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31 May, 2007

Attempt to destroy the unique Oxford University system underway

Fabulous success must be levelled down

Funding reforms will put at risk the one-to-one tutorials in Oxford colleges, according to dons and students. They say that the proposals risk turning the university into a two-tier system. The row over the change in funding rules comes after John Hood, the vice-chancellor, was defeated last year when dons threw out his plans to hand the strategic control of the university to business and political outsiders.

In a letter to undergraduates, union representatives from 23 colleges are urging the student body to reject the funding plans, which could come into effect in October next year. Under the joint resource allocation mechanism, the university will distribute government money �as earned� between departments and colleges, so that research-intensive colleges receive more. Colleges will also be compensated for taking more graduates and overseas students.

The students� college representatives say that poorer colleges, such as St Catherine�s, Keble, Hertford and Pembroke, will lose funding to richer colleges and face having to cut their distinctive one-to-one tutorial system. This will be divisive, they say, splitting the university between the rich and poor colleges.

�Richer �mixed� colleges such as St John�s and Christ Church, while subject to the same incentives to turn to research, will be rich enough to subsidise their tutorial systems,� they wrote. �The evident result of some colleges maintaining the tutorial system, while others are forced to move to classroom-based teaching, is that Oxford will fragment.� Since 1998 colleges and departments have shared out the government block grant, based partly on research and partly on student numbers, so that no college should suffer. Oxford wants to change the system to reward research. Donald Hay, the chairman of the funding committee for the new system, said that it was being phased in over a decade and that the university would subsidise tutorials.

Source




Weak testing methods mask educational failings

Good marks from one source can't disguise Australia's falling standards of education, writes Kevin Donnelly. The PISA assessments are very undemanding

HOW well are Australian students performing? Based on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Program for International Student Assessment test, they appear to be doing very well. The results of the 2000 literacy test ranked Australia second out of 32 countries and in 2003 only four countries outperformed our 15-year-old students in mathematics. Groups with a vested interest in arguing that all is well, such as the Australian Education Union and the Australian Council for Educational Research, quote the results in their submissions to the Senate inquiry into education standards as evidence that there is no crisis.

Wrong. While the PISA test reflects favourably on Australian students, it is open to a number of criticisms. As argued by the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute in its Senate inquiry submission, the PISA test "is not a valid assessment of mathematics knowledge, as only a fragment of the curriculum is tested".

The outstanding performance of Australian students in the PISA literacy test is also open to doubt, as students did not lose marks for faulty spelling, grammar and punctuation. If our students had been corrected, many would have failed as, in the words of one researcher, "It was an exception rather than a rule in Australia to find a student response that was written in well-constructed sentences, with no spelling or grammatical error."

A second measure of the performance of Australian students is the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study carried out in 1995, 1999 and 2003 and involving up to 46 countries. These tests assess essential mathematics and science knowledge. Australian students in Years 4 and 8, while doing well, are in the second XI as measured by TIMSS and are consistently outperformed by countries such as Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, The Netherlands and the Czech Republic.

In more successful overseas education systems, more students achieve at the highest level. In the 2003 TIMSS science test, only 9per cent of Year8 Australian students performed at the advanced level, compared with 25 per cent from Taiwan and 15 per cent from Japan and England. In mathematics, only 7 per cent of Australian Year8 students performed at the advanced level, compared with 44 per cent of students in Singapore. There is also a significant gap in Australia between better performing and less able students. Successful countries overseas are able to get more children to perform at the higher end of the scale, while Australia has a long tail of underperformers.

Further proof is found in a US report by the American Institutes for Research, published on April 24. While acknowledging the difficulties in terms of methodology and making comparative judgments, the report interprets the TIMSS Year8 test results in the light of the expected levels of performance (basic, proficient and advanced) as measured by the US-based assessment of educational progress. On analysing the 1999 TIMMS results for Year8, the US report lists the following countries as having greater numbers of students achieving at the advanced level: Singapore, 34 per cent; South Korea, 26 per cent; Hong Kong, 23 per cent; Japan, 24 per cent; and Belgium, 15 per cent. The percentage of Australian students who achieve at the advanced level is 8 per cent.

The situation is not as bad with the Year8 science results: only Taiwan and Singapore appear to have significantly more students performing at the advanced level. But in the 2003 Year8 TIMMS test, Australians students again underperformed. While 35 per cent of Singaporean students performed at the advanced level, 24 per cent from Hong Kong, 29 per cent from South Korea, 30 per cent from Taiwan and 20 per cent from Japan, only 5 per cent of Australian students achieved at the top level.

Much has been made of the dumbing-down influence of Australia's adoption of outcomes-based education, where everyone is a winner and the curriculum promotes a one-size-fits-all approach, in explaining student underperformance. But also of concern is the way Australia carries out its national benchmark testing in literacy and numeracy.

The results over the past four years at Years3 and 5 suggest all is well in numeracy. About 90 to 94 per cent of students reach the benchmark standard and in reading the figure hovers close to 92 per cent. Such results appear worth celebrating. Not so. Not only is the benchmark described as the agreed minimum acceptable standard - defined as "standards of performance below which students will have difficulty progressing satisfactorily at school" - but there is the suspicion that the bar is set so low that the overwhelming majority of children are guaranteed success.

Source

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

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

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

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30 May, 2007

The Measure Of Preference, At UCLA And Elsewhere

Post lifted from Discriminations. See the original for links

As we have just seen in this recent post discussing a Pew Research Center For The People & The Press survey, by substantial margins Americans support "affirmative action" when it is defined as simply helping minorities but by equally large margins oppose preferential treatment based on race. (We also saw there that Pew's report of its own findings glorified the support but failed to mention the opposition.) Thus it is not surprising that supporters of preferential treatment attempt to disguise what they really support by describing it as "affirmative action."

There is no better place to confirm that "affirmative action" in practice is really racial preference than the data concerning admissions to the University of California, where preferential treatment was ostensibly banned in 1996 by Proposition 209. Let's look at some of it, now that new data has become available.

First, from a recent UCLA news release: "For fall 1995, when UCLA was still allowed to use affirmative action, 1,450 African American students applied," and 693 were admitted.

"The number of applications from African American prospective freshmen for fall 2007 was 2,453, up from 2,173 in 2006. The number of African American admits increased to 392 in 2007; in 2006 there were 249 admits .

Note, first, that the number of black applicants to UCLA did not shrivel up and blow away as a result of the Prop. 209's requirement (it was passed by the voters in 1996) that they be treated like all other applicants, as 209 critics predicted and many of them still claim.

Next, note that in 1995, the last year when racial preferences were both legal and in full force, 48% of black applicants to UCLA were offered admission. In 2006, with such "affirmative action" no longer legal, 11.5% of black applicants were accepted. This year, 2007, after UCLA moved with great fanfare to "holistic review," 16% of blacks applicants were admitted. This represented a 39% increase over the pre-"holistic" 2006 numbers, but it is still a far cry 1995's 48% admission rate.

Another recent UCLA news release reports that "UCLA admitted 11,837 prospective freshmen for fall 2007 out of an applicant pool of 50,729." That's an overall admission rate of 23%.

That "affirmative action" in practice led to drastically higher admission rates for blacks was not, of course, limited to UCLA or to undergraduate admissions. Martin Trow, the highly regarded Berkeley sociologist/political scientist, reported the following regarding admission to Boalt Hall, the law school of the University of California at Berkeley, in 1988. Boalt divided all applicants into A, B, C, and D groups based on a combination of their grades and LSAT scores.

Almost all applicants from all ethnic groups in the A range were admitted, but among those who fell in the B range, 69 percent of Asians, 62 percent of whites, and 94 percent of blacks and Hispanics were admitted. Looking at range C, only 19 percent of Asians and 17 percent of whites were admitted, while 77 percent of the blacks and Hispanics got in. In the lowest range, the disparities were even greater.

Nor were numbers like these limited to California. As Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom point out in their magisterial demolition of Bowen and Bok's hymn to affirmative action, The Shape of the River:

Consider the five private schools Bowen and Bok studied intensively. Among applicants for admission in 1989 with SAT scores from 1200 to 1249, 19% of whites and 60% of blacks were admitted; in the next bracket up (1250-1299), 24% of whites and 75% of blacks were accepted. Among applicants with near-perfect scores (1500 or better), over a third of whites were turned down, but every single black got in. Indeed, black students with scores of 1200-1249 were nearly as likely to be accepted at Bowen and Bok's five institutions as whites with scores of 1500 or better! Under race-neutral admissions, clearly the picture would be quite different.

Data such as the above is well-known among students of affirmative action, and is not controversial. What is controversial, of course, is whether such preferential treatment is (or should be) legal and, even if it is legal, whether it is fair. Reasonable people can disagree over the answers to those questions, but I don't believe it is reasonable to deny - as many defenders of "affirmative action" still insist on denying - that in practice most "affirmative action" programs and policies are permeated with racial preference.

ADDENDUM: Do Preferences Continue?

The above is written as though the passage of Prop. 209 ended racial preference in admissions to California institutions, but did it? There is disturbing evidence that it did not, even aside from the "holistic review" end run. At Boalt Hall, for example, Heather Mac Donald writes, reporting one of UCLA law professor Richard Sander's studies, applicants are now given a numerical score based on a combination of grades and LSAT scores.

In 2002, it admitted 92 percent of white applicants with an index of 250 or higher but only 5 percent with an index between 235 and 239. By contrast, it admitted 75 percent of black applicants in the 235-239 range in 2002 and 65 percent in 2003. No black applicants had an index of 250 or higher. Even a 2004 university study acknowledged that there were admissions disparities by race that nonacademic, nonracial factors could not account for.

Meanwhile, back at UCLA, the Daily Bruin reports that

[d]ata from 1995 to the present recently released by UCLA shows that students who identify as black and Latino or Chicano are admitted with lower average high school GPAs and SAT scores than white and Asian students.

More specifically, the Daily Bruin reports:

In fall 2006, before UCLA switched to holistic admissions, black and Latino applicants' average SAT scores were 255 and 246 points lower than the average for their white and Asian counterparts.

That gap seemed largely unaffected by holistic review - in fall 2007, black applicants' SAT scores were on average 293 points lower than those of white and Asian students, and Latino applicants' scores came up 249 points short.

UCLA officials, like university officials everywhere, attempt to explain these disparities by noting, properly enough, that admission decisions are based on more than grades and test scores, that other, presumably non-racial factors are also taken into account. I'm sure that's true, but it remains difficult to refute Ward Connerly's observation, quoted in the article just linked:

UCLA said it would revise (its admissions standards) to take non-academic factors into account, ... but the data that I looked at suggested that they were looking at non-academic factors primarily for black students.

As if to confirm Connerly's point, that same Daily Bruin article pointed out that in 2007 the percentage of black applicants admitted from poorly performing schools [schools with an Academic Performance Index score of 1 or 2] more than doubled over the 2006 rate, from 12% to 27%, while the percentage of both Asian and white admits from those schools actually declined. Moreover, as the Chronicle of Higher Education's Peter Schmidt pointed out (here, in an article I discussed here):

Although the new admissions policy ["holistic review"] is supposed to take into account disadvantages each student has faced, there was actually a decline in the number and share of admitted students who are the first in their families to attend college and coming from households that make less than $30,000 annually. Last year, the university admitted 1,426 such students, or 24 percent of those who applied. This year, it admitted 1,027, or about 17 percent of those who applied.

Some of the dodges that were developed to avoid Prop. 209's strictures were dazzlingly brazen. Thus, Mac Donald reports,

UCLA's law school established a specialization in critical race studies, a marginal branch of legal theory contending that racism pervades nearly every category of the law and that writing about one's personal experiences grappling with that racism is real legal scholarship. College seniors who say that they want to specialize in critical race studies on their UCLA law school applications get a boost in the admissions process: as the school discreetly puts it, a student's interest in the program "may be a factor relevant to the overall admissions calculus." In 2002, UCLA rejected all white applicants to the program, even though their average LSAT score was higher than the average score of the blacks who were admitted.

Racial preferences may be legally dead in California, but their actual death, as Mark Twain once said about a report of his own demise, is greatly exaggerated.




Australia: The decay of school discipline shows

DESPERATE teachers abused and attacked by students, other school staff and also community members in New South Wales have been forced to take out apprehended violence orders on more than 40 occasions. The protection orders have been sought as principals and teachers are assaulted, stalked, harassed and have their property damaged in schools. The revelations come after a string of incidents in schools across the state last week, including a 12-year-old boy who allegedly threatened a teacher with a replica pistol.

While the Iemma Government claims the number of AVOs taken out by teachers is falling, The Daily Telegraph can reveal some staff still feel so helpless in the face of their attackers that they seek outside help. Data on AVOs over three years to mid-2006 show a range of psychological and physical attacks on teaching staff in both primary and secondary schools. The figures have been obtained by The Daily Telegraph under Freedom of Information as five schools battle a wave of serious threats against students and teachers.

Students, ex-students, parents and community members are shown in AVO documents to have launched assaults or threats against school staff. In one terrifying incident, three high school teachers were forced to take out a restraining order against a former student who used a baseball bat to smash his way into an office. Last year police took out an interim AVO against a student, 16, suspended and charged with attempting to throttle his female teacher, 24. The woman was treated in hospital for severe swelling and bruising to her neck, chest and right hand.

A letter from deputy director-general (schools) Trevor Fletcher went out on Friday to all schools warning criminal behaviour could attract severe penalties including jail. He urged students to report any criminal behaviour they see or know is being planned. "Just because you are a school student does not mean you cannot be held responsible for a crime," Mr Fletcher told pupils. "Nor does the fact that you are playing a prank or a trick. You can still be punished as a criminal. "You should not see reporting a crime as dobbing in a mate - such action may in fact save someone's life or prevent serious injury or damage from occurring."

Opposition education spokesman Andrew Stoner called for more professional counsellors in schools because children with mental disorders were "slipping through the cracks". "We have seen the tragic effects of violent incidents involving school students in the US," he said. "NSW public schools are ill-equipped to deal with this."

The Education Department claims stiffer penalties for crimes in schools, tighter security and quick removal of serious troublemakers have contributed to the decline in AVOs sought by teachers. Education Minister John Della Bosca said good communication between students and staff in the incident at Crookwell High School - where shooting threats were made - enabled police to take swift action and ensure safety. "Schools work closely with police and parents when these type of incidents occur," he said.

Source

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

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

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

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29 May, 2007

Britain: Leeds academics fight back against censorship by threat of violence

Following the controversial last-minute cancellation by the University of Leeds of a lecture from Dr Matthias K�ntzel, 'The Nazi Legacy: the export of anti-Semitism to the Middle East', the University authorities went to considerable lengths to persuade Leeds UCU that no issues of principle were involved - that the lecture was cancelled on public safety grounds only. The initial response of local union leaders was to accept their explanation - we were told that the union needs to maintain a 'constructive' relationship with the University (which no-one would dispute).

A few of us felt that the issue was too important to be brushed under the carpet, and decided to fight. With no backing from the local leadership, we canvassed support for an Extraordinary General Meeting to discuss the lecture cancellation and the wider issue of academic freedom. We were successful - 34 members supported the call (local rules require 25), and the meeting took place on Tuesday 8th May.

In the meantime, the matter was discussed at a meeting of the Joint Committee of the University and the UCU, which concluded that the University's statement was 'a truthful and complete account' of the incident. This statement claims that the lecture was cancelled 'on safety grounds alone', that no issue of academic freedom was involved, and that 'the University was not given sufficient notice' by the organisers of the meeting. Our union representatives reported to us that there was no reason to doubt the claims, or the Vice Chancellor's assurances that 'nobody was leant on by the University authorities to cancel the speech'.

This completely misses the point. We now know that only three emails of protest were received, at least one of which did not even ask for the meeting to be cancelled. None of us ever believed that there was a real threat to public safety, or that anyone had tried to put pressure on the University authorities. The sad fact is that the threats and the pressure were figments of the University's imagination. Apparently it's not possible, if you are a Muslim, to send a protest to the University without its being interpreted as a threat of violence - a rather disturbing state of affairs.

In response to our successful call and our submitted motion, some of the local officers put forward a very much watered-down version, which criticised the University only to the extent that its 'handling of the situation was unfortunate'. So, our task at the meeting was to convince people that the officers' compromise motion did not adequately address the seriousness of what had happened and its implications for academic freedom, and they should therefore support ours.

After a lively but civil debate, our motion was passed by just one vote! A message will now be sent to the University that UCU members disapprove of their action, do not accept their explanation, and will not tolerate any attempt to interfere with academic freedom and freedom of speech on our campus.

Carol Wilson (Medicine)
Eva Frojmovic (Centre for Jewish Studies)
David Miller (Medicine)
Annette Seidel-Arpaci (Modern Languages and Cultures)
Morten Hunke (Modern Languages and Cultures)

The motion:

Leeds UCU is deeply concerned about the University's decision to cancel a lecture by Dr Matthias K�ntzel, "The Nazi Legacy: the export of anti-Semitism to the Middle East", organised by the German department. Both the initial decision and subsequent public statements have damaged the University's reputation by demonstrating an apparent lack of concern for its duty to uphold the principle of academic freedom.

The initial statement from Roger Gair, University Secretary, treated the justifiable concerns of staff, students, the invited speaker and the public in a wholly inappropriate manner. It incorrectly blamed the organisers of the meeting for a failure to abide by the Freedom of Expression policy, and labelled their protests as 'making mischief'. The replacement, whilst moderating its tone, repeated the same untrue claim.

The incident has raised serious concerns, both inside and outside the University, about the wider implications for academic freedom.

We note that:

* The University has failed to give a coherent and plausible explanation of the cancellation, either to Dr K�ntzel and the academics concerned, or in its public statements.

* Although the University publicly asserted that it took the decision because of security fears it has produced no evidence of any threat of violence or disruption, and there were no reasonable grounds for regarding the talk as posing a safety problem.

* The University's handling of the incident was inept throughout, and has left a public impression of extreme discourtesy towards Dr K�ntzel.

* The new Freedom of Expression policy allows the University too much discretion to ban an event (especially Clause 6, which includes a potential 'verbal attack' on 'religion and belief' as a reason for a ban). The wording effectively gives a right of veto over freedom of speech to anyone who objects to a controversial meeting, should the University choose to interpret it in this way.

We seek assurances from the Vice-Chancellor that:

* The University recognises that the decision to cancel the meeting was a serious blunder, which will not be repeated.

* Those involved in the decision will be given guidance in (1) the correct operation of the Freedom of Expression policy; and (2) the extent of the University's responsibilities in upholding academic freedom.

* The University will rectify its misleading public account of the events leading to the cancellation, invite Dr K�ntzel back to give his lecture at the University's expense, and apologise to him and to the academics concerned.

* The Freedom of Expression policy will be revised, in collaboration with Leeds UCU, to ensure that it can under no circumstances be used to obstruct free speech within the law.

Source




Britain: Selective schools improve nearby non-selective schools

They set up a standard for comparison. Both types of school are publicly funded

David Cameron is facing a fresh challenge to his authority with a member of his frontbench team producing new evidence showing that grammar schools dramatically improve the exam results of a whole neighbourhood. Graham Brady, the Shadow Europe Minister and a former grammar school pupil, has passed data to The Timesshowing that GCSE results are significantly better in areas that have an element of selective education - with ethnic minority children benefiting most.

The figures show that in comprehensive areas with no selection, 42.6 per cent of GCSE pupils get 5 or more A* to C grades in subjects including English and maths. This rises to 46 per cent in partially selective areas and 49.8 per cent in wholly selective areas where all pupils take the 11 plus.

This new frontbench division will dismay both Mr Cameron and David Willetts, the Shadow Education Secretary, who unveiled further controversial policy reforms yesterday. He wants city academies to choose pupils by a range of nonacademic criteria, including race, which he hopes will halt growing segregation in some inner city areas. Mr Cameron yesterday called critics of his refusal to bring back grammar schools "inverse class warriors".

Mr Brady's figures challenge a key element of Tory thinking - that pupils who fail to get into grammar schools suffer more than those who go to schools where there is no local selection. His figures show: Areas with academic selection appear to benefit ethnic minorities, and Chinese and Bangladeshi children most. Chinese students get a 82.4 per cent rating for good GCSEs in selective areas but average 61.2 per cent in comprehensive areas. Bangladeshi students get 57 per cent in selective areas but 37.9 per cent in nonselective areas. Eight out of the top ten highest-scoring local authorities in maths and seven out of ten in English are either fully selective or partially selective. Children in areas with nonselective schools are more likely to go backwards between the ages of 11 and 14, according to data released this week.

In a further challenge, Mr Brady questioned whether free school meals - the measure of poverty used by Mr Willetts - was appropriate. He passed a letter to The Times from the headmaster of Altrincham Grammar School for Boys, who says that the educational maintenance allowance, which has a higher cutoff, provides a "truer reflection" of the profile of the school.

Mr Brady said: "These facts appear to confirm my own experiences: that selection raises the standards for everyone in both grammar and high schools in selective areas. "I accept the party's policy on grammar schools. But it is vitally important that policy should be developed with a full understanding of all of these facts - which might lead to the introduction of selection in other ways, including partial selection in academies and other schools."

Professor Alan Smithers, of the University of Buckingham, said that the figures were significant. "It's acknowledged that grammar schools work very well for children in them, but the argument against has always been that children who don't go to the grammar achieve below what they would get in a comprehensive system. But it does look as though it is difficult to sustain the argument." He noted that grammar school pupils often came from more privileged backgrounds.

Source

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

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

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

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28 May, 2007

More anti-Christian discrimination

Farmington, Michigan, High School discriminates against Christians. Authorities won't allow the Bible Club. The Gay Straight Alliance is allowed. The Equestrian Club is allowed. S.A.D.D. is allowed. But the school won't permit the Bible Club. Why?

Aaron Grider has been trying to get the Bible club recognized by Farmington High School. Now the Thomas More Law Center has filed suit against the school because of this discrimination against Christians. The sophomore has done all he can do. Now it's time to bring in the law pros to enforce what should have been permitted months ago.

CitizenLink of Focus on the Family states that "the high school has several noncurriculum-related student groups, including the Gay Straight Alliance, the Equestrian Club and S.A.D.D. Those groups are allowed to advertise their meetings and appear in the yearbook; the Bible club is not. "'The policy and attitude of Farmington High School represents the extreme secularism that has captured many public school systems in America,' said Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the law center. `In this case the school policy not only violates the U.S. Constitution, but also federal and state Equal Access Laws.'"

It's one more war turf where the fight for right must be continued. Christians must remain vigilant to defend the nation's Judeo-Christian heritage. Secularists want the US to be like Europe-secularized to the extent of ditching God. Christians cannot permit this to happen.

Source




British private schools popular in China

It should help them give more "scholarships" to poor but bright British students -- something the government is urging them to do -- but they will have to be super-careful to avoid attack as "racist"

PRIVATE schools are imposing unofficial limits on the numbers of Chinese pupils they admit because of fears that British parents will be deterred from sending their children there. Schools including Wellington College in Berkshire, the Leys school in Cambridge and Brighton college, East Sussex, have decided to restrict their numbers of foreign pupils under pressure from growing Chinese demand. Some schools are adopting the policy to preserve their character, while others are reacting to concerns among parents. According to the most recent figures from the Independent Schools Council, the numbers from mainland China have risen from a few hundred in 2000 to 2,345 this year. When added to pupils from Hong Kong, the total rises to 8,652, 40% of all foreign pupils. There are just 1,888 German pupils, the next biggest foreign contingent.

Ralph Lucas, editor of the Good Schools Guide, said many schools did not want to take more than 10% of their pupils from China although, given the demand, they could easily surpass this number. "To keep the traditional feel of an English public school, they are setting limits," he said. "Chinese pupils sometimes tend to keep themselves to themselves."

The growing numbers have sparked a backlash among some British parents. Margie Burnet Ward, headmistress of Wycliffe college in Stonehouse, Gloucestershire, has cut the number of pupils from China in recent years. "The fact that dare not speak its name is that parents are saying, `We don't want to come to you because you have too many Chinese pupils'," she said. "Five years ago we had 90 pupils from China and now we have 45 . . . Chinese children want to study maths and physics and parents are concerned that their child could be the only UK student in those classes."

Mark Slater, headmaster of the Leys, which has about 8% of its pupils from the Far East, said he believed in limiting the intake, although he added: "Up to a certain percentage it is a very healthy aspect of the school." Anthony Seldon, headmaster of Wellington, said: "They're desperate in China to come to England." He plans to set an informal limit of 15%-20% of foreign students. At Brighton, the ceiling is 8%.

For some independent schools Chinese pupils are, however, a lifeline. Some single-sex schools, particularly girls' boarding institutions, are struggling as more British parents opt for coeducational day schools. Chinese parents, by contrast, almost always pay full boarding fees and are willing to send their children to single-sex schools.

Nick Leiper, director of admissions for Ampleforth college, North Yorkshire, said some schools were now moving so aggressively into China that they were employing brokers to supply pupils in return for 10% of the first term's fees. Before British rule ended in 1997, many Hong Kong Chinese opted for a British private education because of its social cachet. Now, with mainland China's economy booming, the motives have changed. Parents from China see an English-language education as the gateway to an international career.

While most applicants are the children of the country's new rich, others come from less well-off backgrounds, with members of extended families clubbing together to pay fees. Many leading schools argue they are so popular that they could fill their places with children from Hong Kong and mainland China. Some, including Harrow and Dulwich college in London, have even opened branch schools in China.

Others have no plans to curb the numbers of Chinese. At Roedean, the girls' school near Brighton, one-third of the sixth form are from China and one-third from other foreign countries. "Some schools may have quotas, but we do not," said a spokeswoman.

Heathfield St Mary's school in Ascot, Berkshire, has resisted the financial benefits of recruitment from China. Frances King, the headmistress, said: "We are a very small boarding school and the interest in our school has increased. The Chinese are looking for entry into UK or American universities. If there are a lot pupils coming from one place I have to look at it every year. "We are an English boarding school and the Chinese pupils want to feel that they are coming to an English school. We like to have cultural diversity."

Source

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

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

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

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27 May, 2007

Increasing recognition: More spending does not buy better education

These figures would have looked even worse if they had given comparison figures for Catholic schools

The United States spent an average of $8,701 per pupil to educate its children in 2005, the Census Bureau said on Thursday, with some states paying more than twice as much per student as others. New York was the biggest spender on education, at $14,119 per student, with New Jersey second at $13,800 and Washington, D.C., third at $12,979, the Census Bureau said. Seven of the top 10 education spenders were Northeastern states.

The states with the lowest spending were Utah, at $5,257 per pupil, Arizona $6,261, Idaho $6,283, Mississippi $6,575 and Oklahoma $6,613. The 10 states with the lowest education spending were in the West or South. Overall the United States spent an average of $8,701 per student on elementary and secondary education in 2005, up 5 percent from $8,287 the previous year, the bureau said.

Funding is largely a state and local responsibility under the U.S. system, with 47 percent coming from state governments, 43.9 percent from local sources and only 9.1 percent from the federal government. Students in northeastern and northern states tend to perform better on standardized tests than students in southern and southwestern states. But experts say the correlation between spending and testing performance is not strong.

The "No Child Left Behind" education reforms passed during President George W. Bush's first term have placed increased emphasis on performance on national standardized tests. Schools can be penalized if they repeatedly fail to meet targets for improving student scores. "It's not necessarily so that states with higher spending have higher test scores," said Tom Loveless, an education policy expert at the Brookings Institution think tank. He said Washington, D.C., has among the highest spending in the country but its students have among the lowest scores on standardized tests, while some states like Montana with relatively low spending have fairly high performance on tests.

Loveless said two areas where education spending might make a difference were in teacher salaries and small class sizes for first graders. But overall, the relationship between spending on education and test performance was not strong, he said.

Source




Dumbed-down British vocational qualification

Tens of thousands of teenagers are taking a new qualification worth up to four good GCSEs but which government experts say an average 11-year-old could pass. Half of all secondaries are estimated to be opting for the OCR national level 2 in ICT, where tasks include sending an email and searching the internet. It is being adopted as a replacement for the GNVQ in ICT, which controversially helped many low performing schools leap up the league tables. As with its predecessor, schools can use the OCR exam to gain the equivalent of four A*-C GCSEs, even though it only requires the teaching time of one.

But a document leaked to The TES shows consultants from the Government's National Strategies have found a pass in the qualification's compulsory unit "generally" equals level 4 of the key stage 3 national curriculum - the standards expected of an 11-year-old. Some points matched level 5, those of a 14-year-old. The revelation is a new blow to the Government's attempt to ensure vocational qualifications gain parity of esteem with academic ones.

A local authority ICT adviser has rated some of the qualification's most popular optional units and told The TES he found exactly the same standards uncovered by the National Strategies consultants. "The demands of this specification are very low indeed," he said. "Schools are using it to get soft certificates. Many are now putting all their students in for this in the expectation that they will all pass."

Some schools argue the consultants' verdict is too harsh. Mike Reid, an ICT teacher at Broughton Hall high in Liverpool, said: "The level of the tasks they have to perform are industry standard." To gain a distinction in the OCR national, equivalent to A* GCSEs, pupils must master extra tasks that include using quotes and words such as `and' and `or' when searching the internet. The local authority adviser described it as a "tick-box" course, enabling E grade pupils to gain the equivalent of Cs.

A spokesman for the OCR exam board said the National Strategies consultants could not have carried out a genuine comparison because the first results of the new qualification or details about the candidates taking it were still unknown. He said: "The ICT national level 2 is doing incredibly well because it was created in partnership with teachers and is interesting enough to be very learnable for students."

Clare Johnson, a National Strategies ICT programme adviser, said the conclusions by consultants from the West Midlands were part of a draft document that would not be distributed to schools. She did not know of anything that contradicted their conclusions, but said comparing vocational qualifications with an academic programme of study was inappropriate. The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority said it will monitor the new qualification.

Source

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

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

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

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26 May, 2007

Lowering Education Expectations Hurts Texas' Children

Hurting whites to avoid facing the low educational achievements of blacks and Hispanics

Our country was founded on the premise that hard work and education are the keys to success and the American Dream. Home ownership, entrepreneurship, and especially rising out of poverty are all directly tied to one's education, perseverance and creativity. With this in mind, what is more important for our children than a rigorous education? Strong math, reading, and writing skills enable all students from a range of backgrounds to achieve their dreams.

Yet, much to our astonishment, the Texas House is reversing course after spending nearly 20 years raising standards and tweaking the accountability system. The House recently passed a bill that sunsets the accountability system, eliminates graduation exit exams, and makes social promotion easier - gutting the high school accountability system.

Almost everyone wants to get rid of the high school TAKS test. Students, parents, educators, teacher groups, and policymakers all support replacing the high school TAKS test with exams at the end of each course called end-of-course exams. Beyond that, the agreement ends.

Education reformers are trying to raise the rigor of the exams required for graduation to help students graduate ready to succeed, while the education lobby wants to eradicate high stakes testing all together. Testing opponents are successfully watering down accountability in schools; under the House bill, students can fail all of their end-of-course exams and still graduate.

For more than 20 years, Texas has had an exit exam requirement for graduation. Today, students must pass the math, science, English, and history sections of the 11th grade TAKS to graduate. These tests ensured that students did not leave high school without obtaining a certain level of basic knowledge and skills. And over time standards have been slowly raised in response to higher expectations from colleges and employers.

Over the years, high stakes tests stimulated significant gains in student learning. Today, Texas leads the nation in improving elementary and middle school math and reading. Now, just as Texas is beginning to make real progress in getting students to high school on grade level, House legislators destroyed one of the best tools we've used to do so. Only last week the Texas House eliminated high school exit exams as a condition for graduation destroying 20 years of progress and improvement in public education. And now that our tests are finally getting closer to measuring college and workplace readiness, this bill lessens their importance and reinstates "social graduation."

Unfortunately, this is not the only education back-pedaling for legislators this session. The House recently reversed the bipartisan agreement to end social promotion in Texas, replacing the currently generous loophole that allows students to avoid retention with a new loophole that makes social promotion almost inevitable.

Worse still, the House agreed to eliminate the school accountability system in 2011. It has taken Texas 15 years to build up one of the best systems in the country. It should be studied for needed changes, and there remains plenty of room for improvement, but it makes no sense to eliminate the entire system. Sunsetting the current system only makes it vulnerable to bad policy that could further erode the ability of Texans to hold schools accountable. Do legislators really think lowering expectations and academic standards will help more students become ready for the rigors of college and the real world?

Make no mistake; the House's version of the end-of-course exam bill hurts Texas students. Lowering standards and expectations does not help students. It only sets them up for failure in the real world, where results are more important than their self esteem. There's not much time left in the legislative session, but there's enough to make real improvements in public education. Legislators need to raise expectations for our future leaders.If those expectations are lowered, the hard work of education reformers over the last two decades will essentially go down the drain, leaving a horrible legacy for today's leaders and hurting the chances of young Texans to achieve their dreams.

Source




West Australia faces teacher crisis

The report below fails to mention that a major reason for teachers resigning or not starting in the first place is the postmodern garbage they have been asked to teach -- something that has been a major public controversy and which prospective teachers could be expected to be well aware of. It is only older teachers who are hanging on until retirement that is keeping the system afloat

EXTRAORDINARY mismanagement of teacher recruitment has put WA at risk of teacher shortages for years, an international recruiting agency has found. The Gerard Daniels agency accuses the state Education Department of "clearly failing" to develop a workforce strategy, and says officials should have foreseen the problems now being experienced, including some schools still being short of teachers halfway through the school year. Teacher recruitment processes were antiquated, and the department's recruitment website one of the worst the agency had seen.

The agency report, marked strictly private and confidential, was unexpectedly released yesterday by Education Minister Mark McGowan, who commissioned the investigation in January when schools were short more than 250 teachers statewide. Mr McGowan said the shortage had now been cut to 28 teachers but he admitted there was a serious problem in attracting more teachers, particularly for country areas. WA has the oldest teacher profile of any state or territory, ensuring major challenges ahead as the rate of retirements increases.

If immediate action were not taken, the Gerard Daniels report said, years of shortages would result. Graduates were dropping with "application fatigue" after being forced to fill in the same handwritten personal details on up to eight different forms. If they got through that hurdle, many rejected the offers made to them because they were so inadequate. The report said about $18million was needed to overcome the shortages, and recommended structural changes to the Education Department.

Promising to provide money to tackle the problem, but unable to say how much, Mr McGowan said the Government was trying to recruit teachers from Britain, and to encourage retired teachers to return to the workforce, particularly those interested in moving to a country location.

But Gerard Daniels said a survey of recently resigned teachers found widespread disillusionment, and 61 per cent said they would not recommend the department as an employer. The study found 44 per cent would contemplate returning under the right conditions, but the agency warned that the department's "employment brand" had been damaged. Despite being the state's largest employer, it was a matter of "grave concern" that the department did not attract recruits. The booming resources sector had provided much competition for staff.

"The department should be held out as an iconic employment brand," Gerard Daniels said. "It is one of the oldest continuous employers in WA. We recommend that the department re-engineer its brand, including its job offer to graduates."

State School Teachers Union secretary Dave Kelly said the report vindicated everything the union had been telling the Government for years. He said the starting salary of $45,000 for a graduate teacher who had done four years of study was ridiculous against the wages being offered to young unskilled workers in the resources sector. Mr Kelly said pay rates must be raised, and innovative incentives were essential to get teachers to move to country areas. Basic requirements such as housing must be addressed urgently. "We have teachers being forced to live in motel rooms for months because there's no housing provided - it's shameful," Mr Kelly said. "These problems are not suddenly appearing. We've warned about what was happening for years."

He said suggestions by Mr McGowan that he might reinstate a rule to force graduate teachers to work in country schools was not the answer. Mr McGowan said the teaching workforce was larger than the Australian army in an area bigger than Europe, and overall the department was doing a good job.

Source

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

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

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

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25 May, 2007

Increase Educational Flexibility for States, Local School Districts

Press release below from Howard P. "Buck" McKeon (R-CA), Senior Republican Member, Congressional Education and Labor Committee. Yes. For my sins I do now get a lot of press releases. The many tiny teeth of bloggers are getting respect

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has empowered states and local schools districts unlike any federal education law in history. For instance, within the current law, states - NOT the federal government - design and implement their own testing systems, set academic standards, define the meaning of "highly qualified" teacher, and decide how millions in federal education funds will be spent on student achievement. While this amount of flexibility is unprecedented, I believe we must give state and local officials even greater flexibility, because a "one size fits all" approach to education simply cannot meet the needs of our nation's diverse schools.

During this year's NCLB reauthorization, Congress has the opportunity to enhance the flexibility provisions and grant greater control to states and local school districts. With that in mind, I soon will introduce legislation - the State and Local Flexibility Improvement Act - to give states and local school districts the freedom to target federal resources to best serve the needs of their students. While maintaining strong accountability standards, the State and Local Flexibility Improvement Act would:

* Allow states to waive certain statutory or regulatory requirements under law, consolidate federal education programs, and use an alternative method for making allocations to local school districts instead of the current formula if their new proposal targets more funds effectively to those areas with high concentrations of low-income families;

* Measure individual student growth to determine whether schools and school districts meet Adequate Yearly Progress, including through well-designed growth models; and

* Expand the poverty threshold for schoolwide programs, which frees local schools to consolidate all federal funds to improve the quality of the entire school.

Most notably, the State and Local Flexibility Improvement Act would empower states and local schools to use federal dollars on programs that best suit their unique needs and allow states and school districts to transfer 100 percent (up from 50 percent under current law) of its federal funds within certain programs - such as the Safe and Drug Free Schools, teacher quality, or classroom technology programs - and into the Title I program.

For example, if a state or local school district decides to transfer all of the funding that it receives under the Teacher and Principal Training and Recruitment, Education Technology, Safe and Drug Free Schools and Communities, 21st Century Community Learning Centers, and Innovative Block Grant Programs into the Title I program, it would only have to comply with the requirements of the Title I program to do so.

State and local leaders should be given the power to use federal dollars on programs that best suit their unique needs. By building on current local flexibility options already outlined in NCLB, this measure would significantly strengthen the law's overall reforms. For more information on the bill please visit here




English Learners: It's the Teaching, Stupid

From Joanne Jacobs

Forty to 60 percent of students who start California schools as "English Learners" never reach full English proficiency; many won't graduate from high school.

My article, How Good is Good Enough? Moving California's English Learners to English Proficiency (pdf) is up on the Lexington Institute web site.

California schools lose funding when students are reclassified as "fluent English proficient," an obviously perverse incentive. Many set high standards for reclassification: ELs have to do as well or better than the average native English speaker to qualify as proficient.

But the larger issue is that many ELs go to schools that don't do a very good job teaching reading and writing to anyone. They're not reclassified as proficient because they score below-average in English Language Arts on the state exam, even though they may speak "playground English" as their preferred language. ELs become proficient in English more quickly if they attend schools that focus on building the reading and writing skills of all students.

This isn't really about teaching in English (more than 90 percent of ELs are in mainstream English classes) or teaching in Spanish. It's about teaching well.

Source

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

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

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

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24 May, 2007

THE EVOLUTION OF EDUCATION INTO INDOCTRINATION

Post lifted from Dr. Sanity

Siggy has an astonishing series of quotes in his special edition of the Wednesday Weekly Whacky Awards that everyone should read. Scroll down to the Thomas Szaz Award and read what some of our "finest" educators and psychiatrists have said over the last 50 years about education. If you can make it though to the last quote, then you will begin to realize why K-12 education has evolved into K-12 indoctrination--indoctrination into the leftist mindset.

Here are just three examples:

".a student attains `higher order thinking' when he no longer believes in right or wrong". "A large part of what we call good teaching is a teacher's ability to obtain affective objectives by challenging the student's fixed beliefs. .a large part of what we call teaching is that the teacher should be able to use education to reorganize a child's thoughts, attitudes, and feelings." - Benjamin Bloom, psychologist and educational theorist, in "Major Categories in the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives", p. 185, 1956

"This is the idea where we drop subject matter and we drop Carnegie Unites (grading from A-F) and we just let students find their way, keeping them in school until they manifest the politically correct attitudes. You see, one of the effects of self-esteem (Values Clarification) programs is that you are no longer obliged to tell the truth if you don't feel like it. You don't have to tell the truth because if the truth you have to tell is about your own failure then your self-esteem will go down and that is unthinkable."- Dr. William Coulson, explaining Outcome Based Education (OBE)-1964

"Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It's up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well - by creating the international child of the future"- Dr. Chester M. Pierce, address to the Childhood International Education Seminar, 1973

Or, how about this one, from the source of the quotes cited by Siggy:

"Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished ... The social psychologist of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at: first, that influences of the home are 'obstructive' and verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective ... It is for the future scientist to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen."
Bertrand Russell quoting Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the head of philosophy & psychology who influenced Hegel and others - Prussian University in Berlin, 1810

Fichte was instrumental in creating the "climate of collectivism" in philosophy (as Stephen Hicks has referred to it) that prevailed in Germany during the late 18th and throughout the 19th century. In this counter-enlightenment climate, the state was worshipped as the source of all reality and that which brought meaning to life. Hegel, building on Kant, Rosseau and Fichte, would go on to write, "It must be further understood that all the worth which the human being possesses--all the spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State."

Hegel's heirs went on to divide into left- and right-wing camps. The charge of the left was led by leftists like Karl Marx, who transformed Hegel's "dialectic of Spirit" into an economic and social system that depended on godless dialectic of "oppressors vs oppressed." The right-wing Hegelians tended to stress the omnipotence of the state and were less willing to abandon a deity. For more than a 100 years, the two camps have been battling it out, each trying to impose their utopian vision onto the human species.

Both Hegelian offshoots summarily dispensed with free will and human freedom; and between them, they brought forth the philosophical abomination that we now call "postmodernism".

The 20th century was the battleground where the two totalitarian branches of the collectivist philosophers vied for spiritual and physical control over humanity. The amount of death, destruction and misery they ushered in is perhaps unprecedented in human history.

By the mid-20th century, the right-wing, or nationalist, Hegelians, or national socialists (Nazis) had been defeated by an alliance of the left-wing Hegelians and those who stood for human freedom and democracy. By the end of the century, the social systems favored by the Hegelians of the left had been exposed to the world for the lie and deception it was.

But, in this new century, both utopian systems have been given new life by recruited a potent new ally in their attempts to control the minds of men. That ally is postmodern philosophy and rhetoric.

Neither can hope to remain viable in a world where human thought is free; therefore, the goal for the last several decades has been nothing less than to undermine mankind's perception of reality itself. They have been most successful in this goal at all levels of education--elementary, high school and college.

If you can convince children that objective reality is an illusion; that A does not equal A; that black is white; and that good is bad; if you can make them accept that everything is subjective and relative; then you have successfully breathed new life into doctrines that by all objective measures and standards led to the death and misery of millions of people. Through the careful manipulation of language, everything can be distorted, without the messy need to resort to facts, logic, or reason.

For the children of postmodernism, what matters is not truth or falsity--only the effectiveness of the language used. Lies, distortions, ad hominem attacks; attempts to silence opposing views--all are strategies that are perfectly satisfactory if they achieve the desired effect--i.e., furthering the collectivist agenda. Ideas and reason make way for reification of feelings; and freedom is replaced by thought control and preservation of "self-esteem" at all costs.

The postmodern assault as it is used by the new totalitarians of the 21st century is a four-pronged attack to undermine
- Objective reality
- Reason and the rational debate of ideas
- Individual freedom and freedom of thought and speech
- Progress and capitalism

The strategies used are:
- The distortion of language and meaning to undermine the individual's perception of reality;
- The use of direct or threatened physical violence to suppress speech and individual freedom;
- Politically "correct" thought control and cultural relativism to undermine reason and rational debate;
- The promotion of environmental hysteria to undermine progress, industrialization and capitalism

These activities represent the most serious assault on reality, reason, and individual freedom since the defeat of the Hegelian twins in the last century.

Radical Islamic ideology is itself an unexpected combination of several toxic threads of Hegelian thought that have merged in the last 30 years. One thread of this meme is Islam itself--a purportedly "peaceful" religion that is actually historically based on military conquest and coercion of belief through jihad-- entwined with the remnants of the left- and right-wing totalitarian ideologies of the last century.

Thus we see how that 18th century philosophical climate of collectivism is still playing itself out several hundred years later. But the battleground in our time has returned to the battlefield of the mind, where strenuous efforts are being made by the remnants of both to claim the minds of the next generation.

Even 5-year olds and younger children are not too young for collectivist propaganda to be inculcated. Destroy free will; inoculate them with political correctness; treat the "insanity" of their attachment to parents, the Judeo-Christian tradition; or their country--i.e., all traditional Western values that brought civilization, individual freedom and economic progress; achieve a "higher order" of thought by showing them there is no right or wrong; good or evil.

After that, what will be left? The tyranny of the Collective; or the State or of Allah.

Today's political left likes to think they are so different from those Hegelian "fascists" of the 20th century. They appear to have a serious mental block, particularly when they speak so disparagingly of the National Socialist Party (better known as the "Nazis") who were simply one faction of Hegelians (socialists) who happened to be ascendent over the other faction (communists) vying for power at the time. Clearly they are victims of their own educational nihilism; and by lobotomizing themselves they have failed to recognize that there is no essential philosophical difference between the collectivist left and the collectivist right. Both are vying for absolute power as they preach the gospel of moral relativism and postmodernism.

In "The Dictatorship of the Do-Gooders and Soul Murder" I commented about a post of Betsy Newmark's that links to an article demonstrating how the "social justice" advocates of today's collectivists have taken over our K-12 education system and are determinedly undermining American values with their politically correct, multicultural and anti-capitalist curriculum. I wrote:

Make no mistake about it, what those teachers are doing is indoctrinating their students minds into an unquestioning obedience to the collective.

While our popular culture refrains sensitively from prtraying Islamofascists as villians in movies out of political correctness (yet another aspect of socialism's quest for "social justice"); it does not hesitate to make businessmen evil and malignant oppressors of the innocent. Individualism, the pursuit of profit, and private property is always bad and everyone must bow to the will of the collective. Islam (the name even means "submit"), even in all its terrorist varieties, does very well by this perverted moral standard.

One very harmful result of this sorry educational situation is that there are few people--even among those who stalwartly defend the free market, who understand and appreciate the essential morality of capitalism. Certainly our children, taught by ideological purists like the ones above who are leftover from the 20th century debacle of socialist/communist tyranny--never even have a chance to rationally consider any ideas not approved by their aggressively collectivist teachers, so intent at quashing those aspects of human nature they don't like.

This is child abuse, pure and simple. It is indoctrination. It is the willful manipulation of young minds which cannot never be allowed to develop even the capability of thinking for themselves. And these perverts call it "social justice."

In fact there is nothing that is "just" about it. It represents the worse kind of oppression with the goal of enslaving the human mind. And enslavement is exactly what is required to establish their socialist utopia, since it refuses to acknowledge the reality of human nature.

Socialist ideologues like those teachers know that in a free market of ideas, their pathetic system-- which has only brought human misery, slavery and death to those who have embraced--cannot function in a real world. Thus they must "stack the deck" and take absolute control over the thinking of the utopia's future citizens.

On some level they even understand that the very foundation of capitalism is human freedom in its most classical, liberal tradition. And that frightens them to death.

Capitalism's incredible production of wealth is the economic side-effect that occurs when political freedom is present. It has been argued, and I agree, that both economic and political freedom are absolute prerequisites for moral behavior.

Children propagandized by dogmatic tyrants like the ones above have had not only their capacity to think for themselves abrogated; they have had their capacity to make moral choices taken from them.

The moral case for capitalism is not taught in our schools, nor is it argued much in our culture. In fact it has been more or less universally accepted by the intellectual elites that systems such as communism and socialism are "morally superior" to capitalism (hence more "socially just")--even though in practice such systems have led to the death and enslavement of millions, and to those unlucky enough not to die from them, they have led to the most horrible shrinking and wasting of the human soul.

The truth is that neither socialism nor communism nor any kind of religious fundamentalism is compatible with morality at all.

If one's actions are coerced by the state or religion, or both; if human activity is indoctrinated, legislated, regulated and ordained down to the last minute detail--particularly to the degree we see in other countries of the world (e.g., Cuba, China, most Middle Eastern countries, North Korea, and now in Venezuela--then how can it possibly be argued that one's actions are moral? Human behavior under such systems is not voluntarily chosen, but actively coerced.

Morality, though, must always be a matter of choice, not mandate.

One cannot hold a person responsible for actions that are coerced or forced from him. Morality can only exist when freedom of action exists; and thus moral actions in any field of human endeavor require freedom.

Conduct may only be thought of as moral or immoral when it is freely chosen by the individual. It is only then that the moral significance of the action can be assessed. It is only when we are free to act that we can exercise moral judgement.

Taking the mind of a child and feeding it exclusively on your ideological pablum is not only the most cruel and abusive of behaviors; it also ensures that such a mind becomes cognitively stunted and morally impaired (much like the minds of the teachers who so proudly perform such oppressive acts).

All totalitarian/collectivist idealogues will casually and deliberately use and brainwash children. Whether it is Fidel and his communist indoctrination in Cuban schools or the mirror image of the Palestinian's using a Mickey Mouse look-alike to make little children comfortable with the idea of murdering Jews. Both are not above the atrocious behavior of hiding behind children and using them as their shields; parents thourougly schooled in the collectivist propaganda will happily send their children to blow themselves up for Allah and celebrate when they are successful; and all of them know full well that decent people are repulsed at the idea of retaliating against innocents. But the collectivist--both right and left--could care less about the harm their despicable behavior does to the souls of the children who are used or brainwashed in such a manner. For them the individual, whether a child or adult, has no meaning except insofar as they can advance the ideology. Their total worth is only equivalent to their willingness to be fodder for the good the "cause."

Modern-day educators, psychologists, and assorted self-esteem gurus, multiculturalists, and PC policemen are the natural-born heirs of Kant, Fichte, Hegel and many others who have refined and advanced the postmodern irrationality. They are the ones who are in charge of educating your children into the accepted dogmas that now are espoused by the left in this country.of political correctness and multicultural religion. They are the people who are determined to have George W. Bush impeached--or declared clinically mentally ill; they are determined to undermine American values; to portray Republicans and conservatives as absolute evil. By this behavior they signal how desperately afraid they are that there are still many individuals and pockets of people who are willing to think outside of the ideological box they have created and who have not been fully lobotomized by their educational system.

Only those whose brains have been damaged by a defective educational system to begin with could adhere on the one hand to a philosophy advocating moral relativism and subjectivism with unapologetic dogmatic absolutism.

What is outrageous is that anyone--anyone who is capable of thinking anyway--could take these postmodern, brain-damaged collectivists seriously.

Progressing from education to indoctrination, postmodernism has ushered in an age of educational nihilism that seeks to destroy the minds of the next generation of Americans. The good news is that the biggest impediment to their grandiose plans is that they earlier suceeded in destroying their own minds on the bullshit they now force-feed the children of today.

And, no matter how they feel about it, reality, truth and reason must eventually prevail.




Australia: Last days of literature

ENGLISH literature was in danger of disappearing and should be taught as a separate subject in schools, an education conference has heard. Griffith University Associate Professor Pat Buckridge told more than 150 English teachers on Saturday that Queensland faced the "imminent disappearance of the literary canon" if literature was not restored in schools. "In ecological terms, the thing we're on the brink of losing can be thought of as a huge and priceless piece of cultural heritage to which everyone in Australia and the rest of the world has an inalienable right of access and to which - if they want it - everyone in Australia should be offered the means of access," he said.

Professor Buckridge said a major difference he noticed in current students from those leaving school 30 and even 10 years ago was how much English and world literature they had never heard of, let alone read. "Most of them have studied, in some fashion, a couple of Shakespeare plays, but unless they're from interstate or overseas or an older age group they know of nothing beyond a few mid to late 20th century novels." He was speaking at a symposium on English Beyond the Battle Lines: Rethinking English Today hosted by the English Teachers Association of Queensland (ETAQ).

Association President Garry Collins said most English teachers were actively engaged in teaching students to use language well, including correct functional grammar and engaging students in literature. Mr Collins said the association was keen to give classroom teachers a major say on English curriculum content as part of the current review of the Queensland syllabus and the prospect of a national syllabus.

Mr Welford said a literature stream for interested students would broaden choice, just as many schools offered several maths subjects. "We could have literature, mainstream English and English communication for students intending to pursue vocations pathways," Mr Welford said. Sunshine Coast University academic and The Courier-Mail columnist, Dr Karen Brooks, said a balance between popular culture texts and traditional literature from antiquity to the present was vital.

Source

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

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

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

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23 May, 2007

Socialism for tykes?

Post lifted from American Thinker. See the original for links

Inspiration is a truly wonderful educational software package, which teaches kids how to use visual learning. Gosh, I wish I'd had that in grade school - you can see outlines, concept diagrams, and basic facts, all with terrific visual icons. More than 25 million people use this product, including sixty percent of school districts in the United States, according to the company. It's a great educational product, and home-schooling parents should really consider using it.

But there is a slight flaw under the "Social Science" heading in Inspiration. For "capitalism" we see an icon showing gleaming gold bars. For "socialism" we see two hands shaking in everlasting love and peace. Socialism has not been quite as loving as all that. That isn't history or reality: It's propaganda for tykes who don't yet know enough to be skeptical. Need I say that Inspiration was based on a government-funded project?

Oh, and here's a useful quote from a socialist who is now disowned by the Left. From Brussels Journal,

"Who Said This?

'We are Socialists, enemies, mortal enemies of the present capitalist economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, with its injustice in wages, with its immoral evaluation of individuals according to wealth and money instead of responsibility and achievement, and we are determined under all circumstances to abolish this system!'

A quote from?

Adolf Hitler in his May Day Speech, Berlin, 1 May 1927 (quoted by John Toland in his book Adolf Hitler, 1976, p. 306.)"

I think the talented people at Inspiration.com really mean well. They just don't know Western history or economics. They have been mis-educated. And they are inadvertently passing it on.

Still, maybe parents should congratulate the Inspiration crew on their wonderful work, and point out a slight flaw? Yasser Arafat was a socialist, Hitler was a socialist, Stalin and Mao called themselves socialists. They were all dedicated to human perfection in their own minds, and in the minds of millions of followers. They also caused more than 150 million deaths, using deliberate mass-murder and war. It wasn't that long ago, friends.

This is not a warm and loving track record to teach your kids. Let's not teach stupidity to 25 million kids, please. Inspiration.com should voluntarily recall its products and correct a small but awful error. Just as you would recall a tainted drug or food product, educational software must not peddle notorious falsehoods. A kid's mind is an awful thing to poison.




White pupils in British urban schools are failing academically: why?

Are white working class families the new victims?

In a season similar to this 30 years ago, British educationalists were preoccupied with something referred to as "the great schools debate", in which the urban comprehensive was placed under scrutiny. When the media got wind of this, one particular television crew was dispatched to the school I attended in south east London, having decided it was the epitome of an underachieving, inherently multi-racial school within a poor and neglected postcode. The documentary that emerged - Our School and Hard Times - revealed the literacy of teenage pupils was dramatically below par, truancy was high, and hope was at an all time low.

The sixties outakes on the teaching staff were steeped in theories of social engineering and hinted to the camera that surroundings and social class rather than the pupils themselves, or teaching methods, were responsible. It was an argument that appears to have been around since Aristotle was a lad, and served its purpose until the issue of academic underachievement shifted from social class to race. This occurred when it emerged that the poor performance of black pupils - notably boys - was disproportionate to the size of this particular minority.

Thirty years on, and with the new century in its infancy, the poor academic achievement of white pupils in urban schools is becoming an issue. And even additives and E-numbers can't take the flak for this one. More significantly, it's the ethnicity of this group rather than - solely - social class that is relative.

Today, London's Business and Design Centre plays host to a conference devoted to tackling the issue of white underachievement. It brings together figures said to be experts in this field, and is organized by Cambridge Education Associates. In Islington, the CEA has had some success in addressing the poor academic levels of black pupils. By shifting the focus to this trend among white pupils, and largely in urban schools in which these are the minority, the organisers are showing a nerve that is absent elsewhere.

This issue of "white underachievement" has risen to the fore sporadically over the last couple of years, but with little response or action taken. The TES previously released a report on the issue ("white working class pupils have less mobility and employment opportunities than the children of immigrants who moved to the UK in the 1960s"); the Social Policy Group, the think tank established by former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, published its own research last year. The latter revealed that for the first time white working class boys were falling behind their black and Asian contemporaries.

Bad parenting was flagged up as the key culprit, with the high level of success of pupils from more family-based, insular, Chinese and Asian communities cited as the standard of attainment to aim for. If the response of those present at this day-long conference mimics that of the teaching staff at my own secondary school back in the punk spring of 1977, you can bet that the short-sightedness and fear around modern racial etiquette is responsible. With poor performance of black pupils the burden of blame is apportioned to those post-Macpherson fallbacks institutional racism or "unwitting prejudice". In the case of white pupils, racism can't by cited as a reason or excuse any more than the industrial revolution or the age of the child chimney sweep. However, were this any other ethnic group, cultural alienation, lack of high-profile role models and its derogatory portrayal within the media would be brought into the proceedings.

Therefore there might be an argument to suggest the fact that urban white working class communities have endured more change, dislocation and upheaval than any other over the last 40 years, added to the racial and classcist slurs targeted regularly at this group by the press, might have some small part to play. But the greater responsibility for what is very much a 21st century trend might rest with the cult of multiculturalism.

This is alluded to within the research to be revealed at Monday's conference and where the notion of nerve comes in: "in dialogues about diversity, white ethnicity and social class is often rendered invisible and as such is not included in studies of the diverse landscape of British culture". In short, the communities that have been most altered in order to create a multi-racial society and accommodate multiculturalism have been airbrushed from any discussion or literature on the subject.

By recognising this the CEA might not have the answers on why young white urbanites are getting bad exam results, but it does highlight the fault-lines in a modern "inclusive" culture that exiles them. This in itself says more about the myth of multiculturalism than secondary education: it's one thing to build a vision on a myth, it's another to build it on a lie

Source

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

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

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

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22 May, 2007

Australian research shows the importance of good teachers and ....

Some VERY interesting findings below

SCHOOL students who have good teachers take half as long to learn their course material as those with poor teachers, new research shows. The report provides the first objective evidence of which teachers are adding value to the academic performance of their students - and which teachers are letting children down. "The top 10 per cent of teachers achieve in half a year what the bottom 10 per cent achieve in a full year," says the author, economist Andrew Leigh, of the Australian National University.

Dr Leigh tracked three years of numeracy and literacy exam scores for 90,000 primary school students and matched them against 10,000 teachers. Good teaching - measured by improvements in exam scores - has almost no relationship with teacher experience, qualifications or any of the criteria currently used by most schools to hire or reward teachers. Instead, the best teachers appear to be good at their jobs because of innate factors like personal drive, curiosity and ability to relate to students. "Most of the differences between teachers are due to factors not captured on the payroll database," said Dr Leigh. The study shows female teachers are more likely to improve student literacy, while males are better at teaching maths.

Surprisingly, it shows students in large classes performed better than those in small ones - although it doesn't claim a causative link. It also finds no positive effects of teacher qualifications on test scores, a finding which challenges the Federal Opposition's policy of paying teachers more for better academic qualifications rather than for observed ability.

The study is likely to receive a frosty reception from teacher unions and state education bureaucracies which say exam scores cannot be used to measure teacher quality. But it has been seized upon by private schools and the Federal Government. The executive director of the Association of Independent Schools of NSW, Geoff Newcombe, said Dr Leigh's "groundbreaking" findings paved the way for teachers to be partly rewarded by the exam score improvements of their students. "It's complex but we can't stick our head in the sand and say it's too hard," he said.

The Federal Education Minister, Julie Bishop, said the report supports her policy of introducing performance pay for teachers next year. "This makes a mockery of education union and Labor Party claims that teacher performance cannot be measured," she said.

The schools data for Dr Leigh's study, which includes year 3 and 5 numeracy and literacy exam scores and information about individual teachers, was provided by the Queensland Education Department after NSW and Victoria had refused to make their information available. As well as being used to identify, reward and retain the best teachers, Dr Leigh says his methodology could be used to send the best teachers where they could contribute most. If indigenous students had teachers from the top quarter rather than the bottom, then the findings imply the two-year black-white test score gap could be closed within seven years. [A very simple-minded extrapolation]

Source




Australia: Teachers reject payment by results

Predictably. Businesses get payment by results but teachers are high-minded noble idealists, of course

NSW school principals are designing their own plan to reward quality teaching in defiance of the Federal Government's push to link performance pay to student results. The body representing 460 high school heads has rejected the Government's "ideologically driven" model. They are wary of Labor's alternative, saying it is still too thin on detail.

The president of the NSW Secondary Principals Council, Jim McAlpine, said the council's plan would be "based on merit rather than performance". "[The federal Minister for Education] Julie Bishop's performance pay is going to be based on results of students in tests and that is a very narrow performance measure," he said. "But teachers who take on additional responsibilities, who undertake additional professional learning, who contribute to the further development of other teachers, merit extra pay."

From January 2008, first-year teachers in NSW Government schools will earn an annual salary of $50,250 and receive an increase each year for the following nine years up to $75,000. They will then receive no further increase unless they take up a position as a head teacher, deputy principal or principal. Top principals earn $119,000. In all there are 21 pay points in teaching, based on merit, years of experience and school size. The principals suggest creating extra salary steps for teachers who, for example, complete master's degrees and use them to help their colleagues. This would recognise the collegiality of the profession, where a number of teachers may contribute to a pupil's development.

The state Minister for Education, John Della Bosca, has also said he is open to a system of merit pay not based on student results. Mr Della Bosca and his state and territory colleagues last month rejected Ms Bishop's proposal to pilot performance pay in schools from next year, saying they would develop their own plans. Since then, Ms Bishop has said schools will be rewarded with up to $50,000 for outstanding results in numeracy and literacy. Schools could divide the money among their best teachers.

Federal Labor has said it would reward quality teaching using a merit-based system that took into account extra qualifications, professional development and working in rural and remote areas.

The Prime Minister, John Howard, has said that from 2009 he would tie Commonwealth funding to the states and territories to the introduction of performance pay for teachers, giving principals more autonomy to hire and fire and providing parents with more detailed information on school performance. That information should also include cases of bullying and violence. The principals' plan is separate to another being devised by the national teacher union, the Australian Education Union.

Source

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

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

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

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21 May, 2007

British exam bungle

Alan Johnson's chances of becoming Labour deputy leader take a serious blow today from a highly critical attack on one of the biggest changes to secondary education in the past 40 years. Plans for the new job-related diplomas to run alongside A levels have been described as muddled, in danger of lacking practical content and being rushed through without being properly tested. In a scathing report, the Commons Education Select Committee today accuses the Government of not being clear about the purpose of the qualification, the learning that it will involve and a failure to involve teachers and examiners in its development. Mr Johnson, the Education Secretary, is frontrunner in the race for the deputy leadership and a champion of overhauling 14-19 education to keep more teenagers in school.

The specialist diplomas, the first five of which are to be introduced in September, combine practical work experience with academic study in an attempt to offer more relevant courses for teenagers. They came about after Tony Blair refused to abandon the A-level "gold standard" in 2004 in favour of one overarching diploma to replace GCSEs, A levels and existing vocational qualifications. Instead, the Government proposed single diplomas in 14 subjects alongside A levels, from engineering to hair and beauty.

However, in spite of asking both business and universities to design the new qualification, critics have voiced fears that it will neither offer hands-on vocational training nor be sufficiently academically demanding. The MPs lay the blame for this squarely at Mr Johnson's door. "The Government describes diplomas as charting a middle course between vocational and academic learning, but it is far from clear that those in charge of developing the different diplomas share a common understanding of what they are for and what kinds of learning they will involve," they wrote.

The select committee cautioned that there was still confusion about key aspects of the plan. Work to develop the diplomas had been "uncomfortably compressed", and there were widespread concerns that they would not be ready. Teachers, lecturers and exam boards also have had too little input into them and time to prepare for their introduction in schools and colleges next year. "Too often in the past, initiatives have been rolled out in a rushed manner, with negative consequences in terms of quality," the MPs said, adding that if more problems emerged during the first pilot, the rest of the scheme should be delayed. They also raised concerns about the continuing lack of a clear grading system and content, which meant that few universities appeared prepared to take them seriously.

The comments come as a survey of 565 teachers and lecturers reveals that almost two thirds believe that the new diplomas will be seen simply as training programmes leading to low-paid, low-status jobs for nonacademic pupils. According to Edge, the educational foundation which commissioned the research, only 3 per cent of teachers think that diplomas will appeal to middle-class students. Teaching unions said that schools needed more money and training to prepare them for the qualifications, and that A levels should be brought into the structure to break down the barrier between academic and vocational qualifications

Source




Racist treatment of a white teacher is OK

In a new twist in American race relations, a federal court has ruled that a white teacher in a predominantly African-American school was subjected to a racially hostile workplace. The case concerned Elizabeth Kandrac, who was routinely verbally abused by black students at Brentwood Middle School in North Charleston. Their slurs make shock jock Don Imus look like a church deacon. Nevertheless, despite frequent complaints, school officials did nothing to intervene on Kandrac's behalf, arguing that the racially charged profanity was simply part of the students' culture. If Kandrac couldn't handle cursing, school officials told her, she was in the wrong school.

Kandrac finally filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and subsequently brought a lawsuit against the Charleston County School District, the school's principal and an associate superintendent. Last fall, jurors found that the school was a racially hostile environment to teach in and that the school district retaliated against Kandrac for complaining about it. The defendants sought a new trial, but U.S. District Judge David C. Norton recently affirmed the verdict. However, he did not support the jury's findings of $307,500 in damages for lost income and emotional distress.

Although Kandrac clearly suffered -- she was suspended from her job shortly after a story about her EEOC complaint appeared in the local newspaper, and her contract was not renewed -- her case didn't meet evidentiary requirements for damages. The judge said a new trial would have to determine damages, but the school district and Kandrac settled for $200,000.

While the dollars-and-cents issue may have been of paramount importance to school and district officials -- and would have lent heft to the verdict -- the more compelling issue for students, parents and society is the idea that a particular group of people can be allowed to behave in a grossly uncivil and threatening way by virtue of their racial "culture."

The key legal question was whether a school could be held responsible for students' behavior. In this case, the black children of Brentwood had been given a pass for their behavior because vulgar language was considered normal for their culture. Defense attorney Alice Paylor told jurors that the kids heard this same language at home and there was "no magic pill" to make them behave. Paylor is probably right about that, though a magic paddle might have worked wonders. Back in the day, if a student talked the way these did, he or she would have received a well-deserved thwack, been suspended and sent home to face the wrath of his or her father. That process likely would have put a swift end to the tribal tyranny now often tolerated in the service of self-esteem.

Let's be clear: What these children called this teacher is beyond reprehensible and could be only be construed as hostile and threatening. Here's a sample: white b----, white m----- f-----, white c---, white a------, white ho. Other white teachers and students corroborated Kandrac's account, including a male war veteran who testified he would rather return to Vietnam than to Brentwood.

Kandrac's attorney, Larry Kobrovsky, argued that the repeated use of "white" made these slurs racists in nature. But school officials insisted that because black students were equally abusive to other blacks, the language wasn't inherently racist.

Here's what we know without question: If majority white students had used similar language toward black students and teachers, the case would have been plastered on the front page of The New York Times until heads rolled. A black Kandrac would have a million-dollar book deal, a movie contract and hundreds of interviews to juggle. Her oppressors and those who passively facilitated her abuse would have been pilloried by the media -- their faces all over the evening news -- while the reverends Al and Jesse organized protests. But a white Kandrac -- who faced a daily barrage of insults, who had books and desks thrown at her and her bicycle tires punctured -- was treated like an incompetent wimp. She was just a lousy teacher out for money, the defense attorney said.

Though Kandrac lost her job, the real losers are the children deprived of an education by the actions of a tyrannical few. And the worst racists are those teachers and administrators who denied these empowered brats the expectation of civilized behavior. May the rest of America now be emboldened to act decisively in the interest of students who want to learn.

Source

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

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

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

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



20 May, 2007

Black school boss in California had only diploma-mill degrees

A blind eye was obviously turned -- anything to get a black face in your group photographs -- and thus show how wonderful you are! It's only when he was found to be crooked in other ways that anybody looked into his qualifications



Elk Grove schools' recently hired facilities chief -- already surrounded by questions about cronyism and a controversial land deal at his former job -- claims university degrees on his r�sum� that education experts say appear to have come from a diploma mill. The Elk Grove job posting required a master's degree, but The Bee discovered that the company hired to vet Frank C. Harding Jr.'s r�sum� never checked his academic credentials.

On his resume, Harding, who did not respond to several requests for comment, states that he did course work at UCLA from 1972 through 1976 but received both his bachelor's degree in economics and an MBA from Edenvale University. For $2,000 to $8,000, that university will provide a degree based upon "life experience, work experience and any kind of courses taken" at a prior college, said Edenvale registrar Brian Winslow. Currently, Edenvale is a non-accredited online organization with offices in Dallas, New York and London, Winslow said. Previously, he said, it was a correspondence and distance learning organization. Winslow declined to provide an address or phone number for the university's headquarters unless a reporter paid a fee for a degree.

Clients send Edenvale their resume and transcripts and a panel of professors determines if they are qualified for degrees, Winslow said. Letters of recommendation and customized transcripts also are provided. Many legitimate online college programs exist. But education experts said the practices described by Winslow can be tip-offs that an institution sells diplomas. Alan Contreras, administrator for Oregon's Office of Degree Authorization, is widely known as an expert on bogus degrees. He looked at Edenvale's Web site, www.edenvaleuniversity.org. "Fake, fake, fake," Contreras said. "This is not even a close call. This is a diploma mill."

Government officials in Texas and the United Kingdom say it is illegal for Edenvale to issue diplomas from those locations. "(Edenvale) has never been recognized as a degree awarding body by U.K. authorities," Jackie Stevenson, a spokeswoman for Britain's Department for Education and Skills, said in an e-mail.

The superintendent of the Elk Grove Unified School District, Steven Ladd, said the district hired School Services of California to vet Harding's references as part of a rigorous screening process. Harding's previous jobs include posts with the Natomas Unified School District and the private consulting firm School Facilities Planning & Management. Ladd said nothing of concern arose during that screening. "The question for us is, 'Does he have the degrees?' and he does," Ladd said during a break in Tuesday's school board meeting. "You're asking questions about the quality of those degrees."

Yet it turns out the education portion of the screening never actually occurred. Ronald Bennett, president of School Services of California, at first said his firm paid another company to verify Harding's claims. When The Bee found that firm had not made the checks, Bennett said he had accidentally neglected to make that request.

Source




Academic Thuggery

"Indoctrinate U" examines higher learning's left wing bias

IRONICALLY ENOUGH, aspiring conservative documentarian Evan Coyne Maloney received his inspiration from Michael Moore, the left-wing firebrand responsible for the anti-gun polemic Bowling for Columbine and the anti-Bush screed Fahrenheit 9/11. This isn't to say that Moore inspired him figuratively: Maloney literally stopped Moore on the street, interviewed him, and left with some helpful knowledge. When Maloney confronted the Oscar winner about the liberal slant of most Hollywood-produced documentaries, Moore responded thusly:

"I agree with you. I think this art form should be open to people of all political persuasions and not just be people who are liberal or left of center or whatever. . . . You want to encourage all voices to be heard because that's the best way to have, to come up with the best decisions in a free society. You don't want just one voice or one stream of thought being put out there. . . . Make your movies and then the people will respond, or not respond, to them."

Taking this advice to heart, Maloney posted the video of this exchange on his blog in 2003 along with a note that read "I have not yet received payment for the services I have rendered to the [vast right wing] conspiracy. I'll assume this is merely a clerical error on your part and will expect remuneration shortly." This tongue-in-cheek plea for cash was not entirely sarcastic and his fishing expedition landed a nice haul--Stuart Browning, the cofounder of Embarcadero Technologies (a software company that was named 2000's best IPO).

"He sort of threw down the gauntlet," Browning said of Maloney. "Hey, you know, why can't we make these sorts of things too? Why can't conservatives have a voice in this art form too?" Intrigued by Maloney's appeal, Browning then "sent him an email and said 'what would it cost, and what kind of projects are you interested in?' That's how we met."

"He was the guy that put up the first dollars to get" Indoctrinate U going, Maloney says in an interview. "He, and I, and another gentleman, Blaine Greenberg, decided to start a production company after I was able to convince them that there was a feature-length film in analyzing what is going on on college campuses." Browning was interested. "At that point I was pretty well versed on the topic, having read Dinesh D'Souza's books, and Bloom, Closing of the American Mind. I had read all the literature and was very open to the idea," Browning said, adding "And [Evan] looked like a college student! Even though he'd been out of college for a while, he looked the ideal guy to play the part."

WITH FUNDING IN PLACE, Maloney set out on his quest to gather material for the documentary. "We were looking for specific cases that were fairly well-documented that would show different examples of people having their free speech or free thought rights trampled on campus," Maloney says.

There was no shortage of topics. The free-wheeling film first documents the rise of the "campus free speech movement" in the 1960s and '70s, then cuts to examples of modern-day conservatives being shouted down and otherwise intimidated on college campuses. Ward Connerly is verbally assaulted for daring to disagree with campus orthodoxy on the issue of affirmative action and black professors like John McWhorter, formerly of UC-Berkeley, Carol Swain of Vanderbilt University's Law School, and Temple's Lewis Gordon all express their dismay with the current state of the academy, and the suppression of intellectual diversity therein.

From there, Maloney looks at the deprivations some conservative students have faced. He highlights the Kafka-esque nightmare faced by Steve Hinkle, a student at California Polytechnic, who the school attempted to sanction for placing a flier in the university's multicultural center announcing a speech by conservative African-American author, Mason Weaver.

Maloney points out the intimidation tactics used against ROTC recruiters on campus, including a students protest designed to shut down a college job fair the Army Corps of Engineers is attending. The litany goes on and on, with conservative student publications stolen and professors told "we never would have hired you if we knew you were a Republican." Daniel Pipes sums it up best noting, "Going to a university today in the United States is like joining a church--you have to be a believer, you have to have the right set of views, or you're excluded."

The documentary combines relatively shocking footage (one professor excitedly tells the camera "whiteness is a form of racial oppression . . . treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity") with snappy editing to create a documentary that bounces quickly from subject to subject. It's not a perfect production--Indoctrinate U tends to bog down a little when Maloney tries to ambush subjects who haven't replied to multiple requests for interviews. But these segments illustrate an important point: Rather than face a rational discussion with someone who disagrees with them, many academics simply call the cops. (Maloney even had the police called on him at his alma mater, Bucknell.)

WITH FILMING AND EDITING COMPLETE, Maloney is now looking for a way to distribute his film, which is an expensive proposition. "Your first set of prints will probably run you $20,000 to $25,000, and every set after that will be $2,000 to $3,000," Maloney says. It is virtually impossible for an independent filmmaker to shoulder that cost and convince theaters to run the films. If Indoctrinate U is going to be shown at your local art house theater, it will have to be picked up by a mini-major distributor, such as Lion's Gate, or New Line.

In order to generate interest from a studio, the film's producers have been trying to stir up excitement at the grassroots level. "At our website, indoctrinateu.com, people can punch in their zip codes and when they do that, it puts a pin on a Google map. We've got thousands and thousands of pins on there now, and over 10,000 localities around the country where people have expressed interest in the film. That's a bankable asset," Maloney says. "We can go to distributors and say 'Look, we haven't spent a dime on promoting this film yet, and we've already had tens of thousands of people sign up saying they'd see this near them if it was shown there." Browning adds, "The idea is to show the demand for a film like this and show there's a ready made audience. That's the hope."

Maloney believes that his documentary has the potential to be a commercial success and hopes someone in Los Angeles takes notice. "I've gotta figure that there's at least one person in Hollywood who recognizes that there's a huge potential audience for this, and that if they think like a business person, and not like a political operative, we could very easily get mainstream distribution."

Failing that, Maloney plans to take his film directly to the people: "We've got this database of people who've already expressed an interest in seeing the film, and there's other ways of getting it to them, from DVD sales, to the iTunes movie store. One way or another, people are going to get to see this film. The only question is, 'Is Hollywood going to demonstrate that they're really nonpartisan, and do business with folks like us?'"

Source



Australia: School geography has lost its way, say teachers

GEOGRAPHY is taught in schools as a series of issues pushing a particular opinion rather than giving students a grounding in basic facts about natural processes and human interaction with the environment. The Australian Geography Teachers Association and the Institute of Australian Geographers told a Senate inquiry into the academic standards of school education that geography, under the umbrella of Studies of Society and the Environment, had lost its disciplinary rigour.

AGTA director Grant Kleeman told the hearing in Sydney that students studied global warming but not the atmospheric processes required to understand climate change and its impact. "The traditional discipline encouraged students to look at issues from a variety of perspectives with the expectation students then formulate their own opinions rather than inculcate them with a particular perspective," Mr Kleeman said.

IAG president Jim Walmsley said the teaching of SOSE into schools resulted in geography students being "issue-led rather than being rigorous in their understanding of these issues".

Mr Kleeman said the notion of issue-based learning was introduced in the 1970s and 80s when everything taught in schools had to be immediately relevant to the lives of students. "We're advocating a return to a more systematic study of geography and history, where you look at processes as the entry point of study rather than the issue," he said.

AGTA chairman Nick Hutchinson said the perspectives pushed in school geography included radical green opinions and neo-liberal views school, when it should have a robust core as the base. "In geography, we've taken on board everything from extreme environmental perspectives through to peace perspectives," Mr Hutchinson said. "But all the time we come back to this core of the discipline, so we can deal with an issue like deep ecology, which might be as controversial as black-armband history, but we can do it within the discipline because we have tools of dissection," he said. Deep ecology is a philosophy that says animals and plants have the right to as much ethical consideration as humans. "The automatic reaction of most kids is they want to protect nature, the environment, animals and cuddly things," he said. "The job of the teacher is to show them other sides, to facilitate class discussion so they can work out their values towards issues." Understanding the processes at work in areas such as the Great Barrier Reef or cyclones destroying rainforests showed students that destruction was part of the natural growth cycle, he said.

The AGTA says geography should be compulsory for all students in years 7 to 10 as a stand-alone subject.

Source

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

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

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

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19 May, 2007

Black boys' culture works against school, study says

A rare public recognition that blacks are different

The achievement gap separating black boys from just about everyone else springs from a powerful, anti-education culture rising in the black community, a local black think tank argues in a new report. Parents who undervalue education, and a mass media that peppers youth with the quick, shallow rewards of hip-hop lifestyle, are steering alarming numbers of boys down a dead-end path, PolicyBridge contends.

The report calls for public recognition of a phenomenon crippling the black community and the civic will to fight it. It's to be released today via mailings to civic leaders and on the group's Web site, www.policy-bridge.org. "In our community, family culture has changed, and street culture has changed," said Randell McShepard, 42, an executive at RPM International and the secretary of PolicyBridge. "But the headline now is, Those changes are dragging down the education system.' "

McShepard, Timothy Goler and Mark Batson, all local black professionals who attended Cleveland and East Cleveland public schools, founded the nonprofit research center in 2004 to explore issues critical to the black community. They wrote the report with guidance from university researchers and public policy makers, as well as from teachers, principals and Cleveland school students, who are liberally quoted.

Some education experts are skeptical about the report's broad conclusions, but they said the topic is critical to Cleveland. "The Rap on Culture: How Anti-Education Messages in Media, at Home, and on the Streets Hold Back African American Youth" starts from a well-known premise. Black youths, and black boys in particular, perform more poorly in school and on standardized tests than white and Asian youths, regardless of income.

Almost half of black children attending Cleveland public schools fail to graduate, and only a fraction will ever finish college. What's new is the identification of a leading culprit. The report argues that no amount of money or strategy will close the gap as long as black children are raised in an environment that devalues education. "School is life, and that is the message our kids are not getting, and a lot of this is culture," said Goler, 41, a former schoolteacher who is PolicyBridge's executive director. "We have to reverse this anti-education mind-set that our kids have."

The authors trace underachievement to the breakdown of the black family, a trend Daniel Patrick Moynihan publicized in 1965, when he reported that 25 percent of black children were born to single mothers. Today, more than 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Absent fathers, and with families weakened, corrupting influences gained power and prestige, the report argues. Rap music, poverty and pop-culture celebrities combine to create an alluring "cool-pose culture of self-destructive behaviors." The report cites research by a social psychologist who found that black youths enjoy the highest self esteem of any ethnic group, regardless of their grades. It quotes a Cleveland boy who said he ceased to be taunted at school when he let his grades fall. And it includes the observations of a youth mentor, who said he has been told by children he is the only adult in their lives excited to see their report cards.

"This is sort of a silent killer," McShepard said. "Every day, our community is being chipped away at. And because there's no one big horrible event, no one pays a lot of attention."

Barbara Byrd-Bennett, the leader of Cleveland schools from 1998 to 2006, said she has not yet read the report but that its conclusions sound a bit extreme. The black achievement gap results from "a number of variables," she said. "I'm not sure I would classify it in such strong language as anti-education culture." Former Ohio Senate Minority Leader C.J. Prentiss, who is the governor's special representative for closing the achievement gap, also worries the report is too critical of black parents. "That's a piece of it," she said. "How about the role of the churches, the business community, the teachers?"

The report indeed calls for multifaceted action. It recommends that the federal No Child Left Behind Act be amended to treat black boys as a distinct category deserving of special attention, including a longer school year. It calls upon black parents and civic leaders to raise their expectations of black pupils. And it urges black men to "step up" as role models for fatherless youths. "We've reached crisis proportions," McShepard said. "We need to do something different."

Source




Australian Students resent 'guilt' in Leftist history teaching

HIGH school students resent being made to feel guilty during their study of Australia's indigenous past and dislike studying national history in general. The History Teachers Association called yesterday for a rethink of the type of Australian history being taught in schools and the way in which it is taught.

History Teachers Association of NSW executive officer Louise Zarmati said her experience teaching in western Sydney was that students were resistant to learning about Australian politics and, in particular, indigenous history. "This is a somewhat delicate subject but they don't like the indigenous part of Australian history," she told a hearing of the Senate inquiry into the academic standards of school education in Sydney yesterday. "The feedback I get is they're not prepared to wear the guilt. They find it's something that's too personal, too much of a personal confrontation for them. "I think it sparks a lot of racism; it certainly did in my classroom. It makes it an unpleasant learning experience."

Australia's indigenous history has been a contentious issue in the ongoing "history wars" over the interpretation of European colonisation. Historian Geoffrey Blainey brought the phrase "black armband view of history" to prominence in 1993 to describe the portrayal of European colonisation as shameful. The description was picked up in 1996 by John Howard, who later launched an offensive on the teaching of Australian history in schools. The Government is now in the process of developing a national curriculum for Australian history.

Until this year, NSW was the only state in which Australian history was a compulsory stand-alone subject for students in years 7 to 10. In years 9 and 10, students study 20th century Australian history focusing on the workings of government and the history of politics, and the subject is examined in the Higher School Certificate.

Ms Zarmati said more than 20,000 students studied history for the HSC last year, of whom more than 11,000 studied ancient history, making it the most popular history course in the English-speaking world.

Ms Zarmati said history teachers constantly struggled with the unpopularity of Australian history in years 9 and 10. "They don't really enjoy it and feel forced to do it; they don't like the politics all that much," she said. "My personal opinion is that it's the nature of the beast. "Teenagers at that stage aren't mature enough to understand the concepts but when they get to years 11 and 12, they really enjoy Australian history because they're looking at problems and issues and debates."

In other evidence to the Senate inquiry, literacy expert Max Coltheart said the federal Government's budget initiatives to improve literacy and numeracy standards with programs costing more than $500million over four years was a "waste of money". The budget included a scheme granting up to $50,000 to schools that showed a significant rise in literacy and numeracy standards, and vouchers worth $700 to provide one-on-one tuition for students failing to meet minimum national literacy and numeracy standards. Professor Coltheart, professor of psychology and head of the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science at Macquarie University, said the commonwealth should stipulate the type of reading tests schools had to use to qualify for the grants. He said children who struggled to learn to read were labelled as having a learning difficulty but they actually suffered a teaching difficulty. The budget funding would be better spent on training primary school teachers how to teach reading properly.

Source




Australian school science courses 'pre-Newtonian'

SCIENCE in years 8 to 10 in Queensland is essentially descriptive, with courses failing to recognise the scientific revolution triggered by Isaac Newton in 1687, leaving students woefully unprepared for senior study. Submissions to the Senate inquiry into the academic standards of school education argue the calibre of maths and science taught is low by international standards, the quality of teaching is poor and the courses fail to stretch bright students.

A submission from a maths teacher of 40 years' standing, who co-authored a series of textbooks and worked with the Queensland Board of Senior Secondary School Studies, said that maths to the end of Year 10 "fails abjectly" to provide students with the skills to progress to more rigorous maths or the physical sciences. "That this has been allowed to go on for decades is a scandal," John Ridd said. Dr Ridd said the standard of algebra taught in Queensland schools was poor and there was "now no numerical science in years 8/9/10". "It is a sad fact that science in the years up to the end of Year 10 in Queensland is essentially all descriptive. It is non-numerical, pre-Newtonian," he said.

Dr Ridd said the "awful gap" between the standard of maths at the end of Year 10 and the start of Year 11 had required a lowering in the standard of maths taught. "Maths has had to be softened, weakened, by a large amount," Dr Ridd said. "Work that used to be done in years 8/9/10 now appears in the first sections of the Year 11 maths B texts. "Naturally the longer-term effect of that is that the standards reached by the end of Year 12 have declined -- with implications for the next stage -- university maths, physical science and engineering. There is a gap there too."

Dr Ridd's concerns are echoed in a submission by the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute and the International Centre of Excellence for Education in Mathematics, which says the long tail among Australian students "of under-achievement and failure is apparent well before the end of secondary education". The AMSI and ICE-EM submission argues that the OECD maths skills test often quoted as showing Australian 15-year-olds perform highly "is not a valid assessment" of maths knowledge, with some of the questions "effectively general aptitude tests rather than mathematical ones".

The submission says that a better guide to the standard of students is the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study of Year 8 students, which tests curriculum content. Its results show that by the early years of high school, a large proportion of students already lack the background skills necessary for intermediate and advanced level maths courses in years 11 and 12.

The Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers agrees that students are failing to reach their full potential in maths, and attributes this to poor teaching, modelled on methods used in the 1960s that "foster memorisation as opposed to deep learning". But the association says Australian students compare favourably with their international counterparts and the achievement standards in courses compared well to those expected of overseas students. "We believe there is a disproportionate focus on comparisons between the states and territories, particularly through the media, which is not helpful to improving standards," it says.

Source

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

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

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

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18 May, 2007

Arizona clears the way for Leftist propaganda in schools

Public schools can invite speakers to talk about past and current events, even if a topic deals with a pending ballot measure, Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard has concluded. But the schools can't try to influence an election. In a legal opinion stemming from a Tucson incident, Goddard also said Monday that candidates for office can speak to students. But the same restriction against advocating for or against someone's election applies.

Goddard also said schools should consider advising speakers of the legal restrictions. And if someone does go over the line, it's up to school officials to determine what action - if any - is appropriate to undo the damage and to make sure that those in attendance understand the school is not endorsing the speaker's political views. But he said school officials have no legal responsibility to do anything if a speaker does go over the line and tells students how he or she thinks people ought to vote.

The formal opinion comes in response to an incident last year in which labor activist Dolores Huerta spoke to students at Tucson High Magnet School. Her comments included a claim that "Republicans hate Latinos," criticism of the war in Iraq and support for Hugo Chavez, the socialist president of Venezuela. Huerta also urged students to get involved in the re-election campaign of U.S. Rep. Ra�l Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat.

But the opinion - which was sought by House Minority Leader Phil Lopes, D-Tucson, in response to the Huerta incident - has broader statewide implications for schools when they invite speakers. It suggests that school officials won't be prosecuted for breaking the law if they don't knowingly allow people to use their facilities to promote candidate campaigns or ballot measures - even when a speaker ends up doing either.

State law makes it a crime to use the resources of a public or charter school to influence an election. It also is illegal for school employees to use the "authority of their position" to influence the vote. Violators are subject to a fine of $500 plus the amount of misused funds involved in an incident.

Goddard said only statements that "clearly and unmistakably present a plea for action" are considered items that would influence an election. He said Arizona Supreme Court decisions conclude that there is no violation if "reasonable minds could differ" on the message. He was not asked - nor did he say - whether he believes Huerta's speech crossed that line. The attorney general also said it's not illegal merely to invite elected officials or candidates to speak to students, as long as they don't advocate one way or another on an election. And Goddard said "age-appropriate education" about pending issues, including ballot measures, also is legal - again, with the same restriction.

Rep. Jonathan Paton, R-Tucson, had planned to ask Goddard the more specific question of whether allowing Huerta's speech to remain on the Tucson Unified School District's Web site for some period of time amounted to illegal use of school resources to influence the election. But an aide to Goddard said he never got such a request, and Paton conceded he may never have submitted it.

Goddard's opinion comes less than a month after TUSD administrators unveiled a new policy on guest speakers, one that appears to be in line with what the attorney general said are the requirements of the law. The draft policy, which has yet to be adopted by the board, says speakers and statements must be not just age-appropriate but "relevant to the enhancement of the students' education development." It also asks speakers to "refrain from messages intended to promote hatred, bigotry or animosity between groups of people." It does not involve pre-clearance of speeches - only that school principals explain the guidelines to speakers.

Source




Texas school bars the thuggish look -- so it's "racism"



7th grader Derek Jackson says he is back in his normal classes today following his placement in in-school-suspension for having a haircut that was too short; something the school says was both a violation of the school dress-code and a distraction. Derek's mother, Amanda, says she met with Bailey Middle School Principal Dr. Julia Fletcher, and Dr. Fletcher told her that the issue was "not worth the fight".

Leaders of Austin's NAACP are convinced the suspension of Derek Jackson is racially motivated. Nelson Linder with the NAACP says there's no other reason he can think of why a 7th grader would get in-school suspension for having hair that's too short. "We think that Derek is just a metaphor for how people are treated," he said. "For whatever reason, African-Americans are put under very high scrutiny...gang issues, all kind of what I call 'racist projections'. So I think when a black kid has a haircut that they might think is inappropriate, you're seeing phobias from people.

Linder has sent a letter to AISD announcing that the NAACP is conducting its own investigation into the incident. Linder is also calling on AISD officials to change what he says is unfair treatment for African-Americans. "Number one, revoke the suspension for this kid and apologize to the family. Number two, hire people in the district who respect black people and who understand them has human beings," he said.

Jackson's mother, Amanda, tells KLBJ that her son was given in-school suspension for violating a portion of the district's dress code prohibiting hair styles that are "disruptive". She says her son has had other run-ins with the school's principal.

Source




Australia: Bureaucratic hatred of private education

An accreditation body is accused of hounding the colleges it's meant to be monitoring, writes Elisabeth Wynhausen

THESE days Jo Coffey sleeps in a caravan she has borrowed from her son or stays with friends in Newcastle, in regional NSW. Her house is gone and Coffey, the former owner of a vocational training college in the Newcastle suburb of Broadmeadow, says she has lost everything. By January this year, when she declared bankruptcy and closed down her college, Coffey, 59, had spent two years under siege from the Vocational Education and Training Accreditation Board, the agency that accredits vocational training colleges and courses in NSW.

Its critics suggest that instead of merely monitoring their standards, VETAB is hounding these training organisations until some close down. "VETAB dangles its authority over the industry like the sword of Damocles," says a consultant who helps vocational colleges deal with the regulator.

There are legitimate concerns about the burgeoning industry. Most vocational training colleges cater to international students. There are students who abuse the system as a way to get permanent residency, and so-called visa factories that aid and abet them: teaching "cooking" without ovens, for instance, or faking attendance records. This is precisely the sort of abuse VETAB is supposed to stampout.

Critics claim that the regulator goes about its business in a heavy-handed and obstructionist manner. "They make it as difficult as possible for colleges to open up at all, it's easier than closing them down," says Chris Stephens of Phoenix Compliance Management, one of many people to suggest that VETAB's operations are provoking a crisis in the industry in NSW.

According to National Centre for Vocational Education Research figures for 2005, the most recent available, the operating revenues of the vocational education sector were a fraction under $5 billion that year, when there were 1.64 million students enrolled in the publicly funded VET system, 562,100 of them in NSW.

The growing clamour about the operations of the regulator led the VETAB board to commission a review in NSW, which was announced late last year by the then education minister, Carmel Tebbutt. The operations of any regulator create tensions, but its critics emphasise that the essence of their problem with VETAB results from its culture. "I feel they treat us like criminals," says Darryl Gauld, the principal of Macquarie Institute, a Sydney college for international students.

College administrators met most recently at workshops held in Sydney last month as part of the review into VETAB. Many used the occasion to accuse VETAB of paralysing the industry. Gauld says most seemed to feel the regulator was exceeding its rightful role. "At these meetings, TAFE directors responsible for thousands of students expressed grave concerns about VETAB's (use) of power," he says.

Few were willing to talk to the HES on the record. "They're frightened to speak to the media," Gauld says. He says he isn't scared, because he's doing the right thing. Other educators, acutely aware of how long it can take for VETAB to grant approval for courses, are reluctant to speak out. "People wait for eight or nine months for courses to be approved. One person at the workshop spoke of waiting for 11 months," says the chief executive of a string of training colleges catering to international students. "If they take many months to approve a modification to the course, you can't recruit students, you can't print the brochures that have the courses in them. You're just stuck."

Tim Smith is the chief executive of the Australian Council of Private Education and Training, the organisation that represents private education providers. "It's fair to say there's a strong provider concern about VETAB's delays and strange decision-making processes," he says.

At a breakfast meeting with ACPET members last October, NSW MP Brad Hazzard, then state Opposition spokesman on education, vowed that if elected the Coalition would overhaul VETAB. While education is the nation's fourth-largest export earner, Hazzard said, "private training organisations report extraordinary delays in getting their organisations registered and new courses scoped".

VETAB is part of the NSW Department of Education. A departmental spokesman says such criticism of the body is inconsistent with the fact that "the number of VETAB-registered training organisations has risen 7.1 per cent annually since 2000". Industry insiders disagree, suggesting that VETAB regularly fails to meet the standards it imposes on the industry. VETAB auditors demand that colleges meet standards above and beyond those that have been published, Stephens says. "There's a standard that says you have to have a plan for the business. One of my clients was told he had to have a full business plan, a marketing plan and a strategic plan if he wanted to be accredited. "But the standard is very clear: it says you have to have a plan for your business. "And you know how many (employees) he has in the company? Two: himself and a director."

Vocational colleges are regularly forced to spend thousands of dollars in complying with Australian Quality Training Framework standards that may be inconsistently applied. "The problem is that each of the VETAB auditors has their own interpretation of many of the 133 standards," Stephens says. "Things that are acceptable in one situation aren't in another. The power is with the auditor and there is no one else to go to." The departmental spokesman says colleges wishing to challenge VETAB decisions can go to the NSW Administrative Decisions Tribunal, or approach the Ombudsman or the Independent Commission Against Corruption.

Despite official talk of "procedural fairness and natural justice", providers who attended the workshops complained that VETAB auditors seemed intent on lumbering them with the largest possible number of non-compliances. "Here at this college we're trying to do the right thing," Gauld says. "Yet we are constantly challenged. This is a typical instance. Even though I sent VETAB a letter advising them of the appointment of a compliance manager, they claimed not to have been advised. "They make a mistake like that, then they blame you, then it becomes a compliance issue."

Meanwhile, the so-called visa factories running Clayton's courses somehow continue tooperate. "There's a college ready to graduate 40 students for hairdressing: teachers from that college told me they've never set eyes on those students," says the owner of another hairdressing college.

In contrast, Coffey was driven to the wall while trying to play by the rules. She set up her college in 1999, building up the courses in beauty therapy until there were about 80 students. When she was audited in 2003, she had just five non-compliances. With things going well, Coffey took a second mortgage on her home, invested thousands of dollars in the equipment required to teach hairdressing, and tried setting up a second training school in another town in NSW, with a person she knew. There were some problems and Coffey ended the association.

Later a student from the other town complained that Coffey was supposed to help her get a diploma. Coffey received a phone call from a VETAB auditor. Let's call him Flock. She insists he told her, "You are in so much trouble." "He said, 'You know what's going to happen to you ... you're going to have a complete audit."' Coffey's solicitor showed the auditor documents proving that at the time of the supposed promise to the student there was no longer any connection between the two colleges. "My solicitor said to (the auditor), you can now see Jo Coffey Training is clear on this ... and he agreed," she recalls. Even so, the audit lasted for two days, with the auditors going over everything with a fine-tooth comb while making disparaging comments. At one point, she recalls, Flock "walked in and said there's nothing wrong with the hairdressing department, it's incredibly well stocked, but she could have got that stuff in yesterday, just for the audit". "They got me into a state of complete stress. I was shaking like a leaf," Coffey says. Their report said there were 109 non-compliances. Flock phoned her about it; according to Coffey he suggested she get herself a good compliance officer, and recommended a fellow VETAB auditor.

Some might see a conflict of interest. He identified a bunch of supposed problems ,then recommended a colleague as a consultant. The department says: "Conflicts of interest among VETAB auditors are inappropriate." In the event, Coffey hired someone else. The process of fixing the non-compliances took six months and ate up another $16,000, but months after VETAB had been supplied with the evidence, Flock phoned her again. Coffey recalls him saying that the compliance officer she had hired had sent them so much material, they hadn't looked at it. Instead they proposed to audit her once again. This time they found 56 non-compliances.

Between the two audits, Coffey suffered a breakdown. She went on as long as she could, to ensure her students completed their courses, then declared bankruptcy. "I couldn't go on another day," she says. The HES sent a detailed list of questions to the department, asking that these be sent also to Flock.

A departmental spokesman said: "Complaints about the operation of VETAB are taken seriously. VETAB auditors are required to behave consistently and fairly when dealing with RTOs (registered training organisations), and a claim that this has not occurred would be of concern to the board."

Since the HES asked about Coffey's case, the spokesman says, the board has referred the allegations about its auditors to the employee performance and conduct unit, the internal body that investigates the behaviour of departmental employees. Coffey says: "It's a relief to know they're doing something about it, and I'm not alone."

Source

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

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

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

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17 May, 2007

British university allows Leftist goons to prevent free speech

The leader of the British National party, Nick Griffin, has been barred from speaking at Bath University amid fears the event would bring chaos to the campus. Earlier this week the university had said that Monday's meeting, which Mr Griffin was due to address, would go ahead because of the institution's commitment to freedom of speech.

But as the scale of the opposition became clear yesterday the university backed down. In a statement published on its website it said many students had expressed fears for their safety if the BNP leader was allowed to appear. It added: "The university has now learned that a very large number of protesters intend to arrive on campus. This creates the likelihood of substantial public order problems and real possibility of disruption ... making it impractical for the university to allow the event to go ahead. In the light of all these considerations the university has decided to refuse permission for the event to take place."

Mr Griffin was invited to address the meeting by first-year politics student and BNP youth leader Danny Lake, who told the Guardian he wanted Mr Griffin to visit the university to explain the BNP's policies to lecturers and students. However, others said the meeting was part of an wider campaign by the BNP, which failed to make a breakthrough in this month's local elections, to establish a foothold on university campuses.

Last night Mr Lake described the university's decision as "a knee-jerk reaction to threats made by the undemocratic left - namely the unions and Unite Against Fascism who care not a jot for people's right to hold opinions". Earlier student leaders and union officials said the initial decision to allow Mr Griffin, who has a conviction for inciting racial hatred, to address the meeting was naive, describing the BNP as dangerous and divisive.

Bath students' union passed a motion at an emergency meeting condemning the BNP and criticising the university. Earlier 11 union general secretaries wrote to the university's vice-chancellor, Glynis Breakwell, calling on her to reconsider her decision. Last night Sally Hunt, joint general secretary of the University and College Union, welcomed the university's U-turn: "We feel this is the correct decision. Allowing the BNP to speak would have compromised the safety of staff and students and sent out a very worrying message about Bath University's commitment to diversity. "The millions of staff and students who cherish academic freedom ... deplore the presence in an institution of learning of Nick Griffin." Paul Jaggers, president of Bath Student Union, said the decision "sends a clear message that students do not want the BNP on university campuses".

Source




Australia: Science study falling behind

SCHOOL science courses have failed to keep pace with changes in science and society over the past 50 years, leading students to consistently bypass the subject. In a paper released by the Australian Council for Educational Research today, the nation's chief scientist, Jim Peacock, and dean of science education at Deakin University Russell Tytler argue the way the subject is taught in schools is doing a disservice to science education and say a radical "reimagining" of the curriculum is required. It warns fewer students are studying science at a time when Australia and other industrialised nations most need them.

Professor Tytler says science education in Australia is in a state of crisis, as students turn away from a subject they view as irrelevant and unconnected to their lives. "This flight from science is occurring in societies that are in increasing need of science and technology-based professionals to carry the nation into a technologically driven future," he says. "It is the pipeline into this pool of expertise that seems in danger of drying up." A shortage of qualified scientists and science teachers is exacerbating the problem.

The paper argues for science education to be refocused to spark interest and excitement in the field, rather than train future generations of scientists. Dr Peacock says it is time for a paradigm shift in science education and that traditional courses are "not fruitful" in a modern world where students send instant messages around the globe.

Professor Tytler says there is a mismatch between science as taught in schools and as it exists in the "real world". Research scientists say school science does not reflect the way they work and that "the focus should be on engaging young people, not on developing future scientists". "Science education has not kept up with either the changing nature of youth and their expectations or the changing nature of science," Professor Tytler said. "It's still dealing with knowledge as a fixed and delivered thing rather than a practical way of thinking and problem solving."

Dr Peacock said the science he learned at school did not meet the needs of today's students, and scientific research was no longer an individual pursuit but a collective, collaborative effort. "Traditional science education is not fruitful in such an environment," he said.

Professor Tytler said scientific knowledge changed so quickly the focus of schools should be on teaching students to think scientifically, learning to investigate, find information and assess it based on examples from their own lives and communities. The paper argues that one of the reasons for the failure of school curriculums to change with the times was "the silent choice of teachers for the status quo; one which supports and reflects their identities as knowledgeable experts". "The knowledge explosion significantly challenges the traditional model of the teacher as expert who delivers significant and stable science concepts to dependent students," the paper says.

Source

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

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

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

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16 May, 2007

British education failure

After 10 years of `education, education, education', Britain's teachers are drowning in paperwork, targets and banality - and the very idea of a liberal education is under threat

For over a decade, New Labour has been awash with soundbites. The party was `tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime'; there would be `an end to boom and bust'; we'd have `strong Britain, strong leadership'. And then there was the soundbite that stuck better than any, Tony Blair's 1996 pledge that the three priorities of his government would be: `Education, education, education.'

Nowhere has Blair's Orwellian approach to society been writ larger than in his translation of that bare word `education' into Newspeak. For what he has achieved during his decade-long reign has been a narrowing of the very concept of education: the abstract ambitions of pupils have been worn down, and the love and passion some teachers felt for their job have been undermined. We are left with a conveyer-belt process of tests, targets, objectives, goals, tickboxes and paperwork. The idea of the liberal education is under threat at the end of Blair's Britain, as horizons are narrowed and the classroom reduced to a bulletin space for government initiatives. Schools have become a place where the new conformism is taught and enforced.

`Go to your local school', Blair urged after his victory in the 2005 General Election. `You can see the progress in the buildings, in the computers and in the results.' To mark 10 years of education, education, education, I did just that. It's a dreary morning, in an idyllic setting. The neat school building (which I will not name, in order to protect the identity of its staff) rests on a slope, overcast by a vast country church and next to a plantation with great green trees, some of which have been cleared to make way for a playground. The children play there, building small dens and hanging off the various items of play equipment. Smatterings of pink blossom coat the grass. The church bell rings in 9am, and the children, already a little untidy in their bright, blue school uniforms, rush inside. In one classroom, the kids sit on a mat and poke at a hamster called King Alfred; they chatter above the din of an aerated fish tank.

The children's poster paint artwork is pasted on to the walls; the room is a jumble of primary-coloured equipment, books, guides and measures. The children are miniature pots of enthusiasm, fidgeting and clapping their hands and shuffling about on their bottoms until called to attention. Filing into assembly minutes later, they get on with singing hymns and learning a new story about Jesus. `Team points' are given when a child answers a question about the moral of the story correctly.

In this school, as in so many others, the various demands of Blair's Britain have been imposed, by school inspectors, county advisers and the constant tide of new guidelines, new programmes, new initiatives, new glossy booklets - which often contradict last year's glossy booklets - and new schemes for the betterment of the children within the school walls. The teachers inside tell me they feel under siege: unable to teach with freedom, many distrust themselves and their abilities. They are the fag end of Blair's education revolution. Let us consider, then, what `education, education, education' has wrought in Britain's schools.

Under Blair, the public eye has pried into the private world on an unprecedented level. Turning Thatcher's `there's no such thing as society' into `there's no such thing as a private life', schools have become one of the principal instruments for manipulating a new generation into new thought patterns. This week it was announced that schools must foster positive race relations or face closure. Fruit is provided at breaktime in order to improve children's diet because, of course, parents cannot be trusted to feed their kids well. And, under the new Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning scheme (SEAL), teachers are now responsible for shaping the emotional and social lives of the children in their care.

Increasingly, children are taught the correct ways in which to express their feelings. In some schools they participate in group massage sessions, in which they must knead each other's shoulders and send their own positive `toxins' into the air to help the emotional wellbeing of those recalcitrant youngsters who don't want to be group-massaged, or whose parents have denied permission.

This approach permeates a whole new approach to teaching, in which children (especially in the early years) must actually not be taught at all. In fact, in policy circles, teachers are teachers no more: they are `practitioners'. In indoor PE, children are not to be taught how to do a roly-poly anymore; rather they are supposed to `experiment travelling in and through'. (At the school I visited, one teacher, a worried look flickering across her face, told me: `I'm not sure I was ever supposed to teach them how to do a roly-poly..')

To try to teach a child, via the tried and tested `talk and chalk' method that has successfully educated children for generations, is now considered to be wrong. It is too elitist and judgemental apparently.

In the school I visited, the early years teacher seemed to have lost confidence in her own ability to teach, following a negative Ofsted inspection. Her paperwork had been found wanting, and then she had been found actually teaching children as she saw fit.which is the greatest crime under today's inspection regime.

Teachers, like every other public sector worker under New Labour, now drown in paperwork. There is an incessant flood of forms that need filling. They are given `PPA' time, cutting out half a day's teaching, in order to help them cope with the forms and documents. In 2006, the Education and Inspections Act revolutionised the inspections system: it brought in a system where schools have to be prepared for an inspection at any moment (only two days' notice is given) and where schools are assessed on their own internal assessment systems.

It is now all about the paperwork. Like a Soviet Five-Year Plan, if it's down on paper, it happened - if it's not, it didn't. So this school was hauled up for a `culture of bullying' - not because it had a bullying problem (it didn't), but because it did not have a government-advised system of `playground angels' and `buddy benches' to deal with any potential bullying that might arise or have already arisen without the teachers noticing.

The sheer detail in which a child's education is now charted is breathtaking. As Helene Guldberg has shown elsewhere on spiked, under New Labour infants now have `69 early learning goals' (see A tick-box attitude to toddlers, by Helene Guldberg). In this school's classrooms, as in most others, there are now 44 goals in the teaching of literacy. One teacher tells me that striving to achieve such goals often detracts from fundamental lessons that teach children how actually to read. These days while they read, young children have to explain whether a particular character is `good' or `bad', and why they are good or bad. `Instead of concentrating on what really matters, they'll be given a target, something specific, that's disembodied from enjoying reading. It doesn't lead anywhere', the teacher told me. What New Labour seems to have done is to break down reading into a set of meaningless facets, effectively `quantifying the unquantifiable', as the teacher put it.

An Ofsted report cited recently in the Daily Telegraph outlines the new teaching culture that Ofsted wishes to inculcate in our schools: `Too often, the teacher does most of the talking. It is frequently restricted to explanations and predominantly closed questions which ask for recall of previous learning.' Teaching in such a way (explaining a principle, demanding `right' or `wrong' answers to questions) is now looked upon as heresy. Instead `Ofsted prescribes "lively debate", "buzz groups", exercises in "empathy", "scope for pupils to make choices", working in groups, and "drama techniques" such as "hot seating", in which teacher and pupils exchange roles.'

As Ofsted says: `A key characteristic of the best lessons is the opportunity they provide for pupils to talk and collaborate.' This is not just a silly PC idea that we can laugh off; it fundamentally undermines the idea that teachers have something important to impart to children in favour of allowing children themselves to set the agenda by talking and playing and thinking out loud in class. It is little wonder that some teachers feel devalued.

If a teacher asks for advice on how they are supposed to do all this new stuff - how they are meant to reach their targets through drama and buzz groups - they are not likely to find any officially endorsed answer. The paperwork and the new ideas are foisted on schools from on high, and the schools are expected simply to get on with it all by the time of their next inspection.

This imposition of new rules and methods distances children from their own education. Learning programmes for individual kids are now planned out without the adviser who does the planning ever having met the children in question. `I get certificates for going to all these seminars', a teacher explains to me. `I've got them all for my portfolio. But what do they mean? We go, and when we have listened to all the new ideas, we ask for specific methods. And the advisers turn to us, and they say, "You can just do it. You're the professionals - you know how." And yes I did know. Or I thought I knew.'

Children are supposed to be au fait with all the terms their practitioners now use. So instead of `letters' and `sounds' they are encouraged to talk about `graphemes' and `phonemes'. `Tricks' that help young children to learn how to read are definitely out. Today explaining about the magic or silent `e' - which many spiked readers will understand from their own childhood education - is held to be detrimental because `you're giving them a trick to use instead of getting them to understand how various graphemes can make phonemes', the teacher explains. Imagine how baffling it must be for a young child instantly to learn about graphemes and phonemes rather than about magic letters that do certain strange things to words? `Children understand "magic" things. It's part of their world. It's much more understandable to them to see a magic thing coming along and changing a sound rather than a phoneme holding hands and pushing a grapheme out of the way', the teacher says. But no `magic' is allowed in classrooms these days.

Teachers' scepticism about new teaching methods is not appreciated. As in so many other professions today, bureaucrats have been trained up to counteract doubts among those at the frontline of teaching the nation's youth. Legions of school advisers, in every county of the land, come up with a succession of great new examples from other schools that have better Ofsted outcomes, schools that have put all the New Labour theories into practice and achieved great results: the advisers hold these schools up as models in order to force other schools to change and accept the new way of doing things.

A big buzzphrase today is `outdoor learning'. The teacher tells me that at one seminar she attended, `An early years adviser was raving about how wonderful a certain class of children had been, because they had a lesson outdoors in which they were picking up sticks and making graphemes out of them. I couldn't help thinking it would be far better for them if they had done that on paper, with a pencil. It's almost like going back to cave-man times..'

Of course, there is nothing wrong with learning outdoors, investigating and getting to know more about wildlife and the natural environment. But words and language and grammar are surely better taught indoors, in a classroom - unless that, too, is too old-fashioned an outlook for the constantly churning education system.

Attendance is paramount in New Labour's new education system. You can find the attendance stats for any school in the land, simply by typing the name of the school into a portal on the BBC's education website. Under the Blairites' target-obsessed learning system, parents are constantly warned not to take their kids on holiday during school time or to allow them to have many (if any) day absences, because the child might fall behind and prevent the class from reaching its targets.

The obsession with attendance can lead to a culture of snooping. At the school I visited, one of the pupils had a condition called `slap cheek'. It is infectious to other children, but it is not very debilitating for the child who has it and it is easily cured. The child's mother took her daughter out of school while she had the affliction, and on one of the days off school mum took her daughter to the supermarket; there was no one else to look after her at home and the shopping needed to be done. In this sleepy rural town, the child was spotted by a Community Support Officer, who reported the mother to the school. The school was instructed to keep a special eye on the child in future.

Behaviour has to be managed within schools, of course. And as you might expect, new approaches have also been brought in for this area of school life. Today teachers are advised never to be negative towards children; they should not tell a child off, but rather encourage him or her, through incentives, to behave well. In some schools, there is a new behavioural system called `golden time': this is a period of time at the end of the week where all the good children are allowed to do fun tasks but those who have been naughty are excluded. So instead of reprimanding bad behaviour when it happens, and explaining why it is a problem, schools are encouraged to reward all children except those who have done something bad.

In certain schools, `golden time' actually plays into the hands of children who misbehave. After all, the only thing that happens to them is that they miss out on golden time. In schools with big behaviour problems, it is apparently now cool to miss golden time. In this rural school, Year Six children (10- and 11-year-olds) were rewarded with a golden time of `hammer beads', which a teacher described as a `glorified colouring-in exercise, fine for Year Two children but not Year Six'. Any self-respecting 11-year-old, especially of the naughty variety, would not be overly concerned about missing out on such an exercise.....

After a decade of `education, education, education', it is surely time for the government and its myriad minions to get out of the classroom. Government should fund education and direct it, but it should not interfere with absolutely every aspect of school life, teacher-pupil relations, playtime, and children's eating habits, behaviour, weight and so on. Teachers must be allowed to refer to themselves as `teachers' again, not practitioners - and they must be allowed to `chalk and talk' if they want to. In short, they should have the freedom to teach in ways they see fit, and to invigorate the young minds in their trust with enthusiasm and ideas that are not rigidly defined by government targets and health, social, emotional and wellbeing messages.

To paraphrase another New Labour motto, which they borrowed from pop group D:Ream and danced to, excruciatingly, in 1997: `Things in teaching can only get better.' And they will, once we teach ourselves to trust our teachers once more and allow schools to go back to being centres of knowledge and learning rather than outlets for government posturing and social engineering.

Source




Australia: Teachers rewarded for incompetence

EDUCATION Queensland will spend $2.5 million to jettison 500 under-performing primary school teachers. Under the voluntary program, dubbed the "burnt out bonus", eligible classroom teachers can apply for a grant of up to $50,000 by May 25 to help them make the transition to study, business or another career.

Education Minister Rod Welford said the move would open the way for new, enthusiastic teachers to take their places. "We are aware there are some primary teachers who would like to leave the profession and do something different," he said. "This program recognises the service provided to Queensland by these teachers and supports their goal of moving to a new career. "It's a positive for the teachers seeking change - and for the new primary-trained graduates waiting in the wings."

About 1200 teachers have already left Education Queensland since the Government first offered the controversial Career Change Program in 2002. Mr Welford said the program was self-funding through the savings made from the salary difference between senior teachers and new graduates. He said principals and regional officers would decide who was eligible for the bonus and he had made it clear the department was to be proactive in ensuring top performing teachers were not lost as part of the scheme.

While the teachers are not encouraged to seek work in non-government schools, Education Queensland cannot prevent them doing so. However, to obtain the $50,000, they must show details of how the $50,000 will help them establish a new career.

Queensland Teachers Union president Steve Ryan said the payout scheme would allow teachers "to change careers with dignity" and open opportunities for unemployed primary teaching graduates. Queensland Council of Parents and Citizens Associations executive officer Greg Donaldson also welcomed the move. "If Education Queensland is going to look at rejuvenating the teaching workforce with all the new initiatives that have been talked about lately, then we would certainly support this scheme as it is all about getting the best for our kids," Mr Donaldson said.

Source

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

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

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

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15 May, 2007

IMBECILIC VIRGINIA SCHOOL

What makes these weirdos tick? Hatred of kids?

A Norfolk middle school student suspended over a tablet of Tylenol gets to go back to school, but has to attend drug and alcohol counseling. 13-year-old Gabriella Nieves has missed two days of class already over the tablet of Tylenol she says a classmate gave her for a headache. While she's eager to hit the books, she doesn't think she needs counseling.

"I think it's unfair that I have to go to a drug and alcohol counseling, even though it was over an aspirin. I mean, they're making it out like I brought a gun to school," said Gabriella. Gabriella is worried the drug program will mark her future with a giant red flag. "When they look at my record, when I try to apply for college and they see that I went to drug and alcohol counseling, a drug offense in middle school, they're going to reject me," she said.

"She's not going to no drug and alcohol program," remarked Gabriella's mother, Dawn. Her mother wants Gabriella to have a talk about drugs and alcohol with their family doctor, and not a juvenile delinquent counselor. She feels Northside Middle School administrators are making an example out of her daughter for no good reason. "It wasn't a narcotic. It was not a joint. It was not a little small bottle of alcohol. This was an aspirin for a headache," said Settles.

On Monday, May 7th, Gabriella and her mother will find out if she will be able to get counseling from her doctor. Either way, Gabriella, who's an eighth grader, won't be going to high school in Norfolk next year. She and her family are moving to Hampton.

Source




FRENCH EDUCATION

I dread Tuesdays. It is the day that my daughter Olivia comes home from school with a poem that she has to learn by heart. She normally has until Friday to get it right and so for the intervening days the poem is with us wherever we go. She recites it in the car, at breakfast, at the playground. By Friday her younger siblings can recite it, even the cat purrs along. I think it's a formidable discipline and sure to make her extremely clever in the long run, but if you ask her what the poem is about she'll reply: "I've no idea, I just have to learn it."

If Sarko wants to change the way French people think (and therefore act, in terms of work ethic, claiming benefits, etc) he has to start with the schools. Don't get me wrong, I love the French system, it is one of the reasons we moved there, but it does produce more intransigent and less imaginative adults than we have in the UK. This is partly because children are not taught to think for themselves to the same extent as we are. An 18-year-old half-English boy I met in France told me he was asked to produce a literary criticism of a poem. He told the teacher what he thought of it. "I don't want to know what you thought of it," said the teacher. "I want to know what the critics thought of it."

And although French schools are brilliant at teaching good behaviour and what is right and wrong (to my delight the children all stand up in class when a teacher walks in) there is a somewhat blinkered view that often makes the French less flexible than the Brits. The phrase "c'etait pas prevu" (it was not organised or planned) is a concept that I had never heard before moving to France. Now I hear it a lot, mainly from my child minder.

I could go out every night of the week if I wanted to, as long as I had booked her to babysit at least a week in advance. If I suddenly get a dinner invitation (unlikely, because anyone French will have planned their dinner in advance) and I call her up to see if she can babysit I get the "c'etait pas prevu" response and a sigh of horror on the other end of the phone. Similarly, if I change my plans she gets very edgy.

Another phrase you hear a lot is "c'est pas normal", which loosely translated means it's not right. This is something Sarko will be hearing a lot as he tries to overhaul the French social security system. My children already use it. The other day they had a girlfriend over for lunch. I served a salad. As my children don't eat vinaigrette I didn't put any on. But to the young Clemence this was "not right". She was also astounded to see that on the short school run back after lunch I didn't make the children sit in their allocated car seats. I can imagine she went back home relating the "wild ways" of "les Anglais" on the hill.

Intransigence and an inability to see how something different can be good are going to be Sarko's worst enemies. But if I were him I would begin in the schools. If you put a frog straight into boiling water it will jump out; but if you put it into cold water and slowly heat the water up it won't realise what's going on until it's been cooked. If he wants things to change, he needs to start slowly, so that the French don't notice until it is too late.

Source




Australian PM to reshape schools

JOHN Howard will today outline a new push to "reshape the nation's education and training landscape" and force public schools to provide more information for parents on bullying and violence in the classroom. In a major speech outlining the Government's agenda if it wins the next election, the Prime Minister will sharpen his attack on Kevin Rudd's "education revolution" with a pledge to deliver a new era of accountability for parents. He will warn that principals need more support to enforce discipline in the nation's schools and parents must be given report cards on violence and disruptive behaviour.

In his speech to the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, he will also touch on the Government's proposals to place new compliance requirements on the next four-year $40 billion schools funding deal for the states. It is the second in a series of speeches titled Australia Rising, the first of which was delivered last month in Brisbane when Mr Howard warned that only the Coalition could be trusted to deliver targets to cut Australia's greenhouse gas emissions without wrecking the economy.

The new schools funding deal that is being prepared by federal officials will include demands for greater autonomy for principals to hire and fire teachers and requirements to publish more information for parents on academic performance and attendance rates. The outcome is expected to deliver defacto league tables for parents, ensuring school performance is transparent on a range of measures.

"While the states and territories have primary responsibility for government schools, my Government is determined to lay a platform for high academic standards, good teachers, principals with real power and proper accountability," Mr Howard said. "Like all Australians, I am very concerned at reports of school violence and disorder. Parents would be well- served by more information about school discipline, bullying and disruptive behaviour in the classroom. "Parents are entitled to expect that their child is safe at school and that teachers and principals have the authority to ensure a strong learning environment. We want to provide teachers and principals with the necessary support for their essential work."

Mr Howard ignited a schools values debate before the 2004 election when he blamed "politically correct" teachers for an exodus to private schools. In the latest salvo, he will warn that the rise of violence in schools must be tackled.

Australian Secondary Principals Association president Andrew Blair last night said teachers needed more protection against violent students and parents. "We've got examples of kids bringing knives and weapons to school," he said. "I know of one case where very authentic-looking replica pistols have been brought in. I know of cases when students have got up in class and pointed these replica pistols at teachers. "Teachers are dealing with more young people with serious social and emotional problems who are in some cases arriving at school without any food. It varies from cases of parents coming in and physically attacking teachers and principals. "Unquestionably, there needs to be much greater support given to schools via legislation to give schools more power to remove trespassers and when we have violent parents and violent students."

However, Mr Blair also warned there was a continuing problem with private schools dumping difficult-to-manage students on the public sector. "All schools in this country receive government funding, so in my view there's got to be mutual responsibility for taking students who are troubled," he said.

The reforms Mr Howard will outline today are also expected to require the states to offer teachers performance-based pay and to lift literacy and numeracy standards. "School teachers are an important but undervalued profession. Teachers work hard in the interests of their students and my Government's role is to provide further support in their crucial work shaping the lives of future generations," Mr Howard said. "My Government is dedicated to promoting choice, quality and strong values in Australia's education and training system. "Education is crucial to Australia's future. Quality education will lift workforce participation and productivity, helping to maintain today's prosperity," he said.

In separate reforms, the Howard Government is also planning to unleash the same market reforms embraced by universities to shake up the TAFE sector and ensure training is more responsive to the needs of business. Mr Howard will highlight a range of measures in the budget, including summer schools for teachers, a bonus pool of up to $50,000 for principals to award to teachers and reforms to increase philanthropy and business donations to the nation's universities. "The $5 billion Higher Education Endowment Fund deservedly attracted many of the headlines, but new programs to improve literacy and numeracy, more Australian Technical Colleges, summer schools for teachers and reforms to fast-track apprentices will also enhance the quality and diversity of our education and training," Mr Howard said. "For some years now, my Government has aimed to restore prestige to vocational education. The broad community support for Australian Technical Colleges, dedicated centres of trade excellence with incentive structures, including flexible workplace agreements and links to local industry, indicates we are on the right track."

Source

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

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

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

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14 May, 2007

SWEDEN SHOWS WHAT A LEFTIST EDUCATION CAN DO

Less than fifteen years after the last Soviet troops pulled out of the Baltic States, a new survey has shown that young Swedes are still in the dark about the fate of its neighbours behind the Iron Curtain. A poll carried out by Demoskop on behalf of the Organization for Information on Communism (Foreningen for upplysning om kommunismen - UOK) found that 90 percent of Swedes between the ages of 15 and 20 had never heard of the Gulag. This can be contrasted with the 95 percent who knew of Auschwitz.

"Unfortunately we were not at all surprised by the findings," Ander Hjemdahl, the founder of UOK, told The Local. "We had a strong hunch that this would be the case having spent a few years travelling around to various schools," he added.

Of the 1004 young Swedes involved in the nationwide poll, 43 percent believed that communist regimes had claimed less than one million lives. A fifth of those surveyed put the death toll at under ten thousand. The actual figure is estimated at around 100 million. The poll also found that 40 percent of young Swedes believed that communism contributed to increased prosperity in the world; 22 percent considered communism a democratic form of government; 82 percent did not regard Belarus as a dictatorship.

This information gap has roots that date back many years, according to Anders Hjemdahl. "There were strategic reasons. For example, I think the Social Democrats only won one absolute majority in the post-war years. Therefore they had to rely on the support of smaller parties, one of which was the communist party. "Another reason is that a large majority of Swedish journalists are left-wingers, many of them quite far left," he said.

Hjemdahl speculates that some historical ignorance may also be explained by the fact that Sweden accepted Stalin's takeover of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. "Sweden expressed its de jure recognition of the Soviet Union's World War II annexation of the Baltic States. Nazi Germany and Franco's Spain were the other countries to grant such strong recognition," he said.

The organization has provoked a strong reaction in the few short hours it published its findings in Dagens Nyheter. "We have had lots of responses over the course of the morning. Some aggressive communists have called us to voice their opinions. "But we also had two victims of communism crying on the phone, explaining that they had waited fifty years for this," said Hjemdahl. He also added that the organization has plans to make its effort international and is currently working on translating its material into English.

Source




John Lewis and the Battle of George Mason University

There appears to have been only one media report of this event and that was to play down what happened. I thought therefore that I should draw attention to detailed accounts of what happened emanating from a libertarian who was there. He was NOT a member of the sponsoring Republican Club but is a member of the Randian objectivist club. Of the two reports from him below, the first below seems to have been his initial reaction and the second his extended comment

Now that's it's done, that's how I frame John Lewis' talk tonight at George Mason on the need to confront Islamic totalitarianism. There were probably 250 people in attendance to hear Lewis speak (although I use the word "hear" loosely, for a re-invigorated "Students for a Democratic Society" turned their backs in protest the second Lewis took the podium, and even more were simply closed to any of the arguments presented, whatever they may have been).

Never in my life have I been witness to such a seething display of hatred and bile in response to a calm, sober and rationally presented argument. All this for a man who argues for religious and philosophic freedom and against religious tyranny. Lewis is a hero just for having been willing to speak before such a rude and hateful audience.

At the same time, the GMU College Republicans who hosted the event conducted themselves with such grace and class that I haven't the vocabulary to express how grateful I am to them for all their efforts. I'm also grateful to the campus police and local law enforcement who gave Lewis the VIP treatment and were probably all that stood between the mob and an all-out riot. I'm utterly drained by the evening, so I offer this following account of the night that was posted earlier on the blog:

I just got back tonight from Dr. John Lewis' lecture on state-sponsored Islamic-Totalitarianism at George Mason University. There were countless police officers around the building providing security. Needless to say an entire mob mentality broke out as "demonstrators" in the audience disrupted the entire event. Islamofacist groups and their Marxist dhimmi associates hurled invectives, howled, and spat as if in a possessed frenzy. The professor and his supporters, much to their credit, behaved with complete restraint and respect for different viewpoints during the Q&A session. The same absolutely cannot be said of his opponents. So much for tolerance and diversity. Their attempts to disrupt and shut down the talk were a disrespectful, uncivilized display of hate that supported the argument that you cannot reason with or appease this kind of enemy.

I'd be hard pressed to disagree with this assessment. It was not a great night for the civil discourse of controversial ideas. I'll have more to say when I can put my thoughts together tomorrow.

Source




Crass and Class at George Mason University

Dr. John's Lewis' lecture last night at George Mason University on Islamic totalitarianism was one of the most surreal public experiences I have witnessed in all my years as an activist and advocate. It evidenced in no uncertain terms that rationality and common decency are under assault at even our most distinguished forums. Academic freedom means tolerating opposing views and countering them with reason and facts in an atmosphere of respect and civility. It is not an orgy of rude and abusive mindlessness-a description that defined the conduct of many in the audience that evening.

The philosophic theme of Lewis' talk was that individual freedom is a value and that the free have the right to protect themselves from the initiation of physical force. Lewis defended religious freedom on explicit grounds, including the freedom of those in attendance who stood up, turned their backs to him and attempted to shout him down to peacefully practice their respective creeds without fear of threats or physical coercion. Lewis contrasted the exercise of freedom in America with life in the totalitarian Islamic regimes, where there is no distinction between the power of the state and the practice of religion.

Quoting various Islamic theocrats in power today, Lewis showed how these theocrats define themselves as advocates for the initiation of force, including one chilling quote from the leader of the Indonesian Islamic fascists that called for Islamic control of the government and the ruthless imposition of Islamic law upon non-believers. Drawing upon the same right of self-defense that allows a woman to defend herself from her would-be rapist, Lewis argued that a free America has an unassailable right to defend itself by destroying the connection between Islam and the state. Lewis pointed to the example of post WWII Japan to show how fighting for such an enemy's willful surrender led to an era of peace, happiness and freedom, for both us, and the peaceful people who had previously suffered under totalitarianism's boot. War may be hell, but a quick and decisive war is far, far better than living in a state of permanent terror.

For this, Lewis was decried as a racial bigot and murderer, and was taunted with endless interruption, bile and obscenities. That Lewis was even able to keep his focus and not throw his hands up in despair was testament to his moral courage and his unwillingness to concede the floor to any heckler's veto.

The lowest point of the evening came during the Q&A, when a GMU campus administrator took the podium in an effort to settle the audience down. He chose his words poorly though, for he ultimately thanked the audience for their behavior, which was little more than failing to engage in an all-out riot. It is one thing to be thankful that there was no riot; it is another thing altogether to thank people for obeying the law and for (barely) respecting the rights of others in attendance. Furthermore, by thanking rude and abusive students for their thuggish behavior, this administrator all but guaranteed that the next controversial speaker will face a similar rude treatment from those who may happen to disagree with him.

The questions asked during the Q&A could hardly be described as that; rather then even attempt to challenge Lewis by a thoughtful or revealing question, many "questioners" simply grandstanded and repeated non-sequiturs that reflected their own refusal to consider any aspect of his thesis. And in a disgusting and contemptible display of arrogance and hypocrisy, an attorney from the Council on American-Islamic Relations frothed to Lewis that he was "too angry" and needed to "lighten up" a bit; it was this same gentlemen who had worked to press the university into denying Lewis a venue when his talk was originally scheduled for February.

Yet the most telling event of the evening was when Lewis, after being pummeled with interruptions and derogatory remarks implying that he was a lackey for the political status quo, simply noted that he did not support the current political administration in Washington on the grounds laid out in his speech. He was not without interruption long enough to be able to fully explain why he disagreed with Washington's war fighting-strategy, but knowing Dr. Lewis, his position can be distilled as follows: the President's religious sympathies have blinded him to fully realizing the pernicious threat caused of the union of religion and state, thereby weakening his resolve to defeat the cornerstone of religious intolerance today, which is the political union of Islam and the state as seen in nations such as Iran. Rather than propel him to lead America to victory against religious tyranny, Lewis argues that the President's philosophy undercuts his very ability to identify the enemy and fight him accordingly.

Such a statement criticizing the President's philosophy and policies may have challenged the ideas and comfort zone of many of the College Republicans in attendance, yet these College Republicans neither screamed nor howled, nor did they interrupt Dr. Lewis and yell that he didn't understand the president and his creed like others in the audience had done. Instead, the College Republicans were nothing but polite, respectful and thoughtful, even as their own thinking was being challenged by their guest before them and under less than ideal circumstances.

The politeness and thoughtfulness of the GMU College Republicans evidenced the key difference between the civilized and the savage in attendance that night. The civilized can tolerate differences of opinion and they seek to understand why these differences exist in the first place. In contrast, savages are simply unable to tolerate any thinking other than their own emotion-laden opinions. If the police had not been there to preserve order with their overwhelming presence, I am convinced that Dr. Liewis would have easily been strung up from the nearest tree. That from students at my alma mater.

It was not lost upon me, the event's organizers or Dr. Lewis himself that our men and women on the battlefield have it far, far worse than anything we may have experienced last night. Our defiance and refusal to yield to any form of intimidation or heckler's veto is an act of solidarity with these men and women; it is our determined effort to say that we will fight for them just as they fight for us.

And bravo to Dr. Lewis and the GMU College Republicans for standing fast in the face of intolerance. More than anyone last night, they earned the title of GMU Patriot.

Source

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

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

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

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13 May, 2007

Deranged attempt to pass the buck for negligence

Look at this quote today from a newspaper in Indiana about a cheating scandal at the Indiana University Dental School in which nine students were kicked out of school and 16 were suspended and 21 more were reprimanded. That means that 46 students out of a student body of 95 were involved in the cheating - more than half of IU's dental school.

So what do the academics who are teaching these students have to say for such a high rate of cheating in their institutions? They blame George Bush, of course. Here's what Dr. Anne Koerber, associate professor of dentistry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, an expert in dental education had to say: "When you have persons in high places who clearly lie about what's happening with weapons of mass destruction... I think the general public gets the idea that anything that makes money is what's right."

Students cheat on a dental college test and the reason is Bush lies about weapons of mass destruction? You can argue about WMD all you want, and even after you reject everything that George Tenet has said and Bob Woodward and Bush himself - as well as the heads of foreign intel services - but when you blame cheating dentists on George Bush it shows you have come off the rails.

What this shows to me is that the left lie machine is very good. People do actually believe everything - everything - is Bush's fault. And I think if they would kill our enemies abroad as effectively as they kill political opponents at home, this country would be much better off.

Source




What I have been taught in college

Today I finished my third year of college. This time next year I will graduate with a degree in history in secondary education. What have I learned over the past 3 years? Well, I'll tell you.

* I've learned that Iran isn't a big threat to Israel or the United States, and that it's all right for them to have nuclear bombs simply because we do. It's only fair. I've learned terrorism is overrated, and that it really isn't a big threat. Bush, on the other hand, uses the same tactics as Hitler and is just as evil and dangerous.

* Universal health care will be successful in America if the mean, evil conservatives would just allow the ideal to prosper. Cuba has full health care coverage and 100% literacy. We should model ourselves after them. Fidel is just a good idealist and if it weren't for the embargo they would be a success.

* Of course, Bush lied, people died. Bush, Cheney and his lackeys went into Iraq for oil and disregarded the fact that that every federal department and the international community knew he didn't have them. He created terrorism, 9/11 was an inside job, and he is profiting off the death of US soldiers, who are rapists and murderers anyway.

* The US is a torturing nation, and we treat prisoners so inhumanely. Never mind the beheading of Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl; we are the ones who are barbarians. The only reason why the terrorists did that is because we torture. It was their way of responding. We should understand their grievances.

* I've learned the media is a mouthpiece of the Bush administration. Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, and Murdoch are the biggest threat to the airwaves. PBS, NBC, CBS, ABC, and NPR are all on the lap of the neo-cons.

* Global warming is 100% real and it is Bush's fault that it has gotten this bad. The air sucks, the water is no better than drinking dirt, and polar bears are dying off faster than the ice caps.

This is only the tip of the iceberg of what I have learned over the past 3 years in academia. These people who live in the prism of liberalism, which don't see anything but their sick isolated worldview. God forbid you have a different opinion; you are some kind of criminal.

If you believe in God you're a delinquent, but if you believe in Marx you are noble. If you believe in conservatism you're on the fringe, but if you're a liberal you are just what is. If you say the word terrorist you're an Islamophobe, but if you say freedom fighter you're being courageous.

I thought liberals were supposed to be open minded and tolerant. I see more and more each day that it is not the case. So long as academia indoctrinates students in to believing socialism, neo-liberalism, and Marxism is all right and should be tolerated, I am nervous for the future of this country. These people sieve power so to indoctrinate and we need a conservative movement to let them know they are wrong, and radical anything is never justifiable.

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The Idea of a University

"Liberal Education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman. It is well to be a gentleman, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life." John Henry Newman

When considering university reform, it is important to keep in mind what the purpose of a university is so that we may know how far we have strayed from it and what we can do to return to it.

During the Dark Age following the barbarian invasions that toppled the Roman Empire, monasteries served as the centers of culture. They were kept in a loose affiliation with each other through the Church's structure and traveling Irish monks. These monasteries served as centers of learning where monks would study and preserve manuscripts, mostly consisting of the Bible and writings of the Church Fathers.

The ninth-century Frankish king Charlemagne sought to educate the largely illiterate clergy in his kingdom. This revival in learning spawned an interest in scholarship for its own sake. Latin classics and the Latin language were studied once again. Charlemagne established learning centers in every monastery and cathedral. Intellectual growth in Europe developed from these schools. The tenth century saw the collection of a number of classical works and new manuscripts into libraries. The Crusades brought the re-conquest of Iberia and Southern Italy, which gained for European scholars access to classical manuscripts lost to Christendom for centuries. New learning caused a revival of Roman jurisprudence, which spurred further interest in learning.

Those who could read and write were restricted almost entirely to the clergy. Thus the new cathedral schools, replacing monastic ones, attracted students who came to study for the priesthood. Through the eleventh century, students sought teachers to instruct them. The twelfth century saw the establishment of what could be considered the first universities. Instead of the school following the teacher and students gathering where one could instruct them, the teacher followed the school and moved to an institution where other scholars and students had congregated.

In a town there might be a number of different schools for different disciplines, such as medicine and law. These schools formed guilds with other schools of the same discipline and developed standards requisite for teachers. In the early thirteenth century, schools in Paris and Bologna were recognized as bodies of scholars and they gained legal standing as a universitaset societas magistrorum discipulorumque ("a learned society or society of masters and scholars") from both the king and the Pope. The present form of the university finds its origin in these societies.

Dorothy Sayers described a university education during the Middle Ages in "The Lost Tools of Learning", a 1947 lecture delivered at Oxford University. The curriculum was composed of the Trivium and the Quadrivium. The Trivium, the first part of the learning process, was divided into three categories to be mastered successively: grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. Sayers describes them thusly: "The student would then be required to write and to defend an essay. He should be able to speak clearly and intelligently and defend his position against heckling and intense questioning. The goal was to provide the student with the tools of learning, that when he encountered new knowledge and situations, he would be able to understand the problem and devise a solution. The Quadrivium consisted of subjects learned with the skills provided by the Trivium."

In The Idea of a University, John Henry Newman describes the purpose of a university as a liberal education, the acquisition of knowledge. He defines an educated mind thusly: "something intellectual, something which grasps what it perceives through the senses; something which takes a view of things; which sees more than the senses convey; which reasons upon what it sees, and while it sees; which invests it with an idea." This requires the medieval conception of the Trivium for the tools of learning, and the Quadrivium for the content.

Practical reasons for acquiring knowledge and becoming an educated mind are obvious. But, as Russell Kirk said, the university should not be a place to learn simple practicalities "as a means to material ends." It should exist as "an intellectual means to an ethical end", to impart to the student virtue, the skills of the Trivium, and the knowledge of the Quadrivium. Ultimately the goal of this education should be ethical, that the student acquires a sense of "right reason, humane inclinations, and sound taste"-ultimately that the student may be made a gentleman. I think it's quite reasonable to say our universities are failing in this regard.

Source

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

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

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

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12 May, 2007

RI Students Must Watch 'Inconvenient Truth' to Graduate

To receive a degree from Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, students are being forced to watch "An Inconvenient Truth," the documentary on global warming produced by former Vice President Al Gore. The science class requirement has prompted one conservative student to declare that "we should stop calling these schools 'bastions of knowledge' since they're really bastions of leftist thought."

The controversy at Roger Williams University (RWU) in Bristol, R.I., began the week before Earth Day, when the professors teaching the laboratory portion of "Core 101: Science, Technology and Society" required their students to watch Gore's Oscar-winning film in class. The course is one of 12 that students at the university must take in order to graduate.

However, Dana Peloso, an RWU junior and president of the school's chapter of the College Republicans, sent a letter questioning the course requirement to Jeffrey Hughes, assistant dean of marine and natural sciences. "With the issue of global warming being such a highly politicized topic, with the scientific community unsure if global warming is man-induced or part of the natural cycle of the earth, do you think that it is intellectually honest to only show the alarmist viewpoint?" Peloso asked. "If the movie is still shown, what plans are there to incorporate the ideas of leading global warming skeptics into class discussion?" he added.

In his email response, Hughes stated that "I only recently saw 'An Inconvenient Truth' and have to think that it's an ideal subject for a Core lab," because "the point of Core is to inform students of scientific principles and help them make decisions on issues with a scientific basis in their everyday lives." "After an initial and heated debate, scientists no longer question whether the atmosphere is being warmed due to human activities and instead are increasingly impressed with the speed and impact of the process," Hughes wrote. "I repeat: there is no doubt that we're warming the earth and that a continuation of our activities will lead to profound changes. "Penguins, polar bears and your unborn children have no vote in this. They must live with decisions we make today," the assistant dean said. "As educators, we're charged to encourage your intellectual growth," Hughes added. "That can (actually, will) be uncomfortable at times, and we're also here to help you deal with that discomfort. It's truly what makes being a human such a joy, privilege and challenge."

Peloso told Cybercast News Service on Tuesday that his fellow students have reacted to the situation in one of two ways. "Those who understand that there are multifaceted points of view" are "really troubled by this," he said. But others "are so naive" that they take Gore's position "as gospel, the final word on global warming. They see Al Gore is a former vice president, so it's got to be true." The RWU junior approached other members of the faculty and staff regarding the matter, but "I can count on one hand the number of conservative professors I actually know of" at the university, he stated.

Peloso also sought assistance from the conservative Young America's Foundation, and Jason Mattera, a spokesman for the group who graduated from RWU in 2005, responded that Hughes' behavior amounted to "gross intolerance" at a university that promotes itself as a place that values "collaboration of students and faculty in research" and "appreciation of global perspectives." "That aside, it's a bold-faced lie for him to argue that all scientists agree with Al Gore," Mattera added.

Cybercast News Service previously reported that climate change skeptics have called "An Inconvenient Truth" a "sci-fi disaster" movie, and scientists who do not agree with the former vice president's view claim their perspective is being shunned in favor of trying to attain a "consensus" on the subject of global warming.

Mattera told Cybercast News Service that he "wasn't surprised" to hear about the situation because liberal professors often use their positions of authority to indoctrinate young minds. "This happens all the time, so we might have to stop calling these schools bastions of knowledge since they're really bastions of leftist thought," he said.

However, Susan Rivers, vice president of public affairs for RWU, told Cybercast News Service on Tuesday that this semester is the only time the film has been shown to students and as to whether it will be shown in the future, "the faculty and the deans agree together as a group what the content of these courses will be." Rivers said Peloso was not enrolled in the course and therefore did not see the film. "He had already taken the class," she said, and in fact, "he was not enrolled during the semester in question."

Mattera acknowledged that Peloso learned of the situation from friends taking the course and decided to contact the teacher because of concern for his fellow students and the fact that he had no grade to be affected by the action. "He's just trying to be a good student and continue being part in the educational community at RWU," Mattera added. "Besides, any university should not look to limit information but to expand it and have students come to their own conclusions."

Source




Climate-Controlled Classroom?

Steven Milloy comments on the story above

Should schools teach the global warming controversy by showing students only Al Gore's alarmist movie? Roger Williams University just learned the answer to that question the hard way. One week before Earth Day, the professors of the RWU course, "Core 101: Science, Technology and Society," required their students to watch "An Inconvenient Truth." The students were not presented with any other viewpoint on global warming.

Controversy erupted when the president of RWU's College Republicans club complained to assistant dean Jeffrey Hughes, "With the issue of global warming being such a highly politicized topic, with the scientific community unsure if global warming is man-induced or part of the natural cycle of the earth, do you think that it is intellectually honest to only show the alarmist viewpoint?"

Hughes responded that Gore's movie is an "ideal subject for a Core lab" because "the point of Core is to inform students of scientific principles and help them make decisions on issues with a scientific basis in their everyday lives," according to a CNSNews.com report. Dean Hughes continued, "After an initial and heated debate, scientists no longer question whether the atmosphere is being warmed due to human activities and instead are increasingly impressed with the speed and impact of the process. "I repeat: There is no doubt that we're warming the earth and that a continuation of our activities will lead to profound changes. Penguins, polar bears and your unborn children have no vote in this. They must live with decisions we make today. As educators, we're charged to encourage your intellectual growth. "That can (actually, will) be uncomfortable at times, and we're also here to help you deal with that discomfort. It's truly what makes being a human such a joy, privilege and challenge."

But if anyone has learned about how "uncomfortable" learning can be, it is Dean Hughes, who seems to have changed his mind about RWU's one-sided global warming curriculum. An RWU spokesman told me that the backlash against the required viewing of Gore's movie prompted Dean Hughes to "explore alternatives" to teaching global warming. The spokesman said that one alternative includes the presentation this fall of the counter-alarmism movie, "The Great Global Warming Swindle," a Channel 4 (U.K.) documentary that is best described as must-see global warming TV.

As the chastened Dean Hughes learned, while many people have made up their minds about global warming, many others have not. Further, there is evidence that, when presented with both sides of the debate, many believers end up changing their mindset from alarmism to skepticism about the alleged climate crisis.

Last March, the prestigious New York debating society Intelligence Squared sponsored a debate on global warming. On the alarmist side of the debate were the Union of Concerned Scientists Brenda Ekwurzel, NASA climate modeler Gavin Schmidt and University of California oceanographer Richard C. J. Somerville. The skeptical view of global warming alarmism was presented by Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorologist Richard S. Lindzen, University of London bio-geographer Philip Stott, and "State of Fear" author Michael Crichton, who is also a Harvard-trained physician and an instructor at Cambridge University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A pre-debate poll indicated that, by 2-to-1 (57 percent to 29 percent, with 14 percent undecided), the audience believed that manmade global warming was a crisis. But in the post-debate poll, the audience reversed its pre-debate views - the ranks of the skeptics swelled to 46 percent, the believers plummeted to 42 percent and the undecided declined slightly to 12 percent. That's the power of debate. It follows that schools, if they choose to teach the global warming controversy at all, ought to be teaching both sides of the controversy, not just Al Gore's alarmism.

Last fall, the National Science Teachers Association rejected Al Gore's offer of 50,000 free DVDs of "An Inconvenient Truth" for use in classrooms. Recognizing that Al Gore and his global warming viewpoint is just that, opinion rather than undisputed fact, the NSTA expressed concern that other "special interests" might also want to distribute materials and that it didn't want to offer "political" endorsement of the film, according to a Washington Post report. The NSTA probably made the correct decision at the time simply because it would be egregiously biased to present just one particular viewpoint about a controversy as heated and important as global warming. Now that the counter-viewpoints are available, however, schools ought to show their students "An Inconvenient Truth," "The Great Global Warming Swindle" and the Intelligence Squared debate.

According to a recent front-page Washington Post story, one-sided teaching about global warming is taking a terrible emotional toll on children. "For many children and young adults, global warming is the atomic bomb of today.Parents say they're searching for `productive' outlets for their 8-year-olds' obsessions with dying polar bears. Teachers say enrollment in high school and college environmental studies classes is doubling year after year. And psychologists say they're seeing an increasing number of young patients preoccupied by a climactic Armageddon." It's time to learn that bias plus teaching does not equal education.

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Return of the Thought Police?

The history of teacher attitude adjustment

College campus battles over academic freedom and free speech have become a media staple. One widely publicized 2004 case concerned Ed Swan, an education student at Washington State University (WSU), who openly espoused conservative views, including opposition to affirmative action and permitting gays to adopt. The school's "professional disposition evaluation" required that students demonstrate, along with a professional demeanor, written communication, and problem-solving and critical-thinking skills, an "understanding of the complexities of race, power, gender, class, sexual orientation and privilege in American society."

Refusing to consent to the underlying ideology, Swan failed repeatedly. The college threatened to expel him from the teacher training program unless he signed a contract agreeing to undergo diversity training and accept extra scrutiny of his student teaching. After a national civil-liberties group intervened on his behalf, Swan was allowed to continue in the program, and WSU has since revised its evaluation form. The new version requires professors to evaluate students' "willingness to consider multiple perspectives on social and institutional factors that can impede or enhance students' learning." Dean of Education Judy Mitchell explained, "We've changed the format and clarified the words, but we haven't changed the standards."

Advocates of dispositions assessments of the kind in place at WSU defend the screening of pre-service teachers, whether at program entry or later on in the certification process, as standard practice and argue that "dispositions" are merely those attitudes and behaviors necessary to successful teaching. Critics see the combination of program accreditation standards, revised by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) in 2000; a growing curricular emphasis on "social justice" issues; and a left-leaning education professoriate as yielding a one-sided approach to teacher education and the certification of teachers based on ideology, rather than teaching skills or mastery of content knowledge.

As a historian, I am most struck by the parallels between the dispositions assessments of today's aspiring teachers and the evaluations of teachers' mental hygiene and personality that began in the 1940s and continued for two decades. As is the case today, from 1940 to 1960 teacher educators sought to protect the interests of schoolchildren by socially engineering "desirable" characteristics in their teachers. What have changed are the personal qualities deemed most important for success in the classroom.

Assessing Teacher Dispositions

What is the purpose of dispositions assessment? What entity or body is in the best position to make this assessment? If the purpose is to ensure that access to children is denied to those who are truly deviant (sexual predators) or those who could harm children (drug dealers, felony offenders, child abusers), then it seems the assessment is best made by the government, which has the resources and responsibility to identify these people. If the purpose is to ensure that potential teachers have basic characteristics like honesty or fairness, existing standards such as university honor codes in higher education should suffice. If the purpose is to see how a teacher acts in a certain environment (be it an urban, suburban, or rural school, with a diverse or homogeneous student body), then perhaps those in that environment can best perform that assessment, taking into account the standards, mores, and preferences of the community. The ultimate employers of teachers, local school districts, can and do screen for the characteristics they want in their employees. Why, then, is it also necessary for teacher educators to assess the personal and political beliefs of aspiring teachers? Perhaps the policing of teacher personality and dispositions is just a way for teacher educators to extend their control even further into the public school classroom.

The harshest critics of dispositions assessment accuse education schools of acting as ideological gatekeepers to employment in public schools. Indeed, web site after web site shows schools of education that list among their teacher-education program goals the inculcation of political views alongside intellectual curiosity and such work habits as punctuality. The University of Alabama's College of Education is "committed to preparing individuals to promote social justice, to be change agents, and to recognize individual and institutional racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism.." In the teacher education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, students are asked to "act as leaders and agents for organizational change in their classrooms, schools, and society, continually examine their own identities, biases, and social locations, seeking knowledge of students' cultures and communities, and pursuing a complex understanding of societal inequities as mediated through classism, heterosexism, racism, and other systems of advantage." Some program descriptions explain that requiring awareness of these issues and a commitment to addressing them ensures teachers will teach all children. In an October 2006 letter defending the conceptual framework of Teachers College, Columbia University, against accusations of political screening, President Susan H. Furhman wrote, "We believe that responsiveness to the diversity of students' backgrounds and previous experiences are [sic] essential for effective teaching"

Not all universities make the leap from classroom behavior to ideology: The "Teacher Education Professional Dispositions and Skills Criteria" at Winthrop University in South Carolina are only basic indicators of professional commitment, communication skills, interpersonal skills (among them, "Shows sensitivity to all students and is committed to teaching all students"), emotional maturity, and academic integrity; acknowledging social inequities is not mentioned. The difficulty, however, in assessing dispositions, whether they espouse social justice or are seemingly harmless as at Winthrop, arises when the assessors make value judgments rather than encourage academic freedom and respect freedom of conscience. As the Swan case at Washington State University shows, some teacher education programs clearly demand allegiance to a particular perspective on the politics of education.

If schools encourage students to respond honestly to teacher education assignments, and then use any responses that differ from accepted beliefs as grounds for dismissal, that is political screening and a clear denial of academic freedom. A student accused Le Moyne College, a private, Jesuit-run school, of doing just that. In 2004, administrators dismissed the politically conservative graduate student after he wrote a paper on classroom management that questioned the value of multicultural education and expressed limited support for the use of corporal punishment in the classroom.

At the Brooklyn College School of Education, some students complained after a teacher showed the Michael Moore film Fahrenheit 9/11 on the day before the 2004 presidential election. The university asked one student to leave, accused two others of plagiarism, and then denied the two students the right to bring a witness or an attorney to their hearing. K. C. Johnson, a faculty member who questioned the accusation of plagiarism and defended the students in Inside Higher Ed, then faced possible investigation by the university. The hallmarks of a professional program of teacher preparation within a university should be the free exploration of ideas. Yet it seems some teacher preparation programs substitute professional socialization, and the political conformity it requires, for a commitment to academic freedom.

The controversy over political screening of prospective teachers by teacher educators came to a head at the June 2006 reauthorization hearing for the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) with the U.S. Department of Education. Within the list of dispositions aspiring teachers might be required to possess, the agency had included "social justice," a phrase that, to many, signals a value-laden ideology. Under pressure from a number of groups, NCATE president Arthur Wise announced that the agency would drop "social justice" from its accreditation standards; he maintains that social justice was never a required disposition.

NCATE's definition of "dispositions" and its inclusion of social justice as part of that definition had caused considerable consternation. Among the groups represented at the hearing were the National Association of Scholars, which had filed the complaint, and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), founded and headed by civil libertarians Alan Charles Kors, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvey Silverglate, a criminal defense attorney. FIRE, an organization dedicated to the preservation of free speech, has accused a number of universities, including Washington State University on behalf of Edward Swan, of evaluating students on the basis of their political views and thereby violating their First Amendment rights.

Arthur Wise has staked out NCATE's position that dispositions are only "commonsense expectations" for teacher behavior and insists that the accrediting agency does not condone the evaluation of attitudes. Whether or not that is the case, most teacher education programs in this country receive accreditation from NCATE and follow its lead. Even though NCATE has now dropped "social justice" as a disposition, the agency stands behind dispositions assessment and institutions' use of "social justice" as a curricular theme. The phrase appears in countless teacher-preparation program and course descriptions. Critics are not hopeful that NCATE's action will curb abuses. In her testimony at the NCATE hearing, American Council of Trustees and Alumni president Anne D. Neal asked that the agency's reauthorization be denied "until it affirmatively makes clear that teacher preparation programs are not expected to judge the values and political beliefs of teacher candidates and asks that its members review and revise their standards accordingly." ....

Learning from History

The screening of prospective teachers for maladjustment 50 years ago and the dispositions assessments going on today have remarkable similarities. As William Damon of Stanford has noted, dispositions assessment "opens virtually all of a candidate's thoughts and actions to scrutiny...[and] brings under the examiner's purview a key element of the candidate's very personality." The same underlying assumption-that scientific means of selection and training could guarantee good teachers-held sway at mid-century with respect to mental hygiene. Teacher educators who guarded entry to the profession used the techniques of science to study, measure, and evaluate the teacher candidate as do those who guard entry today. Only the specific values and attitudes they appraise have changed. Advocates of dispositions assessment claim that their methods are "standards-based" and provide "accountability" -scientific-sounding catchwords that hold considerable weight in the current political climate. Both sets of desirable characteristics-summed up in the terms mental hygiene and social justice-are tied to progressivism and appear as core components of the teacher preparation curriculum, with the effect of de-emphasizing academic knowledge, or at least requiring subject-matter learning and even pedagogy to make room for them. And hard evidence was and still is lacking. Researchers could never link with any certainty particular personality traits with effective teaching. Nor, as Frederick Hess explains, is there any scientific evidence that requiring teachers to have certain views about "sexuality or social class" ensures that they teach all students: "Screening on `dispositions' serves primarily to cloak academia's biases in the garb of professional necessity."

The history of teacher screening reveals how deeply rooted such practices are in American teacher education. Whether the standard is mental hygiene or possessing the proper political and ideological disposition, the elimination of candidates who do not pass muster gives teacher educators the power to determine who gains access to a classroom based on the values the teacher educators prefer. While the courts have permitted certifying agencies to require "good moral character" of teacher applicants, as legal scholars Martha McCarthy and Nelda Cambron-McCabe note, they "will intervene...if statutory or constitutional rights are abridged." Thus, while pledging loyalty to federal and state constitutions is a permissible condition for obtaining a teacher license, swearing an oath to progressivism is not. Given the evidence and the history, there should be real concern, as teacher educator Gary Galluzzo has said, that "students' views and personalities are being used against them" whenever dispositions are assessed. Those committed to academic freedom within higher education should be concerned when professional socialization trumps freedom of conscience in teacher education programs.

Much more here

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

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

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

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11 May, 2007

Brooklyn Arabic School

Backers of the proposed Khalil Gibran International Academy are insisting that their plan for a middle school that would teach Arabic is still alive, even though the department of education has decided against situating the school at PS 282 in Park Slope. Others suggest it's a fine moment to put the plan to rest for good. Our own view is that it's a good moment to review yet again the whole idea of parental choice in schooling. If there is a logic to the Khalil Gibran school, there's a logic to a lot of other things, too.

We have no apologies for the skepticism and passion with which some of our columnists have reacted to the school. Its principal, Dhabah "Debbie" Almontaser, accepted an award in 2005 from the Council on American-Islamic Relations. When Mayor Bloomberg in 2002 named a CAIR official to the city's human relations commission, it set off a firestorm of complaints. CAIR had cosponsored an event at Brooklyn College where attendees chanted "no to the Jews, descendants of the apes," and the organization posted a letter on its Web site suggesting that Muslims could not have been responsible for the attacks of September 11, 2001.

CAIR is a highly divisive institution in this city and country. It is funded in part by the same Saudi prince, Alwaleed bin Talal, whose $10 million donation Mayor Giuliani rejected after the terrorist attacks of September 11, when the prince called for America to rethink its support for Israel. When one of our reporters asked Ms. Almontaser whether she considers Hamas and Hezbollah to be terrorist organizations and who she thinks was behind the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, she declined to answer, suggesting she shouldn't be singled out for such questions.

Yet if Ms. Almontaser cannot bring herself to address such questions from a newspaper, how is she going to do it in school? We do not believe such skepticism makes one intolerant, or, as some have insinuated, an anti-Arab or anti-Muslim bigot. Arabic Islamist terrorism in Brooklyn is a genuine threat. This is a city that saw Ari Halberstam shot to death on the Brooklyn Bridge after his assailant, Rashid Baz, listened to a sermon at the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge. And more recently saw a clerk at an Islamic bookstore in Bay Ridge, Shahawar Matin Siraj, convicted of a plot to blow up the Herald Square subway station.

Not long ago, a man from Yemen who owned an ice cream shop in Brooklyn was convicted of sending nearly $22 million abroad for use by a sheik with ties to Hamas and Al Qaeda. The "landmarks plot" to blow up the United Nations and the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels was hatched on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn by Omar Abdel-Rahman and others. A civil rights lawyer and her interpreter were convicted of aiding Abdel-Rahman by transmitting messages from him to a terrorist organization in Egypt. This is not a time when concern over these issues can be dismissed as bigotry.

The majority of Arab Americans and American Muslims are law-abiding, patriotic, and peace-loving. Ms. Almontaser herself has won many admirers, including some New York Jewish leaders. "She's been a driving force in allowing trusting and really deep dialogues with not only the Jewish community but" with other communities around the city, the Jewish Community Relations Council's director for intergroup relations, Robert Kaplan, said. The New York regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, Joel Levy, has said, "I have a lot of confidence in her and am optimistic she's going to create an appropriate school."

The city's schools chancellor, Joel Klein, starts out with credibility on the issue of Israel and the war on terrorism. He unceremoniously shut down a program in which Columbia's Rashid Khalidi, a professor known for making sloppy accusations against Israel's American backers, was training New York City school teachers. More broadly, he is a partisan of the Americanizing role of universal public education. It's hard to peg either him or Mayor Bloomberg as a Balkanizer. At the same time, growing politicization within the city's public schools � such as Beacon � is an alarming trend they will need to start addressing somewhere.

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How to sort all this out? Our own preference is for a system of maximizing parental choice through school vouchers. These columns have long advocated vouchers that would allow students to study in a Catholic school or a yeshiva or an Arab school. It is a step that the mayor, the chancellor, the unions, and the liberal intelligentsia in New York have resisted. A taxpayer-funded Arabic school would only underscore the injustice of allowing one group of parents to educate their own children in a school that elevates their language, civilization, and religion at taxpayer expense, while depriving other parents of the same choices. Our test for whether all of the parties to this controversy are standing on principle will be their position on vouchers.

Source




Australia: A missing option -- school for boys



VICTORIA needs more boys-only government schools to improve boys' academic performance, an education expert says. Instead of having to pay expensive private school fees for a single-sex education, parents should have the option of sending their sons to boys-only state schools just as they can send their daughters to girls-only state schools, according to Ian Lillico, an international consultant on gender and boys' education. "It is a shame that we haven't said: 'Let's give some alternatives to boys'. If you are saying you want to choose single sex, and there are good reasons to do that, then they (parents) have to pay for private education - it doesn't make sense at all," Mr Lillico said. There are eight all-girls state schools in Victoria but only one all-boys alternative, the select-entry Melbourne High, which offers only years 9 to 12.

In New South Wales, where Mr Lillico is an adviser to the Education Department on gender and boys' education, there are 22 all-boys government schools and just five of those are select-entry schools.

Some co-ed Victorian schools that are near girls-only government alternatives have a gender imbalance in their student make-up. For example, Camberwell High has 800 boys enrolled and just 400 girls. Principal Elida Brereton said the school ran up to three all-boys classes in years 7 to 10 to keep some classes co-educational. "We sometimes have parents who complain to us that their boys are not getting a co-education, but have enrolled their daughters at (nearby single-sex school) Canterbury Girls. "You can't help but think, if they sent their girls here, the situation might be different," Ms Brereton said.

Research showed that not all boys thrived in a single-sex school, Mr Lillico said, but those who played team sports did. He said that single-sex education for boys and girls was most beneficial in the middle high school years. "If a boy doesn't play team sports, then going to an all-boys school could be a disaster for him. There is still that underlying thing where he might be thought to be a bit of a 'sis' or 'a wuss' or a 'gay'," Mr Lillico said.

Gentle, bookish and musical boys fared better in coeducational schools, he said. But if boys played a team sport and had an interest in a musical instrument or drama, they often fared well in all-boys schools.

But not all experts agree on the need for more boys-only schools. Ken Rowe, a specialist in gender and education at the Australian Council for Educational Research, dismissed the need for single-sex education. "It has truly got nothing to do with the gender of the kid or the gender of the teacher but it has got to do with the quality of the teaching," Dr Rowe said. He said girls did better than boys educationally the world over, but much of the success of single-sex schools came down to the enthusiasm of parents and school communities for creating boys-only or girls-only schools. "I think it may be in the minds of parents as an issue, but it is not an issue," he said.

A spokesman for Education Minister John Lenders said the Department of Education would monitor demand for single-sex education. "There has been a continuing decline in demand for boys-only schooling options in Victoria in recent years and there is no overwhelming evidence to suggest a change. This trend has not been mirrored in levels of demand for girls-only schools," he said.

Source

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

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

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

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10 May, 2007

"Holistic review" at UCLA exposed

Sounds like blatant defiance of the law. Post below lifted from La Shawn. See the original post for links

As regulars know, I've written about holistic review a few times. In this post from last year, I told you that the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) adopted a holistic review admissions process. I made the simple and obvious point that holistic review, if used consistently across all races, would increase the number of white and Asian students, not black and hispanic, as intended.

Last month, I reported that UCLA indeed had admitted more black and hispanic students under holistic review. I opined that the whole thing was a sham, a thinly veiled disguise for race preferences, which are illegal in the state (so say 54 percent of the voters.) If the school holistically reviewed all applicants, without regard to race, and academics were "given the greatest weight," how in the world did the school end up with more blacks and hispanics? Did high achievers suddenly emerge when they learned about the new process? Of course not.

It was just as I expected. Scores for holistically admitted black and hispanics students were significantly lower than holistically admitted whites and Asians. From The Daily Bruin (emphases added):

And while the number of underrepresented minorities admitted did increase overall, there is still a significant gap between the SAT scores and high school GPAs of black and Latino students compared to white and Asian students.In fall 2006, before UCLA switched to holistic admissions, black and Latino applicants' average SAT scores were 255 and 246 points lower than the average for their white and Asian counterparts.

That gap seemed largely unaffected by holistic review - in fall 2007, black applicants' SAT scores were on average 293 points lower than those of white and Asian students, and Latino applicants' scores came up 249 points short.

You don't have to be particularly smart to see what's going on. Under holistic review, a politically correct label for race preferences, reviewers are putting more weight on black and hispanic applicants' skin color (against the law), so-called leadership skills, hard-luck stories, and other "non-academic" factors than they do for white and Asian applicants. Because the scores and grades of whites and Asians are perennially higher than blacks and hispanics, reviewers are virtually forced to de-emphasize hard numbers and overemphasize non-academic qualities. That's contradictory to the school's claim. "Academic achievement still will be given the greatest weight. But added emphasis will be placed on the school context and the resources available to the student."

If academic achievement had been given the greatest weight, which I don't believe it was for blacks and hispanics, there'd be fewer blacks and hispanics admitted for that admissions cycle, not more, and the score gap between admittees would be narrower, not wider. In a previous post, I argued that since more whites and Asians apply to UCLA than blacks and hispanics, there'd be more whites and Asians admitted under the lowered standard. Again, assuming white and Asian applicants were subject to holistic review to the same extent (if at all) as blacks and hispanics.

The worst thing about PC BS is the way bureaucrats have to engage in double-talk. Anyone of reasonable intelligence knows what's going on, so who, exactly, is buying this holistic crap?

Here's something only an idiot would come up with: Because blacks and hispanics have less access to Advanced Placement classes, good schools, and SAT prep classes, they should be admitted to selective colleges and universities for which they're underqualified and face a rigorous curriculum for which they are woefully unprepared, all in the name of diversity and "social justice." Meanwhile, you've got a score gap you could drive a Humvee through, but the disparity and mismatch give students "a true college experience . where they're learning from each other."

Does that make sense? Of course it doesn't. In order for PC BS to "work," we're not supposed to look at evidence, ask questions, and expect sound and reasoned responses. That complicates things. On the one hand, we're supposed to pretend the academic achievement gap means nothing, while on the other hand accept the caused-by-racism explanation for why it exists in the first place.

You know, it wouldn't be the worse thing in the world to match students to colleges and universities according to their abilities. And the sky certainly wouldn't fall if so-called selective schools ended up with far fewer blacks and hispanics. Where did people get the idea that black and brown faces must be present on a campus at all costs, especially when those costs are borne by the students themselves, as proven by lower achievement and lower graduation rates? Again, we're not to supposed to ask questions, so nevermind




Australia: Gross spelling errors in High School textbook

Our Leftist "educators" are even too dumb to use a spellchecker



A PRACTICE Core Skills booklet widely used by Year 12 students contains seven major spelling errors in two paragraphs. The mistakes, pointed out yesterday by an irate parent, include "dagnerous" for dangerous, "gudance" for guidance, "anddetection" for and detection, "detemrine" for determine, "readio" for radio, "teh" for the and "mehtod" for method. The book, Queensland Core Skills Test Workbook, was written by Peter J. Spence, BA BEd Grad. Dip RE, and B.J. Lewis, BA BEd MEd Admin, and published in Brisbane by Education Support Programmes. This is the fifth year of production of the book, which is compulsory in many Queensland schools.

The company did not return phone calls or emails yesterday. The errors occur on page 116 in a science practice question about small robots known as millibots.

Education Minister Rod Welford said: "I hope the students doing the Core Skills Test check their answers more carefully than the authors of this book." The Queensland Studies Authority, which oversees the Core Skills Test, said it had nothing to do with the book. "The QSA publishes its own QCS Test support materials for schools and students," a spokesman said. "Copies of the QSA publications What About the QCS Test? and All You Need to Know About the QCS Test are provided to schools for distribution to all Year 11 and Year 12 students."

Queensland Council of Parents and Citizens Associations executive officer Greg Donaldson said: "Someone has let the side down by obviously not using the spellcheck."

The parent who drew attention to the errors said the students had wondered at first if it was a "correct the spelling mistakes" question, but clearly it was not, as it asked for a calculation to be performed. "What sort of an example do you think this will set for a generation that already struggles to be literate?" she said.

The Queensland Core Skills Test, which will be held on September 4 and 5 this year, is a common statewide test for Year 12 students testing 49 common elements in the curriculum. It gives students individual results from A to E, and group results are used to help calculate overall positions (OPs).

Source

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

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

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

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9 May, 2007

Free to choose, and learn

New research shows that parental choice raises standards-including for those who stay in public schools

FEW ideas in education are more controversial than vouchers-letting parents choose to educate their children wherever they wish at the taxpayer's expense. First suggested by Milton Friedman, an economist, in 1955, the principle is compellingly simple. The state pays; parents choose; schools compete; standards rise; everybody gains.

Simple, perhaps, but it has aroused predictable-and often fatal-opposition from the educational establishment. Letting parents choose where to educate their children is a silly idea; professionals know best. Co-operation, not competition, is the way to improve education for all. Vouchers would increase inequality because children who are hardest to teach would be left behind.

But these arguments are now succumbing to sheer weight of evidence. Voucher schemes are running in several different countries without ill-effects for social cohesion; those that use a lottery to hand out vouchers offer proof that recipients get a better education than those that do not.

Harry Patrinos, an education economist at the World Bank, cites a Colombian programme to broaden access to secondary schooling, known as PACES, a 1990s initiative that provided over 125,000 poor children with vouchers worth around half the cost of private secondary school. Crucially, there were more applicants than vouchers. The programme, which selected children by lottery, provided researchers with an almost perfect experiment, akin to the "pill-placebo" studies used to judge the efficacy of new medicines. The subsequent results show that the children who received vouchers were 15-20% more likely to finish secondary education, five percentage points less likely to repeat a grade, scored a bit better on scholastic tests and were much more likely to take college entrance exams.

Voucher programmes in several American states have been run along similar lines. Greg Forster, a statistician at the Friedman Foundation, a charity advocating universal vouchers, says there have been eight similar studies in America: seven showed statistically significant positive results for the lucky voucher winners; the eighth also showed positive results but was not designed well enough to count.

The voucher pupils did better even though the state spent less than it would have done had the children been educated in normal state schools. American voucher schemes typically offer private schools around half of what the state would spend if the pupils stayed in public schools. The Colombian programme did not even set out to offer better schooling than was available in the state sector; the aim was simply to raise enrolment rates as quickly and cheaply as possible.

These results are important because they strip out other influences. Home, neighbourhood and natural ability all affect results more than which school a child attends. If the pupils who received vouchers differ from those who don't-perhaps simply by coming from the sort of go-getting family that elbows its way to the front of every queue-any effect might simply be the result of any number of other factors. But assigning the vouchers randomly guarded against this risk.

Opponents still argue that those who exercise choice will be the most able and committed, and by clustering themselves together in better schools they will abandon the weak and voiceless to languish in rotten ones. Some cite the example of Chile, where a universal voucher scheme that allows schools to charge top-up fees seems to have improved the education of the best-off most.

The strongest evidence against this criticism comes from Sweden, where parents are freer than those in almost any other country to spend as they wish the money the government allocates to educating their children. Sweeping education reforms in 1992 not only relaxed enrolment rules in the state sector, allowing students to attend schools outside their own municipality, but also let them take their state funding to private schools, including religious ones and those operating for profit. The only real restrictions imposed on private schools were that they must run their admissions on a first-come-first-served basis and promise not to charge top-up fees (most American voucher schemes impose similar conditions).

The result has been burgeoning variety and a breakneck expansion of the private sector. At the time of the reforms only around 1% of Swedish students were educated privately; now 10% are, and growth in private schooling continues unabated.

Anders Hultin of Kunskapsskolan, a chain of 26 Swedish schools founded by a venture capitalist in 1999 and now running at a profit, says its schools only rarely have to invoke the first-come-first-served rule-the chain has responded to demand by expanding so fast that parents keen to send their children to its schools usually get a place. So the private sector, by increasing the total number of places available, can ease the mad scramble for the best schools in the state sector (bureaucrats, by contrast, dislike paying for extra places in popular schools if there are vacancies in bad ones).

More evidence that choice can raise standards for all comes from Caroline Hoxby, an economist at Harvard University, who has shown that when American public schools must compete for their students with schools that accept vouchers, their performance improves. Swedish researchers say the same. It seems that those who work in state schools are just like everybody else: they do better when confronted by a bit of competition.

Source




More on British teacher abuse

Teachers accused of abuse of pupils should be guaranteed anonymity while the allegations are investigated, the Lord Chancellor said yesterday. Lord Falconer of Thoroton said that teachers' reputations were being ruined by the "allegations culture" and an unfair disciplinary process that could leave their careers in tatters even if allegations proved to be completely unfounded.

The Lord Chancellor also called for a more "common sense" approach to human rights. Head teachers were perfectly justified, for example, in refusing unreasonable demands from Muslim pupils who claimed that it was their human right to wear Islamic dress in schools. He cited the decision of a Luton school to stop Shabina Begum wearing a jilbab - a long loose gown - to class.

Lord Falconer told the conference of the National Association of Head Teachers that teachers should not face automatic suspension when an allegation was made against them. False accusations should no longer be automatically reported to the local authority or appear on Criminal Records Bureau checks and job references, he said, and schools should have some means of making public statements of a teacher's innocence as soon as they were cleared of a spurious allegation.

Suspensions and investigations that lasted for years "ruin lives often utterly unfairly", he said. If teachers facing accusations were automatically suspended, regardless of the allegations' merits, that knowledge could spread very quickly, ruining reputations, Lord Falconer said. Nor was it fair that "patently false" accusations should be allowed to follow teachers through their entire career.

Teachers have long complained that allegations against them are recorded by the school and reported to the local authority. This means that the accusations appear on criminal record checks and job references, even when the teacher is cleared, blighting their chances for career advancement. "Where it's demonstrably the case that the allegation is false there should be greater discretion as to whether it's recorded," Lord Falconer said.

Mick Brookes, the association's general secretary, said that heads were sometimes able to protect teachers from false allegations by not reporting them to the local authority, yet there was nobody to protect heads when they fell victim. An accusation against a head would automatically be referred to the authority, which would suspend them at once. "If an allegation is made against a head, the cavalry come out very quickly. Social services are there in squads and there is an immediate, very high escalation," Mr Brookes said.

As a head teacher he had taken the risk of not reporting four cases in which his teachers had been accused of abuse because he had found all the cases to be unfounded. Those teachers were left to get on with their careers. He contrasted this with the case of a head who has been suspended and who attempted suicide as a result, even though the union expects him to be cleared of the claims against him.

Lord Falconer rejected the union's demands for sanctions against those who levelled false accusations against teachers and heads, arguing that this might deter those with genuine grievances from reporting them. He also ruled out changes to criminal investigations of teachers.

Public misunderstanding of human rights legislation partly explained the "allegations culture", the Lord Chancellor suggested. An overzealous interpretation of the Human Rights Act had led to claims in the name of "human rights" that were nothing of the sort.

Source

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

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

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

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8 May, 2007

Weird British school

Another untested theory being imposed on kids

Britain's most expensive state school is being built without a playground because those running it believe that pupils should be treated like company employees and do not need unstructured play time. The authorities at the 46.4m pound Thomas Deacon city academy in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, due to open this autumn, also believe that the absence of a playground will avoid the risk of "uncontrollable" numbers of children running around in breaks at the 2,200-pupil school. "We are not intending to have any play time," said Alan McMurdo, the head teacher. "Pupils won't need to let off steam because they will not be bored."

The absence of play time has angered some parents whose children will attend the school, designed by Lord Foster, architect of the "gherkin" office tower in London. But staff insist that it will have the added benefit of avoiding pupils falling victim to playground bullies. Miles Delap, project manager at the academy, said: "For a school of this size, a playground would have had to be huge. That would have been almost uncontrollable. We have taken away an uncontrollable space to prevent bullying and truancy."

Anne Kerrison, who has three children, said her 14-year-old son Matthew was devastated when he discovered that he would not be able to kick a football around at lunchtime. "All children need fresh air and a chance to exercise during the school day. Break times are the only unstructured time they get," she said.

Another city academy, Unity in Middlesbrough, opened in 2002 without a playground, prompting criticism from government inspectors about poor design. The school later built a playground.

Thomas Deacon, nicknamed "the blancmange" because of its rounded shape, will be one of the biggest schools in Europe. Its features will include a "wetland eco-pool" designed "for rain-water collection" planted with wild flowers. It will replace three schools in Peterborough and is one of the showcases of Tony Blair's academies programme. Academy schools remain in the state sector but are independent of local councils. They are sponsored by private sector firms which have some say in the management.

The academy's timetable will be tightly structured and exercise for pupils will take place in PE classes and organised games on adjacent playing fields. There will be a 30-minute lunch period when pupils will be taken to the dining room by their teacher, ensuring they do not sneak away to run around. McMurdo said refreshments, often taken in break periods at other schools, could be drunk during the school day. "[Pupils] will be able to hydrate during the learning experience," he said.

Other head teachers questioned the wisdom of the playground ban. Ian Andain, head at a comprehensive in Liverpool, said: "There has to be bit of open space to play football. It is important that pupils can have a run around and expend energy." However, Delap, who has run the academy project on behalf of its sponsor, Perkins Engines, and the Deacon school trust, said that playgrounds did not fit into the concept.

Source




FIRE defends campus speech-code survey

An April 20 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education criticized the work of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education after it published a survey of speech codes at colleges and universities across the nation. Jon B. Gould, the author of the article and an assistant professor of government and politics at George Mason University, challenged FIRE's December 2006 survey of speech codes. The report compiled FIRE's analysis of 330 schools and said more than 68% of them had unconstitutional speech codes.

Calling FIRE "an increasingly ideological organization that exaggerates the facts to make political hay," Gould branded its staffers "ideological opportunists." Gould made a four-fold argument against FIRE's findings, to which the organization responded with a series of articles on its Web site.

First, Gould said that the inclusion of both public and private schools in the report showed inconsistency. Second, he compared FIRE's results with the results of a similar survey that he had conducted and challenged the group's methodology. Third, Gould disagreed with FIRE's characterization of sexual-harassment policies as speech codes. Fourth, Gould accused FIRE of making judgments based on selective quotations from university policies.

Inconsistency: Gould asserted that, by including both public and private schools in its survey, FIRE mixes apples and oranges, enjoying "any opportunity - whether at public or private institutions - to challenge what it considers `thought control' from self-appointed, and not inconsequentially liberal, academic censors." He cited its recent campaigns against Brown University, Pace University and Johns Hopkins University - all three private institutions, which are not bound to provide First Amendment speech protections as public campuses are. Chris Perez, a program officer at FIRE, responded, "We at FIRE believe that when a school, public or private, makes a promise to a student - whether in a student handbook or a brochure or a speech from the president, that school is morally and legally bound to honor that promise."

FIRE included 104 private schools in its survey, evaluating them on the basis of the values listed in their mission statements or handbooks instead of on the Bill of Rights, which binds public universities. FIRE Vice President of Operations Robert Shibley wrote, "When we find a school that professes to value free expression or academic freedom, we evaluate its speech codes to see if its choices reflect those values."

Survey comparison: Gould challenged FIRE's research paradigm by comparing it with his similar survey. Using criteria from a similar First Amendment Center survey, Gould evaluated the hate-speech codes at 100 schools from 1992-1997. He found that 46% of schools had policies that restricted hate speech, but only 9% of them were unconstitutional. In contrast, he said FIRE found that 96% of schools had unconstitutional policies.

FIRE Senior Program Officer William Creeley responded to Gould's methodological critiques. He said that Gould combined FIRE's red- and yellow-light ratings to reach the 96%, whereas FIRE's report said only 69% of schools had unconstitutional policies. (A red-light rating was given to a school with a policy that clearly and substantially restricts free speech. A yellow-light rating was for policies that may be interpreted to restrict speech or prohibit only narrow types of speech.) Creeley said two main factors contributed to the discrepancy in the two surveys' results. First, they used different rating systems and different criteria. Second, FIRE surveyed a larger number of universities - 330 to Gould's 100.

Creeley also observed differences in the policies surveyed. "We [FIRE] review any written policy maintained by the school with an impact on campus speech. . Gould's study, on the other hand, is shockingly vague about what exactly constitutes a `college hate speech code' or a `speech policy,' and proper definitions of either term are never supplied."

Sexual harassment: Gould disagreed with the characterization of sexual-harassment policies as speech codes. The debate between FIRE and Gould centers on the definition of sexual harassment and what speech is protected by the First Amendment. Gould cited Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to define harassment, which according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, "includes practices ranging from direct requests for sexual favors to workplace conditions that create a hostile environment for persons of either gender."

Gould also noted the Supreme Court's 1992 opinion in R.A.V. v. St. Paul, which says "that sexist or sexually degrading expression could be litigated as `a proscribable class of speech . within the reach of a statute [Title VII] directed at conduct rather than speech.' More recently courts have created a private right of action under Title IX to apply sexual-harassment standards to academe."

In an April 30 column in The New York Times, Stanley Fish, a professor of law at Florida International University, attempted to clarify the differing views on sexual harassment offered by Gould and FIRE. He wrote: "Much of the disagreement between Professor Gould and FIRE turns on the technical question of what does and does not amount to harassment. FIRE follows a 1999 Supreme Court decision (Davis v. Monroe County) in asserting that speech is harassing, as opposed to being merely offensive, if it is `so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively bars the victim's access to an educational opportunity or benefit.' Professor Gould's threshold for deeming a form of speech harassing would be lower and would be tied to what he considers to be the prevailing norms of `civil society'."

Gould said the problem with FIRE's criticism of sexual-harassment policies was that they are necessary to defend against Title VII and IX lawsuits. Samantha Harris, FIRE's director of legal and public advocacy, said that FIRE's criticism of sexual-harassment policies stems from universities' broad definitions of harassment, which she considers outside of the legal definition. As an example, she cited the Kansas State University policy, which says: "Examples include sexual teasing, jokes, remarks or questions . facial expressions, winking, throwing kisses or licking lips, spreading rumors . staring, looking a person up and down."

Harris said, "The problem is that a large number of colleges and universities define sexual harassment to include speech that categorically does not meet the stringent legal definition of harassment. . Universities cannot simply make protected speech unprotected by deeming it `sexual harassment'." Creeley also said that from 1989 to 2007, seven federal cases have challenged university speech codes. Six of them overturned unconstitutional harassment policies.

Selective quotations: Gould accused FIRE of evaluating selective quotations from speech codes. He cited the speech code at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor as an example. FIRE criticized the portion of the code that reads, "Individuals should not be unwittingly exposed to offensive material by the deliberate and knowing acts of others." However, Gould noted that this was just a portion of the code and that it also says, "Freedom of expression and an open environment for sharing information are valued, encouraged, supported, and protected. . Individuals must be able to choose what they wish to access for their own purposes."

Shibley said the other statements, which FIRE did not include, were modifiers of the original rule. If a student broke that rule, he or she could still be punished in spite of the other clauses. "A public university cannot constitutionally punish one student for merely `offending' other students, via electronic communication or otherwise, and the fact that students have permission to access whatever they like when they are by themselves is immaterial."

The debate between Gould and FIRE has caught the attention of others who have spoken out in support of FIRE. Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, wrote in an email to the Free Expression Network, "By our [SPLC's] measure, colleges could use a lot of improvement when it comes to protecting unpopular expression on both the right and the left. The `ideological opportunists' out there fighting against restrictions on speech are responsible for prompting policy changes that protect the speech of everyone. For that, they deserve to be commended."

David French, former president of FIRE and current senior legal counsel at the Alliance Defense Fund and director of ADF's Center for Academic Freedom, wrote on National Review Online, "I will believe that FIRE exaggerates the prevalence of speech codes the day that a federal judge upholds as lawful a code that FIRE labels `red' in the Spotlight database. We can argue about legal interpretations all day long, but federal judges make the ultimate decision, and so far FIRE hasn't gotten one wrong yet."

In response to Gould's claims that FIRE is "increasingly ideological," FIRE president Greg Lukianoff said, "FIRE defends the rights of those from all points of the political spectrum and we take flack from all points of the political spectrum about one case or another - which indicates to me that we are doing something right."

Source

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

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

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

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7 May, 2007

Legal predators on British teachers

Lawyers who encourage parents and pupils to make speculative allegations of abuse against teachers in the hope of winning financial compensation risk are destroying the reputation of thousands of teachers, a teaching union has said. The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) said that lawyers working on a "no win, no fee" basis were fuelling a rise in malicious allegations against teachers, made in the knowledge that local authorities would often pay complainants without even investigating their allegations.

Mick Brookes, the union's general secretary, said that "a lottery mentality" prompted children and parents to try their luck by levelling spurious allegations to get a payout. "If it is thought that by using a `no win, no fee' solicitor some payout can be got from the local authority, parents at times don't hesitate to go there," he said at the union's annual conference in Bournemouth.

Another head teacher said that she had been astonished to learn that a parent at her school had been paid compensation by the local authority after complaining that teachers had been negligent in caring for her daughter after an accident during a PE lesson. The head, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals from the parent concerned, said that the local authority had handed over the money without informing the school or even bothering to find out whether it was true. The school's own investigation later concluded that the accusation was unfounded.

Dame Mary MacDonald, the head teacher of the Riverside Community Primary School in North Shields, Tyneside, who has been the victim of a false allegation, said that she knew of an insurance company that advised local education authorities to settle claims that might exceed 12,000 pounds if they were to reach court. "Parents know they can put in a claim for anything up to 12,000 and it will never go to court," she said. Dame Mary said that nothing in her three decades as a teacher prepared her for the day the mother of a 3-year-old girl nearly destroyed her career by accusing her of slapping the child. Even though both the police and the local authority - who were called in by Dame Mary that same day to investigate - completely exonerated her, a story soon began circulating on the local housing estate that Dame Mary had kicked the child all around the school hall. This was overheard by a social worker and reported to another branch of the police. Soon calls for Dame Mary's resignation were being made.

"No matter what kind of reputation you have, mud sticks. The problem is that the minute you are accused you are assumed guilty," she said. Dame Mary said that schools should have the right to sue parents who make false allegations against head teachers and their staff and to exclude pupils who do the same.

The NAHT wants teachers who are accused of harming a child to be given anonymity while their cases are investigated - a position that has been rejected by the Government, but that is supported by the Conservatives. The union also wants accused teachers who are cleared to have the right to make a public statement clearing their names. Research conducted by the union among 25 local authorities suggested that the problem of false allegations was not as rare as the Government has indicated. One local authority had suspended 50 teachers in the past five years. But the survey also found that, in some areas, in nearly four cases in ten involving a teacher who had been suspended following an allegation, the accused was later exonerated.

Source




New York City Educator Gets 'F' in English After Poorly Written Note is Sent to Parents

Spell-checkers are probably the lifesavers for a lot of NYC teachers but this guy was too dumb even to use one of those. And the guy is a "Dean" -- which sounds rather senior

A New York City educator is in hot water after sending out a scathing note to parents riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. Michael Levy, a health academy dean at Markham Intermediate School in Staten Island, N.Y., sent home the letter to around 100 eighth graders on Monday after a rowdy food fight in the cafeteria, the Staten Island Advance reported. In the letter, Levy used "unexcecpable" for "unacceptable," "activates" for "activities" and "caferteria" for "cafeteria."

The letter was also filled with contradictions. Levy wrote that the students would be collectively punished and prohibited from attending the prom and the year-end class trip, according to the Advance. He then wrote that the students' punishments would be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. The note also promised to bar students from the prom if the letter was not signed by parents and returned to the school.

The school's principal, Emma Della Rocca, said the letter was unauthorized and that Levy would be evaluated at a conference on Friday. But parents are still scratching their heads over the error-filled note.

"I'd be worried that somebody was educating my son that doesn't know how to spell," Lucy Farfan-Narcisse, a parent whose child attends the school, told WCBS-TV. "That would be a great concern."

Source




WHAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS REALLY NEED

It is hard to recall a day when our public schools were not in the midst of a funding crisis and desperate for more money. No matter how much money the taxpayers have shelled out "for the kids," it has never been even close to enough. Schools today with their never ending proclamations of "crisis" are worse than the little boy who cried, "Wolf!"

What is most ironic about their incessant demands for more money is that more money would not improve the system in any meaningful way. In fact, if some benevolent billionaire dumped a truck load of $100 bills on the doorstep of every public school in town, most if not all of the real problems plaguing those schools would still be there a year later. Why? Because their problem is not a shortage of money.

I recall a ruling by a liberal judge some years ago, I believe it was in Kansas City, where the judge ordered that the failing local school district be given whatever amount of money was necessary to succeed. As I recall, spending per student skyrocketed to something in the neighborhood of $40,000 per student. Everything was first class. Everything money could buy a school was set before the kids.

The result: Grades dropped even lower and the drop out rate increased. Yet, in spite of this case, which proved once and for all that money is mot the answer, the education bureaucracy across America continues to demand more money "for the kids," and naive voters continue to shell out the dough. And all for naught.

Following are just a few suggestions of things schools could do to make the public education system work far better than it is today. Judge for yourself whether these suggestions make more sense than giving schools more money.

Suggestion 1. Pay teachers based on their performance as teachers, not based on how long they have been there. Currently, approximately 95 percent of a teacher's pay is based on their seniority. The other five percent or so is based on their educational credentials beyond their basic degree. Almost nowhere in America are public school teachers paid based on the quality of the service they provide as teachers.

Suggestion 2. Require that teachers be assigned only to subjects in which they have demonstrated expertise. Did you know that in most cases, when there is a reduction in teaching staff, schools keep the teachers with the most seniority and lay off the newer teachers, even if they are the best teachers in the school. Sometimes that results in the school laying off its Advanced Algebra teacher, because he or she has lacks seniority. The Algebra teacher is replaced by the English Literature teacher, who happened to have failed Algebra as a student, but will now teach Algebra because of seniority and n doing so waste an entire year in the education of hundreds of students. This is not as uncommon a scenario as you might think and shows how seriously off-based the current system is, putting the seniority of teachers before the education of our children.

Suggestion 3. Authorize school administrators to pay higher salaries to high school math and science teachers than they do to first grade teachers, who teach kids to color and spell simple words like "cat." Don't get me wrong. First grade teachers are just as important as high school Trigonometry teachers. However, there are a lot more people with the skills to teach the first grade than there are those capable of teaching higher level high school math and science classes. Thus the salaries of those teaching the more technical subject ought to be high enough to attract people with those rarer skills to the teaching profession.

There is a reason why U.S. students are lagging behind much of the industrialized nations of the world in math and science scores. Regardless of what the teachers union wants, you can't pay math and science teachers the same as P.E. instructors and attract enough highly qualified teachers to fill the positions. The teachers unions demand that all teachers of all subjects be paid essentially the same salaries, but continuing to do so is not only illogical, but in the end will destroy Americas ability to compete in a global economy.

Suggestion 4. Don't allow a high school drop out to get a drivers license until age 18. Want to drive? Stay in school at least through the 12th grade. Drop out and you lose your license to drive a car, something most teenagers value greatly.

Suggestion 5. Immerse all immigrant students in English. Don't teach them first to be proficient in their native language, as most districts do. First teach them to be proficient in English. Then teach them in English and only in English. It is common for non-English speaking students to be taught English one-half an hour per day and then be taught the rest of the day in English. This policy sidetracks immigrant students and prevents their being assimilated into society as Americans. Schools employ their current methods for various misguided reasons, one of which is the fact that they receive close to $3,000 in extra funding each year for each student they keep in their English as a Second Language (ESL) classes.

Suggestion 6. Authorize schools to administer the level of discipline necessary to maintain order in the classroom and thus allow teachers to create a classroom environment where learning can take place. Students or outsiders who sell drugs or bring truly dangerous weapons to school, should go to jail. The state and local school districts should abolish any requirement that schools provide expensive, private tutoring to kids who are kicked out for any behavior that warrants dismissal or suspension.

Suggestion 7. Dismiss teachers who are incompetent. I have known many great teachers, who are worth their weight in gold. But I have also known many teachers who were a complete and utter joke. They became teachers because education is one of the easiest majors in college and the major a lot of people gravitate to when they are unable to cut it in tougher, higher paying fields. Until schools are willing to buck the teachers union and remove the dead wood, (the dead wood that everyone from the janitors to the students to fellow teachers to the superintendent knows is dead wood), they should have no credibility to ask for one more dime from the taxpayers than they receive already.

Suggestion 8. Give the principal or superintendent of every school complete authority to make the hiring and firing decisions he or she believes are necessary to make their school excel. Then hold those administrators accountable for the failure or success of their school. Give them bonuses for success or fire them, if they fail. Corporations figured this out a long time ago. The man or woman at the top sets the pace, and if given the authority can right a sinking ship. To be effective, a good administrator cannot be tied down by union contracts that are not designed to help the kids, but to protect teachers.

The current system is not about results. Results are rarely rewarded and failure is rarely penalized in our schools today. In fact, the current system exhibits all of the classic signs of a socialist system where everyone is paid the same and creativity and performance are not rewarded, which is exactly the way the teachers unions demand things remain.

Many have complained that schools spend too much on administration and not enough on teachers. That notion is true and not true. Administrators today are often paid high salaries to manage, but then not given the authority to manage. It would be better to pay good administrators well enough that we attract more of them, give them the authority to make the decisions necessary to turn their schools around, and then reward, dock their pay, or fire them based on the results they achieve. The end result of teachers unions has been to hamstring and neuter school administrators, making no one ultimately responsible for the failure of our schools.

Suggestion 9. Based on my previous comments, you have probably been expecting this one: Get rid of the teachers unions. Even one of the foremost national leaders of the movement back in the fifties and sixties to unionize the teaching profession has repented and announced publicly that the experiment he helped promulgate has been a dismal failure. Teachers unions do not improve the quality of teachers. They do not improve the quality of education. Instead, they dramatically increase the cost of public education and lower the quality by opposing any reform that holds teachers accountable or instills competition into the system. There can be no reform until teachers unions are eliminated.

Suggestion 10. If teachers unions are to remain, at least stop collecting their union dues and union political funds for them via the public payroll system. Make them collect their own money. If unions had to collect their dues and political "contributions" from teachers directly, eight to ninety percent of teachers would not pay up, electing rather to have nothing to do with their unions. It should be obvious to even a casual observer that teachers unions are highly motivated to give campaign contributions to candidates for those public offices that control the purse strings of the schools. Those contributions have a very corrupting effect on public education, increasing the cost and eliminating accountability.

Suggestion 11. Do not allow teachers unions or any other union to donate money to the campaigns of any candidate running for an office that sets school policy, votes on collective bargaining agreements, or the budgets from which those contracts are funded. If a private sector union official was caught giving money to a member of management with which the union negotiates, that union official would likely end up in prison. Knowing that, we continue to allow teachers unions to "purchase" the other side of the bargaining table with their campaign contributions and then wonder why the cost of education is going up at the same time the quality is going down.

Suggestion 12. Let parents send their kids to any school they choose and let the money follow them. If we allow true school choice on an even playing field, competition between public schools and other public schools and competition between public schools and private schools would revolutionize public education within five to ten years, as schools compete for the kids and the dollars that follow them. Nothing improves the quality of a product or service while lowering the cost like competition. Public schools are full of innovative people who would rise to the task in a truly competitive world, if we would just create that world.

My list of suggestions for turning our schools around could go on and on. Can you imagine what would happen to public education if just these twelve suggestions were put into place? Kids would learn from talented teachers in a safe environment. Schools would be staffed with the best employees. Taxpayers would get their money's worth and be happy to shell out even more, if they knew the money was not going into a bottomless pit, but into quality schools that everyday are preparing America's children to compete toe to toe in a global economy.

What I suggest here may seem like a pipedream to some, but I have little doubt that the fulfillment of what today seems like a mere dream would be right before us, if we simply had the courage to make a few critical, systemic changes in the way we approach public education. The system is not failing for lack of talent, but because the system itself is broken. It is designed to fail. Fix a few basic problems, make a few systemic changes, and the entire system would right itself.

In conclusion, public education today is about the following things in the following order: (1) Obtaining more money from the taxpayers; (2) Enhancing the salaries and benefits of school employees; and (3) Teaching kids. Until parents start demanding that school boards and state legislatures put the kids first, the system will continue its downward spiral and all of the money in the world can't change that.

Source

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

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

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

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6 May, 2007

White Privilege

Post lifted from Protein Wisdom

Question: what would happen were an academic to take the actual findings of new AG Cooper's follow-up report on the Duke "Rape" case and write a dissertation based on those findings?

Or, to put it more provocatively: would a dissertation that posited "black, female entitlement"-based, as it is, on a culture of victim politics that rewards group-based grievance narratives and puts the burden of proving a negative on the accused in instances where allegations of sexual offenses against women are proffered-as a society-wide problem, one that underscores the pernicious nature of identity politics and so demands redress through a policy of consciously rolling back weighted legislation benefiting "protected classes," be so readily accepted by media and intellectual "elites"?

And if not, why not?-it being merely the flipside of the kinds of sociological assertions establishment feminists and the faculty 88 championed (and continue to champion, in many cases) before all the facts of the case came to light?

My guess? They'd call such a dissertation "racist" and "misogynistic"-and move to have its writer expelled from the university. Which just goes to show the growing inability of many academics and establishment feminists (and their "progressive" supporters and enablers) to recognize the inconsistency of their views, and to honestly face their own biases and stereotypes.




PostMo Vs MoGo

Post lifted from Democracy Project -- which see for links

Last week I was taken aback by a post by my friend Maimon Schwarzchild, law professor at Catholic San Diego University, about "Civilization, Barbarism, and the Classroom," with excerpts from Professor Steven Balch, National Association of Scholars president. Here's some additional excerpts:

"In order to suppress the new barbarism we should now be refocusing our classrooms on the serious and sympathetic study of civilizations' nature, achievements, and progress - that is to say, of its moral reasons for being.. Our civilization's peculiar misfortune is to be under a double assault, physically by the undercivilized from without, and psychologically by those surfeited with it from within. And these last own the classroom.. [T]he evolution of academic culture has implanted in many a sense of numinous superiority that spills forth in the error-has-no-rights attitude undergirding political correctness, which, in essence, is a claim to rule..

Another term for this anti-anti-barbarism is post-modernism. Balch defines post-modernism as, "the belief that people can have whatever ethics they like, an `anything goes' attitude." NAS contracted a survey that found:

73 percent of the students said that when their professors taught about ethical issues, the usual message was that uniform standards of right and wrong don't exist ("what is right and wrong depends on differences in individual values and cultural diversity"). It's not news that today's campuses are drenched in moral relativism. But we are allowed to be surprised that college students report they are being well prepared ethically by teachers who tell them, in effect, that there are no real ethical standards, so anything goes. Stephen Balch of the National Association of Scholars, who commissioned the survey, says the results show the dominance on campuses of postmodern thought, including the belief that objective standards are a sham perpetrated by the powerful to serve their own interests.

Comments John Leo:

This notion that disagreement is an assault helps explain the venomous treatment of dissenters on campus--canceled speakers, stolen newspapers, ripped-down posters, implausible violations of hate-speech rules, and many other hallmarks of the modern campus.

I asked Maimon Schwarzchild what he thought of this post-modernist theme on campuses. He wrote me back, "I must say, my own sense is of civilization committing suicide."

Another study points out:

[O]ver the past few decades the prevailing disposition among college students - today labeled Generation Y or Millennials - has slid into full-blown narcissism, according to a study released this week.

The "all about me" shift means much more than lots of traffic at self-revelatory websites such as YouTube and Facebook. It points, says the study's author, to a generation's lack of empathy, its inability to form relationships - and worse.

"Research shows [narcissists] are aggressive when they have been insulted or threatened," says Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and lead author of the report, called "Egos Inflating Over Time." "They tend to have problems with impulse control, so that means they're more likely to, for example, be pathological gamblers [or] commit white-collar crimes." .

[A]ccording to the study, 30 percent more college students showed "elevated narcissism" in 2006 compared with 1982..

[S]ays Professor Mruk. "You really do need to have both competence and worthiness. The middle point is where the balance would be," he says, "and where well-being would occur, both socially and individually."

In a follow-on interview, Professor Twenge observes:

The younger the generation, the higher their self-esteem. Young people now are much higher in self-esteem than their Baby Boomer parents were back in the 1970s. This has not led to happiness, however - anxiety and depression are also much higher than they used to be. Perhaps young people expect so much out of life that they are often disappointed. .

Generation Me is more likely to believe that things are out of their control - that what they do doesn't matter. They are also more likely to blame others for their problems. This can set them up for depression and low achievement. Adolescents in particular need to learn that their actions have consequences, and that trying hard can pay off.

I asked my psychiatrist friend Steve Rittenberg, blogger extroadinaire at Horsefeathers, for his thoughts:

Re: Post-modernism. Where to start? It's a kind of extreme relativism and is quite perverse. It seeks to undermine the foundations of Western civilization, as expressed, for example in the Old Testament. When God names and differentiates, species from one another, animate from inanimate, male from female, and lays down laws, like the incest taboo, that separate and define difference as the ground of reality.

Fixing our universities is a subject of much discussion, from reinvigorating core curriculum to a more politically open or balanced professorate. That is so. But, many students are taking matters into their own hands. I'll call it the More God alternative to Post-Modernism. The New York Times reports:

At Harvard these days, said Professor Gomes, the university preacher, "There is probably more active religious life now than there has been in 100 years." Across the country, on secular campuses as varied as Colgate University, the University of Wisconsin and the University of California, Berkeley, chaplains, professors and administrators say students are drawn to religion and spirituality with more fervor than at any time they can remember.

More students are enrolling in religion courses, even majoring in religion; more are living in dormitories or houses where matters of faith and spirituality are a part of daily conversation; and discussion groups are being created for students to grapple with questions like what happens after death, dozens of university officials said in interviews.

A survey on the spiritual lives of college students, the first of its kind, showed in 2004 that more than two-thirds of 112,000 freshmen surveyed said they prayed, and that almost 80 percent believed in God. Nearly half of the freshmen said they were seeking opportunities to grow spiritually, according to the survey by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. Compared with 10 or 15 years ago, "there is a greater interest in religion on campus, both intellectually and spiritually," said Charles L. Cohen, a professor of history and religious studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

The Rev. Lloyd Steffen, the chaplain at Lehigh University. "My theory is that the baby boomers decided they weren't going to impose their religious life on their children the way their parents imposed it on them," Mr. Steffen continued. "The idea was to let them come to it themselves. And then they get to campus and things happen; someone dies, a suicide occurs. Real issues arise for them, and they sometimes feel that they don't have resources to deal with them. And sometimes they turn to religion and courses in religion."

Increased participation in community service may also reflect spiritual yearning of students. "We don't use that kind of spiritual language anymore," said Rebecca S. Chopp, the Colgate president.

Post-Modernism meets its match, More God. Our students aren't so easily manipulated to vacuity as many professors might preach. Their "god", like those similar false ones that came before, fails to meet mankind's sense or needs.




Head Start: Vote to hide failure

Why is this failed program still lumbering on at all?

The House dealt a blow to President Bush's chief early-childhood initiative yesterday, voting to end the standardized testing of 4-year-olds, which was at the heart of his efforts to refocus Head Start. Supporters of the legislation, which would boost spending on the program and includes provisions to improve teacher quality, said it was aimed at ending Republican efforts to shift the focus of the 42-year-old program from nurturing social and emotional development to emphasizing literacy.

"We are back on the right track," said Sarah Greene, president of the National Head Start Association, a nonprofit group that promotes the program. Head Start Director Channell Wilkins said he was pleased that the bill had passed but said he had some qualms, especially about the elimination of the testing. "I'm still concerned that we don't have any kind of assessment tool to show the progress our kids are making," he said.

Democrats said the bill, which passed 365 to 48, signaled a new approach to social and education policy in Congress after control for years by Republicans. "They tried to starve programs like this," said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.). "We are going to start unstarving them." The bill, which would reauthorize the program for the first time since 1998, would increase spending on Head Start from $6.9 billion for the current fiscal year to $7.4 billion for fiscal 2008 and would require that at least 50 percent of Head Start teachers have a bachelor's degree by 2013. It would also make room for as many as 10,000 more youngsters, reversing a participation decline, from 912,000 in 2002 to 909,000 last year. More money would also be directed to programs for younger children and migrant and Indian students, and the bill requires that 25 percent of the new money be used to raise teacher salaries and benefits.

Head Start, seen as the nation's leading preschool program for the poor, started 42 years ago to help children and their families prepare for school academically as well in the social, psychological and health arenas. Services include sending children to a dentist, doctor or mental health professional and teaching them how to hold a fork or use a toilet. The White House proposed a historic shift several years ago to give states broad control over their Head Start programs, but it never won congressional approval.

It also sought to place increased emphasis on literacy education, and officials created the National Reporting System, a set of mini-tests aimed at measuring verbal and math skills in preschool children. It was seen as a natural follow-up to Bush's No Child Left Behind program for kindergarten through 12th grade, which also emphasizes standardized tests. The administration began requiring in 2003 that tests be given in Head Start programs each fall and spring, saying it was the only way to systematically measure the country's nearly 2,700 programs. Before that, Head Start programs used their own assessments to monitor student progress, and they have continued to do so. Hundreds of thousands of children ages 4 and 5 were given the test annually, despite concerns from early-childhood experts that the exam was given too early in children's development and was poorly designed.

The House voted to end the National Reporting System while calling for a new, more accurate way to gauge student progress. The Senate version also seeks to end the current testing. "The tests that were given were absolutely, at best, useless," said Rep. Dale E. Kildee (D-Mich.), the bill's sponsor. "We may go back to testing, but only after we get some scientific information about what to test for and how to test." The Senate is expected to take up its version of Head Start reauthorization within a few weeks, but the measure has some key differences from the House version, including the provision about teacher quality.

Efforts to reauthorize Head Start stalled in the past two Republican-led Congresses in part over proposed rules that would allow faith-based groups to consider religion in hiring for Head Start programs. Democratic leaders refused to allow the amendment to come up for a vote yesterday, and the House beat back an effort, 222 to 195, to force the legislation back to committee to consider the issue.

Source

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

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

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

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5 May, 2007

Brown university goes Islamic green

Post below recycled from American Thinker -- which see for links

Brown University, with a Middle East studies department currently offering no courses and losing one of its few professors in the field, is hosting a workshop titled "The Study of the Middle East and Islam: Challenges After 9-11" on May 3-4. Sponsored by the Middle East/Islamic Studies Initiative, the Watson Institute for International Studies, and the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the workshop purports to explore

"...some of the challenges facing American higher education as it seeks to... help foster a greater understanding in this country of the Middle East and Muslim world."

The only problem is that workshop presenters are almost uniformly composed of academics hostile to the U.S.-led war on terrorism, its ally, Israel, and any efforts via higher education to combat radical Islam on college campuses.

The conference will discuss "new national security regulations" and the "publishing environment faced by scholars writing about the region," as well as "pressures from concerned citizen groups," all of which are seen as impediments to "open discourse and academic freedom." Ironically, it is the very goal of open discourse and academic freedom that has led organizations such as Campus Watch (a "concerned citizen group" for which I work) to criticize the preponderance of politicized professors in Middle East studies. The Brown University workshop only reflects the one-sided approach to Middle East studies that exists in departments across the country.

The viewpoints represented at this event are far from excluded anywhere in academia. The spin that the dominant voices in the field face repression is positively Orwellian. It is normally pro-American and pro-Israel speakers who are left out of the equation. Proving the point, Blogger Omri Ceren of Mere Rhetoric quotes a member of a campus group at Brown on the workshop:

"There are no pro-Israel speakers, and neither Hillel nor Brown Students for Israel were even asked for input on a conference about the future of Middle East Studies."

The two workshop organizers hardly inspire confidence in a fair and impartial inquiry. Elliott Colla is associate professor of comparative literature and director of Middle East studies at Brown, and Marsha Pripstein Posusney is professor of political science at Bryant University and an adjunct professor of international relations at Brown. Colla was a signatory to a conspiracist open letter, penned in 2002 and signed by a number of academics, claiming that Israel would use the war in Iraq to commit "ethnic cleansing" against the Palestinians. Colla was one of the speakers at an event following an anti-war rally earlier this year in Rhode Island, where he maintained that Iran "doesn't pose a threat to the United States." He also took part in a 2004 panel discussion on "Censoring Campuses" at Columbia in which he made the predictable claim that academic freedom was "being attacked," no doubt in reference to the perceived threat of outside criticism.

Similarly, Posusney is a member of the MESA committee on academic freedom in the Middle East and North Africa and has signed letters to Columbia president Lee Bollinger defending the less than stellar work of Rashid Khalidi and Joseph Massad.

Conference speakers include a slew of academics with problematic backgrounds. Lisa Anderson, dean of international affairs at Columbia and past president of MESA, is one of them. Anderson has consistently used her position at Columbia to promote ideologues Rashid Khalidi and Joseph Massad, and has contributed to the books of Georgetown's John Esposito. Anderson also seems to have an affinity for Muslim strongmen, having invited Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi to speak at Columbia, as well as Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, a move that was later overruled by Columbia president Lee Bollinger.

In a blatant conflict of interest, Anderson was appointed to the committee that oversaw the accusations of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic bias and intimidation at Columbia brought to light by the David Project's film Columbia Unbecoming. Unsurprisingly, the committee dismissed almost all the charges. It's difficult to imagine that Anderson will bring any more objectivity to the Brown University workshop than she did the Columbia committee.

Also speaking at the Brown workshop is professor of international affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Stephen Walt, whose notorious article, co-authored with University of Chicago political science professor John Mearsheimer, in the London Review of Books last year, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," has provided succor to anti-Semitic conspiracists across the globe.

Speaking on the same panel is professor of the modern Middle East and South Asian history at the University of Michigan and past president of MESA, Juan Cole. Cole is perhaps best known for being turned down last year for an appointment by Yale University, a rejection he chalked up to a "concerted press campaign by neoconservatives" Yale's decision was based on his scholarly work, or rather lack thereof. (Read more about Cole's self-styled martyrdom, including links to articles on the Yale controversy, in this recent Campus Watch blog item).

Mere criticism or, heaven forbid, competition from scholars putting forth more balanced offerings, has the Middle East studies establishment whining about repression. Perhaps what's really at play is an awareness that when put to the test in the marketplace of ideas, their work cannot stand up to scrutiny.

The fear of accountability on display across the board at the Brown University workshop speaks to the latent power of public scrutiny over the once insulated world of academia and in particular, Middle East studies. It was in fact the attacks of 9-11 that galvanized opposition to the intellectual bullying characteristic of the field. The resulting hysteria may be an indication that such professors are at last feeling the pressure. One can only hope.




Georgia Schools Cautious on Bible Classes

Georgia's public schools walk a delicate line as they decide whether to offer the nation's first state-funded Bible classes _ measuring the difference between preaching and teaching with the likelihood of costly lawsuits looming for those that miss the mark. The state school board approved curriculum in March for teaching the Bible in Georgia's high schools, but there hasn't been a rush of schools to start up the classes. Only a handful of the state's 180 school districts have agreed to offer the elective classes so far. "It has been a very thoughtful, healthy process," said Robin Pennock, deputy schools superintendent of Muscogee County, where the school board decided to offer the Old Testament and New Testament classes next fall. "Most people do realize that this is an area that many people can feel very passionate about."

It's difficult to confirm how many school boards have adopted or are considering the classes. However, Muscogee _ which borders Alabama and includes the city of Columbus and the Army's Fort Benning _ is one of the state's largest districts to have done so. "It's important to understand religion; it's something we've gotten too far away from," said Jan Pease, whose 15-year-old daughter attends Northside High School in Columbus. The Bible already is incorporated into comparative religion and other public school classes in many states, but those classes are funded by the local districts, not with money from state government.

The Georgia law allowing the state-funded Bible classes won overwhelming approval last year from both Democrat and Republican lawmakers. The classes must be taught "in an objective and nondevotional manner with no attempt made to indoctrinate students."

Lawmakers in Alabama, Missouri, Tennessee and Texas have considered similar plans this year, although none has received final approval. One proposal in Texas would require all high school students to take a Bible class. Supporters say fully understanding history, literature and political science _ from the writings of Martin Luther King Jr. to the war in Iraq _ requires knowledge of the Bible. "I don't think you can understand Shakespeare, that you can understand a great deal of literary allusions or that you can understand a great deal of Western civilization without understanding the role of the Bible," said Pennock, a former Western civilization teacher.

The Rev. Charles Hasty, of First Presbyterian Church in Columbus, said he hopes exposure to the Bible's teachings may lead some students to seek out a more spiritual approach in their lives. "It's going to challenge the faith of some students and it may foster the faith of others," Hasty said.

Critics fear the classes could easily turn into endorsements of Christianity. "Georgia has set teachers up for failure," said Charles Haynes, of the First Amendment Center, a Washington D.C.-based civil liberties group. "The chances of it being unconstitutional are pretty big and the pitfalls are huge." His group supports religious discussions and study of the Bible in public schools, but Haynes says Georgia's law fails to give enough guidance to teachers on the difference between academic study and spiritual teaching.

No additional training for teachers is required, although Barrow and Muscogee counties, which both will offer the classes, plan to give teachers an online course and other special preparation.

Haynes said the lack of direction in state law makes schools vulnerable to lawsuits if students feel religion is being endorsed. "People are going to sue," he said. "That's why the Legislature should have been more responsible about putting school boards in situations where they might have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, split their communities and end up in a courtroom."

The First Amendment Center and Georgia's branch of the American Civil Liberties Union both say they plan to monitor how the classes are taught. Concern about violating the separation of church and state is a reason why some of Georgia's largest districts have steered clear of the classes so far. "We have to be very careful with that," said Joe Buck, chairman of the Savannah-Chatham County Board of Education. His school system has made no move yet to consider the classes.

Pease, a Christian, said she'd support schools teaching comparative religion classes, including those that studied the holy books of other major faiths like Islam's Quran. "I don't think any particular religion needs to be pushed on anyone," she said. "But I do think it's important to teach about them."

Source




Britain: Exodus from government schools

A very similar situation to Australia -- except that the proportion of teens going to private schools is much higher in Australia -- around 40%. Note that parents choose schools which offer HARDER (more difficult) subjects

Nearly 40,000 more children are now being educated privately than when Tony Blair came to power, new figures reveal today. Despite increasing government spending by two thirds, in real terms, since 1997, record numbers of parents are turning their backs on state education and paying up to 25,000 pounds a year for private education. Average private day-school fees have more than doubled in this period, according to a report from the Independent Schools Council.

Almost a quarter of sixth-formers now attend a private school while, in London, one in seven pupils is privately educated; in Edinburgh it is one in four. Overall 509,093 children attend Independent Schools Council (ISC) member schools, where the average pupil:staff ratio is the lowest ever, and there is one teacher for every 9.7 pupils. This compares with a ratio of 17:1 pupils to staff in state schools.

Despite average fees of 8,790 pounds and a drop in the number of British children of school age, there has been no let-up in the number of parents opting for private education. Head teachers say that this is not only because society is getting richer and families are having fewer children, but because parents are also better informed and more concerned about education. Pat Langham, president of the Girls' Schools Association, said: "A lot of parents cannot find a school that matches their requirements in the state system. That awareness is what is making more people prepared to pay for independent education. They know what they are getting and they know it's good."

Mounting pressures of commuting and long working hours have also persuaded more parents to turn to independent schools to give their children the care and attention they cannot always provide at home. At the same time, low teacher turnover provides stability and smaller class sizes mean pupils receive more attention and are better disciplined, Nigel Richardson, chairman of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference of elite schools, said. "A lot of parents are both working very long hours and they increasingly value knowing that they will meet the same teachers three or four years running who will know their children."

Jonathan Shepherd, general secretary of the ISC, said that public schools had also bucked the demographic trend because they offered a broader education and wider range of subjects, including modern languages, classics and the sciences at A level. "The Government did make one quite major mistake in making languages optional after Key Stage 3," he added. "That has led to a huge decline in language teaching in the maintained sector. Parents talk to parents. They are the best recruiting agents for any school."

In 2004, the Government made languages optional for pupils over 14. As a result, only 51 per cent of teenagers now take a GCSE in a foreign language, compared with 80 per cent in 2000. Languages are now compulsory in only 17 per cent of state schools at this level. Critics suggest that schools are being motivated by their place in the league tables and tend to guide pupils away from studying languages towards easier subjects. As a result, independent school pupils account for more than half the A grades at A level in French, German, Spanish and other foreign languages. In chemistry, they make up 46 per cent of A grades at A level, 44 per cent in physics and 54 per cent of A level further maths A grades.

The Independent Schools Council covers 1,276 schools from nursery to sixth-form level, including Britain's most elite, of a total of 2,500 independent schools. Fourteen schools now charge more than 25,000 a year and the average boarding school fee at secondary level is 20,000. Of the half a million pupils, just 67,335 are boarders.

The annual census also reveals that 20,852 overseas pupils attend public school in Britain, the majority from Hong Kong and China. Although the number of boarders has dropped slightly, Britain's military commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq may account for a surge in the number of Armed Forces families sending children to private schools.

Source

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

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

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

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4 May, 2007

MARYLAND SCHOOLS ADMIT FAILURE WITH BLACKS

With the governor visiting, Montgomery County school officials might have been tempted to throw up some slides showing rising test scores or burgeoning Advanced Placement participation. Instead, school leaders spoke candidly yesterday about the seemingly insoluble problem of getting students from some minority groups to succeed in advanced math courses.

Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) and County Executive Isiah Leggett (D) listened as school officials gave a PowerPoint presentation showing three schools, one each from affluent, middle-class and low-income neighborhoods, all with moribund math achievement among blacks and Hispanics. "Trying to keep the pace and move the kids along has been very difficult," one school's principal said. He sat at a table of administrators at the school system's headquarters, in Rockville. School officials asked that none of the schools be identified as a condition of opening the session to visitors.

Montgomery school officials were showing off M-Stat, their version of a celebrated initiative that uses statistics and computers to identify and analyze problems. The school system is among the first in the nation to adopt a variant of CompStat, the New York City police program that analyzes crime trends. The "Stat" concept has drawn notice not only for its success but also for encouraging lively -- and occasionally sharp -- exchanges among top brass.

Baltimore's school system was the first to adapt the program to public education, in 2001, shortly after O'Malley, the city's mayor at the time, launched CitiStat in the city government. CitiStat tracked such things as how long it took city workers to fill potholes, how much overtime pay was going to sanitation workers and agencies' use of minority contractors. SchoolStat analyzes student and teacher attendance, discipline and other school-system concerns....

Ideally, the meetings stir revelations. Yesterday's session, for example, left participants with the disquieting fact that black and Hispanic students aren't reaping the benefits of attending high-performing schools in affluent communities. One principal, representing a middle-class neighborhood, predicted that her minority math data would "flat-line" this year because the school is focusing on other reforms. In the often sugarcoated world of public education, that was a bold admission.

Source




"Diversity" Chickens Come Home To Roost

Post below lifted from Discriminations -- which see for links

I've written a number of times about how "diversity," as I put it here, has become increasingly "un-American," about "the awkward fact that a significantly high number of the beneficiaries of racial preference are foreigners." (See, in addition, here, here, here, and here.)

Shirley Wilcher, an early 1970s graduate of Mount Holyoke, looked around at a reunion and became concerned, the Boston Herald reports.

"My suspicions were confirmed," said Wilcher, now the executive director of the American Association for Affirmative Action. She found a rise in the number of black students from Africa and the Caribbean, and a downturn in admissions of native blacks like her.

A study released this year put numbers on the trend. Among students at 28 top U.S. universities, the representation of black students of first- and second-generation immigrant origin (27 percent) was about twice their representation in the national population of blacks their age (13 percent). Within the Ivy League, immigrant-origin students made up 41 percent of black freshmen.

"Whoa, wait a minute!" the diversiphiles now seem to be saying. "When we demanded that everyone `consider race' or `take race into account,' etc., we didn't really mean, you know, race; we meant us." Thus:

Last month, a Harvard Black Students Association message board asked, "When we use the term 'black community,' who is included in this description?" A lively debate ensued, with some posters complaining that African students were getting an admissions boost without having faced the historical suffering of U.S. blacks.

Someone seems to have neglected to tell the Harvard students that, at the insistence of the diversiphiles, for the past decade or so the justification for racial preference has emphatically not been compensation for or correction of "the historical suffering of U.S. blacks."

Indeed, even affirmative action apparatchiks like Shirley Wilcher don't seem to know what arguments they've been making. Looking out at the sea of foreign faces who have benefited from "her" cause,

Wilcher would like to know why. She asks if her cause has lost its way on U.S. campuses, with the goal of correcting American racial injustices replaced by a softer ideal of diversity - as if any black student will do.

The answer, of course, is yes. "Her cause" lost its way, but not when she thinks. It lost its way even before its clever lawyers decided to exploit the "diversity" loophole Justice Powell carved for them in Bakke, back when it abandoned its historical dedication to equal treatment and took off after the pied piper of racial preference.

If you argue that the most important thing about yourself is your race, that you should be given special treatment because of your race, you hardly have grounds to complain (and you certainly should not be surprised) when people are given preferential treatment because of their race, especially if they can be seen to add a dollop of the "diversity" that you have been using lately to justify your special treatment. When racial identity trumps individual identity, then it is sad but true that "any black student will do."

ADDENDUM

As I've mentioned a number of times (such as here), in practice racial preference inexorably results in a form of race-norming (selecting the best candidates from separate racial pools), even though that practice was prohibited in the Civil Rights Act of 1991. Although the Boston Herald article discussed above does not say, could it not be possible that in attempting to fill their non-quota of black students admissions officers simply select those with the best grades and test scores, many of whom happen to be foreign?




Voting with their feet: Australian parents show what they think of government schools

Many suffer considerable hardships to escape such schools

With private school fees soaring towards $20,000 a year, how much more sacrifice can struggling parents bear? A new breed of parent is emerging in the school communities of Melbourne's most established independent schools. These aspirational parents can't, strictly speaking, afford to send their kids to a secondary school where the average annual fee for a senior student is charging towards $20,000, or $400 a week. But if both parents work, or if grandparents help, or if the mortgage can bear it, they believe they can pull it off. Even, it seems, if it means being stressed and exhausted for years.

Adolescent psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg has noticed the number of families stretching themselves to pay for such schools, and puts it down to guilt. He says parents want to be seen to be doing the best they can for their children, and for some this means getting on a "spend and earn hamster wheel" for years.

Across Australia, more parents are enrolling their children in independent schools - rising from almost 10 per cent in 1996 to 13 per cent in 2005, according to Association of Independent Schools of Victoria figures. They are doing so at a time when the Consumer Price Index for secondary school education is rising ahead of inflation, with a hike of about 6 per cent a year for the past six years, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.



The result is that some of Melbourne's most established private schools - unless they decide to absorb costs - will break through the $20,000 a year barrier for fees next year. Many schools already charge about $18,000 a year for year 12, with some, such as Scotch College, Haileybury and St Catherine's School, charging more than $19,000 a year. Such a sum may soon not seem so high. With the secondary-education CPI forecast to continue to rise at about 6 per cent a year, the parents of today's prep students could be paying more than $35,000 a year in school fees for established private secondary schools by the time their children reach year 12.

Sounds improbable? If you ask parents of today's year 12 students, most will recall senior high school fees at independent schools being about $10,000 when their child was in primary school. And many are still getting their heads - and wallets - used to the idea that the fees have almost doubled. Most independent schools contacted by The Age acknowledged that $20,000 was a "psychological barrier", but did not think parents would baulk at paying more, because education was a priority. Even in households struggling to pay.

Some would say this obsession with obtaining an elite private school education - no matter what the financial or personal cost to some families - defies logic. A number of principals said some parents were under great strain, but refused to consider sending their children to state and Catholic schools or the cheaper independent schools springing up in the outer suburbs.

St Michael's Grammar School principal Simon Gipson says people are more "acquisitive" these days, with education seen as a key investment. Other principals agreed that some parents view an expensive education for their children as a valued possession, even a status symbol, that they are prepared to work hard for - and go into debt to obtain.

Certainly, private education is now on the wish list of many households, so much so that parents start debating how to pay the fees when the children are in kindergarten, says Jo Silver, the executive officer of Parents Victoria. She says many parents decide whether to increase the mortgage, apply for scholarships, set up trusts or join tax-effective education plans.

Many women work part-time when the children are at primary school, but go full-time once they go to secondary school. "They also realise they need to find a higher-paying job." But she says parents can forget to factor in annual fee increases. Recent publicity about an annual average of $5000 per student in government funding for independent schools has led some parents to expect fees to plateau. "At some point the fee rises have to stop," Ms Silver says. "It's quite concerning that it is going up to such an extent . . . and yet people are quite willing to put a lot of money into this."

Melbourne Grammar headmaster Paul Sheahan says the annual fee rises are driven by parents' expectations that schools will not stint on resources. "We are all trying to keep ahead of the game and offer bigger and better," he says. "Competition certainly comes into it." The expectations come from parents who, ironically, are having to work harder to pay for those multimillion-dollar technology suites. Korowa Anglican Girls School principal Christine Jenkins has altered the timing of parent functions to take account of working parents. She attributes annual fee rises partly to teacher salaries but also to technology costs. Both parents work in 80 per cent of St Michael's students' families. Mr Gipson describes his parent body as diverse, ranging from "taxi drivers to captains of industry and everything in between".

This is not the stereotype of the inner city private school parent. The Australian Education Union's Victorian president, Mary Bluett, echoes popular sentiment by saying: "Only 8 per cent of the school population go to these elite private schools - and a very large proportion can afford those fees in a blink." Yet increasingly parents do seem to be blinking when the bills arrive. Melbourne Girls Grammar principal Christine Briggs says only a handful of parents would not find the fees an issue. "Most parents are working very hard to pay them. But once parents decide that education is a priority, they do not falter," she says. "They will have more modest housing, cars and holidays." She worries that some families put education ahead of family wellbeing. "If it does seem a very big stretch, then my advice is to look at the government school system," she says. "The most devastating thing is for debt to crush the spirit of a family."

The notion that private school parents are by definition wealthy is incorrect, says Melbourne Grammar's Paul Sheahan. "We have a very wide spread of economic financial background, and there are families who extend themselves significantly to pay the fees," he says. "People subject themselves to huge hardship to keep children in our school." He says if fees continue to rise there will be a point of resistance. "We haven't reached that yet. As long as the product we provide is seen as significantly superior, people will dig deep."

This may sound provocative, but the Education Union's Mary Bluett partly agrees. She says state schools cannot compete with the "old school tie, fantastic facilities and small class sizes" of the elite private schools. But she says many state schools offer a good-quality education, and parents should visit local schools before making a decision. "There is a lot on offer in the state system, but until we get a state government that makes funding a priority there is no competition." Ms Bluett accepts that not all private school parents are wealthy, but says such schools highlight struggling parents to get more government funding.

This claim riles Michelle Green, chief executive of the Association of Independent Schools of Victoria, who argues that there are more parents earning more than $1500 a week with children in government schools than independent schools. However, Daniel Edwards, a research fellow at Monash University's Centre for Population and Urban Research, says his analysis of 2001 ABS data found that 23.5 per cent of independent secondary school students came from families with parents earning more than $2000 a week, compared with only 6.5 per cent of students in the government sector.

Just as the wealth of private school parents is contentious, so is the appropriate amount of government funding. Michelle Green's view is that private schools are entitled to funding because parents pay taxes, and also save the state money by paying hefty fees. Are such high fees worth it? Clearly this is hard to measure. Paying $18,000 a year provides no guarantee of a child's happiness or academic success. But Jo Silver of Parents Victoria says most parents believe they get value. Her concern is with how hard many parents, particularly mums, are working to pay fees. "We (mums) are running a very tight race and have limited time to spend with our families," she says. "The expectations of helping with homework, taking them to after-school activities and weekend sport are very high. You have to be well-organised and respond (well) to stress."

Psychologist Dr Carr-Gregg says parents need to re-prioritise. "The catchcry of parents in 2007 is: 'Do you have any idea how much it costs us to have you here?"' he says. "Parents do the maths and will say things like, 'It's costing 56 cents a minute'. What are they thinking? Nobody has put a gun to their head." Parents in Melbourne and Sydney, in particular, send their children to private schools when they can't afford to, he says, out of guilt, an obsession with VCE scores and in the hope of joining networks of "doctors, lawyers and socialites".

He says when parents make such a big financial investment in a child's education, the kids can believe life is not worth living if they don't perform. "Mum and dad being away from home for long times goes against everything we know about the healthy development of children," Dr Carr-Gregg says. "Parents work their butts off to pay $18,000 a year, and the kids come home to an empty house where they disappear behind the emotional firewall of MSN."

Latchkey kid syndrome is one side effect. Marriage breakdown is another. Karen Weiss, the regional manager of Relationships Australia (Victoria), says many parents feel inadequate if they can't afford a private education. "It puts huge pressure on families," she says. Yet she has noticed that one of the few things divorcing parents agree on is keeping the children at the expensive private school.

To achieve this can be tricky. Mark Lowe, a financial adviser with Tandem Financial Advice, says the amount of money required these days is staggering. "You do hear of marriages breaking up because of it," he says. "When you have to pay such big money out of after-tax income, it is very hard for people." Some people feel pressured to take on debt. "If the local schools are perceived as substandard, there is a feeling of guilt about it," Mr Lowe says. "Sometimes you have to speak harshly to people and say, 'you can't afford it'."

More members than previous years of the Australian Scholarships Group, a company offering education savings plans, are defaulting on payments this year, says ASG general manager, communities, Warwick James. He says families at the most expensive schools are increasing their mortgages and postponing holidays to deal with rising fees. And the pressure won't let up. ASG estimates that from now on, annual private school fees will rise by about 8 per cent, which Mr James says is conservative.

Dr Carr-Gregg reminds parents that they have options, such as moving to an area where they are happy with the local school, rather than killing themselves to pay fees. "I wonder if the joy of being a parent is being lost."

Source

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

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

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

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





3 May, 2007

Even distinguished conservatives kept out of academe

Mark Moyar doesn't exactly fit the stereotype of a disappointed job seeker. He is an Eagle Scout who earned a summa cum laude degree from Harvard, graduating first in the history department before earning a doctorate at the University of Cambridge in England. Before he had even begun graduate school, he had published his first book and landed a contract for his second book. Distinguished professors at Harvard and Cambridge wrote stellar letters of recommendation for him.

Yet over five years, this conservative military and diplomatic historian applied for more than 150 tenure-track academic jobs, and most declined him a preliminary interview. During a search at University of Texas at El Paso in 2005, Mr. Moyar did not receive an interview for a job in American diplomatic history, but one scholar who did wrote her dissertation on "The American Film Industry and the Spanish-Speaking Market During the Transition to Sound, 1929-1936." At Rochester Institute of Technology in 2004, Mr. Moyar lost out to a candidate who had given a presentation on "promiscuous bathing" and "attire, hygiene and discourses of civilization in Early American-Japanese Relations."

It's an example, some say, of the difficulties faced by academics who are seen as bucking the liberal ethos on campus and perhaps the reason that history departments at places like Duke had 32 Democrats and zero Republicans, according to statistics published by the Duke Conservative Union around the time Mr. Moyar tried to get an interview there.

Issues relating to hiring and promotion are "a constant complaint from those on the conservative spectrum in academe," the president of the National Association of Scholars, Stephen Balch, said.

Mr. Moyar is used to opposition. A contrarian among most Vietnam scholars, he does not believe it was a mistake for America to have gone into Vietnam. In carefully argued prose using previously unexamined sources, he marshals support for the "domino theory." His scholarship and books have received great reviews and marked him as a rising star. In saying Vietnam was winnable, Mr. Moyar is "profaning one of the holy of holies," Mr. Balch said. Senator Webb, a Democratic opponent of the Iraq war, and scholar William Stueck, a liberal, have endorsed Mr. Moyar's book, "Triumph Forsaken" ( Cambridge), which was the subject of a conference at Williams College. A conference is a signal honor for a young scholar.

Mr. Moyar says he was the object of political discrimination at Texas Tech in 2005. The chairman of the history department there, Jorge Iber, said he "disagreed wholeheartedly" with Mr. Moyar's assertion. Mr. Iber, who is a conservative Republican, said the department makes its decisions on the basis of individual merit.

A history professor at Texas Tech, John Reckner, declined to speak about specifics of Mr. Moyar's job application at that particular school, but noted generally, "Let's just say, a person applying to teach whose topic is the Vietnam War and whose position is conservative, would encounter difficulties because the ideological ghosts of the 1960s are, unfortunately, still alive on a great many campuses, even though the Vietnamese themselves have put the war behind them." On April 27, 2005, 15 faculty members out of the 20 in Texas Tech's history department voted Mr. Moyar "unacceptable."

Texas Tech is not the only institution in the Lone Star State where Mr. Moyar says he received differential treatment. Another is, of all places, the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. Named after the 41st president, it is where Mr. Moyar worked as a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in 2003 and 2004. Dean Richard Chilcoat, a retired lieutenant general, disputed the idea that that school's faculty is overwhelmingly liberal.

Mr. Moyar said Mr. Chilcoat initially told him the good news that all three finalists were considered qualified, but that he, unfortunately, was not at the top, only to learn later that he was unranked among the three finalists and found unacceptable by three faculty members. Mr. Chilcoat told The New York Sun that maybe there was miscommunication. Mr. Moyar alleges that the job description was changed from the one originally advertised. Mr. Chilcoat said that after a national search, the school made the hire based on the published criteria. Mr. Moyar says he was surprised to learn one objection raised against him was that he would not have an "immediate impact," yet his second book was published before the second book of the no. 1 candidate and before the first book of the no. 2 candidate. He says he was not told why he had been unranked.

Mr. Chilcoat declined to talk about confidential deliberations, but said in no way was ideology or politics a consideration in the voting. "I would never allow any discrimination," he told the Sun. He said Mr. Moyar was not "de-selected" but was a competent historian who got a fair opportunity to compete. "When you added everything up, he was not the best qualified," he said. Mr. Moyar said Mr. Chilcoat didn't reply to him during his final five months there. Mr. Chilcoat said, "I always made sure he knew what my position was."

Mr. Moyar told the Sun that one faculty member informed him she did not vote for him because of "ideological differences." Documents obtained by Mr. Moyar through the Texas Public Information Act and shared with the Sun show an anonymous faculty candidate assessment describing Mr. Moyar as a revisionist historian "bent on proving the merits of the Vietnam War (even if he is doing a great job doing it). His being here would hurt the reputation of the school." Another faculty member expressed concern about "his agenda-oriented research." The dean of the faculties at Texas A&M, Karan Watson, wrote to Mr. Moyar saying no evidence presented indicated that illegal discrimination occurred.

Mr. Moyar's credentials were of little help at Old Dominion, where he learned he was considered more a diplomatic historian than military. At Miami University of Ohio, the history department evaluated his scholarship to be more strongly in the field of military history than American foreign policy. This was despite his having taught courses in American foreign policy and having letters of recommendation from two of the world's top historians of American foreign relations: Akira Iriye and Ernest May, both of Harvard. The new president of Miami University, David Hodge, wrote to Mr. Moyar saying the school took seriously its obligation to hire the best faculty "without regard to personal attributes, including political beliefs."

In applying to the U.S. Air Force War College in 2003, Mr. Moyar said a professor, Jeffrey Record, repeatedly failed to contact Mr. Moyar to set up a visit to the college. Mr. Record told the Sun it was not his job to set up the visit but that he was a "polite and gracious" host to Mr. Moyar. Mr. Moyar says that after he delivered a presentation, Mr. Record told him that he was "full of [excrement]." Mr. Record told the Sun that he "flatly denies" this, but said if he did say something like that, it was purely in jest and people who know him would know it was in jest. Mr. Record said he regards Mr. Moyar's work as serious and scholarly although he disagrees with it.

Asked about the treatment of conservatives in academia, a professor at Columbia University, Eric Foner, said he did not know Mr. Moyar, but he said most history departments do not know or care about the politics of candidates. Mr. Foner, who leans to the left, said conservatives should stop complaining about being victims, which they blame liberals for doing. A professor at Boston College, Alan Wolfe, told the Sun that academic departments tend to hire like-minded people. He said there were surely liberal history departments, but so too conservative political science departments. "There is insufficient intellectual diversity at both liberal Ivy League colleges and as well as conservative colleges like Hillsdale and Grove City College," he said.

A professor at Duke University, Michael Munger, who leans to the right, said that, paradoxically, liberal students benefit most from conservative faculty. Otherwise, he said, in learning how to make arguments, "they don't get to play against the first team."

An emeritus professor of government at Smith College, Stanley Rothman, said he could not speak to individual cases but that a study he co-authored in 2005 called " Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty" seemed to show that statistically, conservatives were not treated as well as liberals in the academy.

The president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Gregory Lukianoff, said universities can "take brutal advantage" of the fact that most tenure and promotion decisions are confidential. An attorney at Alliance Defense Fund, David French, a Christian public interest law firm, said ideologically based discrimination cases, such as race- and gender-based cases, weigh direct evidence and circumstantial evidence of differential treatment. He said that once private institutions advertise for a specific job, they are required to live up to that description. A New York attorney, Jeffrey Duban, said judges look at whether a decision against a faculty applicant was arbitrary or capricious.

This month, Mr. Moyar filed a complaint with the University of Iowa's Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity after he was not selected for an interview for a job in diplomatic history. He found among county voting records that the department had 27 Democrats, no Republicans, two with no voting affiliation, and four not listed. The university has a policy prohibiting discrimination in employment based on "associational preference" along with other things like race and creed.

Mr. Moyar said, "It's extremely unhealthy for the country to have one-half of the political spectrum absent from higher education." Mr. Moyar now holds a chair at the U.S. Marine Corps University at Quantico, Va. Mr. Moyar said he wants to help other scholars in the future "who are going to have to deal with this nonsense." He said he knew going into the history field, it would be bad. "But I had assumed there would be room for a few token conservatives," he said.

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Fevered brains at Kenyon college

"American Thinker" was slurred by a professor at Kenyon College, in an opinion piece in the student newspaper. Below is a reply

In the course of Vernon Schubel's attacking a recent proposal to rent College facilities to a group of Knox County religious leaders for an evangelistic celebration, he has also attacked the American Thinker, a publication to which I contribute, and, indirectly, positions that I have taken against him. I do not know of Franklin Graham or his positions or statements on Islam. I take no position on whether the College should have extended this invitation to his organization. But Professor Schubel speaks disparagingly of those "who are spreading fear of Muslims." He calls this a "virulent disease" that is called "Islamophobia," and then he compares this "disease" to anti-Semitism.

At the risk of being labeled a carrier of this "disease," consider four unpleasant realities: (1) The potential destructive power of chemical, biological, and nuclear weaponry; (2) The significant number of Muslims (al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezb'allah, to name a few of their organizations) who see nothing wrong with killing non-Muslims; (3) The very open desire for certain Muslim regimes (e.g. Saudi Arabia and Iran) to have these weapons, and Iran's very clearly expressed and forthright intention to use them; and (4) When compared to the reaction of Muslims to the Mohammed cartoons, the virtual silence of moderate Muslims in the face of all this hatred and violence.

I must insist that "fear" is a rational response to these unpleasant realities for both non-Muslims and decent Muslims alike. One does not have to assert that hatred and violence are "normative Muslim behavior," nor does one have to argue that "Islam is inherently violent or wicked" to be reasonably fearful of what extremist Muslims have shown themselves capable. This fear is not something that is by definition what the Professor calls "Islamophobia" with its implied bigotry.

Professor Schubel's analogy of "Islamophobia" to anti-Semitism is a creative sleight-of-hand. As I am sure Professor Schubel knows, the worst of the world's anti-Semitism, not seen since the days of the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s, is regularly preached in mosques throughout the Middle East. But he acknowledges no problem here. What bad happens to Jews usually happens to non-Jews before long, so is there anything wrong with this fear of what Muslims are fomenting? For Professor Schubel, anti-Semitism serves as a means to illustrate his views of Islamophobia, but is little more.

Professor Schubel takes a gratuitous shot at the renowned scholar, Bernard Lewis. Readers might want to compare the scholarship of Professor Lewis with that of Professor Schubel. Only one of them is regarded as a giant in the field.

There are cynical elements to the Professor's argument as well. He condemns this supposedly "politically powerful ministry" that he says is openly hostile to Islam. He tacks on the reference to "gays and lesbians" as subjects of this hostility. This reference slickly shifts attention from a serious problem to a pseudo-problem. Professor Schubel must know how gays and lesbians are targeted in places like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, where the life expectancy of a known homosexual is not long. Evangelicals who can be critical, or Islamists who can be murderous; of whom should gays and lesbians be more fearful?

Professor Schubel is very concerned that the presence of Mr. Graham's organization on campus might cause the public to get the idea that Kenyon "emphasizes the study of neo-conservatism." This charge is risible. Anyone who has even a rudimentary knowledge of the prevailing orthodoxies on virtually any campus knows full well that neither Kenyon nor any other liberal arts college "emphasizes the study of neo-conservatism." Find one degree program in neo-conservatism, or name one "center for the study of neo-conservatism." They don't exist, in part because nobody can quite say what neo-conservatism is, beyond a label that many on the left regard as obviously bad.

Having spent most of his life on campus, Professor Schubel certainly knows this. I suspect that the name-calling has far more to do with rallying the faculty and administration for his demand for a new "concentration" in Islamic Studies. How better to keep those scary, "diseased" neocons at bay?

Then there is Professor Schubel's characterization of American Thinker as "ultra-right wing," which says more of the Professor than of the American Thinker. Such a phrase may evoke images of jackboots and death squads in fevered leftist minds, but it is not very useful as a characterization of this widely-read and respected mainstream website, consisting of opinion, analysis, and commentary. American Thinker has been quoted by the Telegraph of the UK and Le Monde in Paris, not to mention a raft of major American newspapers. A new college textbook is reproducing a three part series American Thinker published on the war on terror.

By all means, readers of the Collegian should check out American Thinker. I specifically suggest my July 2, 2006 analysis of Professor Schubel's embarrassing whitewash of Islam that graced the summer 2006 Kenyon Alumni Bulletin. On August 5, 2006, American Thinker published Professor Schubel's even more embarrassing response to an alumnus, and then my response to him. Readers can decide the merits.

There are those who espouse a contemporary Islam that has a serious problem with violence and hatred for those whom Islamists call infidels. To deny this is to actively avert one's eyes from the obvious. This does not mean that one must hate Muslims. Far from it. I suspect that no one except decent Muslims can reform Islam and tame its worst elements. Perhaps when enough decent Muslims recognize this sad fact and decide to purge Islam of its worst elements, prospects will improve for all civilized people, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Professor Schubel, with his name-calling, his whining, his denials, and his silence in the face of Islam-inspired terror, is just another obstacle to the prospect for this necessary reform.

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Children force-fed global warming hysteria

Comment from Australia:

JUST when you thought some common sense was back in schools with the return of core subjects history and geography, it turns out there may be new nonsense on the agenda. Apparently the NSW Board of Studies is looking to introduce climate change classes for kindergarten to Year 6 children as part of its science and technology syllabus. At first glance, it sounds sensible. Climate change could be a critical issue for our children, as well as for us. The problem, of course, is what they will be taught.

There are plenty of reasons for concern on this score. Adults have barely engaged in a grown-up conversation over the causes of global warming. Debate over the what, how, why, and when on global warming has been drowned out by hysteria. Global warming has been cleverly framed as the big moral issue of our time to quarantine it from debate.

Even conservative politicians shy away from suggesting scepticism because anyone who is a sceptic is labelled a denier. If you disagree with some of the science, and the religious fervour it has fuelled, or even evince a level of agnosticism towards it, you are not just wrong. You are a bad person forced to defend your integrity as well as your arguments. This is an old trick, but a good one. Given that stultifying atmosphere among adults, it is a stretch to imagine that classroom talk will be different.

A hint of what students might learn came a few weeks ago. My 13-year-old daughter returned home from school to tell me our house on the coast would be swamped by 6m of water. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was compulsory viewing for Year 8 students at her Sydney school that day. Gore told her sea levels would rise 6mby 2100. And people are causing this horrible global warming, she said.

Fortunately, I had just read up on the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and informed her that their worst case scenario prediction is that sea levels may rise by 26-59cm. Hold back the hysteria, I said. Some eminent scientists are suggesting other reasons for global warming, I added. Indeed, some point to evidence that the world may undergo a global cooling. Curious about the climate change curriculum, I asked the school if the movie coincided with a follow-up lesson to enable students to discuss or even question the Gore message on global warming. No, came the answer. “So Gore was it?” I asked. Yes, said the teacher.

So you see why it’s time to ask serious questions about what our children will be taught about this issue. It will, no doubt, start at the silly, harmless end. Keeping it simple for kindy kids, will they be treated to entreaties by pop star cum global warming guru Sheryl Crow? Crow is calling on people to use only one sheet of toilet paper per visit, rising to two or three for “those pesky occasions” as she writes on her blog.

Then it will get more serious. Perhaps older students will read an extract from the Nicholas Stern report on global warming and be introduced to the growing fad of food-miles. They might be told that kiwi fruit is a climate change culprit because flying 1kg of kiwi fruit from New Zealand to Europe translates into 5kg of carbon being discharged into the atmosphere. Given the dumbed-down nature of other parts of the school curriculum, perhaps climate change lessons will involve excursions to the local supermarket where children, armed with a food miles calculator, will add up the environmental impact of food travelling long distances to our shops.

Don’t laugh. British organisation Carboninfo.org has developed a software package to do just that because “it is essential that people are able to make informed choices about buying food and the effect on the environment of moving food around the planet”. Echoing that call, Tesco supermarkets in Britain are making the exercise easier with its plan to introduce a carbon count on their products - little stickers that will allow you to spot the products that, as the Environmental News Network suggests, “only a carbon criminal would dare take ... to the checkout”. Tesco is also planning to halve the amount of air-freighted fresh produce - a good green initiative that our own supermarkets ought to follow, the students might be told.

Children might then be taught that individual action is all well and good. By all means count your food miles - but governments must also do something to save the planet. Friends of the Earth might pop up in the curriculum with their demand that we need tougher policies to stop out-of-town stores to put an end to car-based shopping.

They want government-funded schemes to ensure local and regional food supplies. Governments must, they say, get tougher to reduce food miles. Like Earth Hour, when Sydneysiders were asked to turn off the lights, there is a certain child-like appeal to these think global, act local campaigns.

But unlike flicking a light switch, the focus on food miles provides a number of lessons on what is wrong with many of the reactions to the global warming hysteria - lessons unlikely to make it into the classroom. Will students, for example, be told that poor African farmers will be the real victims of conscientious Westerners looking to reduce their food miles? When buying local produce is promoted as good, buying foreign food must be bad. And, as the BBC reported earlier this year, that is bad news for countries such as Kenya where horticulture is second only to tourism as the biggest foreign exchange earner. We rightly encourage poor countries to build up their economies and sell their wares to rich, Western countries. Now they are being punished for doing so all in the name of global warming. Will students be asked to consider that?

Indeed, of all the reasons to be sceptical of the climate change agenda is the way it is coalescing with the anti-globalisation, anti-capitalism movements. Will students be asked to reflect on whether food miles is a new form of old-fashioned protectionism dressed up in the alluring language of global warming? Unlikely.

Which brings us back to the core problem. Making students aware of climate change is necessary. Infusing hysteria is downright dangerous. If we do not encourage students to debate, dare one say, to be sceptical about global warming, we risk creating a generation that will demand policy responses that end up causing more harm than good. Even worse, they will be denied the essence of a good education - recognising uncertainty, challenging assumptions and asking questions in the quest for knowledge.

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Schools are too left wing, says an Australian conservative spokesman

TEACHING materials in primary schools have become too politically correct in depicting single sex couples and a black armband view of Australian history, according to the NSW Opposition. The Opposition's new spokesman on education, Andrew Stoner, accused the Labor Government of using schools as "a vehicle for left-wing indoctrination", saying it needed to "rein in the PC culture" within the Department of Education and NSW Board of Studies.

"Under Labor, up to half the curriculum in some subjects focuses on a purely indigenous perspective, including emotive terms such as 'British invasion', as well as 'Survival Day' instead of 'Australia Day'," Mr Stoner, the National Party leader, said. "No one doubts the integral role indigenous people play in Australian history, but any teaching of our past must be balanced. "Labor's political correctness in education also extends to gay causes, including the funding of reading material for children as young as five, regarding gay and lesbian parents. "[The Premier] Morris Iemma should keep his promise and teach kids respect and responsibility, leaving controversial issues like same sex marriage and adoption to parents."

He said books about same-sex parents, used in some primary schools include My House, Going to Fair Day, Koalas on Parade and The Rainbow Cubby House, produced by the Learn to Include project, were funded by the Crime Division of the NSW Attorney General's Department. The books tell the story of a young girl with two lesbian mothers and include a visit to the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.

A spokesman for the Attorney-General, John Hatzistergos, confirmed the department had funded the project in 2004 when the books were produced as a teaching resource to help combat bullying in schools.

The Minister for Education, John Della Bosca, said Mr Stoner had been highly selective in his use of examples from the curriculum. His strong views about Aboriginal history and sexuality "should be a case study on why you don't let a National Party politician desperate for votes write the primary school syllabus". "This syllabus was designed in consultation with parents, teachers and many professional and community experts and has been successfully taught for nearly a decade. Historical events can be seen differently depending on your view and the syllabus requires teachers to always present a range of perspectives."

The president of the NSW Primary Principals Association, Geoff Scott, said principals and teachers had the final veto on which books were used in schools. Books that simply reflected the gay lifestyle, as opposed to espousing it, would generally be considered acceptable for children. However, each school would exercise discretion in consultation with parents to decide whether a book was appropriate. "There would be a number of occasions when award winning books that are well written but have inappropriate content are not put on the shelves in schools," Mr Scott said. "The principal and teachers would be up to speed with what community expected. The books in primary school libraries are not espousing a particular point of view or pushing values on to children. If a story written about people in same sex relationships, that's real life and provided it is at an appropriate standard, then it can be available for children."

Source

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

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

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

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2 May, 2007

EU threat to British universities

The independence of Britain's world-ranking universities is under threat from European Commission plans, MPs say. Moves to create an educational "eurozone" by 2010 risk undermining the institutions' autonomy and rendering one-year British masters and new fast-track degrees virtually worthless.

An investigation by the Commons Education Select Committtee into the so-called Bologna process also concludes that the European credit system, based on hours studied, not achievement, is "not fit for purpose". Barry Sheerman, the chairman of the committee, said: "I am deeply concerned about the expanding influence of the European Commission. The role of the Commission must be constrained if the Bologna process is to be successful." The MPs backed the aims of the process but said it must continue to be voluntary and should not standardise the European university system.

Source




British education at work

Britons have a bewildering lack of knowledge about their country, a survey suggests. Stonehenge was built by the Romans, and Hadrian's Wall is in China - these are two of the misconceptions in the poll of 3,000 people commissioned by UKTV History. Nearly four in ten say that the bulldog is the animal that symbolises this country. That, of course, is the lion, part of the Royal Arms since the Plantagenets.

A quarter say that the Lost Gardens of Heligan, Cornwall, are among the Seven Wonders of the World, confusing them with the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. According to one in five, the Pennines are between France and Spain; and for 18 per cent, Stonehenge was built when the Romans were here - rather than dating back to three millennia previously.

Adrian Wills, of UKTV History, said that the survey showed how little people knew about Britain, "from traditions to landmarks". Viewers are being asked to vote for a favourite historical site.

Some popular erroneous beliefs:

1 Official UK animal is bulldog 39%
2 Leeds Castle is in Leeds 34%
3 White Cliffs of Dover made of sandstone 28%
4 Lost Gardens of Heligan, in Cornwall, are one of Seven Wonders of the World 23%
5 Pennines are between France and Spain 21%
6 Do not know who is on back of 10 pound note 20%
7 Stonehenge was built during Roman Empire 18%
8 Hadrian's Wall is not in UK 15%
9 Nelson's Column is not in Trafalgar Square 12%
10 Lake District has an entrance fee 7%

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Lessons on manners for Australian schools?

SCHOOLCHILDREN can benefit from lessons in traditional values to combat a growing tide of rudeness and anti-social behaviour, the [Queensland] State Opposition said. Liberal Leader Bruce Flegg said social and emotional intelligence lessons would address a general concern across the community that youth were becoming more violent, disrespectful and committing more criminal acts.

Dr Flegg said he would closely monitor the "Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning" program to be introduced into British schools this year after initial testing found it improved behaviour, including attendance and test results. It also created a calmer classroom atmosphere and reduced bullying and violence. The British curriculum will teach "golden rules" such as: "We are gentle, we are kind, we work hard, we look after property, we listen to people, we are honest, we do not hurt anybody."

"The rudeness epidemic is something I am really concerned about and if there is an effective program that can teach children values it would have a lot of attraction, but the devil could be in the detail," Dr Flegg said. "There is a plague of declining social skills and respect for people, authority and property and every child should be polite." He also said busier families were leading to a loss of authority figures.

But Queensland Parents and Citizens Association president Brett Devenish said teachers were already instructing students too often in areas traditionally a parental responsibility. "I don't think parents should be able to abdicate all of their responsibilities to the education system, personal learning like values and morals should normally start a few years before children start school anyway," he said.

Queensland Teachers Union president Steve Ryan said a further narrowing of core subject choice in secondary school would only disadvantage students. "We are already dealing with an overcrowded curriculum and while some ideas may have some merit, the reality is when you introduce any new subject it would have to give way to some other part of the curriculum," he said.

Source

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

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

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

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1 May, 2007

MySpace photo costs student teacher her degree

Some extraordinary smallmindedness here. How can they prove what was in the cup? Apparently the photo bore the caption "Drunken Pirate" but play-acting at parties is common. And in any case drinking alcohol IS legal

A woman denied a teaching degree on the eve of graduation because of a MySpace photo has sued the university. Millersville University instead granted Stacy Snyder a degree in English last year after learning of the web-published picture of her, which bore the caption Drunken Pirate. Snyder received "superior" or "competent" ratings on her final student-teacher evaluation in all areas except "professionalism," in which she was labeled "unsatisfactory," according to the suit filed last week. "I dreamed about being a teacher for a long time," said Snyder, 27, of Strasburg, who has two young sons. She now works as a nanny.

The photo, taken at a 2005 Halloween party, shows Snyder wearing a pirate hat while drinking from a plastic Mr Goodbar cup. It was posted on her own MySpace site. "There were errors in judgment that relate to Pennsylvania's Code of Professional Practice and Conduct for Educators," wrote professor J. Barry Girvin, who supervised Snyder's work, according to the suit.

Snyder did her student-teaching at Conestoga Valley High School in 2006. Conestoga Valley officials told the college they would stop accepting student-teachers from Millersville if she went unpunished, the lawsuit said. Although Snyder apologised, she learned on May 12 - the day before graduation - that she would not be awarded an education degree or teaching certificate. Jane S. Bray, dean of the School of Education, in a meeting that day accused Snyder of promoting underage drinking, the suit states.

The federal lawsuit - filed against the university, Bray, Girvin and Provost Vilas A. Prabhu - seeks at least $75,000 in damages. Millersville spokeswoman Janet Kacskos referred questions to a state System of Higher Education spokesman, who declined comment. "The bottom line is we want the college to bestow the degree and teaching certificate that Stacy earned during four years of hard work and sacrifice," said Snyder's lawyer, Mark W. Voigt.

Source




Swimming with Barracudas

The dangers of discipline-free schools

After the horrific Virginia Tech massacre, Americans are once again focusing on the distressing topic of school violence, which is most prevalent not on college campuses but in the nation's high schools. In New York, critics disagree about whether school crime is going up or down. Mayor Bloomberg announced in February that crime had fallen significantly at certain schools as a result of his "school safety initiative"; the very next day, however, the New York Times countered with an article claiming that major crime in New York City schools had risen 21 percent in the first third of the fiscal year.

But few dispute the existence of a violent subculture among some students. A rash of gang-related stabbings has shaken New York City schools. Following a fight at Franklin K. Lane High School, assailants plunged a knife into a student's chest on the subway. At a "second opportunity school" for students with prior violent offenses, one student used scissors to stab another student on school grounds; the perpetrator had been scheduled to return to a mainstream setting the following month. Equally troubling is a new Clockwork Orange-style game called "Knockout," which has become all the rage in some New York high schools. To win, kids must select an unsuspecting student and knock him unconscious with one sucker punch.

Nor is the problem confined to the five boroughs. Buffalo schools superintendent James A. Williams prompted a media outcry in February by allowing a group of students who had assaulted another student and a teacher to return to school. It wasn't long before three of the students were overheard plotting a follow-up attack.

The violence has prompted some predictable responses from legislators and school administrators. New York State Assembly members Jose Peralta and Peter Rivera have called for the passing of stalled antigang legislation, which would mete out stiff penalties for gangbangers caught recruiting new members on school grounds. In Buffalo, Williams has proposed a range of solutions: expansion of after-school activities, including athletics; a code of discipline modeled on the Catholic schools'; and undoing job cuts that have left students with no music, art, and athletics teachers, and with a shortage of guidance counselors and social workers. Getting at the "root causes" of student violence could take years, Williams suggested. Similarly, other school administrators have proposed more guidance intervention, peer mediation, and counseling; "student contracts" that carry no provisions for enforcement; and mandatory school uniforms, which would prevent kids from wearing gang colors! . And as a last resort, there are always metal detectors, closed-circuit cameras, and an increased police presence.

What's missing from all of these measures is an old-fashioned idea: the expulsion of incorrigible students who interfere with learning and present a threat to the safety of others. For all practical purposes, expulsion no longer exists in New York City schools, which have expelled fewer than ten students over the past five years. Worse still, school advocates--who often seem to advocate only for hoodlums--want incarcerated students to finish their sentences and return to mainstream classrooms as quickly as possible. Their efforts have established a revolving door between prison and New York high schools.

Those who attended New York public schools at a time when kids actually respected school authority can remember the dread of winding up in a notorious "600 School" for troubled children. The dramatic expansion of students' rights and due process, which began with the U.S. Supreme Court's decisions in Tinker v. Des Moines and Goss v. Lopez, has been furthered by consent decrees and changes in state education law that make expelling a student younger than 21 all but impossible. Today, the hoodlum class that menaces our schools fears nothing. The only civics lesson these so-called students have learned is how to manipulate the convoluted due-process system that provides them with endless opportunities for deviant behavior.

Placing these students among kids who just want to get an education safely is a disastrous idea. Metal detectors, cameras, guidance intervention, student contracts, and the like may lead to marginal improvements, but if the schools want to get serious about safety, they need to start removing the barracudas from the goldfish tank.

Source

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

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

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

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