skirts or makeup and force them to wear traditional Muslim headscarves, even though official French policy forbids the wearing of headscarves in public schools. When called to the blackboard, some female Muslim students even put on long coats for fear of retribution from their male Muslim counterparts. Obin's investigative team found that most female Muslim students were too frightened to tell them what their punishments would be if they disobeyed these unwritten rules.

Interestingly enough, the investigators found that the schools most effective in dealing with the problem of Islamization were the ones that completely refused to tolerate it. Because of this finding, the Obin report recommends a policy of "no compromise with Islamist demands." The question is, will France have the stomach to implement Obin's recommendation? Its feeble reaction to the race riots that occurred on March 8, 2005 in response to proposed educational reforms provides a possible answer.

Source



Supporting the troops? Not on campus: "It's been a tough couple years for America's antiwar movement. Unable to effect change at the ballot box and frustrated by the lack of popular support for its agenda, the antiwar crowd has turned its sights on the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) and other military recruitment on college campuses across the country. It's becoming increasingly common for antiwar activists to stage protests and disruptions at college job fairs involving military recruiters. ... Of course, there's absolutely nothing wrong or illegal with exercising one's First Amendment rights and staging a peaceful protest on campus. But activists are not content to simply protest the presence of military recruiters. ... In San Francisco and Santa Cruz, mobs of protesters disrupted job fairs, forced military recruiters to leave and succeeded in either significantly delaying or shutting down the entire event."

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

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

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

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18 May, 2005

THE BRITISH VERSION OF "SCIENCE"

The science that all pupils study from the age of 14 is to focus more on "lifestyles", general knowledge and opinion and less on chemistry, biology and physics, says the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. It published a "revised programme of study" that will govern the content of GCSE from 2006, to "ensure increased choice and flexibility for pupils so that they can study science relevant to the 21st century".

Instead of learning science, pupils will "learn about the way science and scientists work within society". They will "develop their ability to relate their understanding of science to their own and others' decisions about lifestyles", the QCA said. They will be taught to consider how and why decisions about science and technology are made, including those that raise ethical issues, and about the "social, economic and environmental effects of such decisions". They will learn to "question scientific information or ideas" and be taught that "uncertainties in scientific knowledge and ideas change over time", and "there are some questions that science cannot answer, and some that science cannot address".

Science content of the curriculum will be kept "lite". Under "energy and electricity", pupils will be taught that "energy transfers can be measured and their efficiency calculated, which is important in considering the economic costs and environmental effects of energy use".

More here



PHILADELPHIA GRADUALLY GOING PRIVATE

Maxcine Collier had been principal of the 400-student Anderson Elementary School in Southwest Philadelphia for five years when, in 2001, she was told that a for-profit company, Edison Schools Inc., was going to take over the school's management from the Philadelphia School District. Parents and teachers were apprehensive, she said. But more than three-quarters of Anderson's students were performing below grade level, according to Pennsylvania state testing standards. The school, in a neighborhood that borders suburban Upper Darby, housed many special-education students from other parts of the city. "There was no cohesiveness. Many of the children were from elsewhere, and they didn't bond, which hurts education, especially in urban settings," Collier said. "We knew something had to be done better."

Three years later, Collier said, Edison's curriculum, particularly in math and writing, has doubled the number of children who reach state proficiency levels and has unified her teachers. "We still have a long way to go, but I can see already we are on the right track," she said.

Last month, the Philadelphia School Reform Commission, which runs the nation's fifth-largest school district, awarded contracts to Edison to operate two more public schools, in addition to the 20 it gave the company three years ago. The 20 schools were considered among the worst performing elementary and middle schools in the city -- many with less than 10 percent of students at grade level -- and the district was seeking ideas on how to improve them. Though six other organizations, including Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania, were given contracts to manage schools, it is Edison that has taken the lead and come under the most scrutiny as the third academic year of Philadelphia's school "privatization" trial ends next month. Edison, which manages five charter schools in the District of Columbia, has the largest number of Philadelphia schools under its supervision and is the only provider to be offered more by the commission this year.

It has been loudest at proclaiming its purported successes and, perhaps only because it is the largest, taken the brunt of the criticism. It almost went out of business in 2001 when Wall Street traders dropped its stock to less than $1, contending that Edison could not survive managing a mere 20 schools. Edison has since been taken private and asserts that it is solvent. "I think a lot of people in public education around the country have been watching us," said Chris Whittle, Edison's chief executive. "It is in Philadelphia where the movement of outside management of schools is most advanced, and Edison is in the lead here. It is our most high-profile commitment ever, and we accept the criticism and praise that will come."

The privatization movement in Philadelphia was an outgrowth of an agreement between then-Gov. Mark Schweiker, a Republican, and Mayor John F. Street, a Democrat, that the state would offer more funding for the city's schools if it had more control over how they were run. The state appointed the School Reform Commission, which essentially runs the district, with James Nevels, an influential attorney and head of an investment firm, as its chairman.

Critics, including the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, which represents most of the unionized employees in the district, complained that Edison would reassign teachers willy-nilly. After much wrangling, Edison did not get the exclusive contract it wanted, and the teachers union continued to represent teachers and principals. Though many experienced teachers transferred out of the Edison schools, all the schools began that first year fully staffed. "There was a concern at the time that Edison wouldn't be solvent, but I am a pension manager and did the due diligence and determined they would be viable," Nevels said. "It has turned out marvelous, too. There was a lot of outcry at the beginning, which isn't all bad. But when we awarded the two schools to Edison at the April meeting, there was nary a peep."

Nevels and Richard Barth, Edison's manager in Philadelphia, said that based on a standardized state test, grade-level proficiency in the schools Edison manages has increased from 6 percent to 21 percent of students in the first two years of the contract.

More here



FUNDAMENTAL FLAWS IN PUBLIC EDUCATION

From his address at the nation's governors' conference, I give you Bill Gates: "American high schools are obsolete," he said, adding, "By obsolete, I don't just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed and underfunded.... By obsolete, I mean that our high schools-even when they are working exactly as designed-cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.".....

As a matter of historical fact, our public education system was designed two centuries ago, in large part, to honor a racist public policy. This was well researched and reported in the late E. G. West's book, Education and the State (Institute for Economic Affairs, 1965). Private schools were doing just fine, providing what markets provide in exceptionally efficient and, indeed, wise ways: a highly diverse approach to teaching students, not the statist and mainly one-size-fits-all approach, but they also did something very benign and decent-in their diverse and decentralized way they extended their services to all races and religions. But the politicians at the time couldn't stomach this, so they decided to impose a public education system that would be appropriately racist and discriminatory, to fall in line with the prevailing mainstream public philosophy of racism. The result is what we see now, a defunct public education system, defunct not because of some recent mistakes, as Mr. Gates contends, but because of a fundamental flaw in it, its association with government.

Most of us who have gone through the various stages of American public education may not realize this but we have been part of a massive collectivized system, not unlike one the Soviet Union would have championed and from which, in time, it choked to death. Elsewhere public education remains partly functional only because it tends to be highly elitist and does not aim, as it does in America, to accommodate the egalitarian pedagogical philosophy of providing everyone with schooling, nearly to the level of a guaranteed college degree.

The bottom line is that education, like all other productive, creative services in society, is better off decentralized, privatized. Sure some will have to seek out special help, but so do some as they seek to satisfy their clothing, housing, or nutritional needs. Nonetheless, once we abandon the fantasy that everyone needs to be subjected to the same schooling and everyone needs to have his property taxed so as to support this contorted system, the sort of hopes Mr. Gates, and others, with different but equally legitimate agendas for young people, are voicing will no longer have to go unsatisfied. There will be plenty of schools responding to the varied needs to American students and the opportunities that face them in all the disciplines of education. There will, in short, be entrepreneurship in education, as there is in the software industry.

No doubt, this approach is going to be dismissed with total disdain by some-first, by the people who are wedded in their thinking to how government is the solution to all human problems, and, second, by those who are currently mindlessly employed by the state educational systems across the country and care not a whit for proper schooling but mostly for their continued steady employment, not unlike those who have worked for defunct and misguided-and indeed more or less unjust-institutions throughout human history. But they really aren't the best source of wisdom about what young human beings need in the way of an educational alternative to what we have now, an evidently bankrupt one

More here

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

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

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

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

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17 May, 2005

SOME DELIBERATELY MISLEADING RESEARCH:

This week a new empirical study claiming to show that public schools do a better job than private schools has made a big media splash. But the study is deeply misleading. The authors make claims their statistical method can't possibly justify. And if you guessed that the study got off the ground with help from the educational status quo, you'd be right. If there's one thing education research has shown, it's that private schools do a better job than public schools. The consensus in favor of this among empirical studies is as strong as on anything in education-policy research. Indeed, this is just the sort of thing that makes people wonder why we social scientists spend so much time doing empirical studies to prove things that everybody already knows.

Well, one reason we do it is to counteract the effects of propaganda and bad research. This new study, conducted by researchers at the University of Illinois, was first published by an openly anti-voucher think tank located at Columbia University's Teachers College. It's getting media play now because it was picked up by the journal of Phi Delta Kappa, a professional organization for teachers. The authors themselves make no bones about what their real target is. One author told the Christian Science Monitor that their study "really undercuts a lot of those choice-based reforms." Translation: People only support vouchers because they don't realize that private schools are actually worse than public schools.

Another reason why the study is getting attention is owing to its size: The data set includes 23,000 students. People tend to assume that a big study is automatically good. But the same rule applies in research as in so many other things: size does matter, but technique matters a lot more. The researchers take raw test scores from isolated years and apply statistical controls for race, socioeconomic status, and disabilities. While the raw scores are higher in private schools, they find that once you apply the statistical controls public-school students actually have higher test scores. They characterize this as evidence that public schools do a better job than private schools. In fact, it shows nothing of the kind.

The main problem is that they use scores from isolated years. That is, they take a snapshot of student achievement rather than tracking achievement over time. While they do take snapshots from different years, they have no way to track students from one snapshot to the next, which is no better in practice than taking just one snapshot. This is important because if you don't track students over time, you can't establish a causal connection between the type of school a student attends (public or private) and test scores. In other words, their data have nothing to say about the relative quality of public and private schools.

A much more likely explanation for the latest study's results is that when students enter private schools, they tend to have test scores a little lower than other students of their race and socioeconomic status. That seems counterintuitive, because people are used to thinking of private-school students as privileged. And so they are - because of their race and socioeconomic status. But that's precisely what this study controls for. In fact, it makes perfect sense that within each racial and socioeconomic group it's the low performers whose parents will be motivated to make the sacrifices necessary to put them in private schools. What counts is whether those students make better or worse gains over time after they enter private school - and that's just what this study can't tell us. I could go on, but instead I'll let the authors explain it for themselves. Buried in the back of the study, they write:

NAEP data [the test score set they use] do not allow for examinations of growth in achievement over time, nor do they include information about student movement between school sectors. Therefore, correlations between school sector and achievement are not demonstrably causal. In other words, one cannot conclude from this analysis that public schools are more effective at promoting student growth than private schools.

Read that last sentence again: One cannot conclude from this analysis that public schools are more effective at promoting student growth than private schools. So what about all the huffing and puffing in the front of the study - "At this time when market-style reforms are changing the public school landscape, this study offers fresh evidence that challenges common assumptions about the general superiority of private schools," etc.? It's just smoke and mirrors.

As it happens, there's a large body of very high-quality research that does allow us to evaluate the causal connection between school type and student achievement, and it overwhelmingly finds that private schools do better. The most convincing evidence comes from seven studies using "random assignment," the same method used in medical trials. In all seven studies, students who won a random lottery to use a school voucher at a private school had significantly greater test-score gains than similar students who lost the lottery and stayed in public schools. Numerous studies using other methods have also produced a very strong consensus in favor of this finding.

As a general rule, whenever a researcher announces that his study finds something that contradicts all the other empirical evidence, and the finding just happens to coincide with the self-interest of powerful political groups, it's a good idea to do a reality check. One can only hope this study doesn't damage the chances that more students will be empowered to attend superior private schools through voucher programs.

Source



OVERPAID AND UNDERWORKED TEACHERS ON LONG ISLAND: "Moderate" $100,000 salaries for the lucky ones

What you expect from a powerful union

East Islip isn't the only community where teacher pay is under scrutiny. Across the Island, school costs, including salaries, are projected to rise an average of 7.2 percent next year -- the eighth year in a row that spending has outpaced both inflation and enrollment growth. With budget votes coming up on May 17, the spotlight has focused on teacher salaries and benefits, which account for more than 50 percent of most districts' budgets.

Long Beach's school board, for example, is weighing a recommendation for a two-year freeze on teacher's pay. The recommendation comes from a board-appointed committee representing civic associations, business groups and others, and is widely viewed as a bargaining chip in ongoing contract negotiations. For next year, Long Beach proposes a $97.6-million budget that would raise spending 6.2 percent and taxes 9.9 percent.

Proponents of a freeze note that teachers have done better financially than many private-sector workers in recent years. A freeze, these supporters say, would provide homeowners with tax relief. "My husband's working two years without a salary increase," said a member of the advisory group, Mindy Warshaw, whose spouse is an electrician. "And with the rising costs of health care, something's got to give."

Teacher representatives insist that pay raises aren't as high as they appear, because they are offset by retirements of those highest on the pay scale who are replaced by lower-paid teachers. Those representatives add that higher school spending is largely in response to employers' demands for better-trained graduates with advanced degrees. "I hear very few of those business people saying teachers don't deserve what they're getting," said Dick Iannuzzi, a former Central Islip teacher who recently was elected president of New York State United Teachers, the state's largest faculty union. Rather, Iannuzzi added, the usual complaint is that higher spending is simply unaffordable. Teacher unions contend the state should deal with that problem by increasing aid payments to schools, thus curbing local property taxes. Islandwide, raises for teachers generally run 3 percent to 4 percent annually -- a figure that union leaders say reflects the cost-of-living.

Frank Volpe, a Long Beach math teacher who heads the union there, cites this regional pattern in arguing against a local freeze. "Long Beach is no different than any other community, and their teachers shouldn't be treated any differently," he said.

But taxpayer groups and school business managers note these raises are boosted by other provisions buried within contracts - everything from "longevity" raises to additional compensation for college credits - that drive up total compensation 5 percent or 6 percent. All this adds up to a median teacher's salary on the Island of about $67,800 and top pay of about $102,200 for those in the upper 5 percent. Figures are for 2003-04, the latest available, and are the highest for any region in the state

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

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

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

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16 May, 2005

MATH AND SCIENCE GETTING THE CHOP IN TEXAS HIGH SCHOOLS

Unbelievable! Just the pathetic bit they learn in grade school will be accepted as enough for a High school diploma -- Another meaningless diploma that just passes the buck for testing onto somebody else. Pity the kids are going to be deceived about what is adequate, though

Houston ISD students could earn high school diplomas without taking a single math or science class after their sophomore year under a proposal that is drawing criticism from some national education experts. Critics say the change will leave students unprepared for college and the workplace. "I'm surprised they would be considering this move," said Anne Tweed, president of the 55,000-member National Science Teachers Association. "That's a step backward."

Superintendent Abe Saavedra wants to do away with a policy that mandates three years of math and science courses for all high school students. Instead, students who pass high school-level courses in the eighth grade would get credit toward a diploma. State law requires three math and science credits to graduate. Saavedra's proposal, which is expected to win school board approval today, runs counter to a national trend of school systems requiring students to spend more time in math and science classes before they graduate. The decision is even more curious, some education experts said, given the fact that more than two-thirds of HISD's 2004 graduates who enrolled in local community colleges last fall were required to take remedial courses. "That policy will result in more youngsters having to take remedial math when they go on for further study," said Gene Bottoms, senior vice president of the Southern Regional Education Board and director of the High Schools that Work program. "It will also mean more students will not be able to pass employer exams that have a math component."

Saavedra told school board trustees earlier this week that the three-year requirement is unnecessary. It was adopted in 2001, he said, because trustees wanted high school juniors taking math and science classes at the same time they take the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills exam, which students must pass to graduate. The current policy is based more on improving test performance than on academic quality, Saavedra said. What matters, he said, is that students take the necessary courses. "We absolutely are not lowering the standard," Saavedra said. Still, Saavedra acknowledged that having high school students take more math and science classes would better prepare them for college. "If we required four years of math, it would work toward reducing the remedial requirement," he said. "I'm not telling you I won't come back with that kind of recommendation (in the future)."

More here



U.S. PUBLIC SCHOOLS NO PLACE FOR BRIGHT KIDS

PC types unhappy with Harvard President Larry Summers' candor about women in science may not like any better his thoughtful analysis of a swept-under-the-rug problem with the nation's public schools. That is unfortunate, because Summers is on to something in his concern that public educators, in rightly focusing on helping lower-achieving kids, are dumbing down the curriculum for top courses. In the process, they may be pushing many of the best and the brightest into private schools. Summers did not suggest that such was happening on a widespread scale. Yet the exodus from public schools by many high-achievers whose parents can manage the financial burden makes that point. And the long-term implications of such policies are troubling in their effect on top students.

Summers got into hot water by suggesting discrimination might not be the reason women are underrepresented in science and math fields. As a result, he seems wary of making his point about schools too strongly. Summers spoke about schools at a reunion of Neiman Fellows, alumni of a Harvard program that selects 12 American and 12 non-American midcareer journalists for a paid year of study. In his remarks, Summers explained why the national interest requires that more attention and resources be poured into public schools to improve learning, especially among historically lower-achieving groups.

Hooding Carter III, State Department spokesman during the Iranian hostage crisis, asked Summers to square that notion with the reality that most of those in the room, and a majority of Harvard faculty, send their kids to private schools. Summers paused, then talked about how parents must do what is best for their children, which is both obvious and beside the point. In fact, increasing numbers of parents are sending their children to private schools, according to a U.S. Department of Education study. A number choose home-schooling for reasons of finances or faith.

However, many top students attend academically rigorous private schools out of parental concerns that the public schools do not sufficiently challenge them, because of the attention rightly focused on poor learners. Summers, a public-school product, is one of those parents. While Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, he sent his three children, two of whom are now in high school and the third in middle school, to a public school in D.C.'s suburbs. After he became president of Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., in 2001, however, he put them in a private school. Summers said that when he used to attend meetings of senior Clinton aides, he was one of only two sending their kids to public schools. Clinton, you may remember, disappointed many supporters, who see private education as somehow un-American, when he chose to send his daughter, Chelsea, to a private school.

Summers said he recently talked to the other official, whom he did not identify, who had been sending his kids to public school. Summers said that man was reconsidering his decision, because the reading requirement in his son's honors English course had been cut in half to make it possible to triple the number of students able to take the course.

Some may wonder why the country should care if those with the financial means to afford private education do so. Obviously, any child attending private school is one fewer to be educated on the taxpayer's dime. Yet it is not just the wealthy who are sending their children to such private schools. I am among the many middle/upper-middle-class parents, some receiving financial aid, who are investing in their children, even though they would rather spend the money on a new car or nice vacation. At Harvard, private-school graduates make up a third of the student body -- not unusual for a prestigious college -- but roughly three times their share of high-school students. If the public-school exodus of top young minds continues, it will undermine future support for public education among those better able to pay the necessary taxes.

Source



INDEPENDENT EXAMS: A GOOD IDEA FROM THE U.K.

Independent schools should get off their knees, speak with one voice and set their own exams, a conference of private sector headmasters and governors was told yesterday. "Why have independent schools underplayed their hand for so long?" demanded Anthony Seldon, the headmaster of Brighton College, who organised the conference. "We have let ourselves be sidelined by governments of the Left and Right. They have sneered at us when they should have feared us."

Independent schools were major players in the economic, social and cultural life of the nation, he said. They saved Whitehall £2 billion a year because parents paid fees. Their academic results dominated the league tables. They were judged to be among the most successful schools in the world. "Yet independent schools still do not fully realise their importance in national life or make the contribution they could be making," Dr Seldon said. Because of their timidity, they were seen as schools for "toffs", yet the parents of their pupils were often not affluent. They were made out to be self-serving and self-seeking, yet the schools engaged in considerable, and under-recognised, charitable activities. They had allowed themselves to be accused of price-fixing, yet there were no cartels pushing up fees. Independent schools offered better value for money than state schools.

Independent schools should be setting their own agenda, not merely reacting to the Government, said Dr Seldon, who has written biographies of John Major and Tony Blair..... They should set up their own college for training the heads and teachers of the future. And they should devise their own exams to replace A-levels. The urgency of that was underlined by Geoff Parks, the director of admissions at Cambridge, who told the conference that A-levels no longer differentiated between good candidates and exceptional ones. "They don't test the ability to think, analyse or reason - they don't tell us what we want to know," he said. "The introduction of bite-size modules has led to predictable questions, prescribed answers and a mentality of 'learn, examine and forget'. "Able candidates have lost the opportunity to demonstrate their originality and creativity. The failure of A-levels is a tragedy."

More here



World-class standards: Rhetoric and reality: "For several years, education policy analysts in the United States have been aware of the fact that students in the Four Tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore) regularly outperform U.S. students, especially in mathematics and science. This fact underlies the U.S. concern about raising achievement to 'world-class' levels, which are generally interpreted to mean the levels attained by students in the Four Tigers and the higher-achieving countries in Western Europe. Now South Korea is raising the bar again, even before U.S. students reach the levels already attained by South Korean students. In 2007, all Korean students will be eligible for a voucher to cover the cost of one year of pre-primary education at any educational facility the parents choose."

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

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

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

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15 May, 2005

AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOLS NOT CHALLENGING: HOW SURPRISING!

A majority of high school students in the USA spend three hours or less a week preparing for classes yet still manage to get good grades, according to a study being released today by researchers who surveyed more than 90,000 high school students in 26 states. The team at Indiana University in Bloomington calls the findings "troubling." The first large study to explore how engaged high school students are in their work, it adds to a growing body of evidence that many students are not challenged in the classroom.

Just 56% of students surveyed said they put a great deal of effort into schoolwork; only 43% said they work harder than they expected to. The study says 55% of students devote no more than three hours a week to class preparation, but 65% of these report getting A's or B's. Students on the college track devoted the most time to preparation, but only 37% spent seven or more hours a week on schoolwork, compared with 22% of all high school students. Among seniors, just 11% of those on the college track said they spent seven or more hours a week on assigned reading, compared with 7% of all seniors. Surprisingly, 18% of college-track seniors did not take a math course during their last year in high school. That could help explain why studies show that 22% of college students require remediation in math. The Indiana study also found that 82% of students said they planned to enroll in some form of post-secondary education, and most said they expected to earn at least a bachelor's degree. But the study says "a substantial gap exists" between what students do in high school and what they will be expected to do in college.

Martha McCarthy, a senior professor at Indiana University who directs the research project, says the results should serve as "a wake-up call. There is a need for students to work harder and do more rigorous coursework" if they are going to be ready for college. Research has found that one-quarter of students in four-year colleges require substantial remedial work. The new study is part of a long-term project called the High School Survey of Student Engagement, a companion project since 2004 to the National Survey of Student Engagement, which has been administered to 900,000 students at four-year colleges since 2000. Both projects are supported primarily by schools interested in learning about the attitudes and experiences of their students. McCarthy says many high schools have been surprised to find how little time students spend on homework and have instituted changes, such as brief quizzes based on homework assignments.

The study found that as students advance through high school, they are less likely to feel challenged to do their best work. Researchers also found that a higher proportion of students are likely to spend four or more hours a week doing personal reading online than doing assigned reading for their classes. McCarthy says students' positive attitudes toward school were highly correlated with coming to class prepared, participating in discussions and getting prompt feedback from teachers. But 56% of students said they never or only sometimes get prompt feedback.

The results probably will provide momentum to a growing effort to reform high schools. In February, a survey of recent graduates found that whether they went on to college or entered the workforce, about 40% said they were not adequately prepared in school. That study was done in conjunction with the first National Education Summit, an event aimed at rallying governors around high school reform. A number of governors have pledged to make high school reform a priority.

Source



Let's Get Rid of Public Schools

By DAVID GELERNTER

Discussions of school choice and vouchers nearly always assume that public schools are permanent parts of the American educational scene. Increasingly I wonder why. Why should there be any public schools? I don't ask merely because the public schools are performing badly, although (as usual) they are. Pamela R. Winnick discusses science teaching in a recent issue of Weekly Standard. One survey found that a whopping 12% of graduating U.S. seniors were "proficient" in science. Global rankings place our seniors 19th among 21 surveyed countries.

Agreed: The national interest requires that all children be educated and that all taxpayers contribute. But it doesn't follow that we need public schools. We need military aircraft; all taxpayers help pay for them. Which doesn't mean that we need public aircraft companies. (Although if American airplanes ranked 19th best out of 21 contenders, the public might be moved to do something about it.) Schools aren't the same as airplane factories, but the analogy is illuminating.

What gives public schools the right to exist? After all, they are no part of the nation's constitutional framework. Neither the Constitution nor Bill of Rights requires public schools. And in one sense they are foreign to American tradition. Europeans are inspired by state institutions. Americans are apt to be inspired by private enterprise, entrepreneurship, choice.

I believe that public schools have a right to exist insofar as they express a shared public view of education. A consensus on education, at least at the level of each state and arguably of the nation, gives schools the right to call themselves public and be supported by the public. Once public schools stop speaking for the whole community, they are no different from private schools. It's not public schools' incompetence that have wrecked them. It's their non-inclusiveness. American public schools used to speak for the broad middle ground of American life. No longer. The fault is partly but not only theirs. A hundred years ago, a national consensus existed and public schools did their best to express it. Today that consensus has fractured, and public schools have made no effort to rebuild it.

To find out where things stood 100 years ago, check the celebrated 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1910). "The great mass of the American people are in entire agreement as to the principles which should control public education." No one would dare say that today. "Formal instruction in manners and morals is not often found" in American public schools, the Britannica explained, "but the discipline of the school offers the best possible training in the habits of truthfulness, honesty, obedience, regularity, punctuality and conformity to order."

The broad national agreement that made such statements possible no longer exists. Americans today disagree on fundamentals - on the ethics of sexuality and the family, for example. Recently the Boston Globe described an argument at a Massachusetts kindergarten over a book for young children about "multicultural contemporary family units," including gay and lesbian ones. One 6-year-old's father arrived at school to insist on his right to withdraw his child from class on days when this book was on the program. School administrators "urged" him to leave and, when he didn't, had him arrested. (Michelle Malkin's blog pointed me to the story.) Lately there have been other similar incidents in the news.

Then there are parents like my wife and me. We sent our children to public and not private secondary school exactly so they'd become part of a broad American community. Instead, our boys have been made painfully aware nearly every day of their school lives that they are conservative and their teachers are liberal. Making parents feel like saps is one of the few activities at which today's public schools excel.

Public schools used to invite students to take their places in a shared American culture. They didn't allow a left- or right-wing slant, only a pro-American slant: Their mission, after all, was to produce students who were sufficiently proud of this country to take care of it. Today's public schools have forfeited their right to exist. Let's get rid of them. Let's do it carefully and humanely, but let's do it. Let's offer every child a choice of private schools instead. And if this kind of talk makes public schools snap to and get serious, that's OK also. But don't hold your breath.



OFFICIAL MASSACHUSETTS CROOKS

Post lifted from Wizbang

The battle cry of the education industry is "we need more money!" I've noted before that there seems to be an inverse relationship between the amount of money spent on education and actual results, and this morning I see a rather graphic example of just what sorts of things one can expect when you throw more and money at school systems.

The state of Massachusetts has just completed an audit of just how the city of Everett spends its money, and it's appalling. They uncovered over half a million dollars that was spent in -- to put it kindly -- "questionable" means and causes. They found bids submitted -- and won -- by companies long out of business. And rampant cronyism of the likes that would make even a Chicago politician blush.

A couple examples:

* $59,000 budgeted to help students prepare for state assessment tests went to lettering football helmets, a homecoming parade, and a slew of other pet causes.
* $180,000 in legal fees to a lawyer who can't seem to explain just what work he did for that money.
* $64,000 for two homecoming parades.
* $830,000 in grants to hire new teachers instead went into raises for existing staff.

But I'm sure it'll all be OK. After all, it was all done for the children.



Corruption in the Public Schools: The Market Is the Answer

One of the most frequently voiced objections to school choice is that the free market lacks the"accountability" that governs public education. Public schools are constantly monitored by district administrators, state officials, federal officials, school board members, and throngs of other people tasked with making sure that the schools follow all the rules and regulations governing them. That level of bureaucratic oversight does not exist in the free market, and critics fear choice-based education will be plagued by corruption, poor-quality schools, and failure.

Recently, news surfaced that appeared to justify critics' fears. Between the beginning of 2003and the middle of 2004, Florida's Palm Beach Post broke a slew of stories identifying corruption in the state's three school choice programs. The number of stories alone seemed to confirm that a choice-based system of education is hopelessly prone to corruption. But when Florida's choice problems are compared with cases of fraud, waste, and abuse in public schools-schools supposedly inoculated against corruption by "public accountability"-choice problems suddenly don't seem too bad.

So which system is more likely to produce schools that are scandal free, efficient, and effective at educating American children? The answer is school choice, precisely because it lacks the bureaucratic mechanisms of public accountability omnipresent in public schools.

In many districts bureaucracy is now so thick that the purveyors of corruption use it to hide the fraud they've perpetrated and to deflect blame if their misdeeds are discovered. However, for the principals, superintendents, and others purportedly in charge of schools, bureaucracy has made it nearly impossible to make failed systems work. Public accountability has not only failed to defend against corruption, it has also rendered many districts, especially those most in need of reform, impervious to change.

In contrast to our moribund public system, school choice isn't encumbered by compliance-driven rules and regulations, which allows institutions to tailor their products to the needs of the children they teach and lets parents select the schools best suited to their child's needs. And accountability is built right in: schools that offer parents what they want at a price they are willing to pay will attract students and thrive, while those that don't will cease to exist.

More here

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

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

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

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



14 May, 2005

ALL KIDS ARE EQUAL IN PALM BEACH

As nearly as they can make it, anyway

The difference between excellence and mediocrity? Starting next year in elementary schools in Palm Beach County, Florida, the answer is no. Officials there plan to replace A-F grading with numbers 1, 2 and 3: 1 means the student is working a year or more below grade level, 2 indicates the student is working less than a year below grade level and 3 means they are working at or above grade level.

But, "at or above grade level" means there is no distinction between a child barely making the grade and an academic standout. It means getting "100" or "65" on a test is exactly equal. Does that sound like an educational system preparing kids for the vicissitudes of the real world? Or more like one creating another generation of brats taught to believe that feeling good about themselves is a viable substitute for genuine achievement? These days everyone's kid is a "genius" - no matter how mediocre they really are

Source



BLOOMBERG BUNGLING

Michael Bloomberg, one of the most successful businessmen in the United States, pledged to fix the public schools when he ran for mayor of New York in 2001. He said that he could get better results without any additional money, just by applying proven managerial techniques. He promised a back-to-basics curriculum and an end to bilingual education. After his election, he persuaded the state Legislature to give him control of the school system, with its 1.1 million students and 80,000 teachers. He selected as chancellor of the schools a respected antitrust attorney, Joel Klein, who--like Mr. Bloomberg--had no experience in education.

Neither Mr. Bloomberg nor Mr. Klein knew about the war of ideas that had been raging among educators for many years. On one side, beloved by schools of education, are the century-old ideas of progressive education, now called "constructivism." Associated with this philosophy are such approaches as whole language, fuzzy math, and invented spelling, as well as a disdain for phonics and grammar, an insistence that there are no right answers (just different ways to solve problems), and an emphasis on students' self-esteem. Constructivists dislike any kind of ability grouping or special classes for gifted children. By diminishing the authority of the teacher, constructivist methods often create discipline problems.

On the other side are those who believe that learning depends on both highly skilled teachers and student effort; that students need self-discipline more than self-esteem; that accuracy is important; that in many cases there truly are right answers and wrong answers (the Civil War was not caused by Reconstruction); and that instructional methods should be chosen because they are effective, not because they fit one's philosophical values.

Messrs. Bloomberg and Klein embarked on school reform knowing nothing of this heated debate. Mr. Klein selected Diana Lam as his top deputy. At the time she was superintendent of schools in Providence, R.I. More important, she was a constructivist and a proponent of bilingual education. At her urging, the mayor expanded bilingual education instead of eliminating it. Ms. Lam picked citywide reading and math programs that no one would describe as "back to basics." The reading program, called Month-by-Month Phonics, is akin--despite its name--to the whole-language philosophy. Because of the program's weak phonics component, the New York State Education Department withheld $38 million in federal funds until Mr. Klein reluctantly installed a research-based reading program in 49 of the city's nearly 700 elementary schools. The city's elementary mathematics program, Everyday Math, has been criticized by university mathematicians who complain that it neglects basic computational skills.

In the fall of 2003, Chancellor Klein introduced the mandated reading and math programs. About 200 relatively high-scoring schools were exempt from the mandates, and many others adopted supplementary programs to supply the basics that are missing from the standard approach. Still, teachers frequently complained of micromanagement, due to the heavy-handed imposition of lockstep constructivism. In some districts, supervisors roamed classrooms with stopwatches, and teachers were penalized if they spent a few too many or too few minutes on a mandated activity. The new curriculum has proven to be a bonanza for the education establishment, particularly schools of education such as Columbia's Teachers College, which receives millions of dollars each year to train teachers in constructivist methods.....

Since Mr. Bloomberg's original program was announced, the reform agenda has grown. Now one of its highest priorities, funded by the Gates Foundation, is to break up large high schools into small schools of fewer than 500 students. Many of these new small schools are ultraprogressive, appear to lack academic rigor and have inexperienced leaders. Since dozens of them have been established simultaneously, with inadequate planning, the remaining large high schools are bursting at the seams, as students are reassigned to them to make room for the minischools. Some large high schools are now operating at 200% of capacity.

In the first round of state testing in 2004, the results were mixed. In the fourth grade, where the pedagogical changes were concentrated, the citywide scores in math were up by 1.4%, but in reading they declined by 3%. In some poor districts, such as Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, the score declines in reading were in double digits.

State scores for 2005 will be released in the next few weeks. It is widely expected that scores will rise, reflecting the unusual amount of time devoted this year to test preparation. Social studies and other subjects have been shelved to focus on the all-important tests of reading and mathematics (81% of eighth graders failed the state social studies exam, a 20% increase in the failure rate since Mayor Bloomberg took charge). A modest amount of time devoted to test preparation makes sense; but when it consumes vast amounts of instructional time, it does not. In addition, the state education department quietly informed elementary schools that they could exempt children with limited English proficiency from city and state reading tests this year even if they had been in U.S. schools for as long as five years and even if they were tested in English last year. This change will remove an unknown but significant number of low-scoring students from the testing pool and boost reading scores, an advantage not previously available.

Everyone gives Mr. Bloomberg credit for taking on the biggest public policy challenge in the city. Yet the experience of these past two years suggests that it may not be a great idea to give total control of the schools to the mayor. Education is now in the thick of partisan politics. Decisions are made and press releases issued with the election in mind, rather than based on careful evaluation of what works. There is a lesson here. Business leaders who want to reform schools should educate themselves about the issues or risk being co-opted by the education establishment. Who would have believed that smart, pragmatic Mike Bloomberg would become a champion of constructivist pedagogy?

More here



NYC OFFICIAL ADMITS THAT MANY NYC 8TH-GRADERS STILL CANNOT READ

A stunning 81% of the city's eighth-graders flunked the state's basic social studies exam last year - and the scores have gone down annually since the test debuted in 2001. The troubling spiral was disclosed by Education Department officials yesterday at a hearing on civics and social studies instruction called by the City Council's Education Committee. "Clearly we have a crisis on our hands," said City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz (D-Manhattan), who was chairwoman of the hearing and blasted educrats for having a lack of urgency about how to adequately address the problem. The failure rate for eighth-graders on a test that measures students' knowledge of basic history and government has climbed steadily from 62% in the 2001-02 school year, to 76% in 2002-03 and 81% in 2003-04.

Top educrats who testified offered conflicting reasons for the drop in scores. Elise Abegg, the department's social studies czar, said some schools were spending too much time teaching students how to read and do math out of fear that they would be labeled a "failing school" under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

But J.C. Brizard, the department's executive director for high schools, said the real problem was that the 60-question standardized test requires that students be able to read and understand the questions - something he said many cannot do. "They have trouble comprehending what they are reading," Brizard said.

Councilman Oliver Koppell (D-Bronx) said it isn't just a reading problem. "I am dumbfounded that when I go into a class and I ask them who the mayor is, or what a congressman does, they don't know," he said.

Source



Federal court upholds Arizona tax credits : "Ruling in what school choice advocates have called 'the most frivolous' challenge ever filed against a school choice program, a federal district court judge on March 24 upheld Arizona's scholarship tax credit program as constitutional, dismissing a lawsuit from the state American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) chapter. Since Arizona enacted the Tuition Tax Credit Program eight years ago, it has been under almost continuous legal assault by opponents of school choice, first in state courts and more recently in federal ones."

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

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

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

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13 May, 2005

TEACHING QUALITY IMPOSSIBLE IN A DEGRADED LOS ANGELES SYSTEM

I have been a language teacher with the Los Angeles Unified School District since 1991. Today I will sign a final agreement after an exhaustive grievance process, in which I will never be allowed to teach in the District again. For its part, the District will remove my negative teacher performance evaluation. During my last two years at Dorsey High, I've had my classroom burnt to the ground, had a death threat, physical assaults, and constant accusations of racism. Community "activists" in our area have written woeful letters to the Superintendent, imploring her to remove me from my position as a Spanish teacher. Their accusation: Students are failing my class because they're forced to learn Greek and Hebrew instead of Spanish.

I've endured countless demeaning "parent conferences" where lack of student comportment and academic achievement was inevitably spun into my "lack of classroom management and INSENSITIVITY TO THE NEEDS OF A DIVERSE STUDENT POPULATION." Students who did little or no homework, refusing to turn in term papers and not having passed a single exam, were able to manipulate conferences with allegations of racism or personal animosity. When students were sent from my room to the Dean's office for outrageous behavior, such as stabbing another student with a pencil, obnoxious epithets or racial slurs, and open defiance directed against the teacher, they would never arrive; instead, they were picked up by security (found walking around the campus) while our ever-resourceful administration documented a "clear lack of student-teacher rapport and managerial skills." The picture I've painted becomes clearer when one considers that the student who threatened to kill me was allowed to run for student body office! If I had any doubts about my stature on our campus, they were dispelled by such overt attitudes such as this.

Despite numerous excellent references and observations on the part of counselors, mentor teachers, and coaches about my dedication to upholding high academic standards and maintaining a high level of student responsibility and values, I spent two years in a hostile environment without respite from community or administration. Only two individuals came to my assistance during this nightmare: Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, community activist and director of BOND International, and Congressman Dana Rohrabacher of Huntington Beach. Congressman Rohrabacher was sufficiently convinced of egregious nature of campus relations that he contacted Superintendent Roy Romer for clarification. He was stonewalled again and again, with each inquiry going unanswered (the Superintendent was either on vacation or too busy to get back to the Congressman- this over a period of several months and many messages left by staff). Rev. Peterson was present at one of my grievance hearings and was moved to make the comment that I could never get a fair hearing from my administrator since in his words, "She is a blatant racist."

I am not a loser nor will I ever have cause to join the walking wounded. I am a successful author, athlete, speak five languages, and run a successful surfing school. A far more lucrative lifestyle awaits me, far beyond the stifling social prison I've experienced at Dorsey. Yet there is a deep sadness in me, a feeling of disconnectedness from the many students with whom I was fortunate enough to befriend, impacting their lives with a sense of a world built on achievement, maximum effort, and tireless academic rigor. As I told the District Superintendent during my last stage of the grievance process, I forgive the death threats, the physical assaults, the demeaning and racial slurs hurled at me by my charges. If they didn't have the support of "activists" and malevolent do-gooders intent on re-addressing perceived wrongs and power trips by "outsiders" toward their community, this despicable behavior and attitude never would have occurred. In several cases, stacks of letters of complaints were waved at me by my principal ( I was never allowed to see the letters or respond to them) as proof that I was not getting along with my students. She offered this as the justification for burning down my classroom.

It will be hard for me to reconcile with an administration bent on political correctness that serves to ramrod a concerned and caring teacher right out of the District. My union rep told me frankly that I was "the wrong man in the wrong community." This is what hurts me most of all. I gave it my best, taking students with severe emotional and family problems, tempering them with a sense of achievement for a job well done: "You missed the deadline for the term paper? It's OK, your grade won't be as high as it should, but just get it in to me as soon as you can-with spelling and grammar checked.." Around campus, the many students who didn't manage to pass my class would greet me each morning, ask how things are going-each of them knowing that ultimately, I was on their side. I will miss my students, and I know that they won't forget me.

From Rabbi Nachum Shifren



AN EDITORIAL IN THE WILDERNESS FROM CALIFORNIA

A distressing number of California students have completed 12 years in classrooms but can't read on a tenth-grade level or do eighth-grade math. So they can't pass the state's high-school exit exam within six tries in three years. Should they graduate anyway? The correct answer is no, they shouldn't. Graduating kids who can't meet even minimum standards does them no favors - or their prospective colleges or employers. And it diminishes the meaning and reputation of high-school diplomas for all students, including the majority capable of passing the exit exam.

According to the Los Angeles Times, 83 percent of the class of 2006, when the exit exam is supposed to count, have already passed the English portion of the test, and 82 percent have passed the math. Nevertheless, the exam, once slated to begin with the class of 2004 and since postponed until the class of 2006, may be postponed yet again. Critics want it delayed unless schools offer a "performance assessment" to kids in lieu of the exit exam, or until school districts statewide achieve perfection in teacher credentialing, student/teacher ratios and curriculum materials.

A bill mandating such subjective testing and a bill mandating such a utopian system at gargantuan cost have just been approved by legislative committees. If either measure becomes law, the California high-school exit exam as a genuine measure of student achievement will join the passenger pigeon in extinction. That would suit critics concerned less about actual achievement than graduation, as though it were a rite of passage to which seat time entitles every student. It shouldn't suit parents, students or teachers who understand that an unearned diploma raises hopes that the working world quickly dashes. And it especially shouldn't suit the many Latino and black parents whose children attend underachieving schools and whose achievement potential is consistently underrated by legislators, grass-roots groups and the teachers union looking for ever more votes, breaks and pay.

The choices are not lowering expectations and standards for all students, or leaving many minority kids behind, or spending more money Californians don't have. The choices are either spending the K-12 budget - $54 billion in 2005-06, or $10,084 per pupil - on the adults in a system stultified by union rules and bureaucratic bloat or spending it on the kids in the classroom, and meaningful results on a meaningful exit exam.

Source



YOU CAN GRADUATE FROM HIGH SCHOOL WITHOUT BEING ABLE TO READ AND WRITE PROPERLY BUT YOU'VE GOT TO DO P.E.

A decision to take Advanced Placement biology instead of gym will cost a Bow High School senior her diploma, but it won't keep her from going to college in the fall. Though Isabel Gottlieb is a good student, a trumpet player in the school band and holds varsity letters in three sports, she discovered last fall she was one gym class shy of having enough credits to graduate next month.

She asked for a waiver, but the school wouldn't budge, telling her instead she had to drop a class to take gym. "Why would I drop an AP biology class to take P.E.?" the 18-year-old said. "It's just not on my priority list."

"Waivers vary from school to school and they're not standardized at all," said Principal George Edwards. Gottlieb added the class last year after the school told her she had to take it, but then dropped it when she found out it was too much on top of classes she was already taking, including two Advanced Placement classes and calculus. Both Gottlieb and her mother said the school suggested dropping either band, chorus, AP biology or calculus. But she and her mother decided sacrificing any of those would have diminished the quality of Gottlieb's education.

"I'm trying to get into college and someone isn't going to want to see someone drop an AP biology class a month into the year in order to pick up P.E.," Gottlieb said. There will likely be no compromises in time for graduation. The class is not offered in the summer. And it may not matter. Gottlieb already has been accepted to Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., where she plans to major in biology.

More here

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

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

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

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12 May, 2005

SMART HOME-SCHOOLERS START COLLEGE EARLY

My son did well in his dual enrolment university course last year but he was a private school student

When Sarah Cheney began excelling in her home school lessons, her parents decided it was time for some accelerated learning at the next level. So they joined what has become a growing trend for home schooled high school students. The Cheneys signed up their daughter for dual-enrollment courses at Pasco-Hernando Community College, an option once reserved for students in public schools. ``She's done well,'' said Richard Cheney, her father. ``She's gotten all A's, except one B.'' Dual enrollment allows teenagers to take college courses while they are still in high school. The credits earned are counted toward both a high school diploma and a college degree. Students pay no tuition, but home school students pay for their textbooks. School districts typically pay for textbooks for their dual-enrollment students.

At one time, dual enrollment was strictly for public high school students. Then the program was made available to students in private schools. In 1996, the Legislature expanded the program to include home school students. ``It's an equity issue to be sure we are fair,'' said Paul Szuch, vice president of educational services for PHCC. ``It makes sure all students, whether they are in public school, private school or home school, have access to the program.'' Initially, PHCC didn't see many home school students. That began to change about three or four years ago as what had been one or two students quickly grew, Szuch said. Today, PHCC has 47 dual-enrollment agreements with home school families.

Colleges report that dual enrollment, in general, is growing. But Szuch said the home school portion appears to be increasing at a faster rate at PHCC. Szuch anticipates there could be as many as 60 home- school students in the PHCC program when the fall semester begins in August. ``It wasn't too long ago we didn't have any,'' Szuch said......

LaWanda Sutherland of Plant City, who is District 5 director of the Florida Parent- Educator Association, said dual enrollment is popular among home school families. ``Home schoolers love it,'' Sutherland said. ``It's an opportunity for them to get their AA [associate's] degree while they are getting their high school diploma.'' Sutherland's daughter Jenny, 17, was in dual enrollment at Hillsborough Community College last year, earning 14 credit hours, said Sutherland, who began home schooling her children 12 years ago. She also has a son, Britt, 14, and another daughter, Erin, 12.

The Florida Parent-Educator Association district that Sutherland represents consists of Pasco, Hillsborough, Pinellas, Hernando and Citrus counties. The association doesn't push dual enrollment, but it does make sure its members are familiar with it. Each year, the association holds a graduation ceremony for home school students. Several of the students already have earned an associate's degree by the time they accept their high school diplomas, she said.

That may not be surprising, considering trends Moore has observed at St. Petersburg College. ``These students take more courses than students in public and private schools because they have more time,'' Moore said. Students in public and private schools have a structured schedule during the day to work around, while the home school students don't, he said.........

Richard and Beverly Cheney began home schooling their daughter, Sarah, 19, in their New Port Richey home after she finished sixth grade in public schools. ``She was only doing fair, a little below average on achievement tests,'' Richard Cheney said. ``Since then, she's several grades ahead on most of it.'' The Cheneys make use of a computer program designed with home school students in mind. When Sarah was 16, the Cheneys learned about the dual-enrollment option and decided she had progressed well enough to take on the more challenging courses at PHCC. Sarah has taken college courses in such subjects as marketing, English and psychology.

Sarah said as a young girl in public school, she had been a shy loner. During her years of home schooling, though, she developed into an outgoing teenager. Moving back into a classroom setting with other students at PHCC wasn't that difficult a transition, she said. ``I really enjoyed it,'' she said. ``I opened up more and liked to interact more with people after I was home schooled awhile.''

More here



CALIFORNIA DEMOCRATS INSIST ON LOW STANDARDS

In the Legislature, the Democratic majority's only agenda is to undermine hard-won education reforms that had been championed by Democrats in the past. The high school exit examination tops the list. On party line votes, Democrats on Assembly and Senate education committees have passed bills that would delay the exam in perpetuity or transmogrify the requirement into mush. SB 517 would suspend the exit exam until a school district can show that it has fully certified teachers in core subject areas, instructional materials aligned with content standards, supplementary instruction and counselor/pupil ratios of 1 to 476. If we wait until the school system is perfect, we'll never make progress in creating a meaningful high school diploma.

Another bill, AB 1531, would create a fragmented system, where each school district could create its own "performance assessments." All students would still take the exit exam, but could not be denied a high school diploma if they fail - unless they were given two or more ways to complete an "alternate performance assessment." This would render diplomas worthless.

The fact is, the exit exam requirement for a high school diploma, beginning with the Class of 2006, already is having positive effects. High schools are offering more demanding courses. They're working with feeder middle schools. They are identifying students who need additional help and offering more remedial programs. Students have a new incentive to take high school seriously and parents to demand higher quality.

Democrats are poised to take a giant step backward. Next on their list is charter schools. California was the second state to authorize public charter schools and could rejoin other states leading charter school development by allowing colleges and universities to authorize and oversee public charter schools. Many school districts simply have no interest in charter schools or no capacity to do proper oversight. Yet, on a party line vote, Democrats rejected SB 844, which would expand charter school options in a positive way and require greater accountability for oversight.

More here

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

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

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

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11 May, 2005

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES CATCHING THE AMERICAN DISEASE

Top universities are setting targets that favour state pupils over independent pupils in return for being able to set higher fees, The Times has learnt. Despite ministers' assurances that top-up fees would not affect admissions, vice-chancellors have told the official regulator that they would take more state pupils as long as they could charge maximum fees. The move was attacked last night by senior academics for making social engineering part of the admissions process rather than pure academic merit.

Plans sent to the Office for Fair Access (Offa) by Cambridge, Exeter, Leeds, King's College London and York all pledge to change their student intake in return for being able to raise annual fees to œ3,000. Charles Clarke, in his letter of guidance to Offa as Education Secretary last year, said that it should have "nothing to do with admissions" but focus on efforts to increase applications from students in under-represented groups. Professor Alan Smithers, the director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, said: "It is very foolish of the universities to tie themselves to these targets because they may have to widen admissions on social background rather than academic ability to meet them. They will then weaken themselves as universities."

A spokesman for the Independent Schools Council, which represents more than 1,000 fee-paying schools, said: "Admissions targets or benchmarks or quotas based on the type of school an individual went to are a clear breach of the principle that students should be treated on their individual merits and not as representatives of a group. Any targets based on this . . . might lead in individual cases to unfair discrimination." Clarissa Farr, the president of the Girls' Schools Association, said that efforts to widen the pool of qualified applicants to top universities should not extend to social engineering of admissions.....

Cambridge told Offa that it planned to raise state school admissions from 57.6 per cent to 60-63 per cent. It acknowledged that it already had four applicants for every place. Oxford set no admissions target and limited itself to increasing the proportion of state school applicants from 57 per cent to 62 per cent. This will require it to attract another 270 state candidates per year. King's College London included an admissions target after declaring that it "fell short" of government performance indicators for state school entrants. It promised to revise selection procedures if necessary to raise the proportion from 70 per cent to 76 per cent.

More here



JUNK TEXTBOOKS

Several centuries ago, some "very light-skinned" people were shipwrecked on a tropical island. After "many years under the tropical sun," this light-skinned population became "dark-skinned," says Biology: The Study of Life, a high-school textbook published in 1998 by Prentice Hall, an imprint of Pearson Education. "Downright bizarre," says Nina Jablonski, who holds the Irvine chair of anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences. Jablonski, an expert in the evolution of skin color, says it takes at least 15,000 years for skin color to evolve from black to white or vice versa. That sure is "many years." The suggestion that skin color can change in a few generations has no basis in science.

Pearson Education spokesperson Wendy Spiegel admits the error in describing the evolution of skin color, but says the teacher's manual explains the phenomenon correctly. Just why teachers are given accurate information while students are misled remains unclear.

But then there's lots that's puzzling about the science textbooks used in American classrooms. A sloppy way with facts, a preference for the politically correct over the scientifically sound, and sheer faddism characterize their content. It's as if their authors had decided above all not to expose students to the intellectual rigor that is the lifeblood of science. Thus, a chapter on climate in a fifth-grade science textbook in the Discovery Works series, published by Houghton Mifflin (2000), opens with a Native American explanation for the changing seasons: "Crow moon is the name given to spring because that is when the crows return. April is the month of Sprouting Grass Moon." Students meander through three pages of Algonquin lore before they learn that climate is affected by the rotation and tilt of Earth--not by the return of the crows. Houghton Mifflin spokesman Collin Earnst says such tales are included in order to "connect science to culture." He might more precisely have said to connect science to certain preferred, non-Western, or primitive cultures. Were a connection drawn to, say, a Bible story, the outcry would be heard around the world.

Affirmative action for women and minorities is similarly pervasive in science textbooks, to absurd effect. Al Roker, the affable black NBC weatherman, is hailed as a great scientist in one book in the Discovery Works series. It is common to find Marie Curie given a picture and half a page of text, but her husband, Pierre, who shared a Nobel Prize with her, relegated to the role of supportive spouse. In the same series, Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb, is shown next to black scientist Lewis Latimer, who improved the light bulb by adding a carbon filament. Edison's picture is smaller.

Jews have been awarded 22 percent of all Nobel Prizes in science, but readers of Houghton Mifflin's fifth-grade textbooks won't get wind of that. Navajo physicist Fred Begay, however, merits half a page for his study of Navajo medicine. Albert Einstein isn't mentioned. Biologist Clifton Poodry has made no noteworthy scientific discoveries, but he was born on the Tonawanda Seneca Indian reservation, so his picture is shown in Glenco/McGraw-Hill's Life Science (2002), a middle-school biology textbook. The head of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins, and Nobel Laureates James Watson, Maurice H.F. Wilkins, and Francis Crick aren't named.

More here



ARROGANT JESUIT COLLEGE COPS LAWSUIT

Today, former graduate student Scott McConnell filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y., because it expelled him from its education master's program based on his personal beliefs. In January 2005, administrators summarily dismissed McConnell because he had expressed views that opposed "multicultural education" and had stated in an academic assignment that "corporal punishment has a place in the classroom."

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) took up McConnell's case, reminding Le Moyne, a Jesuit college, that its actions breached its own promises to respect students' academic freedom and due process. When Le Moyne refused to address these concerns, FIRE publicly exposed Le Moyne's repressive actions.

McConnell is represented in the suit by New York civil rights attorney Samuel A. Abady and by the Center for Individual Rights in Washington, D.C. "Le Moyne has had multiple opportunities to right this wrong," remarked David French, president of FIRE. "If Le Moyne College had followed its own policies and procedures regarding freedom of expression and due process, it would not only have done the right thing but also would have saved itself a lot of time, money, and embarrassment."

During the Fall 2004 semester, Scott McConnell submitted a paper advocating strong discipline in the classroom for a course taught by Professor Mark J. Trabucco. Trabucco gave the paper an "A-" and wrote a cryptic note to McConnell that his ideas were "interesting" and that he had shared the paper with Cathy Leogrande, the graduate education department chair. Then, without any warning, Leogrande expelled McConnell from the graduate education program in a Jan. 13, 2005, letter, in which Leogrande stated that she had "grave concerns" about a "mismatch" between McConnell's "personal beliefs" and "the Le Moyne College program goals." At the time of his expulsion, McConnell had earned a 3.78 grade-point average for the fall semester and an "excellent" evaluation for his work in a Syracuse elementary school classroom.....

McConnell's lawsuit, filed in the Supreme Court of the State of New York in the County of Onondaga, asks for McConnell's reinstatement to Le Moyne's graduate education program and for millions of dollars in damages for violations of civil rights laws and New York state law. "As we said before, the fight for the academic freedom of Scott McConnell and for all Le Moyne students will not end just because administrators don't feel like addressing the issue," commented Greg Lukianoff, FIRE's director of legal and public advocacy. "FIRE, along with Scott McConnell and his attorneys, will pursue this issue in the court of public opinion, and now in the courts of law, until Le Moyne College honors its own commitments and this injustice is corrected."

More here

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

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

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

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10 May, 2005

WEAK ARGUMENTS AGAINST SCHOOL CHOICE

Considering the overwhelming evidence in favor of the productive power of free individuals and markets, the only parts of the public debate on school choice tax credits that are "just plan wrong" are the arguments presented against deregulating what has been called the last public monopoly.

* It will drain money from public schools.
You can say deregulating telecommunications resulted in AT&T losing money, but deregulation unarguably improved consumer choice, pricing and product innovation. We are better off because we created a telecommunications marketplace rather than rely on a telecommunications monopoly. Politically boxing out competitors because they will upset the financial interests of the status quo is the worst reason to deny parents a competitive market for education.

* There are no alternatives in the poorest counties.
The public school is the only school. It is true that there are currently few alternatives in the poorest counties. However, this situation is the result of government assuming the role of a monopoly provider with enough political clout to suppress competition. Poor parents certainly have the desire for better education. Tax credits and scholarship-granting organizations will give them the purchasing power.

* Some parents just don't care.
School choice will do nothing to help those children. It is simply not justifiable to deny freedom of choice to the majority of parents who do care because a small number of parents do not.

* School choice tax credits encourage private schools with little or no accountability.
Market standards of accountability are more objective and much more useful than government ones. To say that school choice relies on market standards of accountability, not government standards, is actually high praise. There are many examples of markets creating aids for the consumer seeking reliable measures of quality. For example, The U.S. News and World Report Guide to Colleges, The Princeton Review, Consumer Reports magazine and Morningstar mutual fund ratings, to name just a few. Contrast that with a public school system that rates itself. Is it any wonder that we are regularly told we are making "wonderful progress" while our graduation rates and SAT scores remain among the lowest in the country?

* School choice puts public money into private schools.
This is simply false. If you spend money on child care, you can claim a tax credit. It is your money when you spend it, and the government simply gives you a break for spending it on child care as opposed to video poker or the lottery. Such a break is not public money, any more than a tax-deductible charitable contribution. Any claim to the contrary is completely dishonest.

Improving education must consist of some form of school choice, the greater the better. Consumers have benefited from one deregulated industry after another, from telecommunications, to securities, to airlines. Education should prove no different. America is a land of opportunity precisely because limited resources are allocated by competition and markets, not by political clout. Somewhere out there, there is a Sam Walton or Bill Gates of education, just waiting for the opportunity to exercise real creativity in the effective education of children. School choice tax credits may be just what that person is waiting for. We should not keep him or her waiting any longer.

More here



MATHEMAGICS

Two or three times a month, when at home in California, Arthur Benjamin slips into a tuxedo for another of his one-man magic shows. He neither pull rabbits out of hats, nor saws people in half. Instead, he entertains audiences with what he calls Mathemagics. "My mission in life is to bring mathematics to the masses," said Dr Benjamin, a mathematics professor at California's Harvey Mudd College, and now a visiting professor at the University of NSW. Maths "can be wonderfully creative and fun".

At his shows for schools, teachers groups or corporate functions, he hands out calculators, challenging audiences to beat his brain at solving mental arithmetic. What's the square of 963? It's 927,369 he replied without hesitation. "I can rattle off 100 digits of pi," he added. Give him your birthdate and he can tell you on which day of the week you were born. "People love the birthday one because it's so personal," he said. Unlike Dustin Hoffman's character in Rain Man, Dr Benjamin is not an autistic savant. "Autistic savants can very rarely explain how they are doing it. The numbers just appear to them." Dr Benjamin must calculate the answers in his head, which is the point of his performances. He wants to show that everyone, if they know the tricks and short cuts, can tackle complex mental arithmetic. "After a little practice, you can throw away the calculator."

One of his tricks is doing his mental arithmetic from the left, instead of the right, as most people are taught at school. In the case of finding the square of 963, for example, "it is more important to know the answer is around 900,000, than that it ends in nine. It allows me to start saying my answer while I'm still calculating. It gives the illusion that I am even faster."

Diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder as a child, and required to take valium daily between four and 14, Dr Benjamin said he was not a genius. Achieving at maths, like playing a musical instrument or juggling, just required practice, which he said was why homework was so important for students. With Mathemagics, "people come away, even if momentarily, thinking about mathematics more positively. If that attitude stays for just a couple of people in the audience, especially children, my mission is accomplished.

Source

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

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

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

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9 May, 2005

BUREAUCRATIC LOGIC: THE AREA OF BRITISH EDUCATION WHERE DEMAND IS GREATEST IS THE AREA WHERE PROVISION WILL BE CUT BACK!

Thousands of students hoping to embark on part-time study for degrees next year will find their ambitions blocked as universities fear that they will no longer be able to afford the cost of running the courses. Vice-chancellors believe that part-time degrees could gradually disappear as more universities turn to full-time education to maximise funding. With more than 812,000 students, the part-time sector involves 42 per cent of higher education students and is the biggest growth area for universities. However, from 2006, part-time students, unlike their full-time counterparts, will not be eligible for maintenance grants or bursaries and will have to pay increased tuition fees.

Ivor Crewe, president of Universities UK, said: “There is a real danger that universities will see full-time education as financially more advantageous than part-time education. Universities will feel they can’t charge higher fees to part-time students and, given that higher education is a loss-making enterprise, universities will be tempted to move full-time.” Last week the Higher Education Statistics Agency disclosed a 4.2 per cent rise in the number of part-time first-year students to 406,550 in 2003-04. In ten years the number of part-timers has risen by 92 per cent, against 10 per cent for full-timers. In spite of this growth, the needs of part-time students, many of whom are single parents and mature students, were ignored in the Higher Education act 2004. As a result, universities face putting up tuition fees to the proportionate level of full-time degrees or finding money from elsewhere to pay for them.

Les Ebdon, Vice-Chancellor of Luton University, which has 4,504 part-time students, says: “The question is, if we charge £1,500 upfront, will they be able to pay or will we just kill the market off? There is a very powerful disincentive now to recruit part-timers and a real danger that part-time degrees could wither on the vine”.

From next year, full-time undergraduates will have to repay tuition fees only when their income exceeds £15,000 a year, and the real rate of interest will be set at zero. As a result, universities feel able to charge full-time undergraduates higher fees of up to £3,000 — a rise of 30 per cent per student over the combined tuition fee plus government grant that universities receive now. Vice-chancellors say that although part-time students must pay fees upfront without access to the same generous loans, many will feel unable to raise the money, even though the cost of provision is the same, and will instead cut courses.

Carl, a single father of twins who is self-employed, graduated in law from Luton in 2003. Having paid £90 a week in childminding charges, he said that higher tuition fees would certainly put him off doing a degree now. “It’s not worthwhile, if you balance what you lose from working with what you gain from a degree. A degree already costs £4,000 over four years, so if they’re now saying they’ll charge £3,000 upfront and no bursaries, it’s a double whammy.”

David Latchman, Master of Birkbeck College in London, which with the Open University is the only institution in Britain dedicated to part-time degrees. Professor Latchman fears he will have to put up fees, but he is concerned that any increase without a rise on the cap on fee waivers will hit the very people Birkbeck should help. “Everything is calculated to put off precisely the ones you want to attract — we’re not going to put off the City banker, but the single mum who wants to climb another rung on the career ladder with a degree,” he said.

A survey of students at Birkbeck suggested that more than 40 per cent would be forced to give up their courses if fees were increased. That figure rose to 90 per cent at the Open University. David Vincent, Vice-Chancellor of the Open University, says that higher fees would be unsustainable and has offered instead to lay on courses in subjects that other universities have dropped. “We can support subjects which individual universities can no longer afford to teach, but I don’t think an increase in business that way is an adequate alternative.”

The Times



AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITIES DUMBING DOWN FOR FOREIGN CASH

Which is very short-term thinking (HECS are fees paid by Australian students for their tuition )

Australia's universities have become so financially dependent on foreign students that their viability as learning and research institutions hinges entirely on that market. But the pressure of maintaining the 220,000 international students needed each year to keep the campuses afloat has led to a drop in academic standards, a Herald investigation has found. Severe funding cuts to universities began when the Howard Government was first elected in 1996, and the institutions have sought to make up the shortfall by aggressively recruiting foreign students, who pay at least the full cost of their course. These students now make up one in five enrolments in Australian universities. But growth in numbers of foreign fee-payers who rescued universities from collapse has now slowed, leaving the institutions vulnerable.

One university, the University of Central Queensland, gets almost 40 per cent of its revenue from international students. Four others, Curtin University in Western Australia, Macquarie University, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Wollongong University, receive more than 20 per cent of their revenue in the same way, according to Education Department figures.......

The Minister for Education, Brendan Nelson, agreed universities were exposed to "the vagaries of the international marketplace". He said that like "our wheat producers, our coal exporters", the commodities and services industries, "if you rely significantly on international markets and exports for your wellbeing and financial security, in a sense you are exposed".

The higher education market is at the mercy of the dollar, changes in student visa regulations or political instability in students' home countries. Universities also face competition from the US, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore and Malaysia. China, the biggest source of foreign students for Australia, is priming its universities to keep more at home. In 12 months to February China provided about 30,000 of Australia's almost 130,000 foreign higher education students.

Academics say that in some courses entry requirements have been lowered, courses have been made easier and marking has been softened to help overseas students cope with their English language problems. In a survey of 21 economic department heads, Professor Peter Abelson, of Macquarie University, found most believed standards in undergraduate economics courses had fallen over the past decade when foreign student numbers exploded in commercial subjects.

Foreign funding is also skewing the university curriculum towards money-making subjects. Faculties that attract fee-payers had become booming "sausage machines", said the NSW secretary of the National Tertiary Education Union, Stuart Rosewarne, while less lucrative subjects, such as languages, struggled for survival or died......

Many Australian undergraduates, whose HECS fees rise regularly, are complaining of overcrowding in lectures and tutorials. Staff-student ratios have soared. In 1993 there were just 14 students for every teacher. Now it is 21.

Government funding has been restored this year to a similar level as a decade ago but is not indexed. Professor Sutton said this meant income would fall behind university running costs over the next three years. He predicted that universities would hit a financial crisis in 2008 unless the Government budges. However, he defended university standards, saying the quality of students Australia produced was "very high indeed for a mass system, which we are now".

Dr Nelson said that subjects such as the pure sciences and humanities were "bleeding" but blamed universities for offering populist subjects such as aromatherapy and golf club management instead of focusing on "core" subjects.

More here

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

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

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

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8 May, 2005

AINT PUBLIC SCHOOLS GREAT?

Rumors of impending violence between black and Hispanic gang members kept an estimated 51,000 students away from city schools on Cinco de Mayo. "I'm devastated that a rumor can cause such fear," said Randy Cornfield, assistant principal at Hamilton High School. "I was telling parents it would be safer to have their kids in school than out on the street or at the mall." The Los Angeles Unified School District reported that about 18 percent of the 290,000 students enrolled in middle and high schools failed to show up Thursday. The absence rate was 8 percent higher than for the previous Thursday. At Crenshaw High School in South Los Angeles, about 1,700 of 2,800 students did not attend - more than a fivefold increase over a normal day. "I am sitting here staring at a mountain of absentee cards," said Johnny Stevenson, an attendance officer. Attendance was expected to return to normal Friday.

A circulating e-mail rumor had said that Hispanic gang members were going to use the traditional Mexican holiday to attack black gangsters in retaliation for drug thefts, Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton said. The rumors followed two outbreaks of ethnic violence that ended with injuries and arrests last month at Jefferson High School in South Los Angeles. Bratton said the LAPD investigated the rumors and concluded they were baseless. However, school and city police beefed up security at campuses as a precaution.

The only violence reported Thursday in the district was a scuffle between about 10 youngsters outside Narbonne High School in the Harbor City area. The lunch-hour confrontation was quickly broken up and there were no arrests, school police Sgt. F. Minutella said.

More here



FAR LEFT LOSE STUDENT ELECTIONS AT UCLA

But their arrogance is undiminished

Results for the Undergraduate Students Association Council elections were released Thursday night, with the opposition slate Bruins United winning council majority – the first time the Student Power! slate and its predecessors will not control council in over a decade. Runoffs will be held for the positions of president and external vice president, as no candidate received a majority of votes. Jenny Wood with Student Power! and Alex Gruenberg with Bruins United will compete for the position of president, and Jesse Melgares with Bruins United and Jeannie Biniek of Student Power! will compete for the position of internal vice president.

Thirty-one percent of undergraduate students voted in the primary elections for a total of 7,241 voters – the largest voter turnout since 1993, when 36.9 percent of undergraduate students participated in an election where free ice cream cones were given to voters. Seven of the nine candidates from the Bruins United slate were elected in the primaries. "We just did something that has not been done in a long, long time," said an ecstatic Gruenberg, the current Financial Supports commissioner.

Gruenberg said Bruins United winning council majority is the completion of the vision the slate has had since its inception, when it was created to challenge the reign of Student Power! Rallying their supporters in Meyerhoff Park with the help of the 8-clap and a bagpiper, Gruenberg promised his slate would make a full sweep in next week's runoff elections.

With the most influential position on council, the presidency, still undetermined, the race isn't over yet, said Joe Vardner, the newly elected Facilities commissioner. Wood said if elected, she is confident she can overcome the barriers of her slate's minority on council. No candidates were elected from the Future Front or the Bruin Liberation Movement slates, and none of their candidates will advance to the runoffs.

Despite having two of their candidates defeated in the primaries, Student Power! candidates say they are ready to fight even harder during runoffs. "This is our university! We own it!" Wood said while rallying Student Power! supporters as they gathered on Bruin Walk after hearing the election results. Student Power! candidates remain optimistic about their prospects for the future, both individually and for action on council. Pointing to the large number of Student Power! supporters still gathered at 10:45 p.m., Biniek said her slate had the ability to get work done, with or without positions in USAC.

Wood said Student Power! candidates and supporters will continue to work toward social justice and issues on their platform, despite minority standing on council. Wood said she will remain active on campus if not elected, but not necessarily on USAC. Bruins United leaders said they will take the overwhelming student support they have received in elections and try to turn it into substantive change on council. "Some changes are going to be happening to student government," said Vardner. "USAC will once again be opened up to all students."

Source



Sex-Ed Curriculum Put On Hold

Post lifted from The Narrow

For those of us tired of being told that homosexuality is normal, natural and morally right, U.S. District Judge Alexander Williams Jr., has put on hold a sex-ed program in Montgomery County MD that would have taught all of these ideas.

Judge Williams agreed with the two groups that filed the lawsuit -- Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum (CRC) and Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX) -- who argued that the curriculum is biased toward homosexuality and dismisses religious perspectives on the subject.

Montgomery County Public Schools "open up the classroom to the subject of homosexuality, and specifically, the moral rightness of the homosexual lifestyle," the judge wrote in his decision.

"However, the Revised Curriculum presents only one view on the subject -- that homosexuality is a natural and morally correct lifestyle -- to the exclusion of other perspectives.

"The public interest is served by preventing [school officials] from promoting particular religious beliefs in the public schools and preventing [the officials] from disseminating one-sided information on a controversial topic," Judge Williams wrote.

The program was to have been taught at three middle schools and three high schools.

It is very refreshing to see a Judge use logic and reason while making a decision. Our society has redefined tolerance not as something that allows leeway from a societal norm but rather something we should not only tolerate, but embrace and condone alternative lifestyles. So, for the Judge to say The Revised Curriculum presents only one view on the subject -- that homosexuality is a natural and morally correct lifestyle -- to the exclusion of other perspectives is quite a stand in this climate.

David Fishback, chairman of the citizens advisory committee that approved the course materials, said he expected Judge Williams to rule against CRC because the curriculum "does nothing more than state basic facts about sexual orientation as understood by every mainstream American medical and mental health professional association."

Nothing quite like statements without facts. Mr. Fishback's assertion that the curriculum does nothing more than state basic facts about sexual orientation as understood by every mainstream American medical and mental health professional association demands evidence. I have seen no valid evidence presented by this advisory committee to back such an assertion. Just because you want to believe something is true, doesn't make it so.

I pray this decision holds and this pro-homosexual program never sees the light of day.

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

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

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

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

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



7 May, 2005

A STATE-FUNDED DIPLOMA MILL -- IN CALIFORNIA, FUNNILY ENOUGH

Plagued with one of the worst on-time graduation rates in the California State University system, officials at CSU Northridge are slashing general-education requirements by 20 percent. But are they sacrificing education for expedience? The purpose of a university, after all, is to produce educated graduates -- not merely to crank out diplomas.

Yes, improving graduation rates is important. Students at the Northridge campus pay a great cost, in terms of time as well as tuition, for their education. Many have family and work commitments to tend to while they're pursuing their degrees. For them, the road to graduation -- only 3.8 percent of CSUN students graduate in four years, and only 32 percent in six -- is intolerably long. In part, that's because of CSUN's demographics, which include older students who must study part time.

Still, the university has good reason to worry about its graduation rate, and it's wise to boost that statistic in whatever educationally sound ways it can. Administrators' plans to offer students "road maps" for graduation in a set period of time, as well as better counseling, are two worthwhile steps in that direction. Reducing graduation requirements is not. Cutting its 58 required general-education credits -- the highest in the CSU system -- to 48, the lowest that the system permits, might speed up graduations, but only by cheapening the value of a CSUN degree.

More here



CHEATING TEACHERS

Leftist ethics at work. "There's no such thing as right and wrong" -- Remember?

A four-month investigation into possible cheating on state tests at two dozen Houston schools has uncovered evidence of cheating at four campuses, school district officials announced Wednesday. Houston Independent School District Superintendent Abe Saavedra moved to fire four teachers: one at Key Middle School, two from Bowie Elementary who now work at other schools, and one at Petersen Elementary. Key Principal Mable Caleb and an assistant principal are being demoted, and the principals at Bowie and Petersen will receive reprimands, Saavedra said.

He announced earlier this year that two Sanderson Elementary teachers are being fired and the principal demoted. All have denied wrongdoing and are appealing Saavedra's decisions. Saavedra ordered the investigation by the newly created Office of Inspector General in January, shortly after the Dallas Morning News reported test-score anomalies at about 400 Texas schools. Investigators found no evidence of cheating on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills at 13 schools and inconclusive evidence at seven campuses, Saavedra said. "The investigation has clearly shown that a few employees at these ... schools helped their students answer questions on the TAKS test," Saavedra said. "A small number of teachers and administrators have profoundly harmed children in our care by taking away their right to a good education. We apologize to those children and their parents, and we will punish those responsible for this wrong that has been committed."

The school district will give the Harris County District Attorney's Office all the evidence collected during the past four months by a dozen investigators who interviewed dozens of students and employees and inspected thousands of pages of testing documents and data, Saavedra said.

More here

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

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

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

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

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



6 May, 2005

"FREAKONOMICS" DISCOVERS GENETICS

Nice to see economists discovering what psychometricians have known for about 100 years

By now, the letters have landed. The fast-track nursery schools and the "gifted and talented" public schools and the Ivy League colleges have mailed their acceptance letters, and parents everywhere are either a) congratulating themselves for having shepherded their children into the dream school or b) chiding themselves for having failed. In the first case, the parents may tell themselves: It was those Mozart quartets we played in utero that primed her for success. In the second case, they might say: I knew we shouldn't have waited so long to get him his first computer. But how much credit, or blame, should parents really claim for their children's accomplishments? The answer, it turns out, is a lot - but not for the reasons that most parents think.

The U.S. Department of Education recently undertook a monumental project called the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, which tracks the progress of more than 20,000 American schoolchildren from kindergarten through the fifth grade. Aside from gathering each child's test scores and the standard demographic information, the ECLS also asks the children's parents a wide range of questions about the families' habits and activities. The result is an extraordinarily rich set of data that, when given a rigorous economic analysis, tells some compelling stories about parenting technique.

A child with at least 50 kids' books in his home, for instance, scores roughly 5 percentile points higher than a child with no books, and a child with 100 books scores another 5 percentile points higher than a child with 50 books. Most people would look at this correlation and draw the obvious cause-and-effect conclusion: A little boy named, say, Brandon has a lot of books in his home; Brandon does beautifully on his reading test; this must be because Brandon's parents read to him regularly. But the ECLS data show no correlation between a child's test scores and how often his parents read to him. How can this be? Here is a sampling of other parental factors that matter and don't:

Matters: The child has highly educated parents.
Doesn't: The child regularly watches TV at home.
Matters: The child's parents have high income.
Doesn't: The child's mother didn't work between birth and kindergarten.
Matters: The child's parents speak English in the home.
Doesn't: The child's parents regularly take him to museums.
Matters: The child's mother was 30 or older at time of the child's birth.
Doesn't: The child attended Head Start.
Matters: The child's parents are involved in the PTA.
Doesn't: The child is regularly spanked at home.

Culture cramming may be a foundational belief of modern parenting but, according to the data, it doesn't improve early childhood test scores. Frequent museum visits would seem to be no more productive than trips to the grocery store. Watching TV, meanwhile, doesn't turn a child's brain into mush after all; nor does the presence of a home computer turn a child into Einstein.

Now, back to the original riddle: How can it be that a child with a lot of books in her home does well at school even if she never reads them? Because parents who buy a lot of children's books tend to be smart and well-educated to begin with - and they pass on their smarts and work ethic to their kids. (This theory is supported by the fact that the number of books in a home is just as strongly correlated with math scores as reading scores.) Or the books may suggest that these are parents who care a great deal about education and about their children in general, which results in an environment that rewards learning. Such parents may believe that a book is a talisman that leads to unfettered intelligence. But they are probably wrong. A book is, in fact, less a cause of intelligence than an indicator.

The most interesting conclusion here is one that many modern parents may find disturbing: Parenting technique is highly overrated. When it comes to early test scores, it's not so much what you do as a parent, it's who you are. It is obvious that children of successful, well-educated parents have a built-in advantage over the children of struggling, poorly educated parents. Call it a privilege gap. The child of a young, single mother with limited education and income will typically test about 25 percentile points lower than the child of two married, high-earning parents.

So it isn't that parents don't matter. Clearly, they matter an awful lot. It's just that by the time most parents pick up a book on parenting technique, it's too late. Many of the things that matter most were decided long ago - what kind of education a parent got, how hard he worked to build a career, what kind of spouse he wound up with and how long they waited to have children. The privilege gap is far more real than the fear that haunts so many modern parents - that their children will fail miserably without regular helpings of culture cramming and competitive parenting. So, yes, parents are entitled to congratulate themselves this month over their children's acceptance letters. But they should also stop kidding themselves: The Mozart tapes had nothing to do with it.



AMERICA NOW ADDS CRAP TESTING TO CRAP EDUCATION

Examinations have long had mindlessly "inclusive" results but now the SAT is going that way too

Not long ago the College Board revamped the SAT, adding an essay section along with the traditional multiple-choice aptitude tests; the essay counts for 25% of the total SAT verbal score. The New York Times reports that Les Perelman, "one of the directors of undergraduate writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology," analyzed all the graded sample tests the board has made public, and concluded, in the Times' words, that the test "is actually teaching high school students terrible writing habits"--namely, the longer the better:

[Perelman] was stunned by how complete the correlation was between length and score. "I have never found a quantifiable predictor in 25 years of grading that was anywhere near as strong as this one," he said. "If you just graded them based on length without ever reading them, you'd be right over 90 percent of the time." The shortest essays, typically 100 words, got the lowest grade of one. The longest, about 400 words, got the top grade of six. In between, there was virtually a direct match between length and grade.

He was also struck by all the factual errors in even the top essays. An essay on the Civil War, given a perfect six, describes the nation being changed forever by the "firing of two shots at Fort Sumter in late 1862." (Actually, it was in early 1861, and, according to "Battle Cry of Freedom" by James M. McPherson, it was "33 hours of bombardment by 4,000 shot and shells.")

Dr. Perelman contacted the College Board and was surprised to learn that on the new SAT essay, students are not penalized for incorrect facts. The official guide for scorers explains: "Writers may make errors in facts or information that do not affect the quality of their essays. For example, a writer may state 'The American Revolution began in 1842' or ' "Anna Karenina," a play by the French author Joseph Conrad, was a very upbeat literary work.' " (Actually, that's 1775; a novel by the Russian Leo Tolstoy; and poor Anna hurls herself under a train.) No matter. "You are scoring the writing, and not the correctness of facts." . . .

SAT graders are told to read an essay just once and spend two to three minutes per essay, and Dr. Perelman is now adept at rapid-fire SAT grading. This reporter held up a sample essay far enough away so it could not be read, and [Perelman] was still able to guess the correct grade by its bulk and shape. "That's a 4," he said. "It looks like a 4."

Perelman's recommendation for students preparing for the SAT: "I would advise writing as long as possible, and include lots of facts, even if they're made up." That's also good advice for those who want to go to work for Dan Rather at CBS's "120 Minutes."

(From Taranto)

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

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

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

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



5 May, 2005

SOME LONG-OVERDUE MOCKERY

College administrators have been enthusiastic supporters Eve Ensler’s play The Vagina Monologues and schools across the nation celebrate “V-Day” (short for Vagina Day) every year. But when the College Republicans at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island rained on the celebrations of V-Day by inaugurating Penis Day and staging a satire called The Penis Monologues, the official reaction was horror. Two participating students, Monique Stuart and Andy Mainiero, have just received sharp letters of reprimand and have been placed on probation by the Office of Judicial Affairs. The costume of the P-Day “mascot” — a friendly looking “penis” named Testaclese, has been confiscated and is under lock and key in the office of the assistant dean of student affairs, John King.

The P-Day satirists are the first to admit that their initiative is tasteless and crude. But they rightly point out that V-Day is far more extreme. They are shocked that the administration has come down hard on their good-natured spoof, when all along it has been completely accommodating to the in-your-face vulgarity of the vagina activists.

V-Day has now replaced Valentine’s Day on more than 500 college campuses (including Catholic ones). The high point of the day is a performance of Ensler’s raunchy play, which consists of various women talking in graphic, and I mean graphic, terms about their intimate anatomy. The play is poisonously anti-male. Its only romantic scene, if you can call it that, takes place when a 24-year-old woman seduces a young girl (in the original version she was 13 years old, but in a more recent version is played as a 16-year-old.) The woman invites the girl into her car, takes her to her house, plies her with vodka, and seduces her. What might seem like a scene from a public-service kidnapping-prevention video shown to schoolchildren becomes, in Ensler’s play “a kind of heaven.”

The week before V-Day, the Roger Williams campus was plastered with flyers emblazoned with slogans such as “My Vagina is Flirty” and “My Vagina is Huggable.” There was a widely publicized “orgasm workshop.” On the day of the play, the V-warriors sold lollipops in the in the shape of–-guess what? Last year, the student union was flooded with questionnaires asking unsuspecting students questions like “What does your Vagina smell like?” None of this offended the administration or elicited any reprimands, probations, or confiscations. The campus conservatives artfully (in the college sense of "artful") mimicked the V-Day campaign. They papered the school with flyers that said, “My penis is majestic” and “My penis is hilarious.” The caption on one handout read, “My Penis is studious.” It showed Testaclese reclining on a couch reading Michael Barone’s Hard America, Soft America.

“Testaclese” tipped the scales when he approached the university Provost, Edward J. Kavanagh, outside the student union. Apparently taking him/it for a giant mushroom, Provost Kavanagh cheerfully greeted him. But when Testaclese presented him with an honorary award as a campus “Penis Warrior,” the stunned official realized that it was no mushroom. After this incident, which was recorded on videotape, the promoters of P-Day were ordered to cease circulating their flyers and to keep Testaclese off campus grounds. Mindful of how school officers had never once protested any of the antics of Vagina warriors, the P-warriors did not comply. The Testaclese costume was then confiscated and formal charges followed.

It is easy to understand why school officials would not want a six-foot phallus wandering around campus; nor why they would ask students not to paper the college with posters describing all the things it likes to do. But that is just the sort of thing the vagina warriors have been doing, year after year, on hundreds of campuses. In fact, P-Day at Roger Williams was mild by comparison. Wesleyan College hosted a “C***” workshop; Penn State held a “C***”-fest. At Arizona State, students displayed a 40-foot inflatable plastic vagina. It was not confiscated and no one was ever threatened with probation.....

But for the short term, college administrators should brace themselves. The rebels at Roger Williams are talking about a Free Testaclese Fund. And word is spreading to other campuses. P-Day and Testaclese will be back next year. And not just in Rhode Island.

Source



BIG MUDDLE IN BRITAIN

Head teachers called on Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, to think again yesterday and abolish GCSEs and A levels in favour of a new diploma. The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) said it was profoundly disappointed by her rejection of reforms set out by Sir Mike Tomlinson. Sir Mike proposed the introduction of a diploma for students aged 14 to 19 to replace GCSEs and A levels within a decade. He said that a single qualification structure would overcome the divide between academic and vocational education, and encourage more youngsters to stay on after 16. Ms Kelly rejected his report in February and instead set out plans in a White Paper to create 14 vocational diplomas to run in parallel with GCSEs and A levels.

Members of the NAHT voted overwhelmingly at their annual conference in Telford, Shropshire, to press the Government for a rethink, saying that the White Paper would deepen divisions between vocational and academic study. Eric Fisk, a member of the NAHT's national council, said that the Tomlinson report had won support from Charles Clarke, Ms Kelly's predecessor, David Bell, the head of Ofsted, and Ken Boston, the chief executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, the Government's exams watchdog. ....

Delegates also complained that grammar schools were being hit by the Government's new secondary admissions system. Local authorities asked parents to give a list of their preferred schools this year in an effort to ensure that every child got the offer of one place, rather than some having none and others holding several. The conference was told that some schools were refusing to consider applications from parents who had not placed them first on the list. As a result, parents in some areas with grammar schools were unwilling to enter their children for the entrance exam because they feared that if they were unsuccessful they would not be considered by the most popular non-selective school. The NAHT voted unanimously to press for a government review of the admissions process.

The head teachers jeered Stephen Twigg, a Schools Minister, after he ruled out extra money to ease a crisis over free time for classroom staff. .... Richard Collins, head of the Whyteleafe School in Surrey, said heads could not afford to employ extra teachers to cover for colleagues so would rely on unqualified classroom assistants to take lessons instead.

More here

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

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

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

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

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



4 May, 2005

THE CURRENT SCENE IN U.S. LITERARY STUDIES

Such has been the politicization of the MLA that a counter-organization has been formed, called the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, whose raison d' etre is to get English studies back on track. I am myself a dues-paying ($35 annually) member of that organization. I do not go to its meetings, but I am sent the organization's newsletter and magazine, and they are a useful reminder of how dull English studies have traditionally been. But it is good to recall that dull is not ridiculous, dull is not always irrelevant, dull is not intellectual manure cast into the void.

The bad old days in English departments were mainly the dull old days, with more than enough pedants and dryasdusts to go round. But they did also produce a number of university teachers whose work reached beyond university walls and helped elevate the general culture: Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, Ellen Moers, Walter Jackson Bate, Aileen Ward, Robert Penn Warren. The names from the bad new days seem to end with the entirely political Edward Said and Cornel West.

What we have today in universities is an extreme reaction to the dullness of that time, and also to the sheer exhaustion of subject matter for English department scholarship. No further articles and books about Byron, Shelley, Keats, or Kafka, Joyce, and the two Eliots seemed possible (which didn't of course stop them from coming). The pendulum has swung, but with a thrust so violent as to have gone through the cabinet in which the clock is stored.

From an academic novel I've not read called The Death of a Constant Lover (1999) by Lev Raphael, Professor Showalter quotes a passage that ends the novel on the following threnodic note:

Whenever I'm chatting at conferences with faculty members from other universities, the truth comes out after a drink or two: Hardly any academics are happy where they are, no matter how apt the students, how generous the salary or perks, how beautiful the setting, how light the teaching load, how lavish the re-search budget. I don't know if it's academia itself that attracts misfits and malcontents, or if the overwhelming hypocrisy of that world would have turned even the von Trapp family sullen.

My best guess is that it's a good bit of both. Universities attract people who are good at school. Being good at school takes a real enough but very small talent. As the philosopher Robert Nozick once pointed out, all those A's earned through their young lives encourage such people to persist in school: to stick around, get more A's and more degrees, sign on for teaching jobs. When young, the life ahead seems glorious. They imagine themselves inspiring the young, writing important books, living out their days in cultivated leisure.

But something, inevitably, goes awry, something disagreeable turns up in the punch bowl. Usually by the time they turn 40, they discover the students aren't sufficiently appreciative; the books don't get written; the teaching begins to feel repetitive; the collegiality is seldom anywhere near what one hoped for it; there isn't any good use for the leisure. Meanwhile, people who got lots of B's in school seem to be driving around in Mercedes, buying million-dollar apartments, enjoying freedom and prosperity in a manner that strikes the former good students, now professors, as not only unseemly but of a kind a just society surely would never permit.

Now that politics has trumped literature in English departments the situation is even worse. Beset by political correctness, self-imposed diversity, without leadership from above, university teachers, at least on the humanities and social-science sides, knowing the work they produce couldn't be of the least possible interest to anyone but the hacks of the MLA and similar academic organizations, have more reason than ever to be unhappy.

More here



A LEFT-WING WITCH HUNT: ANOTHER COMMENT ON THE PROF. BEAN AFFAIR

The notion of left-wing political bias in the universities is widely pooh-poohed on the left as so much right-wing propaganda -- a smokescreen for an attempt to push a conservative agenda on college campuses. Sure, conservative professors may be a rare breed; but that, we are told, is only because the academy is all about intellectual openness, tolerance of disagreement, robust and untrammeled debate, and all those other intrinsically liberal values that conservatives presumably just don't get.

For a rather dramatic test of this proposition, one need look no further than Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, which is currently in the grip of a witch-hunt that would do the late Joe McCarthy proud -- except that it's directed by a leftist mob. The victim of this left-wing McCarthyism, history professor Jonathan Bean, identifies himself as a libertarian but is widely regarded as a conservative on the campus; he serves as an adviser to the Republican and Libertarian student groups at the university. (There are reportedly no Republicans among more than 30 faculty members in his department.) A prize-winning author, he was recently named the College of Liberal Arts Teacher of the Year.

On April 11, six of Bean's colleagues published a letter in the college paper, the Daily Egyptian, denouncing him for handing out ''racist propaganda" in his American history course. The offending document, which Bean had distributed as optional reading for a class that dealt with the civil rights movement and racial tensions in that era, was an article from the conservative publication FrontPageMagazine.com about ''the Zebra Killings" -- a series of racially motivated murders of whites in the San Francisco Bay area in 1972-74 by several black extremists linked to the Nation of Islam. The article, by one James Lubinskas, argued that black-on-white hate crimes deserve more recognition.

Bean's critics charged that the article contained ''falsehood and innuendo" and that, in printing it out for the handout, Bean deliberately abridged it in a way that disguised its racist context -- specifically, a link to a racist and anti-Semitic website. In fact, Bean did omit a paragraph containing a link to the European American Issues Foundation, which has held vigils commemorating the Zebra victims and which is indeed racist and anti-Semitic (its website features a petition for congressional hearings on excessive Jewish influence in American public life). He has told the student newspaper that he was simply trying to fit the article on one two-sided page.

By the time the letter from the outraged professors appeared, Bean had already canceled the assignment in response to criticism and sent an apology to his colleagues and graduate students. His letter of apology ran in the Daily Egyptian on April 12. On the same day, College of Liberal Arts Dean Shirley Clay Scott canceled his discussion sections for the week and informed his teaching assistants that they did not have to continue with their duties. Two of the three teaching assistants resigned, leaving the course in a shambles.

One may argue that Bean showed poor judgment in selecting the article for a reading given the offensive link it contained. But imagine reversing the politics of this case. Suppose a left-wing professor had assigned a reading which turned out to contain a link to the website of the Communist Party USA, or to a group that supported Palestinian terrorism in Israel. Imagine the outcry if the administration penalized this professor for such guilt by association.

Anita Levy, associate secretary in the Department of Academic Freedom and Tenure of the American Association of University Professors, says that making one's own decisions about the course curriculum as long as the material is relevant to the course is ''a part of academic freedom" and that it's clearly inappropriate to penalize a professor for such decisions -- especially without any due process. (While FrontPageMag.com has criticized the AAUP for remaining silent on the case, Levy says that the organization had not heard about it before and has not been contacted by Bean, whom I have been unable to reach for comment.)

A number of SIUC professors who do not share Bean's politics have rallied to his defense. Jane Adams, an anthropologist who was a civil rights activist in the 1960s, told the Daily Egyptian that the persecution of Bean ''puts an axe at the root of academic freedom and the freedom of inquiry." She added, ''For anybody who is a conservative, this has got to be a chilling case." Indeed, if this case is any indication, conservatives on many campuses are not just a rare breed but an endangered species.

Source

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

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

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

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3 May, 2005

PROFESSOR BRIBES STUDENTS TO ADOPT ANTI-SCIENCE POLITICS

John Munson, professor at the U of Wisconsin - Stevens Point, is being sued by a local cocktail lounge. The suit doesn't seek financial damages, but just to make him stop certain activities.... A university professor "paying" his students, with extra credit points to circulate petitions in favor of a smoking ban, and to patronize non-smoking restaurants.

I was angry, as are the bar owners who were fighting the smoking ban. I've worked with Minnesotans Against Smoking Bans and I know that big sums of extorted tax money are used by a few people to inflict smoking bans on all of us. I also know that smoking bans have destroyed many small businesses and have a serious negative economic impact that anti-smokers refuse to acknowledge.

Worst of all, I know that the secondhand smoke issue is a total fabrication from a scientific standpoint. For many organizations, it has been a straw-man opponent they could attack and look as if they're doing something of value. They've demonized smokers with lies so that they could enlist the financial contributions of people who don't have the time to discover the truth. Simply put, they've used every trick in the book to SCARE people into believing lies, and they've profited grandly by doing so. Most of those groups have gotten financial funding from corporations who sell stop-smoking products.

Like most things, this professorial action is more complex than it first appears. John Munson teaches several sections of something called "Health Promotions". I don't expect teachers to be omniscient, but it does seem that a professor teaching such a course should make a more diligent attempt than most of us can... to know the truth about health issues. A teacher has a rather serious responsibility to either present a balanced view of contentious issues, or to present scientific evidence when appropriate. It's obvious that Munson didn't do that, because he came down clearly on the side of implementing a smoking ban and penalizing the opposition.

The fact that Munson is a state employee, teaching at a tax-supported state university, complicates his position, because he rewarded his students for taking actions that will harm some of the very people who support his salary. Yes, what he did is illegal, but far more importantly, it is wrong, not just scientifically wrong, but wrong in "bribing" students to take a political position.

Are my expectations higher of Munson because he teaches at a state university? They are, not because I hold state institutions to be a source of truth, but because many students do. From the time they start kindergarten, the supposed beneficience and truthfulness of government is fed to them. THEY expect to hear truth from their government-school teachers, so professors have influence far beyond what they deserve.

By the time I was a college underclassman, I was influenced by what I was taught, and thought that government was the solution to any and all societal problems. Solving problems was only a matter of designing the proper government programs and "making it so". I was, effectively, a socialist. As I've matured, and considered information from non-governmental sources, it has gradually become clear to me that government is not the solution to ANYTHING, it is almost always the source of our problems. In retrospect, it makes me angry that I was misled for so long by people whose word I should have been able to trust. They not only didn't present the truth, but they wasted a lot of my time in disproving and unlearning what they fed me. Many of us don't ever go through that questioning and unlearning process, but spend the rest of their lives in ignorant belief that what they were taught IS the truth. But therein lies the problem:

How can we expect government-paid teachers in tax-supported institutions to teach anything BUT that "government is the solution"? Do we expect government employees to bite the hand that feeds them? To do so is to deny human nature. To expect John Munson to be a maverick and teach freedom of choice instead of governmental repression would be unrealistic.

Government schools are the single biggest means dragging us toward a totalitarian society. They subtly brainwash in favor of government and tend to convince us that we would be helpless without government control. The result has been a never-ending increase in government control over us... government gains power, and we, as individuals, become closer to being mere serfs. It starts in elementary schools, and it obviously continues right up through state universities.

On a brighter note, the voters of Stevens Point rejected the smoking ban.

More here



HOW LOW CAN YOU GO? CALIFORNIA WANTS TO DUMB ITS EDUCATION DOWN EVEN FURTHER!

All that silly stuff about being able to read and write will be ditched soon

Momentum is growing to provide alternatives to California's controversial high school exit exam, which critics say contributes to low graduation rates and discriminates against minority students. The test's opponents in the Legislature sought support Wednesday for two new bills that would rein in the graduation policy, which is a requirement for next year's senior class. Both measures passed committee hearings.

Grass-roots groups, meanwhile, have been mobilizing against the test by lobbying legislators, holding rallies and recruiting new members on high school campuses. "I'm very concerned that students will be discouraged and [question] why they should go forward if their futures rest on one exam," Assemblywoman Karen Bass (D-Los Angeles) said before the vote, which fell largely along party lines. "I don't understand why people think that giving an exam magically improves education."

But the test, which students begin taking in their sophomore year and have six chances to pass, is praised by others who say it is an important measure of academic success. They note that research is inconclusive on whether the exam contributes to low graduation rates.

Bass' measure would offer students alternative methods to prove their knowledge of English and math through assessments and projects tied to the state's academic standards. The other bill, in the state Senate, would delay the exit exam requirement until schools demonstrate that they offer access to fully credentialed teachers, adequate books and counselors - educational deficiencies that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has publicly acknowledged.

Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg (D-Los Angeles) said at the education committee hearing that students who fail the exit exam are often victims of classroom deficiencies. The exit exam, she said, "is going to punish the students who were born poor" and attend underachieving schools.

Republicans voiced dissent, saying that an unfettered exit test can motivate learning, promote better standards and ensure that all graduates meet a statewide standard. Assemblyman Keith Richman (R-Northridge), a physician, noted that after medical school he had to take board tests ensuring competency. The state's high school exit exam represents a similar hurdle, Richman said.

If it proceeds with the planned exit exam, California would join 19 other states that require students to pass high school exit exams. The 6 1/2 -hour exam, which includes multiple choice questions and an English essay, is pegged to sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade standards in math, including Algebra I, and to skills through 10th grade in English. Even with the modest expectations, however, state officials delayed enforcement of the exam from the Class of 2004 to the Class of 2006 amid concerns about low passage rates and a desire to give students more time to master the material. So far, 83% of next year's seniors have passed the English portion of the test and 82% have passed math.

As the deadline for the graduation requirement approaches, critics are once again highlighting the need for better preparation and pointing to the specter of more dropouts, particularly among African Americans, Latinos and other groups with the highest failure rates. They note that 78,000 of next year's seniors must still pass the English section, and 59,000 must pass math. Some of the same students could be included in both groups. "I've already seen it demoralizing the ones who haven't passed," said Elizabeth Minster, a teacher at Los Angeles High School and a leader of Coalition for Educational Justice, a grass-roots Los Angeles group.....

More here

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

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

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

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2 May, 2005

BRITAIN: "CHOICE" = ANTI-INTELLECTALISM

New Labour shares a similar concern for order, but its big idea is personalisation. It plans to 'tailor our education system to individual pupil needs', and talks up flexibility. Apparently many pupils find the 'academic track' too narrow, and schools should loosen up. If pupils were given more choices, more might stay on.

All this choice-talk sounds empowering, but what does it mean? Students are being encouraged to specialise at an early age. The result is that many are dropping a battery of key subjects at 14, such as history and modern languages. For the government, apparently, ignorance is empowerment and inclusion trumps standards. The Conservatives evidence a similar disdain for academic education. Labour, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats all promote vocational training as an alternative for the disaffected. Teachers should expose this for what it is: giving up on those who most need schools to broaden, not narrow, their minds.

All the parties talk up choice while undermining it. Choice has no meaning if the content of education gets squeezed out. And ignorant pupils are in no position to make considered choices about their lives.

More here



PLAGIARISM A SYMPTOM OF EDUCATIONAL DECLINE

By Jessica Durkin

The UK Plagiarism Advisory Service recently reported that one in four British students admits to copying and pasting material from the internet then presenting it as their own. Across the Atlantic in the USA, where I am a student, internet plagiarism is even more rampant. A national survey published in Education Week asserts that 54 percent of American students admitted to internet plagiarism. This includes everything from students who copy and paste a few sentences, to those who fork over premium beer money for custom-made papers. University officials believe the rise in plagiarism is driven by the internet's accessibility. Phil Anderson, director of the honors system at Kansas State University, says: 'The internet is the main driver because it is so easy.'

However, the growth of plagiarism is not just a result of the internet, or of American students' laziness - it also comes from students' new perception of education. Most American students do not attend university to embrace knowledge; university is just a gateway to a successful career. Once an American enters high school, he or she feels pressure from parents and teachers to attend university. Students are told that college is the only way they will get a 'good' job. American university student Maureen Kellner did not feel she had a choice about whether or not to attend university: 'I went to college because I had to. There is absolutely no way I could start a career without a degree. I couldn't really care less about what I'm learning except if it has something to do with what I'm going to do later on in life.' Kellner says she memorises what she needs to know for tests in order to receive high grades, and then she forgets the material that does not involve her major. Other students also see college as a route to a job. Some do not try to perform exceptionally well in their courses; they just aim to pass in order to receive their degree. It is this that provides the market for internet plagiarism.

Searching for a term paper online is easy. Within seconds of googling 'buy term paper', hundreds of websites appear, from cheathouse.com to oppapers.com. Most websites like cheathouse.com require students to submit papers of their own in order to gain access to thousands of free papers. The website's staff reviews papers for quality, and within three to seven days, writers of 'quality' papers are given access to the site. Here they can find papers on a variety of topics, including the political system of Australia, the depiction of women in modern art, and a brief history of tattoos. However, these free papers seem to be of low quality. Sample introductions often have misspellings like 'atractive', and poor punctuation such as 'a persons surroundings'. Even if students fix spelling and grammar errors, the papers often lack a coherent thesis. An essay on Oedipus Rex on oppapers.com begins: 'Oedipus is guilty because, despite knowing the prophecy that he will commit parricide and incest, he yet kills an elderly gentleman and sleeps with an elderly women.'

Students can also pay for custom-made papers. On oppapers.com, a custom-made paper costs $3.95 a page for seven-day delivery and $8.95 a page for overnight delivery. Other sites like essaysfree.com charge $22 per page for papers delivered in seven days and $55 for 'emergency service'. Additionally, the student must pay for the paper before they see it, but some websites like perfecttermpapers.com offer unlimited free revisions.

By paying for custom papers, students ensure that professors will have a harder time tracing the paper. But in general, the internet has made it easier for professors to spot plagiarism. Dr Stephen Lambert, a writing professor at Hillsborough Community College in Florida, says that online searches take seconds, while searching through books in the library would take ages. Additionally, many schools subscribe to anti-plagiarism software such as turnitin.com. Teachers upload suspected papers on to turnitin.com, and the software searches the web, its own database of papers, and published works for signs of plagiarism.

Nonetheless, professors could perhaps avoid subscribing to such services by injecting enthusiasm into their lectures. 'If my professor is engaging, I want to learn. I put a lot of effort into those classes. However, if a professor isn't putting effort into teaching, I don't want to put too much effort into that class', said American university student Michelle Pilson.

Additionally, society needs to promote the value of learning over a degree's increased job potential. The current emphasis on careers training leads students to overlook the fact that knowledge has intrinsic value - in broadening their minds and expanding their horizons. Some students do realise this and take advantage of the opportunities that university offers. American university student Brandon Bodow commented: 'I went to college to learn and to become a better person - more educated in all facets, more experienced, and more intelligent.'

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

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

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

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1 May, 2005

REBELLION IN FAVOUR OF STANDARDS IN FRANCE

They reject so-called "child-centred" teaching in favour of knowledge transmission

'Modern pedagogy's only use is to justify the abandonment of the ambitions we once had for our children. We are facing a real cultural catastrophe', writes Marc Le Bris, a 50-year-old head teacher at a primary school in Medreac, France. His book is an attack on the child-centred philosophy that has dominated reforms of the French education system in the past 30 years, and a defence of the Enlightenment idea of an education based on the transmission of knowledge to every citizen.

A schoolchild in the riots of May 1968, the author of this passionate book started his teaching career as a moderniser. When he left teacher training in 1977, he had learnt 'one thing above all': that 'old-fashioned teachers were almost incompetent; they were ridiculous...unthinking labourers working the wrong way round'. 'Yet', he writes, 'the pupils of the older teachers...obtained the best results. At the start of secondary school, their pupils were better prepared. My pupils, pampered by modern methods, were subjected to an academic handicap of which I am ashamed today.'

Along with Rachel Boutonnet and Fanny Capel, Le Bris is a member of Sauver les Lettres (Save Literature) a collective founded by teachers in the year 2000, during the protests that forced education minister Claude Allegre's resignation. The organisation campaigns against child-centred education through its website, numerous books and other public initiatives. At the beginning of February 2005, one of the group's surveys showing the decline in French pupils' spelling ability received wide publicity in the French and the British press.

Child-centred education is based on the constructivist theory of learning, according to which learners construct their own knowledge by analysing experience. For Marc Le Bris, this is a false theory, because the whole of humanity, not the individual child, constructs knowledge. The dominance of constructivism means that pupils will be, at best, autodidacts lacking the solidity of systematic learning.

In Britain there is also a strong aversion to the transmission of knowledge. The idea that pupils must be 'active' and become 'independent learners', rather than depend on the teacher, is seldom questioned. An independent school head teacher recently asked me: 'We are often accused of spoon-feeding our pupils. How can we help them become independent learners?'

Rachel Boutonnet could have answered that question. A French primary school teacher with a master in philosophy, she kept a diary throughout her teacher training and her first year as a teacher, which she published in 2003. She rejects the idea that traditional teaching methods make pupils passive: 'I think it is impossible to learn in a passive way. If you have learnt something, you must have been active;...in order to listen, you must concentrate. What the speaker is saying, you must make your own. This often requires effort and will power.'

She also questions the belief that so-called active methods lead to pupils' autonomy: 'the fact that pupils are "in research mode" doesn't mean that they are active. Often...they just ape an activity. They go through the motions that the teacher has scripted for them. Intellectually speaking, they are passive.'

The constructivist method is not so much an alternative to previous teaching methods as an anti-method. Boutonnet captures well the destructive impulse behind it: 'by refusing to transmit knowledge, the teacher trainers nevertheless transmitted something. They could not avoid this, since they were in the position of teachers.... This something was the rejection of knowledge. In this, they were the experts.'....

Despite overwhelming evidence over the years that synthetic phonics is by far the best method (2), educationalists in France and the UK have been reluctant to implement its adoption, because its principles conflict with the child-centred model. As Geraldine Bedell explains in an excellent article in the Observer, this resistance is due to the belief 'that synthetic phonics is traditionalist teaching of the stuffy grammarian type.... True, some educationalist conservatives may favour it - but there is nothing cramping about being able to read'

More -- much more -- here



LIFTING UP THE POOR

Dumbed-down education where qualifications are increasingly meaningless means that poor but bright kids now have no way of proving themselves

What if academic selection was fundamentally less elitist than the current regime of bog-standard comprehensives with personalised learning plans? It's just a thought. Or it was, before a new study seemed to show precisely this point. The study, carried out by researchers at the London School of Economics (LSE) and widely reported in Monday's newspapers, compares social mobility in Britain with the situation in seven other wealthy countries. It found that British children from poorer families have less chance of improving their lives than those in every country apart from the USA. Unlike any other country, social mobility in Britain has worsened over time - which, apparently, is partly a consequence of the demise of the grammar school system.

So kids who are born poor in Britain get a lousy education and stay poor for life. This grim conclusion will come as little surprise to anybody with a basic understanding of real life in Britain 2005. It should, however, come as something of a shock to those in the upper echelons of policymaking, who continue to peddle the fantasy that everybody gets equal educational chances these days, and if all kids just had more schooling, social inequalities would magically disappear. So three-years olds are pressured into pre-school, 18-year-olds are pushed into university, and the Labour Party manifesto promises 'No more dropping out at 16'. When will they ever learn?

Education is not a panacea for social problems. It never has been, and it never will be. A decent education, within a hierarchy that rewards academic merit, can help a few individuals progress beyond the circumstances of their birth - enabling, in theory at least, the son of a dustman to become a lawyer, the daughter of a dinner lady to become a doctor. The problem that this study seems to show is that in Britain today, we don't even have that.

The intellectual hierarchy embedded in the grammar school system has been flattened out and levelled down to provide every child with an equally mediocre education. Those who do well in this situation are not the children who are poor but bright, but the children who simply happen to be born middle-class, living in areas with better-resourced schools that are attractive to better teachers and with access to private tuitition or private schooling, and greater ability and expectation to go on to higher education. As one news report described the LSE's findings: 'Educational opportunities improved for those born in the early 1980s but social inequalities widened because children from wealthier families benefited overwhelmingly from the increase in places at university'

How did it all go so badly wrong? Whilst international comparisons of social mobility are useful, the issue is not that Britain fares badly compared to other wealthy nations. The fact that four of the eight countries studied by the LSE were Norway, Denmark, Finland and Sweden, much less populous and diverse societies than the UK, with a very different relationship to the state, indicates the limitations of such comparisons. And it is important not to romanticise a 'golden age' of grammar schooling. Many of those who pushed for comprehensive education in the 1960s were motivated by well-founded concerns about the way that academic selection reproduced and ossified social inequalities. Grammar schools selected a small academic elite, comprising children who passed the 11-plus examination. This provided the scope for some working-class kids to 'make good' in education - but it was generally the case that those who came from wealthier backgrounds were most likely to achieve educationally, whilst those from the poorest backgrounds were most likely to end up taking the second-best secondary modern route into manual work.

Today's stubborn campaign to abolish Britain's few remaining grammar schools seems to be motivated by little more a base desire to bring all schools down to the level of the bog-standard comprehensive. The argument seems to boil down to: 'If our kids can't have a good education, why should anybody else's?' But half a century ago, when grammar schools were not simply the odd quirky institutions but part of the established education system, the arguments against the grammar system often involved a genuine, if idealistic, belief that all children could enjoy the quality education that had previously been offered only to a few, giving all children, irrespective of background, a shot at academic and social advancement. That this never happened was not because of the abolition of the grammar system, or the failings of the concept of comprehensive schools. It was because of the UK's increasingly instrumental approach to education.

In today's society, increasingly devoid of either political vision or economic dynamism, education is promoted as the way to solve all manner of social ills and realise all kinds of individual ambitions. Under the weight of all these expectations, it fails to fulfil any of them; and in the process, education is screwed up as well. So we end up with the worst of all possible worlds.

Schools become sites of socialisation and life skills, with pupils put through a battery of courses on sex, drugs, citizenship and 'circle time'. For every overblown social 'problem', from teenage pregnancy to childhood obesity to the pensions crisis, there is a policy-solution that revolves around the schools. Train up the dinner ladies! Teach saving and budgeting schools! Install nurses with unlimited supplies of emergency contraception! Enforce more physical education! End bullying, child abuse and domestic violence!

As the importance of knowledge - education - moves further and further down the list of a school's priorities, the more we hear tales of woe about university undergraduates who cannot structure an essay or new recruits to the job market who can barely spell their own name.You wouldn't now expect any school-leaver to be able to recite a poem or conjugate French verbs, though they are frighteningly well-versed in the language of self-esteem.

Education is also, paradoxically, promoted as the key vehicle for social mobility. If kids start 'pre-school' at aged three, we are told, they might become middle-class in outlook by aged five. The more qualifications that children ratchet up whilst at secondary school, taking their pick from a bewildering array, the more likely they will be to go on to university - and everybody knows that a degree is how you increase your earnings, so that's social mobility, isn't it?

The actual consequence of persistent grade inflation and accreditation mania is conveniently ignored. When all have top grades, those who choose university are those who can afford to spend three years frittering away their pocket money and immediate future; those whom universities choose are the candidates who have interesting travelling experiences, middle-class hobbies and intantigible qualities like 'confidence', because who's to tell if they are brighter or dimmer than anyone else in the A-grade pile?; secretaries have degrees in business studies, are called executives and are paid like secretaries. The degree-as-social-mobility line is a con, and no doubt many of the refuseniks from poor backgrounds are smart enough to know this.

The crusade against academic elitism has made the education system into a naked reflection of a more basic social elitism, where 'What's your name and where d'you come from?' ends up counting for more than intellectual application, and good fortune is more a driver of social mobility than exam results. The idea that education can move people forward in leaps and bounds has been usurped by the prosaic notion of 'value added' - that if children leave school slightly more literate and numerate than when they started, that's good enough. But it isn't, and it shouldn't be. Real education has its own value; today's brand of vapid instrumentalism isn't worth the interactive whiteboard it's written on.

Source

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

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

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

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