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31 May, 2008

Raising a gifted child

What a sad world where talent is seen as a burden. My son (now a mathematician) was definitely seen as "different" as a child but it was so obvious that he was like his academic father that it was seldom held against him

A very good friend of mine was pulled aside yesterday by her son's daycare teacher to be told in hushed, sympathetic tones, "We think your son is gifted". Her heart sank. Rather than being thrilled at the virtually limitless potential contained within her child, her first reaction was tearful. "I don't want my child to be different, I just want him to be normal, to be average," she said sadly. In those first moments she could only see the difficulties ahead for a child who didn't fit into the cookiecutter establishment.

And this is a common first reaction for parents when a teacher pulls them aside for that talk. In fact, according to Judith Hewton, the current secretary and past president of Queensland Association for Gifted and Talented Children (QAGTC), it's virtually the only thing a parent can think about when the possibility is first raised. She has 20 years' experience with gifted children and at the QAGTC she is the first port of call for parents who have been given "the chat".

"It takes a while for them to process what it all means and embrace it," she says. "At the beginning, when parents come in to see us, they're not big-noting themselves, `Ooh, my child is better than yours'. It's not like that. All they know is someone has noticed their child is different," she says.

Even at just three years of age, my friend Melissa's son, Billy, is old enough to be assessed. Hewton says it's crucial to find out early if your child falls into the `high achieving' category. In a society where the establishment - from daycare to primary school and high school - is built to cater for the masses, for the ordinary, it's very difficult to manage the extraordinary when they occasionally turn up. Which is why early detection is crucial and it can make all the difference to the child's self-esteem and development.

"Research indicates gifted children need to be with other children with similar minds, ideas and attitudes; we all need that. They need to be able to go as fast as they want to (through the curriculum)," Hewton says. "Another key finding from research is that many of these children are looking for (validation) from teachers. They don't necessarily want the teachers to be gifted also, or want them to know everything or even do a lot for them. They just want recognition and respect," she says.

And high achieving children aren't necessarily the top of the class. In fact, often the opposite is true. Gifted children in the classroom are often the underachievers. For those children who go on undetected, boredom sets in and behavioural problems arise. They don't do well academically and experience a broad range of problems. These problems are often mis-diagnosed by the system, which is usually better versed in conditions such as ADHD or Asperger's Syndrome.

"Teachers aren't trained at college to identify gifted children,'' says Hewton. "And yet, we (at QAGTC) estimate the top 10 per cent of the population fall into the gifted category. So in Queensland we're talking about 80,000 children. That's a high incidence group, so we've got a gifted child in every classroom, possibly even two," she says.

Hewton believes more could be done to support the gifted child in the classroom, beginning with making it compulsory for schools to develop a program and actively manage gifted children. "(The Education Department) puts out policies but there's no way of forcing schools to adhere to them. There is some funding and some training and people in different areas who (are employed at the school) have `gifted' next to their name but they're usually only part-time. It seems there's only enough funding for part-time, never full-time," she laments.

Finding out your child is gifted needn't be a tragedy. Through education and learning how to extend the gifted child parents can find that home life becomes harmonious and school life is no longer the drudge it once was. Properly raised, gifted children can achieve great things. And when they are being challenged and extended in the right ways by parents and teachers, they are no more demanding than raising a child whose abilities fall within the `normal' range.

For parents the rewards of raising a gifted child can be many. Hewton urges parents to be active in extending their gifted child. The Association runs seminars, conferences and offers significant support to parents in their education of how to raise a gifted child. "They are delightful," Hewton says of gifted children. "And have enormous potential to create a lasting, positive impact on the world. How many of us can say that?"

Source




BOOK REVIEW of "Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life" By Anthony T. Kronman

Review by Christopher Orlet

How many English majors does it take to make a cinnamon dolce latte? (That's actually the set-up and the punch line.) If current trends continue, java junkies will have to rely not on tragically tattooed English majors but on high school drop-outs and illegal immigrants to mix our ridiculously expensive frappacinos and caramel macchiatos.

With university costs topping $50,000 a year and the cost of food, fuel, insurance, and pretty much everything else rising, majoring in the Humanities seems to make little economic sense. Which is why universities in the US and the UK have seen dramatic decreases in the number of students majoring in English, philosophy, fine arts, classics and history. (The Humanities still thrive in the rarified air of the Ivy League and Oxbridge where money is not generally an issue, but these few schools are the exceptions.)

Indeed the Humanities are a tough sell in the best of times, and God knows it is tough to pay off those student loans on a barista's wages. Today, business savvy students are demanding more bang for their buck, which translates into specialized training, not education.

It is not just the new crop of students who think so. Recently in the UK, an Education Minister drew flak when he called some history professors "ornaments" and suggested their departments did not deserve state funding.

Rising costs, however, cannot completely explain the decline of the Humanities. There must be other factors at work.

The decline of the American university has been a perennially popular subject for editorialists since Henry Adams' day. Nearly 75 years ago, Albert Jay Nock complained that universities were offering training, not education, for the obvious reason that "education is a flat liability," and a "subversive influence." Nock noted that, "circumstances have enabled our society to get along rather prosperously, though by no means creditably, without thought and without regard for thought, proceeding merely by a series of improvisations; hence it has always instinctively resented thought, as likely to interfere with what it was doing."

As early as 1987, Allan Bloom's surprise bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind, alleged that universities had "extinguished the real motive of education, the search for a good life." In subsequent decades Dinesh D'Souza and Roger Kimball have taken up the subject.

Now a self-described non-partisan academic has seen the fading light. Yale law professor Anthony T. Kronman's Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life attempts to explain why the Humanities have been relegated to second-class status somewhere above Physical Ed, but below HVAC repair, and what this may mean for our civilization.

AT ONE TIME the purpose of a university education was to give future leaders an opportunity -- before they shouldered the dull burdens of civic responsibility -- to explore the purpose and value of life. By instilling a strong sense of history, of reason, of logic, of the best of what has been thought and said, a background in the Humanities would prepare a young scholar for whatever may lie ahead.

This, at least, had been the belief going back to Plato's Republic.

Like Nock, Bloom believed the university should provide the student with four years of freedom, "a space between the intellectual wasteland he has left behind and the inevitable dreary professional training that awaits him after the baccalaureate." More important, the college years were "civilization's only chance to get to him." (Somehow I doubt Tom Wolfe would agree.)

The Humanities also served a primary existential purpose, which was to counterbalance "the defects of a democratic order" (Bloom's phrase), and to fill "a void by pointing to the human ends which the ideals of liberty and equal rights are unable to prescribe," adds James Pierson in the New Criterion.

The Sixties Generation broke with this four-thousand-year tradition. If the bugbears of early 20th Century radicals were the consumer-driven economy and the thoughtless pursuit of material comfort, then the Baby Boomers' bete noire was Western Civilization and all it entailed.

From then on, social change, rather than concerns about work and consumption, would be paramount on college campuses. Such change would not come from the government or the people, but from the university, since the university was uniquely situated to tackle moral issues. After all where else could one find so many smart, morally superior persons? First, however, the university, and its Humanities departments (the propagandizer of the elitist, racist, sexist, imperial tradition of Western culture) must change and adapt.

In the subsequent 40 years the radicals and their political agenda have triumphed unopposed on the college campus, so much so that today's student is compelled to conform to an intolerant progressive doctrine if he hopes to receive his sheepskin. Students are now told that there is a single right answer and, like the Sphinx, only he, the professor, possesses it.

Inevitably this atmosphere of conformity and groupthink results in a sterile learning environment, where dialogue and debate are limited for fear of uttering the wrong sentiment and facing disciplinary action.

A RADICAL FREE MARKETER might say that the Humanities deserve their fate since they proved unable to compete in both the marketplace and the marketplace of ideas. However it wasn't the marketplace that killed the Humanities, says Kronman. Rather, it was the one-two punch of political correctness and research specialization.

Of these, political correctness and its offspring diversity, multiculturalism and constructivism (which gave us such wonders as "rainforest math" and "African math") have done the most damage. With more women than men on college campuses, and near majorities of foreign students, to say nothing of the distinctive viewpoints, experiences and traditions they bring, political correctness is seen as an "instrument of corrective justice" -- payback for the sins of all of the Dead White Males that created the racist, patriarchic and imperial West.

Not only are the ideas and institutions of the West and the works that embody them no more valuable than those of other non-Western civilizations, but professors find it difficult to teach Western Civilization courses when they loathe its chief representatives. Lost in this political quagmire is the question of how we can hope to understand or appreciate or compare and contrast ourselves to other cultures if we are wholly ignorant of our own?

The final blow to the Humanities has come in the form of the modern research ideal, an idea that honors and rewards original scholarship, specialization, and incremental thinking, and whereby academics "choose an inch or two of the garden to cultivate," and which the Greeks and the renaissance scholars knew was the antithesis of true learning.

Kronman reminds us that specialization is anathema to the broad study of the "great conversation" that has been going on throughout the history of Western Civilization. When he focuses on original discoveries, Kronman argues, "a scholar does not aim to stand where his ancestors did. His goal is not to join but supersede them and his success is measured not by the proximity of his thoughts to theirs, but by the distance between them -- by how far he has progressed beyond his ancestors' inferior state of knowledge," all of which leads him to pretentious philosophical departures like deconstruction, where one misses the big picture by focusing on the minutiae. As Pauline Kael's reminded, "Taking it apart is far less important than trying to see it whole."

Despite the obvious doom and gloom Kronman sees reason for optimism. Political correctness has had a 40-year run and at long last seems to be on the wane. A few universities are even dusting off their Great Books courses.

And then there is obstinate human nature. The instinct to find an ultimate meaning remains as powerful as ever, it has just been directed away from its proper home in the universities toward fundamentalist religion, New Age spiritualism, and Barack Obama's campaign.

It's time to bring the eternal questions home. Can I get a "Yes we can?"

Source





30 May, 2008

Are Students Canaries In the Free Speech Coal Mine?

After 12 years of censorship and regimentation, many high school students will graduate this spring with little or no idea about what it means to be a free, active and engaged citizen in a democracy. When they march across the stage to get their diploma, let's hope someone slips them a copy of the First Amendment - with instructions on how to use it.

Far too many public school officials are afraid of freedom and avoid anything that looks like democracy. Under the heading of "safety and discipline," administrators censor student religious and political speech, shut down student newspapers and limit student government to discussions about decorations at the prom.

Fortunately, a growing number of brave students defy the odds and take seriously what they hear about free speech in civics class. Earlier this month, Heather Gillman won her fight when a federal judge ruled that her Florida high school violated the First Amendment by prohibiting students from displaying any symbol of support for gay rights, including rainbow stickers. And last month, Alexander Nuxoll won the right to express the opposite viewpoint when the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that his suburban Chicago school must allow him to wear a "Be Happy, Not Gay" T-shirt while his civil rights case proceeds.

Of course, students don't always win in court - in fact, they often lose. On May 12, Kimberly Jacobs lost her battle to wear a religious message on her shirt when a 9th Circuit panel upheld a Nevada school district's dress code prohibiting messages (including political or religious expression) on student uniforms.

But win or lose, students shouldn't need to call a lawyer in the first place. Public schools are supposed to be places that teach and model what it means to be a citizen in a democracy, especially what it means to use the basic freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment. Instead, many school officials are convinced that keeping order means ordering students to leave their religious and political convictions at the schoolhouse door.

Yes, schools have an important interest in maintaining safety and discipline. Schools can and should prohibit speech that is obscene or defamatory or promotes illegal activity. And schools may draw the line at student speech that can be clearly shown to cause a substantial disruption in the school. But the widespread practice of censoring the political and religious views of students simply because their speech might offend someone or might be controversial contradicts everything schools are supposed to teach about freedom of expression.

Students have become canaries in the free-speech coal mine: We can predict the future health of freedom of speech in America by looking at how public schools live up to - or fail to live up to - the First Amendment. Right now, there are a lot of sick canaries out there. It's no mystery why so many young people tune out public-policy debates, stay home from the polls and become cynical about their government.

Not all school officials make the false choice between security and freedom. In a small number of schools across the nation - Federal Hocking High School in Ohio and Fairview Elementary School in California are two stellar examples - students are given a real voice in the life of the school.

When schools uphold the First Amendment, they become learning environments that are not only free, but also far safer than schools where students are alienated by censorship and repression. The challenge is for schools to promote freedom through lessons in civic responsibility. This includes, among other things, involving students in decision-making, teaching peer mediation of conflicts, encouraging a free student press, offering instruction in the ethical use of the Internet, and integrating lessons in civic character across the curriculum.

Here's a concept: Freedom works. Freedom and democracy, not censorship and repression, create safer schools for students - and ensure a more secure society for us all. Freedom also takes work. Many school officials complain that in this era of high-stakes testing they don't have time for such "extras" as supporting meaningful student government, promoting student journalism or creating opportunities for student engagement in public policy and service. But if we can send young people to fight and die in the name of freedom and democracy abroad, surely we can take time to practice freedom and democracy at home.

Source




US Can't Pass English 101

Most Americans can't write a decent college paper. It's not exactly news. Half a century ago Bernard Malamud, smart Jewish kid from Brooklyn, taught English at Oregon State University. He found the experience so grueling that he wrote it up in A New Life. His fictional hero, Levin,

"lectured his students on this thinness of their themes, for their pleasant good-natured selves without a critical attitude to life."

Then he wondered why "people disappeared from his classes" and transferred to other courses.

The boneheadedness of the average college student is, of course, a favorite theme of the educated classes, so it is not surprising to read in the June Atlantic the lament of an adjunct college instructor. In "The Basement of the Ivory Tower" we learn of the experiences of "Professor X" teaching English "at a small private college and at a community college."

Professor X is not teaching the children of The Atlantic readers. He is teaching evening classes to other peoples' children, students whose college applications showed "blank spaces where the extracurricular activities would go." Nor are many of the students children. Many of them are health-care workers, would-be police officers, and municipal employees who need college level credits to "advance at work," or, in short, get a raise.

The students' chosen path to increased emoluments is not easy, for many of them are not well prepared for college work. Never mind the agonies of the "compare-and-contrast paper, the argument paper, the process-analysis paper... and the dreaded research paper." Many of the students "cannot write a coherent sentence."

Professor X wonders when he's going to get a note from the college to pass more students, and he worries "about the larger implications, let alone the morality, of admitting so many students to classes they cannot possibly pass."

Since we are worrying about "larger implications" let us escape from the bell jar of liberal thinking and wonder why it is that after a century and a half of "free" public education so many students present themselves at college unable to write a coherent sentence. If you read the latest National Assessment of Adult Literacy you will find that only 13 percent of US adults are rated "proficient" in prose literacy, e.g., "comparing viewpoints in two editorials." We are not talking here about 87 percent of Americans lacking the skill to write a scintillating article comparing foolish liberal with wise conservative viewpoints on education. We are talking about 87 percent of adults being not quite up to the task reading a couple of editorials and getting the point.

Could it be that the vast majority of Americans aren't particularly interested in reading and writing? Could it be that they don't really need advanced literary skills in order to hold down a decent job and enjoy a comfortable life in these United States? The "larger implication" of unprepared students attempting entry-level college English is that maybe the program of universal K-16 education is fatally flawed, for it suggests that for an unknown proportion of students the program of compulsory bums-on-seats education that is a central article of faith for the governing elite is a mistake.

If we have made a mistake in the development of our government education system we ought to do something about it. Liberals were properly outraged that President Bush tolerated two years of failure in Iraq before he would agree to change his strategy. For some reason they are not in quite such a hurry about the K-12 education system that was excoriated over twenty years ago in A Nation at Risk.

But if the current education system is broken what should we do to fix it? Laurence Gonzales' intriguing Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why suggests a different understanding of learning. Gonzales warns that you cannot confront the crises of life with just book learning. If you fall down a crevasse on a mountain or your yacht sinks a hurricane you need more than a rational appreciation of natural hazards to survive. You need practice, and actual experience in decision-making under duress so that your rational knowledge becomes internalized as an instinct. That's the way they teach you to fly airplanes. When the weather starts to close in good pilot must combine knowledge, skill, experience, and judgment to make the decisions that will get him out of a jam. The same applies to ordinary life crises like losing a job or getting divorced.

The day will come, perhaps sooner than we think, when the American people will be ready for education reform. Yet after a century and a half of government stasis it is difficult to know what to do. There is not even consensus on the notion of a "learning style." Perhaps the only thing to do will be to let the American people decide for themselves.

One thing is certain. The future of education will not have much to do with forcing government bureaucrats to jump through hoops in order to get their next raise.

Source




Some Australian teachers to be paid on merit

THOUSANDS of teachers are set to be judged partly on the academic performance of their students under a ground-breaking accreditation scheme to recognise excellence in the classroom. In an Australian first, the state's most outstanding classroom teachers will be able to apply for merit promotion to newly created advanced level positions. To qualify, teachers will have to demonstrate their students' achievements, provide work samples, submit references from parents and others and allow inspectors to assess their classroom performance.

The new positions - professional accomplishment and professional leadership - will eventually attract higher pay after negotiations with the Government or school authorities. The changes provide a new layer of seniority over the decades-old system of grading teachers automatically on length of service, and gazump the Rudd Government's agenda to reward classroom excellence. They also open the floodgates potentially for an even more comprehensive overhaul of teacher quality aimed at retaining the best teachers and weeding out duds.

Education Minister John Della Bosca said yesterday NSW would have the first comprehensive scheme in Australia to recognise excellence across the whole teaching profession in the state. All schools in the state will come under the new merit scheme judged on standards laid down by the NSW Institute of Teachers. "Outstanding teachers in NSW public, Catholic and independent schools will now have the opportunity to be formally recognised by the profession and the community by meeting high level professional teaching standards," Mr Della Bosca said.

Teachers yesterday welcomed the opportunity to gain recognition at an advanced level and said it would encourage many to remain in the classroom. The Teachers' Federation said it had a range of concerns about how the scheme would work and called for talks with the Government. It is now mandatory for all new teachers to be accredited at the level of professional competence but it is voluntary to apply for the two higher levels. Mr Della Bosca said the Institute of Teachers had developed standards setting out whole of career pathways for teachers in Government and non-government systems.

Source





29 May, 2008

Arizona Raza unit survives under fire

Calls are heating up to kill the Tucson Unified School District's ethnic studies program - at the same time it becomes more likely that the district's most controversial department could expand to reach more, and younger, students. Critics, from the state's schools chief to lawmakers to conservative talk-show hosts and columnists, have singled out Mexican-American/Raza Studies in particular, saying it's divisive and turns students into angry revolutionaries. But supporters say the program's reach is too limited, given that it boosts student achievement by providing relevant and rigorous work to students all too often overlooked.

In a ruling last month that conditionally lifted the district's decades-old racial balance order, a federal judge noted that "it is unimaginable that the eight-staff Mexican American/Raza Studies department would be capable of serving the (district's) 30,118 Hispanic students."

TUSD's budget crisis is putting the kibosh on any new money for this coming school year, but Governing Board member Adelita Grijalva says she's committed to seeing the program grow the following year. For now, she's asking for a discussion about equity within the ethnic studies' $2.3 million budget, given that African-American Studies gets more funding and staff in a district overwhelmingly Latino. Raza Studies serves about 500 high school students, who take a four-course block of history, social justice and two Chicano literature classes.

The program should reach younger students, a 2006 outside audit said. Auditors recommended a feeder pipeline starting in the elementary schools. Although they criticized the African-American, Pan-Asian and Native American departments for too few accountability measures, they lauded Raza Studies as the program's "flagship."

It's the end of the school year and Raza Studies students at Tucson High Magnet School are presenting research findings to their principal. Their PowerPoint presentation is critical of policies toward English learners; some concerns hinge on whether students are funneled to vocational tracks, and some focus on inferior equipment. Then comes an exploration of classroom decor, with photos of classroom items students consider culturally insensitive.

First up is a baseball poster, which they say should be soccer or rugby to validate other cultures. Next up flashes the Pledge of Allegiance and a patriotic poster featuring the Statue of Liberty, the American flag and an eagle. "Most of the kids are from a different country, and this is showing them that this is the country that's the greatest and yours doesn't matter," a student maintains.

Principal Abel Morado tells the students he disagrees with their perspective. An initial role of public education was to mold a citizenry united under one democratic blanket, he says. "It's in our DNA in public schools to be sure we're teaching you about being citizens of this nation," Morado says. Morado says he considers the dialogue valuable because it's important to reflect that America does not have just one culture or value system.

Tom Horne, the state's superintendent of public instruction, considers the program's very premise grounds to publicly rail against it, and, if necessary, to ban it through legislation. "One of the most basic American values is that we judge people as individuals based on what they know and what they can do and what their character is like - and not based on what ethnic group they happen to have been born into," Horne says. "I think it's profoundly wrong to divide students up by ethnicity."

Augustine Romero took over as head of ethnic studies two years ago, after running Raza Studies for four years. In his view, the system already divides students by ethnicity. When he was a senior at Tucson High, his father asked school counselors to make military recruiters stop calling. His counselor couldn't believe Romero planned to go to college. He proved the counselor wrong, and the 41-year-old just finished his doctorate. "Yes, there are examples of people who have made it, but we've made it by having to work harder than most people because we've had to endure the inequities of the system," he says.

Romero summons the work of Brazilian educationalist Paulo Freire to explain the premise of the program, hauling out a dog-eared and extensively highlighted copy of "Pedagogy of the Oppressed." He points to a passage: "This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well." If people don't like being called oppressors, Romero offers no apology. "We have to be able to be honest. If we have cancer, should we not name the cancer and overcome it? If oppression and subordination are our cancers, should we not name them?"

Anglos often don't see racism, he says, so it needs to be pointed out, even though it has led to accusations that he propagates reverse racism. "When you name racism, people think you're playing the race card and then they say, 'You don't like me because I'm white.' No, I don't like what was said. Because I'm one who names these things, some have the perception that I'm a racist and that I only care about children of color."

Those children clearly need advocates, Romero says. There are glaring performance disparities between white and minority students - even in this district, where whites are only 30 percent of the student body. The recent court ruling noted test scores for black and Hispanic students lagged 10 percent to 15 percent behind those of their white counterparts, and up to 21 percent for Native Americans.....

The program's critics range from elected state officials to high school students. The campus Republicans at Tucson High circulated a petition in April to rein in the class after seeing a banner in a class window asking, "Who's the illegal alien, pilgrim?" The petition, signed by 50 of the school's 2,900 students, was forwarded to a handful of state legislators, along with a note that maintained the department "is creating a hostile environment for non-Hispanic students and students who oppose creating a racially charged school environment." ....

More here




Child abuse by teacher in Florida

Melissa Barton said she is considering legal action after her son's kindergarten teacher led his classmates to vote him out of class. After each classmate was allowed to say what they didn't like about Barton's 5-year-old son, Alex, his Morningside Elementary teacher said they were going to take a vote, Barton said. By a 14 to 2 margin, the class voted him out of the class.

Barton said her son is in the process of being diagnosed with Aspberger's, a type of high-functioning autism. Alex began the testing process in February for an official diagnosis under the suggestion of Morningside Principal Marsha Cully. Alex has had disciplinary issues because of his disabilities, Barton said. The school and district has met with Barton and her son to create an individual education plan, she said. His teacher, Wendy Portillo, has attended these meetings, she said.

Barton said after the vote, Alex's teacher asked him how he felt. "He said, 'I feel sad,'" she said. Alex left the classroom and spent the rest of the day in the nurse's office, she said. Barton said when she came to pick up her son at the school on Wednesday, he was leaving the nurse's office. "He was shaken up," she said. Barton said the nurse told her to talk with the child's teacher, who told her what happened.

Alex hasn't been back to school since then, and Barton said he won't be returning. He starts screaming when she brings him with her to drop off his sibling at school. Thursday night, his mother heard him saying "I'm not special." Barton said Alex is reliving the incident. They said he was "disgusting" and "annoying," Barton said. "He was incredibly upset," Barton said. "The only friend he has ever made in his life was forced to do this."

The child's mother filed a complaint with the school resource officer, who investigated the matter, said Port St. Lucie spokeswoman Michelle Steele said. But the state attorney's office concluded the matter did not meet the criteria for emotional child abuse, so no criminal charges will be filed, Steele said. Port St. Lucie Police is no longer investigating, but is documenting the complaint, she said.

Steele said the teacher confirmed the incident did occur. St. Lucie School's spokeswoman Janice Karst said the district is investigating the incident, but could not make any further comment. Vern Melvin, Department of Children and Families circuit administrator, confirmed the agency is investigating an allegation of abuse at Morningside, but said he could not elaborate

Source. Some comments by another teacher here




London schools must be Greener, says British regulator

Schools are failing to teach children to be green and are treating environmental awareness as a peripheral issue, Ofsted has found. Inspectors said that the majority of schools they visited did not pay enough attention to sustainable development. "Ethical purchasing was usually confined to buying Fairtrade products for the staff room," its report on schools and sustainability said. The report praised schools for their imaginative projects and excellent teaching on sustainability, but it said that work tended to be uncoordinated. Primary schools were better than secondary schools at putting children's passion for being environmentally friendly to good use.

Christine Blower, from the National Union of Teachers, said: "Far too few schools are teaching about the biggest issue facing the planet. Schools are over-burdened with a range of excessive and unreasonable external demands. This makes it harder to focus on teaching climate change and sustainability."

Ofsted recommended that the Government should give higher priority to sustainability in schools, support this through funding, and ensure that the curriculum reflected the importance of the subject. The Government wants all schools to become sustainable by 2020, as part of its ambitious 45billion pound Building Schools for the Future programme, which will rebuild or refurbish all schools in the country. Schools are responsible for 2 per cent of all carbon emissions in this country - and almost 15 per cent of those produced by thepublic sector in Britain.

The Government has admitted that it would be too expensive to make schools "zero carbon", in response to a committee of MPswhoasked for details about the environmental targets that BSF schools would reach.

Source





28 May, 2008

Raza studies gives rise to racial hostility

As a former teacher in Tucson Unified School District's hotly debated ethnic studies department, I submit my perspective for the public's consideration. During the 2002-2003 school year, I taught a U.S. history course with a Mexican-American perspective. The course was part of the Raza/Chicano studies department. Within one week of the course beginning, I was told that I was a "teacher of record," meaning that I was expected only to assign grades. The Raza studies department staff would teach the class. I was assigned to be a "teacher of record" because some members of the Raza studies staff lacked teaching certificates. It was a convenient way of circumventing the rules.

I stated that I expected to do more than assign grades. I expected to be involved in teaching the class. The department was less than enthusiastic but agreed. Immediately it was clear that the class was not a U.S. history course, which the state of Arizona requires for graduation. The class was similar to a sociology course one expects to see at a university. Where history was missing from the course, it was filled by controversial and biased curriculum.

The basic theme of the curriculum was that Mexican-Americans were and continue to be victims of a racist American society driven by the interests of middle and upper-class whites. In this narrative, whites are able to maintain their influence only if minorities are held down. Thus, social, political and economic events in America must be understood through this lens.

This biased and sole paradigm justified teaching that our community police officers are an extension of the white power structure and that they are the strongmen used "to keep minorities in their ghettos." It justified telling the class that there are fewer Mexican-Americans in Tucson Magnet High School's advanced placement courses because their "white teachers" do not believe they are capable and do not want them to get ahead. It justified teaching that the Southwestern United States was taken from Mexicans because of the insatiable greed of the Yankee who acquired his values from the corrupted ethos of Western civilization. It was taught that the Southwest is "Atzlan," the ancient homeland of the Aztecs, and still rightfully belongs to their descendants - to all people of indigenous Mexican heritage.

As an educator, I refused to be complicit in a curriculum that engendered racial hostility, irresponsibly demeaned America's civil institutions, undermined our public servants, discounted any virtues in Western civilization and taught disdain for American sovereignty. When I raised these concerns, I was told that I was a "racist," despite being Hispanic. Acknowledging my heritage, the Raza studies staff also informed me that I was a vendido, the Spanish term for "sellout."

The culmination of my challenge to the department's curriculum was my removal from that particular class. The Raza studies department and its district-level allies pressured the Tucson High administration to silence my concerns through reassignment to another class during that one period. The Raza studies department used the "racist" card, which is probably the most worn-out and desperate maneuver used to silence competing perspectives. It is fundamentally anti-intellectual because it immediately stops debate by threatening to destroy the reputation of those who would provide counter arguments.

Unfortunately, I am not the only one to have been intimidated by the Raza studies department in this way. The diplomatic and flattering language that the department and its proponents use to describe the Raza studies program is an attempt to avoid public scrutiny. When necessary, the department invokes terms such as "witch hunt" and "McCarthyism" to diminish the validity of whatever public scrutiny it does get.

The proponents of this program may conceal its reality to the public. But as a former teacher in the program, I am witness to its ugly underbelly. Arizona taxpayers should ask themselves whether they should pay for the messages engendered in these classrooms with their hard-earned tax dollars. The Raza studies department has powerful allies in TUSD, on its governing board and in the U.S. House of Representatives and thus operates with much impunity. Occasionally there are minor irritations from the state superintendent of public instruction and the Legislature.

Ultimately, Arizona taxpayers own TUSD and have the right to change it. The change will have to come from replacing the board if its members refuse to make the Raza studies department respect the public trust.

Source




The Creation myth taught in government schools

Post below is inspired by the story above. It is recycled from Kenn Gividen. See the original for links

Ignore the title. It was composed for two reasons: First, to attract liberals and, second, to emphasize their hypocrisy. Case in point: Liberals love to bemoan teaching creationism in government schools. "It's not true science," they claim. "It's a myth!" Some universities refuse to recognize creation science classes when considering student applications.

But move from the Science Department to the History Department and the liberal shift is precisely 180 degrees. Mythology is required teaching. John A Ward, a former teacher in Tucson, explains how American history has succumbed to indoctrination in our tax-funded government schools: "The basic theme of the curriculum was that Mexican-Americans were and continue to be victims of a racist American society driven by the interests of middle and upper-class whites.

"In this narrative, whites are able to maintain their influence only if minorities are held down. Thus, social, political and economic events in America must be understood through this lens. "This biased and sole paradigm justified teaching that our community police officers are an extension of the white power structure and that they are the strongmen used 'to keep minorities in their ghettos.'"

My conclusion?

Liberals say they oppose the creation myth being taught in government schools while creating history myths to replace the true history. No wonder liberals oppose school choice. It afford students to learn true history. And with truth working against them, liberals can't win.




Australia: No excuses for indigenous students

This guy is right but he is pissing into the wind. What he wants "aint gunna happen" -- though there are always individual exceptions, of course

The indigenous community has to discard the misguided notion that gaining an education makes them less Aboriginal. One of the nation's most respected indigenous educators, Chris Sarra, has called on the Aboriginal community to ensure children take their rightful place in the Rudd Government's education revolution. Ahead of his address to the National Press Club today to mark Sorry Day, Dr Sarra said Australian society had to stop making excuses for Aboriginal students being chronic under-achievers who failed to attend school, and expect the same of them as any other student.

He said the Aboriginal community had a responsibility to embrace the education revolution and discard any idea that it threatened indigenous culture. "We have to stop making excuses now and stop thinking schools are turning our kids into being like white kids," he told The Australian. "We have to understand the more educated we become, the greater the scope for us to enhance our culture and sense of Aboriginal identity."

Dr Sarra is a member of the federal Government's Australian Social Inclusion Board, announced last week, and director of the Indigenous Education Leadership Institute in Queensland. He was principal of Cherbourg State School, with a predominantly indigenous student population, where he introduced initiatives that cut absenteeism by 94per cent and brought literacy and numeracy results to the state average.

Dr Sarra said the perception that school was bad for indigenous culture stemmed partly from the older generation's memories of school and how Aborigines were represented. But the feeling was sustained by non-indigenous people holding the "romantic view" that remote communities should be left to their own devices to follow their own culture. "That's fine for tourists who are driving through and want to see them as museum pieces," he said.

In his speech today, Dr Sarra intends to present a way forward for indigenous education and says the Government's education revolution must include Aboriginal Australians. "If we lift the education standard for indigenous Australian children, we lift the overall education standard of all Australians," his speech says. "We must demand that indigenous Australian children have access to that which we would consider quality education outcomes for any Australian child."

Dr Sarra outlines what he says are the five most fundamental strategies to ensure Aboriginal children perform at the same level as other school students: developing a positive Aboriginal identity in schools, embracing Aboriginal leadership in schools, high expectations of Aboriginal students, innovative schools and innovative staffing models.

But the biggest challenge is providing schools Aboriginal children want to go to, and that requires rethinking the way things are done outside the traditional school day of 9am to 3pm. Dr Sarra says secondary school education for remote students needs to be redesigned, with options such as residential or boarding facilities in bigger regional centres considered. Also required was greater flexibility in the school calendar to better address the wet-dry seasonal issues in northern Australia and more flexibility about teaching hours to better engage and meet the needs of students.

Source





27 May, 2008

Subway for illiterates

This story has been going around the blogs a bit in the last day or so, so I thought I might mention it here:

The Subway sandwich chain is running a writing contest for kids from which homeschooled kids are specifically excluded. Excluding a potential one million customers seems pretty dumb to start with but the stupidity does not end there. In their promo they write (down the very bottom) of the "Untied" States and homeschoolers are described as "home schools". Note that there was another misspelling too: "bastket".

And to top it off it is pre-schoolers that they are asking to compose sentences. A bit ambitious! See here and here for more.

So why did they do it? I think Bob McCarty has the best explanation.

Update:

As I had had a small eye operation only a few hours before I wrote the above, I could not see very well and missed a couple of things (funnily enough). Now corrected.

Jerry Lerman has grabbed a copy of the original promo in case they wake up long enough to correct the original. See here. You may have to use the resize gadget to enlarge the pic. Jerry has highlighted the bloopers in red.




Fantasizing "The New McCarthyism"

By Phil Orenstein (Excerpt:)

After the lengthy front page tribute in the New York Times treating Deborah Almontaser, founder and former principle of the Khalil Gibran International Academy (KGIA), as the later day Mother Theresa, I thought the public forum she would be addressing later that evening, alongside her embattled sister in solidarity, City University of New York (CUNY) faculty union official Susan O'Malley, would be thronged by numerous admirers and reporters. But there were no such crowds or media. Wandering the endless corridors of the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan, I bumped into the panelists Susan O'Malley and Ms. Almontaser, who were just as lost as I was, looking for the classroom where the public forum, "Academic Freedom and the Attack on Diversity at CUNY," was to be held.

A little more than 20 people including CUNY faculty, students as well as the speakers showed up. The poor attendance may be due to the fact that the CUNY Senate Forum email list received the announcement on Sunday after 10 PM, the day before the event. I was the only person at this "public" forum sponsored by the Middle East Student's Association (MESO), who attempted to speak up to dispute the cunning agenda and break through the monolithic conformity of the group.

Billed as an important forum to address the issues of Islamophobia at CUNY, the email announcement stated: "Around the country, Islamophobic and Anti-Arab attacks on professors have increased, most notably at Columbia and Barnard. This movement to attack and discredit dissent has been called "the New McCarthyism" - shutting down reasoned debate on important issues... Ms. Almontaser will appear on this panel along with CUNY Professor Susan O' Malley and others working to expose the attack on academic freedom across the nation.There is some urgency here as these attacks are one tip of a vast ideological iceberg that is also threatening to impact the current election campaign."

Although the issue of the "anti-Arab attacks" at Columbia and Barnard was not broached in the forum they were most likely referring to the recent public uproar of Columbia and Barnard alumni over the ill-advised tenure decision of Professor Nadia Abu El-Haj granted by virtue of her unimpressive scholarship of one book Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society based on flimsy evidence and hearsay, which purports that the historical origins of the State of Israel are fictitious.

What I witnessed was a closed forum dedicated to a veiled radical agenda, riddled by hysterical paranoia, name-calling, slanderous accusations against prominent scholars and city officials, and strategies for their ouster, where the panelists professed that "attacks" against Arabs and professors are a coordinated right wing smear campaign launched by Daniel Pipes, CUNY trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld and their ilk, which they dubbed the "New McCarthyism." But Mr. Pipes and company whom they demonized with such venom, have simply exercised their First Amendment rights of critical journalism and free speech, civilly exchanging opinions and information in online magazine articles, speeches, op-eds and blogs, where all sides of the issues were often given a fair hearing in the media.

I was confused as to the reasons for their excessive paranoia. How are Pipes and company threatening their academic freedom? The so-called "New McCarthyites" have been vociferous, no doubt, but they demonstrated nothing resembling the violent student mob attacks at Columbia University on Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist, because he expressed disagreeable views. Mr. Pipes and a few opinionated bloggers, including myself, are not U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy. What is this "vast ideological iceberg" that is "threatening to impact the current election campaign" of which the so-called attacks on academic freedom are only the tip?

Deborah Almontaser: Founder and Former Principle of KGIA

One of the featured panelists was Deborah Almontaser, who resigned as principal of KGIA after she stirred up controversy over her misleading explanation of the term "intifada" as "shaking off of oppression" in response to a reporter's question about the inflammatory "Intifada NYC" slogan on the AWAAM organization's T-shirts. She recently filed a lawsuit against the New York Department of Education and Mayor Bloomberg, charging that her First Amendment rights were violated when she was wrongfully forced to resign. A federal appeals court ruled that she will not be reinstated as principle and she is now appealing. In the words of a sympathetic anti-bigotry activist present at the forum, Almontaser is "a traditionalist-leaning Muslim and as such, has ties to the more fundamentalist Muslim groups," thus apparently not a moderate Muslim as many supporters claim.

Almontaser and the KGIA public school are enthusiastically supported by a number of radical individuals and Islamic groups such as AWAAM, CAIR -- currently under federal investigation as an unindicted co-conspirator for terrorist financing, the American Muslim Association of Lawyers (AMAL) - which defended the notorious "6 imams" who threatened to sue passengers for profiling, cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal, unrepentant former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, anti-Israel Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi, and others. Three radical Imams are on KGIA's board of advisors composed of 12 Islamic, Jewish and Christian religious leaders. Almontaser has expressed virulent blame America attitudes in the past making statements in interviews such as: "I have realized that our foreign policy is racist; in the `war against terror' people of color are the target..the terrorist attacks have been triggered by the way the USA breaks its promises with countries across the world, especially in the Middle East."

In her talk, she described her activities for tolerance and understanding in the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11th. She visited synagogues, churches and mosques lecturing on religious and cultural sensitivity, spreading the message that Islam is a religion of peace. In a post 9/11 world of anti-Muslim backlash and discrimination, she described the lack of understanding of what her people were faced with and her contributions to a "September 11th Curriculum Project" to alleviate the backlash and discrimination in the New York public school system, training teachers and students in cultural sensitivity. She spoke of the weekly protest efforts together with Mona Eldahry seeking justice for Arab and Muslim detainees some of whom "suffered abuses in the name of our country."

She described how people lobbied and a movement was mobilized against the KGIA. Almontaser was the unfortunate victim of a movement by a "loud minority of voices" which she dubbed "McCarthyism of 2008." One writer to the New York Times called this movement of Daniel Pipes, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld and company, "the thought police." The moderator asked why this is happening to you, why are you so under attack? In answer, she described the role played by cultural tolerance and understanding in bridging the gap between East and West and opening doors to peace, so you don't need war anymore. The purpose of KGIA is to create "ambassadors of peace and hope," as the New York Times article mentioned. She said "the school is aiming to humanize the enemy" we're supposed to be at war with. This is a threat to many people who claim that "we're at war" and "we need to keep the war going" in order to thrive. "If you don't have an enemy, you can't keep Lockheed in business." She clarified.

She further characterized her "attackers" as those who feel "we need to have an enemy, a bad guy." What they find threatening is the whole notion of "learning the language and culture of people that we should be hating because we're at war with them." Members of the audience contributed to the theme that "this country is engaged in an imperial war and needs to build up an enemy." Someone elaborated that conservatives, by the same token need to build an enemy on a smaller scale so they target local Muslims, Arabs and the KGIA, and Wiesenfeld lashes out at CUNY and public education, to fulfill their need for an enemy and someone to hate, in order to ultimately support the imperial war.

A little latter someone in the audience continued on this theme, mentioning that anyone who visits the Stop the Madrassa website will notice that they "subscribe to an extreme version of the `Clash of Civilizations,'" and they see the battle to close the KGIA as "one local fight in a broad national battle against Islam" and what they call the "Islamization of America." They see the same Islamic colonizing phenomena that produced "Eurabia" slowly happening here and "they are drawing battle lines wherever they can." They see themselves as "great crusaders or heroes protecting Christendom and Western Civilization" against barbarians. They will "lie, distort, smear and destroy careers and people themselves," and they will do "anything and everything to further their cause. "They are not a civil debating society." They are not interested in ideas. That's why you can't sit down and talk to them or have a civil debate.

Although I witnessed a paranoia which reached astonishing new levels of hysteria, I would imagine that the morning New York Times article must have taken some of the wind out of their sails, for how could they complain about intolerance and anti-Muslim "attacks" when such a display of sympathy and veneration in pictures and words on page one of the newspaper of record limits their outrage to just a handful of critics like myself who disagree with their outlandish premises and challenge their dubious motives? ....

Susan O'Malley: CUNY Trustee Ex-officio and PSC Executive Committee Official

The third and final panelist was CUNY faculty union official Susan O'Malley, who has filed an ongoing $2 million defamation lawsuit against Professor Emeritus Sharad Karkhanis, for his audacity to state that it's not appropriate to place convicted terrorists, Mohamed Yousry and Susan Rosenberg on the CUNY payroll. In his introduction, the moderator stated O'Malley has been "attacked" as a "so-called terrorist sympathizer" as he listed her credentials. She defended herself with the same cries of Islamophobia and racism as Almontaser but only O'Malley's persecution came from a "crazy man" and his conservative allies. She cried that in her case, for at least 13 years she has been "attacked by a crazy man named Sharad Karkhanis."

To explain the methods Karkhanis and his friends used to "attack" her, she expounded on the "craziness" of guilt by association that was used to smear KGIA and its founder, Ms. Almontaser. The same strategy is being used to attack Senator Obama, by associating him with controversial figures, Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, the unrepentant former leader of the Weather Underground. The method is to take something irrelevant out of context and repeat it over and over again until it is cited as established fact. This leads to the "establishment of lies" which inadvertently appear in everyday conversation, as people rehash them as household words. That is how she was smeared by Karkhanis and she proceeded to tell her tale of anguish.

Karkhanis put out a newsletter, The Patriot Returns, which he distributes to 13,000 CUNY faculty, in which she's been "red-baited, lesbian-baited and everything-baited," called "a terrorist" and a "friend of terrorists," and even declared that she was "at an al-Qaeda training camp." She claimed to have endured "about 50 attacks" from the various issues of the newsletter. He doesn't do it alone, she explained. It's an effort of a group of rightwing conservatives, probably including Daniel Pipes, from whom she's received emails. Jeffrey Wiesenfeld was also closely "connected with these attacks."

O'Malley continued, saying he put out these "attacks" over and over, for such a long period of time that everywhere she went, even up in Albany, "people knew her as the butt of this person's attacks" and were afraid to associate with her. The attacks became such a nightmare and she "started really freaking out." She feared boarding an airplane one day and being turned away because she's a terrorist. She said she would have loved to respond to his accusations, but it was just impossible, so she had her lawyer friend send a letter to Karkhanis asking him to "please stop attacking her, and he said he would not." She wanted it to stop, she wanted quiet and since she was no longer head of the CUNY University Faculty Senate (UFS), she filed a libel suit against him.

She continued in defense of her actions to try to hire Mohamed Yousry and Susan Rosenberg. She explained that the "attacks" on her became most virulent after 9/11 when Yousry, an adjunct at York College was removed from the classroom without discussion or due process rights, after he was convicted for aiding terrorism. As UFS chair she was in a position to protect faculty, especially adjuncts whose "academic freedom and right to due process were limited." After calling her UFS office in desperation since he couldn't find work, she tried to find a teaching position for him since his academic career and his life were destroyed after his dismissal. She knew Yousry to be "very fine teacher" and a "man of stature." She rationalized that he should be considered "innocent until proven guilty which is part of the law in this country."

Essentially, Ms. O'Malley is either unfamiliar with the U.S. legal system or is feigning ignorance as a cover for her actions in her capacity as CUNY union official. Yousry was convicted along with co-conspirator Lynne Stewart in federal court and found guilty as charged for providing material support for terrorism and defrauding the government. How could a man with a terrorist conviction be "a man of stature?"

O'Malley conveniently forgot to mention a few things about Mohamed Yousry. He was removed from his adjunct position only after he was indicted, but was paid salary for the entire semester. O'Malley should also be grateful that Yousry did indeed receive contractual and legal rights of due process as his grievance followed all the proper channels from "step one" at the college level all the way up to arbitration with all expenses paid by dues paying union members. Mr. Yousry lost his case. This was all spelled out in plain English in The Patriot Returns 35.4. What makes her think that "the CUNY administration was going to roll out a welcome mat in CUNY for this terrorist and put him back on the payroll after his conviction in Federal Court and after CUNY prevailed in arbitration?"

She has yet to answer the following question raised in the same issue of The Patriot Returns: "Has Queen O'Malley ever made a "Job Wanted" announcement like this for a non-convicted, non-violent, peace loving American educator for a job in CUNY? There are hundreds of qualified people looking for teaching jobs. Why does she prefer convicted terrorists who are bent on harming our people and our nation, over peace-loving Americans?"

In a similar fashion, O'Malley sought to help find employment for former John Jay College adjunct Susan Rosenberg who was a Weather Underground terrorist convicted as an accomplice in the murder of two police officers and a security guard and for her role in the 1983 bombing of the United States Capitol and was imprisoned for a 58 year sentence for the possession of 700 pounds of dynamite and weapons. She served 16 years of her sentence until she was pardoned by President Bill Clinton.....

O'Malley had plenty of opportunities to take on Dr. Karkhanis and refute his accusations. She could have responded in the Clarion, the CUNY faculty union newspaper or the UFS faculty newsletter, which at one point she was an editor. Instead she chose to hire a lawyer and sue Karkhanis in New York State Supreme Court in order to silence his critical tongue and shut down The Patriot Returns. The poor retired professor, Dr. Karkhanis's First Amendment rights have been threatened more than anyone of the fakers in the room.....

At one point in the discussion the true condescending nature toward "people of color" slipped out accidentally. Almontaser described the KGIA as a school that caters to children of Arab descent immersed in their own culture, but welcomes students of all backgrounds and ethnicities as well. But only a dozen of the 60 students presently enrolled are Arab. Her dream that this school would function as a home to Arabs and Muslims was shattered, and now regrettably the school caters mostly to non-Arabs. One person in the audience said that mostly African Americans and Puerto Ricans enrolled their kids at KGIA because they think it would lead to a great job as a translator, as others in the room seemed to agree and chuckle quietly. How telling that they should look down their noses at the very people they claim to protect and defend, for attempting to rise above their surroundings and strive to build valuable marketable skills.

While posing as the paragons of diversity and multiculturalism, Ms. Almontaser and Prof. O'Malley betray a patronizing nature that they try to conceal. They demonize their critics in order to bully them into silence, while posturing as hapless victims of a hateful "vigilant squad" of anti-Muslim "attacks." The same type of scrutiny that they christen "guilt by association" that is used to vet politicians running for the highest offices must be utilized to examine the actions of lesser public officials.

No one who chooses a leadership role is immune from scrutiny. Echoing the sentiments of President Harry Truman, Hillary Clinton admonished Senator Obama: "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." If a public official were to associate with David Duke, participate in Stormfront rallies and condone the message of "White Pride" T-shirts, there would be universal condemnation and justified public outrage. Whether this person was a public school principle, a CUNY union official or Barack Obama, he or she would summarily be toast. Any teacher will tell you that a student caught hanging out with troublemakers would be severely reprimanded. These lesser public officials likewise should continue to be rigorously vetted and judged by virtue of the troublemakers they associate with and recruit. Any attempt to thwart the process of freedom of criticism via the courts or any other forms of intimidation or censorship, will be viewed as a direct threat to the First Amendment rights of all and a danger to our national security at a time of global crisis and Islamic terrorism.

Source




British schools in revolt over under-5s curriculum

A powerful coalition of England’s leading independent schools is demanding that the Government scale back its new national curriculum for the under-fives, claiming that it violates parents’ human rights by denying them the freedom to choose how they educate their children.

The Independent Schools Council (ISC), which represents 1,280 fee-paying schools educating more than 500,000 children, has written a blistering letter to Beverley Hughes, the Children’s Minister, complaining that the new curriculum will mean that the education of under-fives is subject to greater government interference than that of any other age group.

A leaked copy of the letter, seen by The Times, says that the curriculum, known as the Early Years Foundation Stage framework, will compromise its member schools’ independence. “This clumsy intrusion into the early years’ curriculum of independent schools is both unjustified and unnecessary. More importantly, this interference conflicts with the rights of parents to privacy in their home life, which includes the freedom to choose how they educate their children and to educate them free from the control of the state,” the letter states.

The letter, copied to the Schools Secretary, Ed Balls, also complains that the framework is likely to hold back children’s progress and to lower standards. George Marsh, who is headmaster of Dulwich College Preparatory School in South London and chairman of the Independent Association of Prep Schools, said he was concerned that the framework might eventually herald greater interference in the curriculum for older children.

The framework becomes law in the autumn and will affect all 25,000 nurseries and childcare settings in England, whether they are run by the state, charities or private companies. It sets out up to 500 developmental milestones between birth and primary school and requires under-fives to be assessed on 69 writing, problem solving and numeracy skills. The framework has come under heavy fire from a number of leading child development experts and academics, including members of the Government’s own early education advisory group.

Some argue that it relies too heavily on formal learning at the expense of free play, while others fear that its formal literacy targets will instill a sense of failure in teachers and children because they are beyond the reach of most under-fives. There are also fears that the legislation, which requires nursery staff to make constant written observations on children to note their progress, will interfere with teachers’ ability to interact with children.

Ms Hughes has so far resisted any attempts to water down the new curriculum, arguing that standards have to be set high to ensure that children from deprived backgrounds are given the same opportunities for learning in the crucial early years as middle-class children. She said that the 69 early learning goals were aspirations, and not targets.

The entrance of the ISC into the debate will raise the stakes considerably, not least because the independent schools have chosen parents’ human rights, not just child well-being, as their main point of attack. Unlike the national curriculum for schools, which does not apply to independent schools, the framework will apply to all pre-school settings.

The letter, signed by Chris Parry, the ISC’s chief executive, outlines a number of other objections to the framework, which will apply to 946 of its member schools, which cater for children up to five years old. It complains that an anomaly in the legislation will leave independent schools with stricter staffing controls than the state sector, requiring private schools to hire three or four adults for each reception class of 30, compared with one in the state sector. Mr Parry says: “It seems ridiculous that [the framework] should dictate rules relating to staffing in the independent sector and this prescription smacks of an ideological approach.”

The ISC also complains that the requirements for teachers to produce written observations on each child will result in teachers “acting as time and motion experts hovering around children with clipboards, Post-it notes and cameras to collect ‘evidence’ ”. This will not raise standards, but will “simply distract teachers from their teaching responsibilities”.

Mr Parry says that there was inadequate consultation with ISC members over the new law, adding that the regulatory impact assessment which followed the so-called consultation was “materially misleading”. ISC schools, the letter adds, have been given contradictory advice from local authorities as to how the framework should be implemented. Some have not been able to get any advice at all. It says that, given this lack of consultation, there should be a 12-month transition period for the implementation of the framework.

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families, said that individual parents would have the option of applying for an exemption for their child for some or all of the learning and development requirements of the framework. He added that the framework was flexible enough to support a wide range of approaches to education.

Source





26 May, 2008

The Nightmare We Call Our Schools

A friend of mine recently wrote to me saying, “My wife is retiring in June after thirty years of teaching. A high school degree means nothing. No Child Left Behind is an even bigger joke. It is a scary situation that could lead us to third world status, but we are prepared for that since we already teach English as a second language.”

I remember my Father, the son of Italian immigrants, telling me how, when he entered kindergarten in the early years of the last century, the teacher paired him with a boy who spoke both English and Italian. That was how he learned to speak English. He was not considered special, the school was full of immigrant’s children and they were expected to pick up English as best they could and as fast as they could. Later, my Father worked his way through New York University and became the youngest person at the time to pass the exam to become a Certified Public Account.

The difference between my Father’s era—and mine at mid-century—and the children in today’s schools is that there were subjects we were expected to master and grades reflected actual achievement.

Today’s schools reflect the opening quote from a friend of mine, a fellow with a master’s degree in education who tried his hand at teaching and discovered that his school was a jungle of incompetent teachers, indifferent administrators, and a majority of students for whom the expectation of good behavior and a dedication to learning was laughable. And his school was every public school.

That explains why Dr. Renato C. Nicolai, Ed.D, with forty years of teaching elementary and middle school as well as being an administrator in California schools, sat down and wrote “The Nightmare That is Public Education: An Expose of What Really Happens in Public Schools” ($17.95, iUniverse). I recommend this book to parents so that the blinders can fall from their eyes and especially to teachers who still have a desire to actually teach. “I believe teachers and principals work in school systems throughout the United States that are ineffective, poorly administered, and broken,” says Dr. Nicholai. He cited six “myths” the public is spoon-fed to keep them in the dark.

The Money Myth—“Schools perform poorly because they need more money.”

The Special Ed Myth—“Special education programs burden public schools, hindering their academic performance.”

The Myth of Helplessness—“Social problems like poverty cause students to fail; schools are helpless to prevent it.”

The Class Size Myth—“Schools should reduce class sizes; small classes would produce big improvements.”

The Certification Myth—“Certified or more experienced teachers are substantially more effective.”

The Teacher Pay Myth—“Teachers are badly underpaid.”

Politically conservative parents have an even greater problem with today’s schools that are totally in the grip of unions with a demonstrable leftist agenda. “The terms multiculturalism, modernism, diversity, secular humanism, individual self-expression, moral relativism, and political correctness identify the secular-progressive,” writes Dr. Nicholai. “When these terms are discussed with praise and commitment, you know you’re on the trail of persons who believe that traditional values, rights, and responsibilities are old-fashioned and out of step with modern thought.”

“Public schools are havens for liberal thought and practice. Secondary teachers are generally far left, left, or left-leaning.” The greatest complaint of parents with children in today’s school is that they are factories for indoctrination of values that run contrary to their own “old-fashioned” views.

It is doubtful still that parents have any idea how bad the situation is in their local schools, even if their children attend those in prosperous suburbs. Dr. Nicholai simply says they have been hoodwinked. Everyone participates from the students to the teachers to the administrators. “Actually, at most public high schools, chaos is just under the surface of the daily routine, with cops on campus and administrators supervising before and after school, during passing periods, and at lunches and recesses, with walkie-talkies and cell phones.” Not exactly the description of a serene, safe environment in which to learn or teach anything.

We as a nation have known about this as far back as 1983 when the National Commission on Excellence in Education issued its report, “A Nation at Risk.” Here we are, twenty-five years later, and the situation is infinitely worse. At a current average cost of $9,200 per student, an increase of 69% over 1980 per-pupil spending, taxpayers are spending more and getting worse results.

Source




British universities skew admissions towards poor pupils

This may not be as bad as some forms of affirmative action. Students who come from "sink" schools but who have yet scored well enough to hope for university entrance probably do have greater talent than similarly-scoring students from a better background

Britain's leading universities have overhauled their admissions procedures in an attempt to socially engineer their intake by favouring students with lower exam grades if they come from poor families. Admissions staff have been instructed to give extra points to candidates whose parents did not go to university and to favour talented applicants if they attended poorly performing comprehensives. The policies show attempts at positive discrimination in favour of those from deprived backgrounds as universities try to curb the domination of higher education by the best-performing state and independent schools.

The institutions that have drawn up the most systematic policies to favour pupils from poor families include Edinburgh and St Andrews. Cambridge and some departments at Bristol also use statistical models to favour pupils from less successful schools, while Liverpool and Manchester have signalled they will move in that direction. Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act show that numerous universities try to give various advantages to candidates from poor families.

The policies are a reaction to government pressure to change the social profile of higher education. John Denham, the universities secretary, has accused leading institutions of “social bias” against the poor, leading to a “huge waste” of talent. The institutions all deny social engineering. They insist their systems are designed to uncover candidates with the greatest academic potential regardless of social background. Critics, however, warn that universities cannot hope to cancel out the failings of secondary schools.

“It’s a minefield,” said Alison Wolf, professor of public sector management at King’s College London. “Of course there should be a mechanism for spotting those who can really make it and of course one should take into account where they went to school, but you cannot sort out a deep-seated social problem by giving kids extra points because of the schools they went to.”

At Edinburgh, ranked 14th in The Sunday Times University Guide, tutors use a complex points system to aid candidates from poorer backgrounds. All applicants for the most popular courses are given a score based on their GCSE grades and predicted A-levels, or their Scottish equivalents. Any candidate considered disadvantaged is awarded extra points – someone who would be the first in their family to attend university, for example, gets two. There is also a sliding scale of points to compensate those who attended poorly performing schools (up to six points) and another to help those from comprehensives in the surrounding area (up to two points).

The university advises staff that a total of eight points – in addition to the basic entry requirement of three Bs at A-level – should be enough to secure an offer. It means candidates from the most deprived backgrounds can win a place there with three Bs while most others would need at least two As and a B. “We are trying to look at students who don’t have advantages and to reflect their achievements in context,” said Elizabeth Lister, Edinburgh’s director of admissions. “If we operated a system simply of academic grades, [some] students would be extremely advantaged because they have such support and the quality of teaching and educational environment. So would that be fair?”

Cambridge operates a more limited points system, helping applicants whose schools come low down GCSE league tables. Geoff Parks, Cambridge’s admissions director, said: “Nobody gets in or out because of GCSEs; it is simply an attempt to capture what I would say is the unarguable fact that your performance at GCSE is influenced by the quality of the school you attend.”

Some departments at Bristol, including the law school, also use a points system. Oxford has a less formalised approach. It asks on application forms about the performance of a candidate’s school but has advised staff it should be used to “gain a general understanding” of the pupil.

St Andrews, which was attended by Prince William, marks application forms with code letters indicating whether the candidate is entitled to help under a series of “access” schemes. Its admissions handbook advises staff that “any requirements may be waived . . . to promote wider access”.

Other universities have a less sweeping approach. “It is never going to be an exact science but we do want to change our social profile so we are more representative of society,” said Steve Smith, vice-chancellor of Exeter University, where 27.5% of students come from the private sector, compared with more than 32% five years ago. “We may soften our offers, perhaps from AAA to AAB . . . for someone who comes from a school that performs badly.”

Several universities, including Birmingham and Manchester, do not automatically give extra points to pupils from poor backgrounds but run rigorous courses to find the most able. Kimberley Anderson, 19, a comprehensive pupil from Sutton Coldfield, benefited from the A2B scheme at Birmingham, in which pupils are put through a series of essays and assessments. Only if they do well are they given a head start in admissions. “A few did go to university from my school but not many. I was worried that you needed very high grades to get in,” Anderson said. “The programme lowers the grades you need and that’s why I chose Birmingham.”

Claims of university discrimination against middle-class candidates under government pressure erupted in 2003 when independent schools discouraged pupils from applying to some courses at Bristol and elsewhere, alleging unfair policies. Few of the new systems discriminate explicitly against independent schools, but that may change. Documents from Liverpool University state: “Students from independent schools appear to do less well than those from state schools and colleges, all other things being equal.” The university is now considering how data on the type of school attended by a candidate should affect their application.

David Willetts, the shadow universities secretary, warned there was a “real danger of rough justice” if institutions adopted blanket policies to compensate applicants from poorer backgrounds. “This results from universities having to pick up the consequences of very limited educational opportunities in too many parts of our country,” he said.

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25 May, 2008

Does Academe Hinder Parenthood?

Numerous reports and accounts suggest that balancing parenthood and academic careers can be difficult, particularly for women. Two new studies suggest that, possibly as a result, many female academics may be opting not to have kids.

One study compares female academics to those in other professions that have substantial training time and finds professors far less likely to procreate. The other study, in anthropology, finds male anthropologists more likely to have children than are their female counterparts — and finds significant evidence that women in academe (even in a discipline not seen as promoting outdated gender roles) find their careers limited by responsibilities at home.

The study comparing professions tracks recent household “birth events” (having a child aged zero or one) in households of physicians, lawyers, and academics — with the thinking being that all three professions require many years of training and long work hours to succeed. The study, based on 2000 Census data, finds that academics are the least likely to have experienced recent birth events, and that the gap is greatest for women. (Physicians are most likely to have had children recently, and lawyers are in the middle.)

Controlling for such factors as age, weekly hours worked, and race or ethnicity, male faculty members are 21 percent less likely than male physicians to have recently had a birth in their households. Controlling the same factors for women, those who are academics are 41 percent less likely than physicians to have recently had children. When controlling for marital status, the gap between female faculty members and physicians narrows, but the study finds that female faculty members are the most likely of the three job categories to be separated, divorced or widowed.

One factor that makes it easier for the male doctors to have recent offspring is that, in addition to earning more than professors, the M.D.’s are less likely to have child-care needs. That’s because male doctors are almost twice as likely to have spouses out of the labor force as are male academics (40 percent vs. 22 percent). In another sign of the impact of academic careers on parenthood, male professionals whose wives are physicians or lawyers are disproportionately likely to have had recent birth events, while male professionals whose wives are academics do not have any greater than average chance of new parenthood.

“Given the high rate at which academics marry other academics, it appears likely that the low fertility of female professors ... can account for the relative paucity of birth events among male faculty,” the report finds.

The study, “Alone in the Ivory Tower: How Birth Events Vary Among Fast-Track Professionals,” was presented at the meeting this spring of the Population Association of America. The authors are Nicholas Wolfinger, associate professor of family and consumer studies at the University of Utah; Mary Ann Mason, former graduate dean at the University of California at Berkeley and author of Mothers on the Fast Track; and Marc Goulden, director of data initiatives in academic affairs at Berkeley. Mason and Goulden are also members of the team that leads research work at the UC Faculty Family Friendly Edge, which promotes policies to help academics with family obligations.

While the population study compared academics to other professions, a committee of the American Anthropological Association has just released a report on the status of women in the field — featuring survey comparisons of male and female anthropologists. The report notes a number of differences between men and women in anthropology, and a greater satisfaction by men than women with the work environment. Men were more likely than women in a national survey of faculty members to feel that policies were supportive, while many women felt that they were burdened with a disproportionate share of administrative work in departments.

Key differences were found with regard to work/home balance: men in the field are more likely to be parents, but women are more likely to be more responsible for child care or other family obligations. For instance, of men who experienced a career interruption, 7.4 percent cited child care as the reason and 3.7 percent cited the experience of being a “trailing spouse,” one who moves when a partner is hired elsewhere. Of women who experienced career interruptions, 22.9 percent cited child care and 9.1 percent cited being a trailing spouse. And women were much more likely (52.9 percent to 5.6 percent) to anticipate a future career interruption due to child care responsibilities.

In looking at marital and parental status, men were more likely than women to be married and to have children. But given those gaps and the large gender gaps in career interruption due to childcare, one surprising figure in the survey is the percentage of men with children reporting that they are the primary caregiver — not as high a percentage as women with children, but high. (Of course, it is self-reported.)

Source




Britain: Disruptive pupils to be privatized

Private companies are to be given the go-ahead to take over the running of specialist units for teaching the country's most disruptive state school pupils. Ministers are considering allowing them to profit from the provision under a shake-up of the way specialist pupil referral units are run, outlined in a White Paper yesterday. The move is expected to pave the way for firms such as Group 4 Securicor and Serco, which are already highly involved in the public sector, to take over units. A spokesman for Group 4 Securicor said the firm would study the proposals and "assess whether there are opportunities to provide additional public services".

The proposal to allow the involvement of commercial companies alarmed Britain's biggest teachers' union, the National Union of Teachers, which said it was "a deeply worrying rubicon" for the Schools Secretary, Ed Balls, to cross. In the past, firms running local authority services have been allowed to make profits, but not mainstream schools.

Christine Blower, the acting general secretary of the NUT, said it would lead to companies "making economies in provision for the most vulnerable people". She added: "The last thing pupil referral units need is to be outsourced to private companies. Such a move would only increase their sense of isolation from other local authority provision."

The White Paper published research that showed that 99 per cent of pupils taught in the units failed to reach the Government's benchmark of five top-grade GCSE passes. Nearly nine out of 10 of the 135,000 children taught in the units every year also fail to obtain five GCSE passes at any grade.

Under the proposals, ministers plan to invite competition for running pupil referral units, nicknamed "sin bins". They are anxious to encourage private companies and voluntary groups or charities - such as the Prince's Trust and Barnardo's to run the units. Independent schools with a record of offering boarding places for deprived children in danger of being taken into care - such as Rugby - would also be invited to apply as would sponsors of the Government's flagship academies.

Sir Alan Steer, the headteacher appointed by the Government to head an inquiry into school discipline, warned that the pupil referral units had become "the forgotten service". "Vulnerable children can be placed with others who are displaying serious criminal tendencies," he said in a letter to Mr Balls. Mr Balls said he wanted the units to offer more places to pupils at risk of expulsion - rather than those already excluded from school. "We can then help them to access the right support before the behaviour spirals out of control and reaches the point of exclusion," he said.

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States holding back schools, warns Australian Federal minister

Sounds hopeful but a bit hard to follow.

The federal Government has effectively put the states and territories on notice over the reporting of school and student performance, saying they are hampering efforts to raise standards. Education Minister Julia Gillard has also announced an overhaul of the funding model for private schools, which is understood to include the controversial guarantees that keep funding for about 60 per cent of non-government schools at inflated levels.

In a speech to the Association of Independent Schools of NSW, Ms Gillard implicitly criticised states such as NSW, Queensland and South Australia, which are opposed to publicly releasing national test results. "It does not serve the interests of Australian students to have schooling policies delivered through structures and reporting systems which operate in parallel but allow no meaningful comparison or exchange between them," she said. "While different jurisdictions and authorities treat the use of data as part of a competition between themselves, they are short-changing the students and families who rely on them for a high-quality education."

Ms Gillard said she was not interested in establishing a crude form of league tables ranking schools according to raw test results. "(But) I believe there is an overwhelming public interest in developing a more comprehensive, more reliable and more open picture of school and student performance," she said.

Ms Gillard said the National Data Centre, announced last week in the budget, would act as an independent agency to validate and report on education statistics and that she expected the states and territories to contribute to its running costs. She said the centre would examine the results of national tests as well as other sources of data measuring the effect on education, such as socioeconomic status and early development. "I want to promote a more sophisticated understanding of what influences educational success," she said.

In the speech on Wednesday night, Ms Gillard said she expected a government review of the funding model for private schools to conclude in 2011 and new arrangements to start from 2013 that provide funding according to student needs as determined by socioeconomic status. The Government guaranteed existing funding levels for non-government schools until 2012 to defuse the issue during the election campaign last year. The "hit list" of private schools to lose money drawn up by previous Labor leader Mark Latham is credited with being a major factor in the ALP losing the 2004 election.

Ms Gillard described the schools funding system as "one of the most complex, most opaque and most confusing in the developed world" and she called for an end to the debate pitting public against private schools. [Stopping Leftist attacks on private school would be a good place to start]

As a first step to improving transparency, Ms Gillard will release the new socioeconomic status scores for all non-government schools, which will determine the amount of funding each school receives from next year to 2012. [Class-war Leftism again]

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24 May, 2008

Foolish charitable initiative

Bill Gates and Eli Broad didn't become billionaires by tinkering around with hopeless old models. Gates got rich selling the world new computer software it needed and wanted, while Broad's KB Homes provided better, cheaper houses. Unfortunately, offering something new and better isn't Broad and Gates's strategy for their joint education-reform effort. While these titans of industry might be consummate business winners, a forum sponsored by their $60 million Strong American Schools initiative last Wednesday made clear that when it comes to education, they're backing a tired, big-government loser.

Strong American Schools seeks to get education high on the presidential campaign agenda and push for "American education standards," "effective teachers in every classroom," and "more time and support for learning."

So what does $60 million get you when you're trying to put education on the national political map? So far, not much. Education has been almost invisible in the presidential race. During the panel discussion, ED in '08 chairman Roy Romer, a former governor of Colorado and superintendent of Los Angeles schools, argued that issues like the faltering economy and national security are hogging all the air time.

Romer is right about other issues eclipsing education and freezing out ED in '08's priorities, but there's more to it. The minor tweaks and empty rhetoric ED in '08 offers up - I mean, who isn't for effective teachers? - are as inspiring as bologna on Wonderbread . . . without mustard. Worse, the national standards Romer and most of the other panelists suggested sound like a more intrusive No Child Left Behind Act, the one education issue that has gotten significant campaign attention - because people loathe it.

"Hillary Clinton's most reliable applause line is about ending the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind education program," Bloomberg News recently reported. Barack Obama, for his part, wouldn't scrap NCLB, but would replace its test-driven accountability with multiple, non-threatening measures. Finally, while John McCain supports NCLB, his campaign website focuses on moving power from government to parents.

"[A] public education should be defined as one in which our public support for a child's education follows that child into the school the parent chooses," McCain's education statement declares. The Arizona senator might be onto something, but you'd have probably never guessed it if you had listened to the ED in '08 panel. I say "probably" because amidst all the panel's former and present government officials sat Mike Feinberg, co-founder of the wildly successful Knowledge is Power Program schools. Feinberg paid lip service to better standards from above but emphasized power from below, explaining that KIPP already has the effective teachers, longer school days, and culture of success the other panelists merely talked about because its schools are independent and parents choose them. KIPP succeeds because it isn't controlled by politics.

Feinberg's fellow panelists, unfortunately, didn't get his message - one a lot like McCain's - and continued to obsess over moving authority further up government ladders and crafting classic political strategies such as "consensus building" and "leadership." They just didn't see, or refused to acknowledge, that the key to transforming education is autonomous, parent-chosen schools.

Ironically, the countries the panelists are most afraid will pass us by have clearly gotten the memo about free markets. China and India have explosive economies because they've torn down stultifying economic controls. In education, the ascendant South Koreans consume more private schooling than the people of any other industrialized nation. Even parents in the world's poorest slums know the score. Ongoing work by British researcher James Tooley in impoverished places like Ga, Ghana, and Hyderabad, India, find poor parents turning in droves to for-profit private schools in order to move their kids ahead.

And the message isn't just being heard abroad. States are also getting it. Indeed, on the same day the Ed in '08 panelists got together to chat about their favorite top-down policy proposals, Georgia became the sixth state to offer tax credits for donations to private scholarship funds. All told, 14 states and the District of Columbia offer tax credit or voucher programs, and the vast majority allow charter schools.

School choice - really, just plain freedom - is where the future's at, and if Gates and Broad want to replicate in education the success they've had in business, they'd better change their product fast.

Source




An Academic Bill of Rights in Australia?

By Rafe Champion

The Australian Liberal Students' Federation and the Young Liberals have unleashed an attack on leftwing political bias in university teaching. The problem is real but the proposed remedy may not be effective, beyond lifting awareness of the problem. An alternative is proposed. Taking a cue from the US Students for Academic Freedom organisation, the Federation and the Young Liberals are pushing for an Academic Bill of Rights to promote changes to curricula, hiring of staff without regard to political affiliations, remedies for students who believe that they are being marked down for political incorrectness, etc.

Certainly there is cause for concern about the level of bias in course contents and the attitudes of many teachers towards conservative and non-left liberal ideas. Symptoms of the problem include:

* The dozen or score of economically illiterate books purporting to critique economic rationality, one of them edited by a man who is widely regarded as the leading public intellectual in the land.

* A collection of papers, workshopped through the Academy of the Social Sciences, that emerged rather like a set of anti-Liberal Party political pamphlets.

* Widespread incomprehension of the ideas of Hayek and classical liberalism. So the then leader of the opposition (now the Prime Minister) could launch a public attack on a crude caricature of Hayek without arousing widespread hoots of mirth or gasps of horror from opponents and supporters respectively.

The point is that nobody can consider themselves broadly educated at present without the same grasp of Hayek's ideas (in outline, not in detail) that we expect people with tertiary education to have on things like Darwinian evolution; Mendelian genetics; or the way that the Copernican revolution and Einstein advanced physics.

Similarly everyone in the relevant fields should be familiar with the work of Jacques Barzun on education and cultural studies, Ren, Wellek on literary studies, Karl B_hler and Ian D Suttie on language studies, psychology and psychoanalysis, Bill Hutt on industrial relations, Peter Bauer on third world development, Stanislav Andresky on the methods of the social sciences, Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian school of economics.

The push for the Bill of Rights will generate a great deal of angst without any guarantee of achieving either the Bill or the desired improvements, even if the bureaucratic systems are put in place to support it. Top down intervention is most likely to generate resistance and resentment, to politicise and personalise the problems in a divisive manner.

A non-bureaucratic, "bottom up" alternative is proposed. At the very least this could run in parallel to the proposed Liberal initiative and it should enlist the support of people of good will of all political persuasions. Investigation and discussion should proceed on two fronts; one is the question of course contents, the other is the broad issue of what tertiary education is supposed to achieve.

Taking the second issue first. A recent Unleashed article 'Back to school' (2 May 08) revealed, yet again, a great deal of disappointment and dismay over the university experience for many students. The simple fact of the matter is that Australia followed the US experience, learning nothing from it, despite the clear warning in Barzun's 1968 book on The American University. The sector expanded too rapidly for the process of education to keep up: that is, the discovery of the disciplines and rewards of serious, though not pedantic, teaching, learning and scholarship. But that is a topic for another day.

On course contents, there is a need for a data base on what is being taught, a survey of course outlines and reading lists to identify courses that are not providing students with an introduction to the best thinkers and ideas in the field. This should lead to suggestions for improvements. This may be done in a manner that is contentious and divisive, but it should be possible to proceed in way that is illuminating and educational in its own right. The aim is to recruit the spirit of cooperative scholarship, using a base of evidence to advance the cause of learning and scholarship. There is no need to deny university teachers their own interests, their points of view and their politics. The question is how the courses stack up when they are examined in a climate of civil and robust debate.

The Liberal initiative has been smeared as an attempt to restrict freedom of speech. On the evidence in hand, it is no such thing. It is better described as a long overdue reaction to the radicalisation of the campuses in the aftermath of the Vietnam debate in the 1960s and 1970s.

The task of investigation, reporting and suggestions for improvements can start in a modest way, wherever people with time and energy are prepared to start the process. There was a small beginning a couple of decades ago, with a survey of courses in politics at the 21 universities at the time. It was very hard to find any reference to Hayek and his work. What is the situation today, how much has changed in two decades?

The process needs to be sustained and it needs to generate debate on campus and beyond, wherever there are people with an interest in the life of the mind, in education, in ideas, in maintaining good order in "the house of intellect" (as Barzun called it).

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23 May, 2008

British student union rejects academic's IQ claims

The response from the Left has been a little more muted this time. No attempt to dispute the facts -- which have been well publicised at least since the work of Jensen in 1969, not to mention the big monograph by Herrnstein & Murray

Elite universities are failing to recruit working-class students because IQ is, on average, determined by social class, according to an academic. Bruce Charlton, a reader in evolutionary psychiatry at Newcastle University, claims that the greater proportion of students from higher social classes at highly selective universities is not a sign of admissions prejudice but rather the result of simple meritocracy.

Student union leaders responded angrily to his claim, which was also dismissed by a minister. Charlton's paper, reported today in Times Higher Education, says: "The UK government has spent a great deal of time and effort in asserting that universities, especially Oxford and Cambridge, are unfairly excluding people from low social-class backgrounds and privileging those from higher social classes. "Evidence to support the allegation of systematic unfairness has never been presented. Nevertheless, the accusation has been used to fuel a populist 'class war' agenda. Yet in all this debate a simple and vital fact has been missed: higher social classes have a significantly higher average IQ than lower social classes."

He argues: "The highly unequal class distributions seen in elite universities compared with the general population are unlikely to be due to prejudice or corruption in the admissions process. On the contrary, the observed pattern is a natural outcome of meritocracy. Indeed, anything other than very unequal outcomes would need to be a consequence of non-merit-based selection methods."

The National Union of Students described the paper as "wrong-headed, irresponsible and insulting". Gemma Tumelty, NUS president, said: "Of course, social inequality shapes people's lives long before they leave school, but the higher education sector cannot be absolved of its responsibility to ensure that students from all social backgrounds are given the opportunity to fulfil their potential ... many talented individuals from poor backgrounds are currently not given the same opportunities as those from more privileged backgrounds. This problem will not be addressed as long as academics such as Bruce Charlton are content to accept the status quo and do nothing to challenge the inherent class bias in education."

Sally Hunt, of the University and College Union for acedemic staff, said: "It should come as little surprise that people who enjoy a more privileged upbringing have a better start in life. However, research has shown that students from state schools outperform their independent contemporaries when they reach university." Bill Rammell, the higher education minister, told the Times Higher Education that Charlton's arguments had a definite tone of "people should know their place".

Source. Another comment here




Australia: Reading, writing and all things irrelevant

Curricula have become political footballs

THE social engineers are hard at it again in our schools. Now they have added gambling studies to the endless list of non-core subjects required to be addressed in a day that is something less than six hours long. Across the state, teachers' cupboards are bulging with "resources" on road safety, personal health, obesity, safe foods, civic pride, values, drugs and alcohol, multi-culturalism, child protection, life skills, bullying and anti-homophobia. There's even a program now to teach rugby league in primary classrooms, promoting NRL players as role models for students. Not long ago it was recommended students be taught how to prepare for bushfires.

Despite a stream of warnings, schools are drowning in a sea of worthy but non-essential subjects peddled by well-meaning but misguided people -- usually politicians. It is generally accepted schools should spend at least 80 per cent of their time on key subjects of the curriculum, while the remaining 20 per cent is shared between an exhaustive list of other activities. Governments love to trumpet the success stories of the education system but thousands of students are still struggling with basic work such as reading, comprehension and numeracy.

Sure, the mandarins at the Department of Education and Training will claim they are getting round the problem of subject overload by integrating disciplines so that more than one can be studied at once. The idea is the kids can bone up on their numeracy skills while working on a gambling program. Or some literacy work can be included in lessons on personal health. But even with double or multi-skilling, the school day is in danger of becoming so overloaded with non-core subjects that the depth and quality of literacy and numeracy has to suffer.

For some time principals have feared their schools are becoming a dumping ground for programs that amount to little more than "social engineering". A few years back one school leader calculated that more than 60 extra education tasks were proposed in a 12-month period -- most of them by politicians or community interest groups. Many teachers believe most of these are issues that should be dealt with at home and are hot in claiming that parents have been abrogating their responsibilities.

Over the next three days a million students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 will sit the first national assessments in literacy and numeracy. In a country as wealthy and healthy as Australia, good results will be expected. But our children and their teachers could be going into these tests ill-prepared. Maybe Prime Minister Kevin Rudd needs to call another 2020 summit to work out exactly how schools should be spending their precious time. Before all the programs piling up on their desks collapse under their own weight.

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22 May, 2008

Galloping bureaucratic bloat ("non-instructional expenditure") is siphoning off the college tuition dollars

Across sectors of higher education, only a minority of spending by colleges supports direct instructional costs, according to a report being released today as part of an effort to reframe the debate over college costs. "The Growing Imbalance: Recent Trends in U.S. Postsecondary Education Finance," is the result of an unusual attempt to change the way colleges and policy makers analyze higher education. The report - issued for the first time today and now to be an annual project - examines not only revenues, but how colleges actually spend their money.

After years in which people have read about tuition going up, and about state support covering smaller shares of public higher education budgets, the idea is to focus on what results from these and other trends. Some of the findings challenge conventional wisdom - such as the widely quoted belief that the top expense for higher education is the personnel costs associated with professors and other employees.

The report was produced by the Delta Cost Project, part of the Lumina Foundation for Education's Making Opportunity Affordable program. The overarching thesis of the work is that higher education will do a better job of serving students if everyone is aware of where the money goes - not just how much college costs. By examining the different spending patterns at different types of institutions, the report notes growing gaps among sectors and among items receiving financial support. For example, spending per student at private research universities is almost twice that of public research universities.

The following data show both the public-private gap and the relatively small share of funds that goes to instructional costs (faculty and departmental costs related to what goes on in the classroom), compared to other education-related costs (such as student services and admissions) and non-educational costs (primarily research and service activities).

While the disparities in these figures alone may raise questions to many people, the report notes other factors that may make the figures even more troublesome. One is that spending per student at public community colleges and master's institutions has gone down, as enrollments have grown and increases in support for these institutions have been modest. Another key factor is that the institutions that spend less and are heading downward in spending per student are the very institutions (along with for-profit institutions) that are enrolling a disproportionate number of the minority and first generation college students whose arrival in higher education is seen by many as crucial to the country's economic success.

Further, across sectors, spending on instruction has become relatively flat, and is increasing at slower rates than in the past. For example, at private research universities, the report finds that the average percentage change in median spending per full-time enrolled student on instruction was 2.2 percent in the period 1987-1996. But in the period 1998-2005, the increase was only 1 percent. (For public research universities, the figures were 0.5 percent and 0.4 percent in those two periods.) Jane Wellman, executive director of the project and author of the report (along with Donna M. Desrochers and Colleen M. Lenihan), said that while the data are not shocking to those who work in the field, "a lot of people will be surprised that the big driver of spending is not instruction."

Another surprise to some, although probably not to those at public colleges, will be the gap in public-private spending rates. "The private research universities are really pulling away," she said.

In addition, the data raise questions about some of the common strategies suggested for public higher education to support its mission at a time of constrained state budgets. While the data clearly show that public research universities attract considerable research support, that money is for specific projects and has not closed the gap in instructional spending, Wellman said. Further, even as public colleges have raised tuition and raised much more money from private sources, those funds have only made up for some of the losses in state support and have not allowed public higher education to keep up with the privates.

Too many legislators, Wellman said, believe that "if you cut money for higher ed, you can replace it" with tuition revenue and fund raising. The reality, she said, is that "there is no more private money pay for the enterprise than there was 20 years ago." "They can't fund raise their way out of this," she said.

The dramatic gaps between public and private spending are in large part attributable to the category of non-instructional, education related costs. At research universities, private spending is more than twice public spending per FTE.

This is where spending is on "amenities and the arms race" of competition, Wellman said - especially in student services. Many critics of higher education focus on this type of spending, equating it with the much discussed competition for the best climbing walls in campus recreation centers. Wellman stressed that much of the spending in this category is actually very focused on education: computing, advising services, counseling services and so forth. Much of this spending is also "consumer driven," in that colleges are responding to their perceptions of services that students and parents want, she added.

Wellman stressed that the idea of pointing out this and other spending patterns was not to declare such spending bad, but to ask questions about whether it was justified by evidence. "Better counseling might be a cost-effective expenditure," she said. But the question colleges may want to ask is whether they can show that. Does spending on a new writing center translate into better student performance in the classroom and in turn to better completion rates? Asking such questions, Wellman said, would help colleges identify both areas for improvement and areas for cost savings (or even more spending).

Similarly, she said that focusing on spending will draw attention to the questionable impact of tuition discounting. Advocates of tuition discounting tend to focus on the impact on applications or yield rates. But looking at spending draws attention to the way tuition discounting (when not needed to provide access for low-income students) reduces tuition revenue, and in turn reduces available funds to spend on educational needs.

Along with the data on spending categories, the report includes sections examining tuition and demographic trends. But the portion of the report that is notably different from other analyses is the emphasis on spending. In keeping with the idea of the Delta Project, the data are being made available for use by colleges and others seeking to do their own analyses. Regional groupings - broken down by sector - are also available on the project's Web site.

What this all adds up to in the report may depress those writing tuition checks. For while the report finds evidence of cost cutting, especially in the public sector, there is no evidence that the changes have led to tuition reductions. And so students are left with insufficient data, the report says, on what they are getting for their tuition dollars. There may be good answers, but the report suggests that they haven't been offered in enough detail to date - either by colleges or by the state lawmakers who are making decisions that dictate both tuition rates and college spending patterns.

In the report's closing section, it poses two questions: "Are college tuitions rising because spending is growing? If so, where is the money going?" The answer: "For more than three-quarters of the students enrolled in higher education, the answer is no: Students at public institutions are paying for a higher proportion of costs, but their money is not translating into a higher level of service. These students are paying more, and getting less. For students in private, nonprofit institutions, the answer is clearly yes: Students are paying more, and the institutions are spending more. But even here, there is not clear evidence that greater spending is translating to improvements in degree productivity."

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Official admission: Big failures in British schools

Progress in raising school standards has "stalled", amid fears that the attainment gap between rich and poor shows no signs of closing, the Chief Inspector of Schools suggested yesterday. Christine Gilbert, the head of Ofsted, said it was unacceptable that 20 per cent of pupils still failed to master basic English and maths when they left primary school, while 10 per cent of 16 to 18-year-olds who dropped out of education were not in work.

The link between these two groups of underperformers was very strong and was showing no sign of weakening, she said. "We are not seeing enough movement there. The gap between the `haves' and the `have-nots' is not reducing quickly enough," Ms Gilbert said. "We think standards have stalled and we think we need to accelerate improvement, and we are looking at ways of doing that."

Ms Gilbert's comments appear to contradict claims by ministers of "unprecedented improvements" and a continual and "unarguable evidence of rising achievement" in school standards.

They come after research from the Conservatives suggesting that the school system is dividing children along social and economic lines. Fewer than a third of children in the most deprived 10 per cent of households in England gain at least five GCSEs, including English and maths, at grades A* to C. In those areas that make up the richest 10 per cent, more than half do.

Ms Gilbert, outlining radical reforms to England's school inspections, said that they would be more tailored to the performance of individual schools, with greater focus on underperforming schools. Rather than study overall or average school performance, inspectors would focus more on the progress made by different groups of children, including the weakest and the most vulnerable as well as the brightest.

Under the reforms, failing schools will be monitored two or three times a year. Schools judged as "satisfactory" will be inspected every three years, unless they are struggling to improve, in which case they will receive inspections every 12 to 18 months. The best schools will be subjected to a "light touch" inspection every six years, with a short monitoring "health check" after three years.

Ms Gilbert said that GCSEs and national curriculum tests results may play a greater part in inspectors' judgments in future. Inspectors will also take more account of the views of parents in deciding when a school needs to be inspected, through conducting regular surveys. Pupils will also be surveyed regularly. In addition to being asked how happy, healthy and safe they feel, they may be asked how bored they are at school, Ms Gilbert said. A consultation on how Ofsted will fulfil a new government requirement to measure child wellbeing will begin over the summer.

Ms Gilbert said that the inspectorate would trial "lightning" inspections, in which teachers would receive no warning before a visit, so that Ofsted could "see the school as it really is". Schools currently receive two days' warning of an Ofsted inspection. Inspectors are likely to spend more time observing lessons, but no inspection will last longer than two days.

Teachers criticised the proposals, which are open to consultation until August 11. Christine Blower, acting general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said that the "punitive" inspection system would lead staff to resign. "I can see no virtue in nonotice inspections. Schools will feel that an inspection visit is the equivalent of Russian roulette, and inspectors could visit when half the school is on a school trip," she said.

Nansi Ellis, of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, questioned the idea of enabling parents to trigger an inspection. "We would like parents to take any concerns about a school to the school itself in the first instance, with the confidence the school will sort out any problems," she said.

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21 May, 2008

Democrats for School Choice

When Florida passed a law in 2001 creating the Corporate Tax Credit Scholarship Program for underprivileged students, all but one Democrat in the state legislature voted against it. Earlier this month, lawmakers extended the program – this time with the help of a full third of Democrats in the Legislature, including 13 of 25 members of the state's black caucus and every member of the Hispanic caucus. What changed?

Our guess is that low-income parents in Florida have gotten a taste of the same school choice privileges that middle- and upper-income families have always enjoyed. And they've found they like this new educational freedom. Under the scholarship program, which is means-tested, companies get a 100% tax credit for donations to state-approved nonprofits that provide private-school vouchers for low-income families.

The program already serves some 20,000 students. The expansion will allow it to assist an additional 6,000. It's no surprise that poor families would embrace educational options, given that their government-assigned schools are clearly failing their children. The high school graduation rate for black students in Florida is 45% overall, 38% for black males. The 52% graduation rate for Hispanics is also nothing to brag about.

What's encouraging is that these parents have managed to convey their pro-choice sentiments to their representatives, who are responding even though voucher programs infuriate powerful liberal special interest groups like the teachers unions. Given that 70% of the program participants are black or Hispanic, you'd think Democrats would be taking the lead on a measure that mostly benefits their traditional constituency. Apparently they needed a little prodding, but we're glad to see they did the right thing.

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Amazing: Australian schoolkids to do a serious study of Australian literature

But only in NSW -- and even there the "greats" (Henry Lawson, Banjo Paterson, C.J. Dennis) seem to be missing

HIGH school students in NSW will have to study at least four works of Australian literature by the end of Year 10 under changes to the English syllabus. The NSW Board of Studies has reworked the English syllabus for primary and secondary students to promote Australian literature in the classroom. The changes specify the study of printed literature - books, poems and plays - over multimedia forms such as film, television shows and websites.

The move follows a directive last year from NSW Education Minister John Della Bosca to strengthen the study of Australian literature in schools. Mr Della Bosca yesterday said a study of Australian literature was important in providing a sense of identity and insight into our national culture. "While Australian literature is already featured across the primary and secondary English syllabuses, these proposals will help to ensure that all students experience the wisdom, knowledge, and talent of our authors," he said. The board will start consultations with teachers later thismonth to draw up lists ofsuggested books and writers for study. The changes could be phased in as early as next year.

Books currently recommended for primary school students include Animalia by Graeme Base, Snugglepot and Cuddlepie by May Gibbs, Five Times Dizzy by Nadia Wheatley, and Father Sky and Mother Earth by Oodgeroo Noonuccal. In high schools, suggested books for Years 7 to 10 include Storm Boy by Colin Thiele, Playing Beattie Bow by Ruth Park, My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin and The Getting of Wisdom by Henry Handel Richardson. Senior students already study Australian literature including Peter Carey's The True History of the Kelly Gang, David Malouf's Fly Away Peter, Patrick White's The Aunt's Story and Tim Winton's Cloudstreet.

But the board is proposing a new Year 11 module for Extension English students in Australian literature, covering traditional and contemporary writers. In primary schools, the new syllabus directs that students are given "a substantial experience of Australian literature". This includes regular reading, with the teacher, in groups or independently, of Australian picture books as well as extended study and close study, either as a class or in groups, of novels and poetry. The syllabus also suggests units of work that cross other subject areas, using a detailed study of Australian literature as a link into teaching history, for example.

High school students in Years 7-8 and 9-10 are already required to study at least two works of fiction, films, non-fiction books, drama and a wide range of poetry for each two-year period. The syllabus will now be changed to require that at least two works covering all the genres be "drawn from different types of Australian literature in the print medium". "The selected texts must include Australian literature and other Australian texts including those that give insights into Aboriginal experiences and multicultural experiences in Australia," it says.

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20 May, 2008

Morehouse And The Myth Of “Diversity”

Post below recycled from Discriminations. See the original for links

Morehouse College in Atlanta, alma mater of Martin Luther King Jr. and widely regarded as one of the top colleges in the country, and the best for black men, has just made the news by graduating the first white valedictorian in its 141 year history. I’m not sure how many non-black students were enrolled at Morehouse this year, but I’m sure there weren’t many. Back in 1998 an article mentioned that a freshman from Indianapolis “was one of two white full-time students at Morehouse this year,” and added:

Enrollment of white students at Morehouse, founded in 1867, varies from none some years to two or three in a year, said a spokesman.

But wait. Haven’t we loudly, insistently, and incessantly been told that without pigmentary “diversity” there can be no real education? How can “segregated” Morehouse be so successful? By 1998, it’s clear, Morehouse was clearly feeling a bit defensive about its absence of “diversity.”

“Morehouse has always had a diverse, international faculty and staff,” college president Walter E. Massey. “For years ... the school maintained an interracial vision and hosted interracial conferences in defiance of Georgia’s Jim Crow laws.”

So can we assume that if an institution has an “interracial vision” it doesn’t have to actually be interracial? This sounds like “diversity for thee, but not for me.” Not at all, says Sterling Hudson, currently dean of admissions at Morehouse.

I think some of our alumni are a little nervous about a white student graduating from Morehouse with all of its rich history for producing African-American male leaders. But I don't think it's contradictory at all.... “We’re not aggressively pursuing white students,” says Hudson. “But like every other college, we’re interested in diversity. So, if a white student becomes interested in Morehouse — of course we are going to treat him like any other student.”

Of course in this regard Morehouse is not at all like — it’s more like the polar opposite of — every other selective college in the country, all of whom, in the name of “diversity,” are aggressively competing for and courting the unfortunately small pool of highly qualified minority students. “Of course” those other colleges do anything but “treat [minority applicants] like any other student[s].” But that’s not all Hudson said. He continued:

“The interesting thing about [valedictorian] Josh [Packwood]’s experience is that he had a full Morehouse experience,” says Hudson. “When he marches across the stage on May 18 and receives his diploma, he’s going to be a Morehouse Man in every way — except ethnicity.” “I don’t think ethnicity makes the difference; it’s what’s in his heart.”

Perhaps the rest of selective higher education in this country should follow the lead laid out by Morehouse and its valedictorian.

“What Morehouse stands for at the end of the day, and what Dr. King epitomized, it’s not about black or white, it’s about the content of [a person’s] character,” says Packwood. “It’s about me, representing Morehouse in that light -- not as a white man or a black man.”

I suppose there’s nothing ironic about Martin Luther King’s vision being, even if somewhat awkardly, alive and well at his alma mater while the remainder of selective higher education institutions in the country trip over themselves and each other in their racial classifying and their frantic attempts to produce racial balancing. It’s not ironic; it’s worse.




Pro-Abortion Expression Permitted, Pro-Life Forbidden at a major Australian University

The Student Union at Queensland University have shown themselves to be opposed to differing opinion and free speech like many other secular universities around the world. The school's Newman Society has been censored and threatened with disaffiliation from the student union because union leaders believed the group's "pro-woman" and "pro-pregnancy" campaign took a stand against abortion. The poster and leaflets, displayed on a booth outside the student caf,, did not mention abortion but featured a photograph of an eight week old child in the womb, and offered compassion and support for young women who might find themselves facing the difficult challenge of an unplanned pregnancy.

Elise Nally, third-year applied science student and Newman Society secretary, said in a report by The Australian that the union's action was totalitarian and against free speech. "I'd like to know what laws we've broken," Nally said. "The union is acting like a dictator."

Joshua Young, president of the student union, gave this explanation for the union's actions against Catholics on campus: "I know the Newman Society thinks the union is being heavy handed, but the student union voted in 1993 for free, safe abortion on demand so all women have a genuine choice when faced with unwanted pregnancy." From a student body of 30,000, a total of approximately 3,500 voted in the 1993 referendum, with about 1900 in favor of abortion rights, 1400 against, and 200 abstaining. When asked if the vote precludes other views being advocated in campus debate, Young said, "It does."

The Australian Catholic Students Association (ACSA), which represents Catholic students in schools throughout Australia, issued a statement criticizing the decision of the student union. The statement said that pro-life groups had been active at the University of Queensland for five years after the student referendum's passage in 1993 and no disciplinary action was taken against them. The ACSA argued that the referendum only established the school as a pro-choice campus, and did not require any particular viewpoint to be suppressed.

"ACSA is concerned that the use of a 15 year old referendum by the UQ Union to take disciplinary action against the Society raises serious concerns for students' freedom of speech and the implications this might have on other student groups at The University of Queensland," the statement declared.

ACSA National President Camillus O'Kane said that, "if the truth becomes something we can simply vote for, it becomes a weapon that can be used against others. This is why freedom of speech is one of the guiding principles of our society. It is a shame that this incident has occurred at one of Australia's leading universities, a place of learning where we should be able to express our views freely."

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19 May, 2008

"Zero tolerance": For student safety or to control them?

Massacre. Suicide-bombing. Mass murder. Conspiracy. WMDs. They love those inflammatory words, don't they? Not just adolescents, who use the words as adolescents would, without gauging their impact, but also law enforcement types, who should know better. The climate that makes chatter of school shootings so endemic can be attributed to the few deranged souls who think up mayhem fantasies in their miserable little journals and cyber-caves. But they're not the only ones responsible.

"Massacre" and "conspiracy to commit murder" were the words (and official charges) of choice when three DeLand Middle School seventh-graders were arrested in March after their "plot" to gun down other students and themselves was uncovered. "The investigators determined the students did not appear to have weapons or means to carry out the threats," a Volusia County Sheriff's spokesman said soon after their arrest. Nevertheless, word of a massacre averted and severe punishment deserved spread through the community. The three children's grind through the system is only beginning.

What, so far as we know, had these children done? One of them posted threatening messages and satanic idiocies on his MySpace page, along with the obligatory references to the Columbine school massacre. No matter how baseless, those references have become iconic for anyone angling for his 15 minutes of fearsome fame. Innumerable journal entries by seething adolescents, in print and online, are no doubt filled with Columbine fantasies. They're ignored, as adolescent scrawls generally (or absent more incriminating evidence) should be regardless of medium. Once in a while they're "uncovered." What should be the occasion for a parent-child reality check, a dressing down or at most a trip to the local counselor, is turned over to law enforcement instead. The cycle of public fear and sensationalism kicks in. For the children in question, humiliation and cruelty (what any form of juvenile-criminal proceedings and detention consist of these days) follow.

There's been a spate of alleged plots in schools lately, locally and elsewhere. Spring is the season of threats. It's stupid students' way of commemorating the Columbine and Virginia Tech massacres, which took place April 20, 1999 and April 16, 2007, claiming 47 lives between them (the three gunmen included). Earlier this month two schools in New Smyrna Beach swirled with rumors of an attack. Since April, Malcolm X College and St. Xavier University in Chicago, Oakland University in Auburn Hills, Mich., and three parochial schools in Michigan all closed when threats scribbled their way around each campus. Tales of suspicious backpacks, rumors endowed with the power of errant bullets and bad jokes elevated to threat levels worthy of the Department of Homeland Security's paranoia locked down or shut down schools in Oveido, Pittsburgh and South Bend.

And police in Chesterfield County, S.C., in what's becoming a habit of pre-emptive arrests based on private thoughts rather than action, arrested a high school senior who'd been writing threatening messages in his journal for up to a year. He'd referred to an alleged suicide-bombing plot against his own high school as "Columbine III." The boy's parents tipped off police in that one. The boy was charged, if you can believe this, with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction.

What almost all these allegations have in common is disproportion -- the disproportionate fantasies of the alleged perpetrators, whose frames of reference are cribbed from a culture that blurs the lines between video games, entertainment, celebrity and violence; and the disproportionate response from schools and law enforcement, whose overzealous narratives incite fear by feeding into overheated anxieties. But there's glamour in the language of violence and humiliation. Witness the Daytona Beach police chief's fetish for the word "scumbag," now emblazoned (as "scumbag eradication team") with an obscene image on shirts for the teenagers in the department's Police Explorer program. There's power in the language of violence supposedly averted, even if the upshot of it all is more irrational fear, not more security, and more children slammed into a juvenile-justice system designed to scare and punish, not heal and reintegrate.

We live, it's true, in one of the most violent states in the most violent society of the developed world, the most crime-ridden, the most prison-happy (2.3 million people behind bars and rising). Schools might reflect their world. But sensational incidents aside, schools remain among the safest quasi-public spaces anywhere -- not because they've been turned into fortresses of discipline and order, which they have, but because schools are simply not useful to criminals. Rather, they're being made too useful to the policing mentality of zero-tolerance discipline, perpetual surveillance and unquestioned authority that mirrors a larger transformation of society. Security is the excuse. But obedience to authority has little to do with security, and everything to do with control. Schools in this bogus age of terror are the cheapest, most impressionable, most unquestioning incubators of mass submission.

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Assessing British children can only improve their education

The whingeing [whining] about tests for 11-year-olds last week was predictable and depressing. To sum up what Chris Woodhead says below: The "experts" are offering little more than feelgood crap

Last week MPs on the education select committee jumped on what might well now be an unstoppable bandwagon and demanded an urgent rethink of the national curriculum tests in primary schools. Terrified by the prospect of a poor league table position, too many schools were, its members argued, force-feeding their pupils. Joy, spontaneity and creativity have been driven from the classroom. Something must be done, and now.

The fact that the problem might lie not with the tests, but with teachers who cannot accept the principle of accountability does not seem to have occurred to the committee. Neither did its members explain how problems in failing schools can be solved if we do not know which schools are failing.

At the moment, children are assessed by teachers in English and maths at seven and sit more formal tests in English, maths and science at 11. Two periods of testing in four years of primary education. What’s wrong, moreover, with some preparation for tests if the tests assess worthwhile skill and knowledge?

I have to confess to a dreadful sense of deja vu. Sixteen years ago the then Tory education secretary, Ken Clarke, horrified by the sloppiness he found in many of the primary schools he visited, asked Robin Alexander and Jim Rose to research what became known as the Three Wise Men report. I was the third wise man, parachuted in later to represent the interests of the fledgling national curriculum.

Now Professor Alexander is heading up a review of primary education, funded by a charitable foundation, and Sir Jim Rose has been asked by ministers, eager not to be upstaged, to mount his own investigation – though testing has been excluded from the terms of his report.

In retrospect, the Three Wise Men report was one of my more amusing professional experiences. At the time it was a nightmare. Jim Rose is a nice man, but he is not the Clint Eastwood of primary education. Consensus makes his day. I found that Robin Alexander bridled at any challenge to his opinions. He elevated preciousness into an art form. Working with him was marginally less stressful than being married to Heather Mills.

It was touch and go, but in the end we did it, and Robin even turned up for the press conference. The importance of subject knowledge; the need for teachers to teach the whole class and to stop trying to engage individual pupils; the vital role of assessment: the report emphasised commonsense educational truths that had been drowned by a tsunami of child-centred 1960s twaddle.

For all his prickliness, I never knew what Robin Alexander really thought. Now I think I do. Interim reports from his review show that he may well be part of the malaise Ken Clarke tried to cure. Reading a recent lecture he gave, I found just one reference to “teaching”, and that very much in passing. Instead he waxed lyrical about how children are “natural and active learners”; how learning takes place everywhere; how children learn from each other and not just adults; and how “we need to engage with and listen to children, and not just talk at them”.

There is a truth, of course, in each of these platitudes. What worries me is the sub text, which actually is not that sub. Throughout the lecture he cites evidence that his inquiry has uncovered – of “the loss of childhood”, of the “overcrowded” primary curriculum, of our “high stakes national testing regime” and of “teachers’ anxieties about league tables, inspection and the somewhat punitive character of school accountability”. Professor Alexander may, of course, choose to reject this evidence but the burden of much that has been said thus far suggests this is unlikely.

My prediction would be that this primary review will reject most, if not all, of the educational reforms that have taken place since 1990. I can understand why teachers who never accepted these reforms might applaud. But why are so many politicians and parents buying into a proposition that would kill off any hope that state education might improve?

Isn’t it obvious? The better a teacher teaches, the more a child will learn. The key to higher standards is better teaching. By which I mean: teachers who have real knowledge of and passion for the subjects they teach, the highest possible expectations of each and every child, and, obviously, the classroom teaching skills needed to keep order and inspire and enthuse their pupils. We do not need research and reviews into the nature of primary education. We need a remorseless determination to implement these commonsense truths.

Plus, of course, a system of national testing. Robin Alexander appears to be siding with those in the world of education who hate the fact that the tests shine the bright light of accountability into the murky corners of failing and complacent schools. Thus far the government is defending the tests. For once ministers are doing the right thing.

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18 May, 2008

Jihad supporters on campus

Below is an email from David Horowitz [info@frontpagmag.com]

On Monday night, I spoke at the University of California-Santa Barbara about Islamo-Fascism - the ideology of the radical Muslims dedicated to our destruction. Throughout the talk I was heckled, jeered, and cursed - standard treatment on our campuses for anyone trying to rally students to defend America against the jihad. Leading the attempt to disrupt my appearance were members of the Muslim Student Association and their sympathizers.

Tuesday I spoke at the University of California-Irvine - a school that right now in the midst of a weeklong celebration of jihad and terror. The occasion - although it seems these days that supporters radical Islam don't need an excuse to call for violence against Israel and America- was what members of the Muslim Student Association the Nakba or "catastrophe," which is what they call the creation of Israel 60 years ago.

At both universities I called on the Muslim Student Association to denounce the calls for genocide that come daily from Iran's Ahmadinejad and from the leaders of Hamas and Hizbollah. Neither group would take this stand.

Nor is this virulence restricted to universities in California. You'll see in this email that I've reproduced the cartoon attack on me and on the Freedom Center's work in exposing the threat of jihad in America - by the Muslim Student Association at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.



This cartoon is right out of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Take a good look at it. The anti Semitic hate for anyone who dares disclose what is at the heart of the Islamo-fascist movement oozes off the page. How dare I, or anyone, expose the professors and students on our campuses who serve as apologists for the butchers of jihad?

Of course that is precisely what we're doing with our Terrorist Awareness Project (TAP), and, more specifically, our recent Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week on campuses across the nation - including Wisconsin-Milwaukee. We are exposing the secret agenda of pro-terrorist supporters across the nation, especially on the campuses of our universities. And we're also showing how the Muslim Brotherhood, godfather to al Qaeda and Hamas, helped create the Muslim Student Association and other Muslim student groups as part of its stealth jihad against American institutions.

Founded in Egypt in the late 1920s, the Muslim Brotherhood has long used violence as the primary means to its end -- strict compliance to Sharia law, death to all Jews, the oppression of all non-believers, and Muslim rule across the globe. That the ultra-radical, rabidly violent Muslim Brotherhood lurks behind the scenes of Muslim Student Associations across the nation should be of concern to every American!

The theme of our most recent lslamo Fascism Awareness Week was a "Declaration Against Genocide" - the genocide against the Jews first called for by Islam's prophet Mohammed and echoed with increasing menace by radical Islamists in the Middle East and on American college campuses today.

How serious are they about this new genocide? The Muslim Student Association at the University of Southern California has the call for genocide on its website, verbatim. "The Prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: The time [of judgment] will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews and kill them, until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!"

Radical Islam is fascism by another name. And across our nation, our universities - funded by your tax dollars - are harboring what amounts to indoctrination cells for Islamo-Fascism. These universities are allowing these Muslim Student Associations to masquerade as harmless cultural and religious organizations, rather than the front groups for jihad that they are. Not only this, university administrators and student governments are funding these MSA chapters so that they can preach hate and incite violence.

So, today, following my encounters with hatred at UC Santa Barbara, UC Irvine, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the Freedom Center is launching a campaign dedicated to exposing the bond between the Muslim Brotherhood and Muslim Student Associations!

We've just published a pamphlet, The Muslim Student Association and The Jihad Network which details the relationship between the violent Muslim Brotherhood and American MSAs. We need to get this into the hands of college students concerned about this front group for terror, and to university administrators, policy makers and members of Congress. This is the first step of our fall campaign to send speakers onto more than 100 university campuses to engage the Muslim Student Association in its lair.

You can get a copy of the pamphlet and donate to David's campaign here




The great difficulty of real scholarship in America today

By America's premier Herman Melville expert, Professor Hershel Parker

When I started research on my dissertation in 1962 I met two candidates for the PhD at Columbia who were amused that Northwestern was offering doctorates and curious about what kind of dissertation I was writing that would involve my going to New York City. When I told them I was going to the New York Public Library or the New-York Historical Society every day to read nineteenth-century newspapers and copy out nineteenth-century letters about Melville and politics, they were dumbstruck. They had a great story to regale their fellow students and their teacher Richard Chase with at Columbia, this guy from the Midwest going to the libraries every day and looking at old newspapers and manuscripts! In 1962, a graduate student going to the archives as if the New Criticism had never triumphed! Almost every graduate student in the Ivy League knew that biographical and historical evidence was irrelevant to interpretation, just as the early New Critics had said in the late 1940s. And here I was coming all the way to New York to look for biographical information! They were too polite to laugh outright, but the way they kept rolling their eyes at each other showed they thought this was the quaintest damned thing they had ever heard. It probably was.

'In 1962 and for many years afterwards I would find that no scholar had ever called for a box of documents or that no one had called for it since one of my teacher's colleagues had consulted it in the 1940s. During the 1940s Stanley T. Williams at Yale had looked at the low quality of work on Melville and had determined that his best graduate students would do biographical-historical dissertations on Melville. When Williams retired in 1953, biographical scholarship died at Yale. Taught by one of Williams's students, Harrison Hayford, I built much of my career on meticulous establishment of chronology. Once in the 1970s, as I explain in my and Brian Higgins's Reading Melville's 'Pierre; or, The Ambiguities' (LSU Press, 2006), p. 199, I laid out the known documents in sequence and helplessly quoted to myself Mr. Compson from Absalom, Absalom!: 'It just does not explain.' Then I realized that none of us had seen one of the documents in full, and that document, sent to me from Houghton Library, solved the puzzle. My devotion to chronology remains: my computerized expansion of the 900 page The Melville Log (1951) (the work of a film scholar, Jay Leyda, not a professor of English) runs to around 9,000 pages. In the long course of transcribing nineteenth-century manuscripts and items from newspapers and books for my electronic New Melville Log in the 1980s and 1990s, I discovered dozens of wholly unknown episodes in Melville's life.

'While I was pursuing my own way, the New Critical repudiation of biographical and historical research continued under different guises, and more virulently. The original New Critics of the 1940s had been trained as scholars back in the 1920s and 1930s. They were ruling out consideration of biographical information in criticism, but they were quite familiar with their authors' biographies. Charles Feidelson, who replaced Williams at Yale in American Literature, had not been so rigorously trained, and each successive generation of teachers and each successive critical movement moved farther and farther away from scholarship until at last Yale was represented by Richard Brodhead and then by Wai-chee Dimock.

'Even textual critics avoided scholarship or at least gave others a way of avoiding it. James Thorpe in the 70s then Jerome McGann in the 1980s championed not texts closest to the author's original intention but texts that got published with the help of family, friends, editors, and publishers--the 'socialized' product. The great appeal of McGann's approach in the 1980s was that it reduced or eliminated work: all the new textual editor really needed to do was identify a text supervised by an editor and base his edition on it. Certainly the textual editor did not need to try to read a difficult manuscript in order to recover what the author wrote, for McGann had repudiated the idea of the author as fiery creator and ultimate authority.

'My own Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons (1984) was less appealing because it celebrated the author's creative process as I established it from working with manuscripts and revisions. In Much Labouring: The Texts and Authors of Yeats's First Modernist Books (1997), David Holdeman said that I 'might almost be regarded as 'McGann's 'anti-self' (to use a Yeatsian term)': 'Like McGann, Parker contests the ontological assumptions of Greg-Bowers editing and of the criticism it underpins, but he interests himself entirely in authorial texts and meanings, constructing a hermeneutics that privileges manuscripts and those early creative processes that he believes are affected least by sociohistorical contexts.' No editor wanted to hear about the creative process. One follower of McGann, Jack Stillinger, in the revealingly entitled Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (1991), called me the 'most extreme theorist of textual primitivism to date'; my greatest sin, he thought, was believing that 'genuine art is coherent.' Jonathan Wordsworth, another primitivist, and I should have rushed to embrace late, watered-down, dumbed-down 'socialized' texts.

'In the 1970s the latest chic form of the New Criticism was 'Reader Response Criticism,' which once again banished the author from consideration. What counted was the Almighty Reader, the true maker of the meaning. The trouble was that the author kept recurring because his or her name was attached to books. Roland Barthes in 1967 published his influential 'Death of the Author,' and in 'What is an Author?' (1977) Michel Foucault argued for denying the existence of the author while acknowledging an 'author function.' Yet inexplicably Foucault kept cautiously copyrighting his own books just as if he were the real author.

'In the 1970s and 1980s, American imitators of the French Deconstructionists played at dismantling texts but did no textual investigating of their own and ignored all the challenging examinations of major American novels then going on. New Critics and Deconstructionists alike preferred the Appleton The Red Badge of Courage (the product of the social process in which the editor, Ripley Hitchcock, made cuts which had disproportionately massive effects in the little book) while not wanting to read the original version (almost all of which could be reconstructed, I decided, and was in due course reconstructed by my student Henry Binder). Crane critics rushed to defend the expurgated Red Badge, on which they had built their reputations. Now, Mike, people who live in the real world rather than the Ivory Tower understand censorship when they see it. Hitchcock's arrogant hacking away at Zane Grey's texts is well documented, and Jon Tuska in his Foreword to his restored version of Zane Grey's Shower of Gold (2007) happily quotes me as the authority on what Hitchcock achieved with his censoring.

'In the 1980s the latest fad, 'New Historicism,' sounded far more rigorous than 'New Criticism' but it was not new 'Historical' research, not at all. Typically, a New Historicist like Wai-chee Dimock, hired by Richard Brodhead at Yale, acted as if all historical research had stopped early in the 20th century, say the 1930s. Real historians had done nothing after that on Manifest Destiny, she was sure. New Historicists (by now who was surprised?) dismissed the author and consciously tried to repress mention of the author lest he push the Almighty Critic out of the limelight. What was important was not Shakespeare the creative genius and real-life theatre man of his time but the general Zeitgeist, in which a particular author (and an author's particularities) were not of significance. Uniqueness and creative power was always to be distrusted and suppressed. The place of power was held by the Critic, and only Critics gained tenure.

'You can observe the perversely misused power of the academic establishment in strange places. Look at the horror Michael D. Coe coolly describes in Breaking the Maya Code (1992). After the dazzling work of amateurs (at 18 David Stuart was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship!) and some unruly, atypical scholars in deciphering the Maya hieroglyphs, most of the tenured Maya archaeologists turned their backs on the new discoveries. Coe reports that most field archaeologists 'are almost totally illiterate in the Maya script' and few 'if any' know the living Mayan tongue.' They can't read the hierglyphs and don't want to because the writing is primarily about kings, and they want to talk Marxist talk about the masses. As Coe says, 'Imagine someone calling himself an Egyptologist who couldn't read a hieroglyphic inscription, or a Sinologist tongue-tied in Chinese! How can illiterate scholars pretend to study a literate civilization?'

'Richard Brodhead either did not know that Melville had finished a book in 1853 and another in 1860 or else he lied about it in 2002 when he ignored decades of scholarship in order to make it seem that I had made these books up--which of course meant that I was not to be trusted on anything. In order to preserve the status quo in scholarship (that is, the 1921 status) he trashed me as a 'demon-researcher' on a voyage fated to sink, like Ahab's. Late in 2003 Robert Steel boasted that he was bringing a fine scholar to Duke. He brought the Brodhead who in 1996 had published THE SCHOOL OF HAWTHORNE without bothering to look in Sterling Memorial Library to see who had been enrolled in that class other than a few famous white men. In reaction, I gather from the preface, the forces of political correctness came down on Brodhead so brutally that he never risked their wrath again.

'The repudiation of the great creative genius continues. In the 11 April 2008 TLS Raymond Tallis looks at the latest form of this extreme exaltation of the Critic over the author, the invoking of 'neuroscience' in literary criticism: 'Norman Bryson, once a leading exponent of Theory and a social constructivist, has described his Damascene conversation, as a result of which he now places the firing of neurons, rather than signifiers at the heart of literary criticism.' As Tallis says, for many years now the literary work 'becomes a mere example of some historical, cultural, political, or other trend of which the author will have been dimly aware, if at all. The differences between one author and another are also minimized.' New terms (neurons!), old follies. Underlying all of these critical approaches which succeeded the 1940s New Criticism have been attempts to deny original creative genius (that is, to repress or expel the author from consideration, particularly an author with fierce originality) while exalting Critics themselves as the masters of the texts they are teaching.

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17 May, 2008

Canada: Human Rights Complaint Forces College to Permit Pro-Life Group Official Club Status

The Capilano College Heartbeat Club and the Capilano Students Union (CSU) have reached an agreement that will see the pro-life Heartbeat Club achieve CSU club recognition, pending they submit an application in the fall. The parties released a joint statement shortly after the agreement had been made: "The Heartbeat Club filed a Human Rights complaint against the Capilano Students' Union. The Club and the CSU have entered into a settlement agreement which is confidential. The parties agree that there is no admission of liability by the CSU and that the Heartbeat Club will be entitled to CSU club status if they apply."

The summer of 2006 saw the CSU pass a motion put forward by a member of the campus “Women’s Center” that made the group an official “pro-choice” organization. Shortly after, the CSU denied the Heartbeat Club’s application requesting official CSU club status. After a second application was also denied, for the reason that the club would hinder "a woman's right to choose", Heartbeat forwarded a complaint to the British Columbia human rights tribunal, that stated the club was being discriminated based on religious belief

In January of 2008, the tribunal rejected a request by the CSU to dismiss the Heartbeat Club’s complaint. This morning, the two parties reached an agreement that will finally give Heartbeat a chance to be recognized as an official CSU club, allowing them to utilize the University’s facilities in order to carry out their mission.

Source




Gubmint Skools Fear the Competition

Gov. Sonny Perdue of Georgia recently signed into law legislation which makes it easier for charter schools to get funding.

The new law, called HB 881, allows a new state-appointed commission to authorize a charter school's use of a school system's per-pupil funding, including local money — even if the local board did not approve it.

The regular public schools, i.e., government schoolsaren't too happy, and of course in this over-lawyered society we have become, might take the expected next step and challenge the law in court.

Nothing like a little competition to bring out the best in folks, but of course the folks so firmly ensconced in the educational system in the administrative roles, rather then look to see what charter schools do that make them so successful and try to adopt those practices, would rather simply run the charter schools out of town. If folks would really look at what portion of the school budget in their areas go to pay the salaries of the administrators, which is everybody from the principal on up to county board of education and compare that to what is spent in the classroom to pay the teachers and get school supplies there might be more outrage expressed by the citizens.

In Georgia, when you get your property tax bill it shows you just how much is going to education and how much goes to the county in real property tax. For me the amount targeted to schools is three times as much as what actually goes to the county. Since they have started doing this in Georgia a lot of people have started looking at the budget of their local school districts. If you gave people back that money there would be a lot more kids in charter and private schools. Once people started seeing that broken down they realized private school wasn't so expensive after all.

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16 May, 2008

Students Fail — and Professor Loses Job

He refused to say that blacks were qualified when they were not

Who is to blame when students fail? If many students fail — a majority even — does that demonstrate faculty incompetence, or could it point to a problem with standards? These are the questions at the center of a dispute that cost Steven D. Aird his job teaching biology at Norfolk State University. Today is his last day of work, but on his way out, he has started to tell his story — one that he suggests points to large educational problems at the university and in society. The university isn’t talking publicly about his case, but because Aird has released numerous documents prepared by the university about his performance — including the key negative tenure decisions by administrators — it is clear that he was denied tenure for one reason: failing too many students. The university documents portray Aird as unwilling to compromise to pass more students.

A subtext of the discussion is that Norfolk State is a historically black university with a mission that includes educating many students from disadvantaged backgrounds. The university suggests that Aird — who is white — has failed to embrace the mission of educating those who aren’t well prepared. But Aird — who had backing from his department and has some very loyal students as well — maintains that the university is hurting the very students it says it wants to help. Aird believes most of his students could succeed, but have no incentive to work as hard as they need to when the administration makes clear they can pass regardless.

“Show me how lowering the bar has ever helped anyone,” Aird said in an interview. Continuing the metaphor, he said that officials at Norfolk State have the attitude of “a track coach who tells the team ‘I really want to win this season but I really like you guys, so you can decide whether to come to practice and when.’ ” Such a team wouldn’t win, Aird said, and a university based on such a principle would not be helping its students.

Sharon R. Hoggard, a spokeswoman for Norfolk State, said that she could not comment at all on Aird’s case. But she did say this, generally, on the issues raised by Aird: “Something is wrong when you cannot impart your knowledge onto students. We are a university of opportunity, so we take students who are underprepared, but we have a history of whipping them into shape. That’s our niche.”

The question raised by Aird and his defenders is whether Norfolk State is succeeding and whether policies about who passes and who fails have an impact. According to U.S. Education Department data, only 12 percent of Norfolk State students graduate in four years, and only 30 percent graduate in six years.

Aird points to a Catch-22 that he said hinders professors’ ability to help students. Because so many students come from disadvantaged backgrounds and never received a good high school education, they are already behind, he said, and attendance is essential. Norfolk State would appear to endorse this point of view, and official university policy states that a student who doesn’t attend at least 80 percent of class sessions may be failed. The problem, Aird said, is that very few Norfolk State students meet even that standard. In the classes for which he was criticized by the dean for his grading — classes in which he awarded D’s or F’s to about 90 percent of students — Aird has attendance records indicating that the average student attended class only 66 percent of the time. Based on such a figure, he said, “the expected mean grade would have been an F,” and yet he was denied tenure for giving such grades.

Other professors at Norfolk State, generally requesting anonymity, confirmed that following the 80 percent attendance rule would result frequently in failing a substantial share — in many cases a majority — of their students. Professors said attendance rates are considerably lower than at many institutions — although most institutions serve students with better preparation.

One reason that this does not happen (outside Aird’s classes) is that many professors at Norfolk State say that there is a clear expectation from administrators — in particular from Dean Sandra J. DeLoatch, the dean whose recommendation turned the tide against Aird’s tenure bid — that 70 percent of students should pass. Aird said that figure was repeatedly made clear to him and he resisted it. Others back his claim privately. For the record, Joseph C. Hall, a chemistry professor at president of the Faculty Senate, said that DeLoatch “encouraged” professors to pass at least 70 percent of students in each course, regardless of performance. Hall said that there is never a direct order given, but that one isn’t really needed. “When you are in a meeting and an administrator says our goal is to try to get above 70 percent, then that indirectly says that’s what you are going to try to do,” he said. (Hoggard, the university spokeswoman, said that it was untrue that there was any quota for passing students.)

Hall agreed that both attendance and preparation are problems for many students at Norfolk State. He said that he generally fails between 20 and 35 percent of students, and has not been criticized by his dean. But Hall has tenure and the highest failure rate he can remember in one of his classes was 45 percent.

Dean DeLoatch’s report on Aird’s tenure bid may be the best source of information on how the administration views the pass rate issue. The report from the dean said that Aird met the standards for tenure in service and research, and noted that he took teaching seriously, using his own student evaluations on top of the university’s. The detailed evaluations Aird does for his courses, turned over in summary form for this article, suggest a professor who is seen as a tough grader (too tough by some), but who wins fairly universal praise for his excitement about science, for being willing to meet students after class to help them, and providing extra help.

DeLoatch’s review finds similarly. Of Aird, she wrote, based on student reviews: “He is respectful and fair to students, adhered to the syllabus, demonstrated that he found the material interesting, was available to students outside of class, etc.” What she faulted him for, entirely, was failing students. The review listed various courses, with remarks such as: “At the end of Spring 2004, 22 students remained in Dr. Aird’s CHM 100 class. One student earned a grade of ‘B’ and all others, approximately 95 percent, earned grades between ‘D’ and ‘F.’” Or: “At the end of Fall 2005, 38 students remained in Dr. Aird’s BIO 100 class. Four students earned a grade of ‘C-’ or better and 34, approximately 89 percent, received D’s and F’s.”

These class records resulted in the reason cited for tenure denial: “the core problem of the overwhelming failure of the vast majority of the students he teaches, especially since the students who enroll in the classes of Dr. Aird’s supporters achieve a greater level of success than Dr. Aird’s students.”

DeLoatch also rejected the relevance of 16 letters in Aird’s portfolio from students who praised him as a teacher. The students, some of whom are now in medical or graduate school or who have gone on to win research awards, talked about his extra efforts on their behalf, how he had been a mentor, and so forth. DeLoatch named each student in the review, and noted their high grade point averages and various successes. Some of the students writing on his behalf received grades as low as C, although others received higher grades.

But although DeLoatch held Aird responsible for his failures, she wrote that he did not deserve any credit for his success stories and these students, by virtue of their strong academic performance, shouldn’t influence the tenure decision. “With the exception of one of these students, it appears that all have either excelled or are presently performing well at NSU. Given their records, it is likely that that would be the case no matter who their advisors or teachers were.”

Aird stressed that he does not believe Norfolk State should try to become an elite college. He said he believes that only about 20 percent of the students who enroll truly can’t do the work. He believes another 20 percent are ready from the start. Of the middle 60 percent, he said that when the university tells them that substandard work and frequent class skipping are OK, these students are doomed to fail his courses (and not to learn what they need from other professors). “I think most of the students have the intellectual capacity to succeed, but they have been so poorly trained, and given all the wrong messages by the university,” he said.

The problem at Norfolk State, he said, isn’t his low grades, but the way the university lowers expectations. He noted that in the dean’s negative review of his tenure bid, nowhere did she cite specific students who should have received higher grades, or subject matter that shouldn’t have been in his courses or on his tests. The emphasis is simply on passing students, he said.......

Jonathan Knight, who handles academic freedom issues for the American Association of University Professors, said that he has no problem per se with administrators asking questions about such a high failure rate. “It is not improper for an administration to be concerned about it,” he said. But he cautioned against automatic assumptions. He said the questions to be asked are why so many students are failing, what is being done to help students succeed, what is taking place in the classroom, and so forth. While Knight did not see academic freedom issues related to asking such questions, he said he would be concerned about orders to pass certain percentages of students. “Professors obviously should have the right to determine what grades the students should have,” he said.

Aird — who is applying for teaching jobs — acted on such a belief and stuck to it. While administrators have noted that they urged him to change his ways, his defenders note that he was always clear with his students about his belief in high standards. In a letter he sent to students at the beginning of last January’s semester, he wrote: “You can only develop skills and self-confidence when your professors maintain appropriately rigorous standards in the classroom and insist that you attain appropriate competencies. You cannot genuinely succeed if your professors pander to you. You will simply fail at the next stage in life, where the cost of failure is much greater.” Today, Steve Aird is packing up his office.

More here




CU seeks right-wing prof

How liberal is the University of Colorado at Boulder? The campus hot-dog stand sells tofu wieners. A recent pro-marijuana rally drew a crowd of 10,000, roughly a third the size of the student body. And according to one professor's analysis of voter registration, the 800-strong faculty includes just 32 Republicans.

Chancellor G.P. "Bud" Peterson surveys this landscape with unease. A college that champions diversity, he believes, must think beyond courses in gay literature, Chicano studies and feminist theory. "We should also talk about intellectual diversity," he says. So over the next year, Mr. Peterson plans to raise $9 million to create an endowed chair for what is thought to be the nation's first Professor of Conservative Thought and Policy.

Mr. Peterson's quest has been greeted with protests from some faculty and students, who say the move is too - well, radical. "Why set aside money specifically for a conservative?" asks Curtis Bell, a teaching assistant in political science. "I'd rather see a quality academic than someone paid to have a particular perspective."

Even some conservatives who have long pushed for balance in academia voice qualms. Among them is David Horowitz, a conservative agitator whose book "The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America" includes two Boulder faculty members: an associate professor of ethnic studies who writes about the intersection of Chicano and lesbian issues, and a philosophy professor focused on feminist politics and "global gender justice."

While he approves of efforts to bolster a conservative presence on campus, Mr. Horowitz fears that setting up a token right-winger as The Conservative at Boulder will brand the person as a curiosity, like "an animal in the zoo." We "fully expect this person to be integrated into the fabric of life on campus," replies Todd Gleeson, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Boulder is far from the only campus to recognize a leftward tilt to the ivory tower. National surveys have repeatedly shown that liberals dominate faculties at most four-year colleges. And conservative activists have grown more aggressive in demanding balance. A group called the Leadership Institute now sends field workers to scores of campuses each fall to train right-wing students to speak up. College administrators are beginning to respond.

Academics studying the trend cite Georgetown University's recent hiring of former Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet. And Stetson University in DeLand, Fla., kicked off a conservative lecture series with a talk by the now-deceased William F. Buckley Jr.

At Boulder, long known for its lefty politics, the notion of a chair in conservative thought had kicked around campus for a decade. Then, in 2005, the college was thrust into a polarizing debate over an essay by ethnic-studies professor Ward Churchill, who argued that the bankers killed in the Twin Towers on Sept. 11 were legitimate military targets because they were "little Eichmanns" who "formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire."

Fox News television host Bill O'Reilly seized on those comments, and Mr. Churchill swiftly became a national symbol of political extremists running amok on campuses. The university opened an investigation into his scholarship, and Mr. Churchill was fired last summer for what the school described as plagiarism and academic fraud that was unrelated to the Eichmann essay. Mr. Churchill didn't respond to a request seeking comment. Within days, the university launched an effort to woo back donors infuriated by the affair.

Several months later, fund raising began for the chair in conservative thought. Administrators say the move had nothing to do with Mr. Churchill, but was part of an ongoing effort to address weaknesses in the curriculum - for instance, by adding language classes in Farsi and Indonesian. "That's what a good university does - look for an area where they don't have depth or diversity and start investing," Mr. Gleeson says.

Mr. Peterson - a Republican who took over as chancellor two years ago - says he would like to bring a new luminary to campus every year or two to fill the chair, for an annual salary of about $200,000. No candidates have been approached, but faculty and administrators have floated big names like Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, columnist George Will and Philip Zelikow, who chaired the 9/11 Commission. "Like Margaret Mead among the Samoans, they're planning to study conservatives. That's hilarious," says Mr. Will, dryly adding that "I don't think it would be a good fit." Ms. Rice didn't respond to a request seeking comment, and Mr. Zelikow declined to comment.

On campus, the chancellor's fund-raising efforts set off a prickly debate. Faculty members demanded to know whether donors would control the appointment. (They won't.) They asked for a chance to vote on the endowment. (They didn't get it.) "We don't ask the faculty if it's OK if we create a chair in thermodynamics," Mr. Peterson says - so why give them veto power over conservative thought? After all, he says, "It's an intellectual pursuit."

Ken Bickers, who chairs the political science department, says that while he supports the concept of intellectual diversity, he has reservations about the university's strategy. He worries students will get the impression that the "conservative thought" professor speaks for all conservatives. And he resents the implication that ordinary professors don't air conservative ideas in class. Registered as unaffiliated with any party, Mr. Bickers says he makes a point of discussing all perspectives, but because he doesn't stick a political label on each lecture, students "don't realize, 'Oooh, that was conservative.'"

Mr. Peterson agrees that most professors try to be fair. He adds, "I don't know that it always happens." Indeed, on the lush campus, lined with flowering trees, professors tack articles slamming the Bush administration outside their offices. A humor piece posted in the philosophy department mocks the Bible. Job boards feature internships with left-wing groups and Democratic candidates.

Jack Roldan, vice chair of the College Republicans, has felt the lopsided politics keenly during his four years studying international affairs. He longed for a conservative mentor, and says he graduated last week with many questions left unanswered: When is military intervention necessary? Why does the GOP focus so much on economic policy? And what's up with the neo-cons? "There's a lot more about what I'm about that I'd like to know," Mr. Roldan says.

Other students don't have much sympathy. They love Boulder precisely because of its liberal swagger. Sophomore Marissa Malouff sees the campus as a sort of re-education camp. Sheltered rich kids from out-of-state might come for the snowboarding, but while they're here they get dunked in a simmering pot of left-wing idealism. And that, in her view, is how it should be. "They need to learn about social problems and poverty and the type of things liberal professors are likely to talk about," says Ms. Malouff, a Democrat.

Chancellor Peterson's response: Not to worry. He's not trying to change the essential nature of CU-Boulder. In fact, Mr. Peterson said it's not imperative that the new professor of conservative thought be an actual conservative. "We hire lots of scholars of the French language," he says, "and they aren't necessarily French."

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15 May, 2008

Discrimination Doublespeak At The University Of Oregon

Post below recycled from Discriminations. See the original for links

Last June I wrote:

If there were a prize for the most ridiculous rationale for racial discrimination, it would surely go to the University of Oregon.

I was referring to the university's almost hilarious defense of its "Underrepresented Minority Recruitment Program," under which departments are rewarded handsomely for hiring ethnically "underrepresened" applicants. According to economics professor Bill Harbaugh, I noted,

the startup package for a new, nonminority faculty member in the economics department typically would total about $7,000 over the first three years. A faculty member in the minority recruitment program could get up to $97,000, he said.

The university's explanation of why this blatant racial favoritism is not illegal was, well, entertaining:

Provost Linda Brady and general counsel Melinda Grier said the program, which helps new minority faculty set up an office or lab, is legal and needed to help attract minority faculty in a competitive market.... The funds come into play after a selection committee has chosen a candidate and made an initial job offer. The funds then can be used to negotiate a final contract, [Grier] said....

The money goes to the professor's department, not to the professor, she said. "Dollars aren't allocated based on race," she said. "Departments get reimbursed for costs."

Now it appears the Department of Justice is not amused.

"The Department of Justice has information that the University of Oregon may be engaged in a pattern or practice of unlawful discrimination against newly hired non-minority faculty members with respect to the disbursement of salary and other employment benefits via its `Underrepresented Minority Recruitment Program,'" according to a letter sent to University General Counsel Melinda Grier that is signed by David Palmer, chief of the employment litigation section of the U.S. Department of Justice.

The university is sticking by its story that rewarding departments for hiring minorities, some of which reward almost always goes to the minority in question, involves no discrimination against non-minorities. According to university president David Frohnmayer, the program has "been carefully examined by our legal council [sic] over a number of years. We've made reasonable judgment that it is defensible." (Almost anything is defensible; whether it's legal or not is another matter.) The university counsel also trotted out the same old argument:

University General Counsel Grier also defended UMRP's legality in a four-page letter she sent to the U.S. Department of Justice. The program "is designed to help the University of Oregon diversify its workforce and to help UO meet its obligations under state and federal law," Grier wrote. "The UMRP does not provide benefits to individuals based on their race or ethnicity. Rather, under the UMRP, departments are reimbursed for the expenses they incur in recruiting and hiring individuals or for general department activities where the hiring of the individual would help to eliminate an underutilization."

How odd to think of the University of Oregon "underutilizing," say, black philosophers or Hispanic (not, mind you, Guatemalan or Cuban or Puerto Rican) chemical engineers. And how refreshing it would be if the Department of Justice were to take seriously the requirements of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibiting institutions from making distinctions based on race in the terms, conditions, privileges, or benefits of employment.




Offensive guesswork as "education"

School Survey Asks: Who'll Get Pregnant?

The father of a sixth-grader in Jackson, Miss., said he wants a teacher fired following a survey students completed that said his daughter will likely get pregnant before graduating high school, local station WAPT reported. Curtis Lyons said that when his daughter came home from Chastain Middle School Monday she told him what had happened. "She was humiliated," Lyons said. "She's an honor student."

Lyons said his daughter told him that the students were given a survey in science class that asked them to select a student they thought was most likely to die, get pregnant, or contract AIDS. The names of all of the students were included on the survey and the class associated the names with the scenarios. Once the results were tallied, Lyons said, the teacher told his daughter that the statistics showed that her classmates believed that she was one of four girls most likely to become pregnant.

"I don't think she should be teaching kids," Lyons said. "Those questions were out of place and inappropriate. I want to know what was the lesson in that?"

School officials said they are investigating the matter. "Jackson Public Schools expects all teachers to extend the basic courtesy of appropriate decorum to all students and to use good professional judgment in the selection of instructional activities," said Lucy Hansford, JPS communication specialist. "We are presently investigating the matter at Chastain. However, we are not able to release details in this matter so as to not violate the rights of confidentiality of personnel and students."

Lyons said he wants the teacher fired and he wants an apology from the school board.

Source





14 May, 2008

Preschool doubts

Lisa Downs Henry's father and stepmother opened Downs Preschool in 1984 as a private day care center in Watkinsville, Ga. Business was good, but it really took off in 1995 after the state approved state lottery receipts to pay for pre-kindergarten classes. The family converted the day care center into a preschool, which has since become a kind of institution in Oconee County, an hour's drive east of Atlanta. Of 12 preschool classes countywide, Downs boasts seven.

Each fall, Henry, the school's director, welcomes a new class of 140 children, all 4-year-olds, all attending tuition-free. "Since it's state-funded, you just don't have to hound parents about money," she says.

If you're a 4-year-old in America, it's a safe bet you're in school. The past 20 years have seen a quiet but steady rise in the number of children in preschool. The most recent federal statistics show that more than 1 million children were enrolled in public programs in 2005, up 63% from 1995. The rise far outpaces that of public school enrollment, up 10%. "It's what we do with children now," says Joan Lord of the Southern Regional Education Board.

What's behind the increase? A bigger share of working mothers and a shift in thinking: States increasingly finance preschool programs, citing research that says kids are ready for school at an earlier age.

Proponents of publicly financed pre-K say the push will pay off in better achievement, higher graduation rates and lower chances that a child will need expensive special-ed services. But they also say the quality of programs is uneven. Research suggests a lot of private programs are "pretty mediocre," says Steve Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University. The institute says 75% of 4-year-olds now attend some sort of preschool.

A study released today by the RAND Corp. finds a growing body of research that shows funding pre-K pays off in the long run, saving money by reducing social services later in life and by increasing tax revenue from higher earnings when students grow up. "There's growing evidence that supports the idea that prevention has an advantage over treatment," says Rebecca Kilburn, a RAND economist who led the research team. But the RAND report also notes that not all pre-K programs produce long-term benefits big enough to offset their costs to states, which the Rutgers institute puts at more than $3.7 billion, or $3,642 per child.

It's still an open question whether the pre-K return will ultimately be worth the investment, she says. "The research we're doing says we're making a difference in the shorter term, and yet we need to know whether those results are going to hold."

Source




Poison Ivy

What has me dwelling on ivy is my recent realization that much of what I don’t like about American politics — namely, American politicians — can be traced back to Ivy League schools. It can’t just be a coincidence that four or five universities keep spitting out presidential candidates and their spouses with the sort of regularity that Notre Dame used to turn out All American football players. What’s more, it’s not a sudden development and it’s not limited to just one party. William Howard Taft, for crying out loud, went to Yale. Theodore Roosevelt went to Harvard, and so did his fifth cousin, Franklin Roosevelt. Woodrow Wilson graduated from Princeton.

George Herbert Walker Bush went to Yale. His son, not willing to leave bad enough alone, went to both Yale and Harvard. Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Kerry, all went to Yale. Al Gore and Michael Dukakis went to Harvard. Ted Kennedy went to Harvard. Twice. The first time, they booted him out for cheating on a Spanish exam. Barack Obama went to Columbia and his wife, Michelle, went to Princeton. With such a terrible football team it’s really no wonder she was never proud to be an American.

Considering the politicians the schools have let loose on us, perhaps they should rename it the Poison Ivy League. It’s enough to make me wonder if the reason I liked Harry Truman was because he’s the only president since 1896 who didn’t have a college degree. Ronald Reagan had one, but it was from Eureka College, which probably didn’t even have ivy on its walls.

It is worth noting that, although Harvard has been around since 1636, Yale since 1701 and Princeton since 1746, none of them can claim Washington, Jefferson or Lincoln, as an alumnus. George Washington was home-schooled. Thomas Jefferson attended William and Mary and graduated in two years. Abraham Lincoln was also home-schooled, but he was both teacher and student, a true autodidact who read the Bible, Shakespeare and his law books, by candlelight.

Dwight Eisenhower attended West Point and John McCain graduated from the Naval Academy. So it’s no surprise that Ike was able to lead the fight against Nazi barbarians and that McCain was able to stand up to Viet Cong sadism for five long years. Which, come to think of it, is longer than Barack Obama has spent garnering leadership experience listening to the likes of Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd spewing forth on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

The only thing that prevents me from giving whole-hearted endorsement to a military education is that one of our former presidents also graduated from the Naval Academy: Jimmy Carter.

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Backdown on school 'league tables' in Australia

School secrecy prevails. Parents must not be told how bad a government school is

National literacy and numeracy testing of Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 school students begins for the first time today but frustration looms for parents who want to use the test results to compare individual school performance. Despite the Rudd Government declaring it was vital that Australians knew how well the education system was performing in providing literacy and numeracy skills, state education bureaucrats have vowed to stop the outcomes of the tests being released on a school-by-school basis. Individual schools will still have to report their results, but not until more than a year after the tests are taken.

The Queensland Studies Authority says it will keep secret results that would identify school performance on the tests. The authority also has reminded school principals that student assessment information it collects is exempted from release under Freedom of Information laws. It has warned schools that "access to these reports should be limited to those who have a legitimate reason to do so". Instead, the published data is likely to only compare the performance of the states as well as males and females and indigenous and non-indigenous students.

Parents will get reports on the performance of their child in the tests and schools will receive student, class and school reports. But, under current rules, parents wanting to know how their school fared in the tests this week may have to wait until June 30 next year to access the information.

The tests, hailed as the first truly national assessment of children's literacy and numeracy skills, will be spread over today, tomorrow and Thursday. It is the first time Year 9 students have sat national literacy and numeracy tests and also the first time all students will sit the single national test. Education authorities across the country decided on May dates for the testing because it was early enough in the year for the results to help diagnose learning problems or issues.

Parents will receive reports showing how their child has performed on a scale of achievement using bands, allowing the child's progress in numeracy and literacy to be tracked throughout their schooling. Education Minister Julia Gillard said parents would not just know how their child was performing against a national benchmark but whether he or she was in a low achievement band or a high achievement band. However, Ms Gillard yesterday ducked questions about how the performance of individual schools would be reported. "At this stage what parents are going to get is their own report card," she said in a radio interview. "We are talking to state and territory governments about the best use of this information. Obviously it can be used by government to work out who needs additional assistance."

State Education Minister Rod Welford said there would be little change from previous testing arrangements. He said parents should reassure their children that the tests include material that they would have covered in the classroom. "The real focus of the assessment program is to look at how students are performing and where they may need help so we can then look at our teaching and curriculum planning," he said.

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13 May, 2008

The nonsense never stops

Nobody seriously proposes that IQ can reliably be measured before age 4 but this guy is talking about measuring it at 8 months! Nonetheless, it is certainly true that more can be done to improve black educational achievement and the guy below is at least trying

What ails black America? Public debate falls between two poles. Some academics and most civil-rights activists stress the role played by racial discrimination. It may no longer be overt, they argue, but it is still widespread and severe. Julian Bond of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People reckons that racism is still “epidemic” in America.

Black conservatives, while never denying that racism persists, think it much less severe than before and no longer the main obstacle to black advancement. Bill Cosby, a veteran comedian, tours the country urging blacks to concentrate on improving themselves: to study hard, to work hard and—especially—to shun the culture of despair that grips the ghetto.

The debate is often bitter. Michael Eric Dyson, a leftish academic, argues that the black middle class has “lost its mind” if it believes Mr Cosby's argument downplaying the importance of race. Larry Elder, a conservative pundit, wrote a book about blacks who blame racism for nearly everything called: “Stupid Black Men”.

Mr Fryer eschews histrionics in favour of hard data. He is obsessed with education, which he calls “the civil-rights battleground of the 21st century”. Why do blacks lag behind whites in school? Mr Fryer is prepared to test even the most taboo proposition. Are blacks genetically predisposed to be less intelligent than whites? With a collaborator from the University of Chicago, Mr Fryer debunked this idea. Granted, blacks score worse than whites on intelligence tests. But Mr Fryer looked at data from new tests on very young children. At eight months to a year, he found almost no racial gap, and that gap disappeared entirely when he added controls for such things as low birth weight.

If the gap is absent in babies, this suggests it is caused by environmental factors, which can presumably be fixed. But first they must be identified. Do black children need better nutrition? More stimulation in the home? Better schools? Probably all these things matter, but how much? “I don't know,” says Mr Fryer. It is a phrase that, to his credit, he uses often.

His most striking contribution to the debate so far has been to show that black students who study hard are accused of “acting white” and are ostracised by their peers. Teachers have known this for years, at least anecdotally. Mr Fryer found a way to measure it. He looked at a large sample of public-school children who were asked to name their friends. To correct for kids exaggerating their own popularity, he counted a friendship as real only if both parties named each other. He found that for white pupils, the higher their grades, the more popular they were. But blacks with good grades had fewer black friends than their mediocre peers. In other words, studiousness is stigmatised among black schoolchildren. It would be hard to imagine a more crippling cultural norm.

Mr Fryer has some novel ideas about fixing this state of affairs. New York's school system is letting him test a couple of them on its children. One is to give pupils cash incentives. If a nine-year-old completes an exam, he gets $5. For getting the answers right, he gets more money, up to about $250 a year. The notion of bribing children to study makes many parents queasy. Mr Fryer's response is: let's see if it works and drop it if it doesn't.

Another idea, being tested on a different group of children, is to hand out free mobile telephones. The phones do not work during school hours, and children can recharge them with call-minutes only by studying. (The phone companies were happy to help with this.) The phones give the children an incentive to study, and Mr Fryer a means to communicate with them. He talks of “re-branding” academic achievement to make it cool. He knows it will not be easy. He recalls hearing drug-pushers in the 1980s joking “Just say no!” as they handed over the goods, mocking Nancy Reagan's anti-drug slogan.

Source




Seniority stupidity

In 2004, Providence named a beloved biology teacher, John Wemple, Teacher of the Year. In the spring of that year, Amgen Corp. gave Wemple a $10,000 award for science teaching excellence. But shortly after, Providence laid him off from his job at Classical High. He’d been “bumped” by a teacher who had the right, thanks to state law, to displace a colleague with less seniority in the system. Wemple’s widely acknowledged merit counted for squat. A tony private school snapped him up. The message to the kids is that the silly grownups can’t tell the difference between an excellent or indifferent teacher, or that they don’t care who teaches the kids. Forget science; seniority-driven school systems teach cynicism.

Last year at Times2 Academy, a district-charter school in Providence, 14 of the 18 elementary teachers were bumped out and replaced with teachers that the charter’s home district no longer needed because of declining enrollment. The time and resources spent on professional development, team-building and cultivating those bumped teachers just went down the tubes. Times2 leaders had to start all over again building the school’s culture. Devastating. And in the service of what?

“Bumping” is only one of several educationally pernicious personnel practices left over from the factory-model labor contracts that depress the quality of Rhode Island schools. Factory-model contracts treat teachers as interchangeable. It doesn’t matter whose hand is on the educational die press. What matters is their date of hire.

Most other states are further along in the process of professionalizing teachers. Rhode Island General Law 16-13-6 states that when the student population declines, teachers must be laid off “in the inverse order of their employment,” and rehired, when possible, according to their seniority in the system. Period. Merit is not an issue.

Last October in Providence, the East Side Parents Education Coalition hosted an education forum with the elected officials from the greater East Side. To everyone’s surprise the officials all came — from the state Senate, House and City Council. The conversation was temperate until the subject of bumping heated up the room. A parent recounted the John Wemple story, leading others to share their experiences of having some marvelous teacher yanked out of the classroom, often replaced by someone distinctly inferior. Parents waxed so hot at the session that both Rep. Gordon Fox and Sen. Rhoda Perry agreed to submit legislation to end the practice of bumping. However, the two bills appear to be languishing in the legislature, at least partly because neither offers a clean, clear solution.

I consulted the Business Education Partnership, the go-to people for understanding Rhode Island education’s labor contracts. They have four reports on the state’s teacher contracts that propose solutions to each of the problems they identify, including bumping. (Available at www.edpartnership.org) For openers, BEP’s chief analyst, Lisa Blais, said, “There is no one bad guy here. There’s a culture of the way we do business that prevents us from getting what we need. Across the nation, districts complain that seniority does not work in the interests of the kids. Unions complain that administration doesn’t know what they’re doing. Both have a point. So our concept is to acknowledge fundamental practices like seniority and tenure, and to work with them instead of trying to bury them.”

To professionalize education personnel practices, Blais and her colleagues put the focus squarely on evaluation. Rhode Island is one of only a handful of states that do not mandate that teachers be evaluated. In fact, most Rhode Island teachers are never evaluated in any meaningful or helpful way. Blais says the key to an effective and fair evaluation system is to use several different measures, instead of just one principal’s say-so. Evaluations should include objective, quantifiable information, such as student achievement, as well as administrator and peer observations. The resulting evaluations should place teachers at one of four levels: master, pre-master, basic and below basic. With these categories in hand, teachers would no longer be interchangeable. Any teacher with two consecutive below-basic evaluations could be let go. (At last!) No basic teacher could bump a master, no matter how long he or she has been in the system. Only master teachers should be peer evaluators.

In other words, let’s develop standards that have teeth. The state’s official teacher standards are fine, but in practice they are treated as nice, ignorable guidelines and not as the foundations for rigorous evaluation. Distinguishing between the lazy and the committed, between the well-informed and the limited, between those who speak clear English and those who are poor communicators, would go a long way toward dismantling factory-model schools. This BEP recommendation is right on the money.

That said, however, developing evaluation systems takes time. In the meantime, Rhode Island could pass a very simple law stating that all teachers should be hired professionally — matched to the job via an interview and resumé or portfolio in hand — and that no teacher, however senior, is owed any job other than as a substitute teacher. If enrollment declines, the “excessed” teacher automatically becomes a substitute — until landing a more permanent position. That way the schools stay stable, and the teacher’s livelihood is intact. Yes, an “excessed” top-step teacher will be more expensive than regular subs. But that would be far less expensive than the wasteful havoc seniority and bumping are currently causing. If no school wants the “excessed” teacher for a permanent position, it shouldn’t be the kids, parents and school that suffer.

The BEP’s idea is better than mine — more respectful, more professional — but the state needs to end bumping immediately. The kids and parents can’t afford it; the quality of the state’s education can’t afford it. So legislators need to work on those bills and see to it they get passed. We need to assure people like John Wemple they can confidently take jobs in our public-school classrooms and trust that their merits will be valued.

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12 May, 2008

Propaganda-driven kids attack think tank

'We are going to tell you about global warming... you horrible people'

Students at a California public school have written a series of letters to Chicago's Heartland Institute, which works to discover and develop free-market solutions to society's problems, attacking its members for "destroying our planet" by refusing to endorse the politics of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" film. According to students in the sixth-grade class of teacher Michael Steria at David A. Brown Middle School, the institute consists of "fools" and "horrible people."

"I think your (sic) fools for denying G.W. you know it could kill us all & you're just adding to it. I want you to help stop G.W. not increase it," said one letter. "We are going to tell you about global warming. I don't care if you don't want to read, but I'm making you read it you horrible people," said another.

Officials at the school, a part of the Lake Elsinore School District, declined to respond to WND requests for a comment. Officials at the district office also declined to respond. But Maureen Martin, a senior fellow for legal affairs for the institute, told WND that it was heart-breaking to see the results of such indoctrination of students. "It's tragic," she said. "The kids were terrified." She said some of the students expressed their belief they would be dead in 10 years. The district's allowance of such teachings is "shameful, especially when there's a divide in the scientific opinion," she said. She said the lessons reflected probably don't even meet the requirements of the state's educational guidelines, which for sixth graders demand lessons in earth sciences and the scientific methods of examining data.

Among the students' other comments:

* "We feel that it is wrong what you are doing. We know that you know that global warming is NOT we repeat NOT a myth, And we think it is selfish that you would take money over yours and your peers lives."

* "We feel upset because you are making Global Warming worse instead of helping it. We know that almost half of the country knows that G.W. is a crisis. We know that you could help the environment with the $800,000 you have."

* "We feel that they are destroying our planet by saying G.W. is not a crisis. You think GW is not a crisis but it is; you know deep down that it's a real thing that's happening. Everyone has a part in helping GW, and you're making worse."

* "I do not think that what you are doing is right because you are telling people that global warming is not a crisis. If this is not a crisis, how come floods have occurred in asia, Mexico, and India. Plus, how can you explain why the glacier glaciers are melting. they can't melt themselves, because they are in the coldest region in the world."

Martin told WND that by searching the Internet for key phrases used by the students, she was able to read seven of the 10 articles the students reported reading. "Three of the articles have nothing to do with global warming or greenhouse gases. Two are dire predictions from non-scientists at the United Nations disaster relief agency, the U.N. Development Programme, and nongovernmental organizations engaged in disaster aid. One article relates state efforts at monitoring greenhouse gases," she said.

One other was an attack on Heartland for its funding procedures, accusing the organization of selling out to energy corporations. But Institute chief Joseph Bast said such donations never have amounted to more than 5 percent of the organization's budget and more money comes in from individuals than from companies.

The facts, however, mattered little to the students doing the assignment. "I am very unhappy with your disgracing actions to the world, because you guys and woman are trying to hide the facts about Global warming so you can make more money. Well you guys aren't going to fool anybody except yourself. The reason is because if you were to look at a picture of Glacier National Park 50 years ago, you would see that there is less ice now then there was fifty years ago," said one letter.

Martin told WND one of the articles apparently came from a blog and condemned the organization's March conference in New York, which assembled hundreds of scientists and others who are skeptical of Al Gore's belief in the earth-threatening capabilities of temperature change, and his affirmation that man is at fault for whatever changes there are.

One phrase that appeared was "global warming denier group," which also had been used earlier on a critical blog article headlined, "Global Warming Denier Group Funded By Big Oil Hosting Climate Change Denial Conference."

"No. 1, no matter what people think, those who disagree ought not to be vilified," Martin said. "More than that, schools are supposed to be teaching kids about evaluating information. It's a life skill. We deal with it as citizens every day of our lives." In this case, however, the students reflect teaching that tells them anyone who disagrees is "wrong and evil."

Martin said she currently is working on a project for Heartland to address what the United Kingdom determined was propaganda in the Gore film, and present balancing information to public school classrooms whose students now often are shown the Gore production. "We're looking for parents, taxpayers, in the right situations. We're prepared to go to the schools and make a demand for equal time. We're not trying to stifle anything," she said.

What about the California school? "I wrote to the superintendent. I said I'd be willing to provide information, DVDs, printed material, a book, we can send speakers. I haven't heard back yet," she said.

Such teaching, however, raises huge concerns. "Global warming 'means that if we don't fix the climate, everything will be destroyed and we won't be able to survive,' two students wrote. Others found their global warming lessons similarly frightening," Martin wrote.

The students also left no room for discussion of the scientific issue. "We've read article about global warming. And we know all the facts," said one, while another added, "Natural disasters have quadrupled in 20 years, 53 bird species face extinction, World must fix climate in 10 years, Air pollution shrinks fetus size. THIS IS CAUSED BY GLOBAL WARMING!!!" said another.

When the Heartland Institute held its conference in New York in March, WND reported more than 100 internationally prominent environmental scientists argued that global warming is, instead, a natural process and not the result of human activity. "The purpose of the conference is to provide a platform for the hundreds of scientists, economists, and policy experts who dissent from the so-called 'consensus' on global warming," said Bast.

"Is global warming 'An Inconvenient Truth,' as Vice President Al Gore charges, or a 'Global Warming Swindle?' Harriet Johnson, spokeswoman for the Heartland Institute asked in a statement distributed at the conference. "The alarmists in the global warming debate have had their say - over and over again, in every newspaper in the country practically every day and in countless news reports and documentary films," a notice on the Heartland Institute website said. "But they have lost the debate."

In one of the papers released, environmental scientist S. Fred Singer's "Nature, Not Human Activity Rules the Climate" summarized a three-year international scientific research project conducted by the Nongovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or NIPCC. He said the climate is affected by many factors, but what can be ruled out by scientific evidence is that greenhouse gases are an important factor in causing global warming.

Source




History textbooks promoting Islam

New report says Muslim activists 'succeeding' in expunging criticism

History textbooks being used by hundreds of thousands of public school students across the U.S. are blatantly promoting Islam, according to a new report by an independent organization that researches and reviews textbooks. WND has reported several times on issues involving the promotion of Islam in public school texts, including a recent situation in which California parents complained their children were being taught that "jihad" to Muslims means "doing good works." The new report is from the American Textbook Council, which was established in 1989 as an independent national research organization to review social studies textbooks and advance the quality of instructional materials in history.

In the two-year project, whose report was authored by Gilbert T. Sewall, the ATC reviewed five junior and five high school world and American history texts, concluding: "Many political and religious groups try to use the textbook process to their advantage, but the deficiencies in Islam-related lessons are uniquely disturbing. History textbooks present an incomplete and confected view of Islam that misrepresents its foundations and challenges to international security."

The report finds that the texts present "disputed definitions and claims [regarding Islam] . as established facts." "Islamic activists use multiculturalism and ready-made American-made political movements, especially those on campus, to advance and justify the makeover of Islam-related textbook content," the report continued. "Particular fault rests with the publishing corporations, boards of directors, and executives who decide what editorial policies their companies will pursue," the report said.....

The report noted that several of the textbooks have found harsh critics among parents and others, and "History Alive! The Medieval World and Beyond" published by the privately held Teachers Curriculum Institute has been criticized repeatedly. In Lodi, Calif., parents "were not objecting to a word or two that they took out of context but to a textbook long on chapters filled with adulatory lessons on Islam." This was the same book cited by parents who contacted WND with their concerns about such indoctrination.

A parent whose child has been handed the text in a Sacramento district at that time accused the publisher of a pro-Muslim bias to the point that Islamic theology has been incorporated into the public school teachings. "It makes an attempt to seem like an egalitarian world history book, but on closer inspection you find that seven (not all are titled so) of the chapters deal with Islam or Muslim subjects," wrote the parent, whose name was being withheld, in a letter to WND. "The upsetting part is not only do they go into the history (which would be acceptable) but also the teaching of Islam," she said. "This book does not really go into Christianity or the teachings of Christ, nor does it address religious doctrine elsewhere to the degree it does Islam."

She said the book's one page referencing Jews "is only to convey that they were tortured by Crusaders to get them to convert to 'Christianity.' (It fails to mention that the biggest persecutors of Jews throughout history and still today are Arab Muslims). It gives four other one-liner references to the Jews being blamed for the plagues and problems in the land. It does not talk about the Jews as making a significant impact on the culture at large."

Bert Bower, founder of TCI, told WND at that time not only did his company have experts review the book, but the state of California also reviewed it, and has approved it for use in public schools. "Keep in mind when looking at this particular book scholars from all over California (reviewed it)," he said. One of those experts who contributed to the text, according to the ATC, which earlier released a scathing indictment of that specific project, was Ayad Al-Qazzaz.

"Al-Qazzaz is a Muslim apologist, a frequent speaker in Northern California school districts promoting Islam and Arab causes," the ATC review said. "Al-Qazzaz also co-wrote AWAIR's 'Arab World Notebook.' AWAIR stands for Arab World and Islamic Resources, an opaque, proselytizing 'non-profit organization' that conducts teacher workshops and sells supplementary materials to schools."

The newest report cited the same issue raised by parents. "In a passage meant to explain jihad, they encountered this: 'Muslims should fulfill jihad with the heart, tongue, and hand. Muslims use the heart in their struggle to resist evil. The tongue may convince others to take up worthy causes, such as funding medical research. Hands may perform good works and correct wrongs,'" the new report said.

The ATC report noted a complicating factor is a ban in California, to whose standards most textbook publishers align their work, on "adverse reflection" on religion in school. "Whatever 'adverse reflection' is, such a mandate may be conceptually at odds with historical and geopolitical actuality," the study said.

"None of this is accidental. Islamic organizations, willing to [provide] misinformation, are active in curriculum politics. These activists are eager to expunge any critical thought about Islam from textbook and all public discourse. They are succeeding, assisted by partisan scholars and associations. It is alarming that so many individuals with the power to shape the curriculum are willfully blind to or openly sympathetic to these efforts," the report said.

Regarding the TCI book, the report said its lessons contain "stilted language that seem scripted or borrowed from devotional, not historical, material." Also, the "Medieval to Early Modern Times" book features a two-page prayer to Allah "the Merciful."

"Among the textbooks examined, the editorial caution that marks coverage of Christian and Jewish beliefs vanishes in presenting Islam's foundations. With materials laden with angels, revelations, miracles, prayers, and sacred exclamations; the story of the Zamzam well; and the titles 'Messenger of God' and 'Prophet of Islam' the seventh-grade textbooks cross the line into something other than history, that is, scripture or myth."

More here





11 May, 2008

Lawmakers target big college endowments

Soak the arrogant Leftist b*stards for all they've got! They are almost certainly using their endowments in ways that the original donors never intended

Massachusetts lawmakers desperate for additional revenue are eyeing the endowments of deep-pocketed private colleges to bolster the state's coffers by more than $1 billion a year, asserting that the schools' rising fortunes undercut their nonprofit status.

Legislators have asked state finance officials to study a plan that would impose a 2.5 percent annual assessment on colleges with endowments over $1 billion, an amount now exceeded by nine Massachusetts institutions. The proposal, which higher education specialists believe is the first of its kind across the country, drew surprising support at a debate on the State House budget last week and is attracting attention in higher education circles nationally.

The idea has prompted a range of questions, including whether it is legal to infringe upon private colleges' tax-exempt status or single them out based on their wealth. It also faces significant opposition from the colleges and some skeptical lawmakers.

But proponents say the colleges' vast accumulations of wealth - Harvard University has the biggest endowment at $34 billion - and their often modest contributions to their host communities justify the assessment. "When is a nonprofit not a nonprofit because of the wealth they are acquiring?" said Representative Paul Kujawski, a Democrat from Webster and chief backer of the legislation. "It's mind boggling that one entity not paying taxes has $34 billion. How do you justify that?" said Kujawski, who serves on the influential House Ways and Means Committee. "When people can't afford to live. How do you justify not taxing them?"

University leaders criticized the plan as a gimmick that would backfire by hurting institutions that are pivotal to the state. "You'd be taxing success here," said Kevin Casey, Harvard's associate vice president for government, community, and public affairs. "Over time, this would put us at a real competitive disadvantage, which would drastically hurt the Commonwealth." Casey said it was understandable that lawmakers would search for new sources of revenue when economic times are tough. But he said the law would hurt colleges' fund-raising and financial aid initiatives.

The plan was introduced amid a national debate over whether elite colleges are hoarding their endowments. Members of Congress, including Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, have questioned why elite universities do not spend more of their vast reserves to defray the cost of tuition. Amid the scrutiny, some top-tier colleges have sharply expanded financial aid offerings, often replacing student loans with grants and waiving tuition for a greater number of families. At some of those schools, increases in financial aid are outpacing tuition increases.

The Massachusetts plan has also brought to the fore a more radical notion: whether certain colleges have amassed so much wealth that they no longer deserve to be tax-exempt.

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Free Public Schools are Far from Free Actual Costs Greatly Exceed Published Costs

Unlike businesses in the private sector, public school budgets often exclude many significant costs when computing expenditures, thus giving misleading information to the public. The Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs (OCPA) found this to be the case in its comprehensive study, "Education in Oklahoma: The Real Costs." Based upon my hands-on experience with school budgets around the nation, the findings of this report are generally applicable to other states.

The report says that the state government's "official" per-pupil cost of education in Oklahoma in the 2003-04 school year (latest available figures) was $6,429. This amount was derived by the procedure commonly practiced in school districts nationally, that is, by dividing the (published) school district budget by the number of students in the district. However, when OCPA performed its thorough accounting according to the generally accepted accounting principles as promulgated by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board, it came up with a shocking real per-pupil cost of $11,250.

Why the difference? Unlike private-sector businesses, the government's school accounting systems exclude many significant and legitimate costs. If the CEO and finance division of any publicly held company attempted to influence public opinion with such misstated public financial data, they likely would be subject to criminal and civil prosecution. Remember Enron and WorldCom?

Many Costs not Included

Unbelievably, the "official" per-pupil cost did not include - according to OCPA accounting procedures - a number of significant expenditures. (1) Oklahoma taxpayers subsidize the retirement benefits of Oklahoma teachers by having part of taxpayers' individual income taxes, sales taxes, and use taxes sent directly to the Teachers Retirement System of Oklahoma, thus bypassing incorporation into local school district budgets. (2) The state's Department of Career and Technology pays for part of middle and high school business and industry programs. Again, not reported in the local district budget. (3) Yearly depreciation of school buildings is not included in district budgets. This unaccounted-for wear and tear amounted to about $2.2 billion in 2000. (4) The Teachers' Retirement System of Oklahoma defined benefit plan annually adds debt that will be paid for by future generations. In 2003, the total unfounded liability of the retirement system was $1.93 billion. This same problem exists in state retirement funds throughout the nation, where 45 states have gaps between assets and promised benefits

Also not included in the "official" $6,429 per-pupil cost are the state's financial contribution to teacher preparation programs and the $27,000 per pupil for students at the residential School of Science and Mathematics.

Additionally, the public schools receive "off-budget" funds from the state's earnings from state-owned lands and minerals. The OCPA study did not include a number of other revenues that should have been included in an accurate per-pupil cost. For example: the cost of incarcerated students under age 18, high school remedial instruction for freshmen students in college, the cost of collecting school taxes, special student health care paid for by non-education agencies, the cost of maintaining unused and underused school properties, and the "universal service" fee on consumers' telephones that allows a discounted rate for school access to certain telecommunications services.

Other Hidden Costs

The OCPA report could have included other legitimate costs not counted in the state's official per-pupil costs. Such cost are discussed in my book, The Deserved Collapse of Public Schools, such as needed tutoring fees paid by parents, in-kind and cash donations to individual schools, donations from booster clubs and similar organizations, free use of non-school district facilities (such as those at municipal recreation departments), the operational costs of the state department of education, the costs to manage the U.S. Department of Education, volunteer services, and the costs borne by parents for student supplies and materials, estimated to be around $500.

A factor that never is considered is the impact of dropouts on per-pupil costs. If the number of students at the opening of school is divided into the school district budget, a certain per-pupil cost will result. However, if by the end of the year, there are fewer students operating under the same budget due to dropouts, the per-pupil cost increases.

The OCPA study concludes that, "uncounted costs are routinely omitted from official government reports on public education. It's a small wonder that one scholar could remark that 'school accounting guidelines would bring smiles to an Enron auditor.'"

It is likely that any per-pupil cost published by any school district is grossly underreported by as much as 75% (for example, as in the case of Oklahoma). This means that public school per-pupil costs average about three times the per-pupil costs of private schools.

Those who expect full transparency and honesty in school district budgets are doomed to disappointment. All school budgets should be examined with intense skepticism. After generations of training and experience, government bureaucrats have become master illusionists.

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10 May, 2008

Underhand racism at work in Kentucky

Sounds like lots of busing again

Last June, the eulogizing came quickly after the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to strike down the race-based integration plans at two public school districts. "Bye-bye, Brown," was University of Louisville education professor Skip Kifer's succinct response in the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader.

But in Jefferson County, Ky. - one of the school districts whose policies the court declared unconstitutional - school officials have come up with an integration strategy that uses household income, adult education levels and race to determine a school's student body composition. If the Board of Education adopts the plan when it votes in early May, Jefferson County will join the vanguard of school districts that looks at integration along socioeconomic lines as the best way to diversify their schools.

National scrutiny of school integration in Jefferson County is nothing new. The county first made headlines in 1974, when a U.S. district court judge ruled that the county's schools had not been desegregated. A 1975 Time cover-story, "Busing Battle," reporting on the resulting court-ordered busing, described black students passing through rows of armed state troopers into their new schools.

Jefferson County achieved integration with a policy requiring that no less than 15 percent and no more than 50 percent of the student body be black. That was the plan the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional last summer in Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education. Jefferson County's new plan uses Census data to divide the county into two geographic areas. "Area A" is below the district average in median household income and educational achievement, and above the district average in its percentage of minority students. "Area B" is the opposite.

Schools are then grouped into clusters and students are assigned to schools within those clusters, based primarily on parents' choice. Schools would now have to include no less than 15 percent and no more than 50 percent of students from geographic Area A.

Only the district's elementary schools will be affected by the plan. Depending on how the clusters are drawn, as few as 1,700 elementary students would have to shift schools. (Enrollment at middle schools and high schools currently meets the new standards.)

"There's a reason to want to [integrate schools along socioeconomic lines], even if it didn't produce racial diversity," says Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a nonprofit public policy institute. "It's that low-income kids do better in a middle-class environment." He points to the 1966 Coleman Report on educational integration, which showed that the socioeconomic makeup of schools is second only to family influence in its effect on student achievement. It's a finding that has been repeatedly upheld.

Kahlenberg says that in schools integrated along socioeconomic lines, students tend to be more academically engaged and are less likely to create discipline problems; parents tend to be more involved; and the schools attract better teachers and administrators.

Kahlenberg says that if the purpose of school assignment is to increase academic learning, "then the primary issue is class. If the issue is how do we create tolerant adults, then I think we want to continue to focus, in part, on race." The model in Jefferson County attempts to do both.

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Charter School Students in Chicago Enjoy Better Graduation, College Entry Rates

Chicago's multi-grade charter high schools (those serving students in grades 7-12, 6-12 or K-12) appear to improve their students' chances of graduating and attending college, as compared with the city's traditional public high schools, according to a RAND Corporation study issued today. The study is the first to rigorously examine the impacts of charter schools on the critical measures of high school graduation and college entry.

The study finds evidence that Chicago's charter high schools may produce positive effects on ACT scores, the probability of graduating, and the probability of enrolling in college-but these positive effects are solidly evident only in the charter high schools that also included middle school grades. For the average eighth-grade charter student in Chicago, continuing in a charter high school is estimated to lead to

* an advantage of approximately half a point in composite ACT score (for which the median score for the students included in the analysis is 16)

* an advantage of 7 percentage points in the probability of graduating from high school

* an advantage of 11 percentage points in the likelihood of enrolling in college.

"The results for the charter high schools are encouraging and raise questions as to why students attending these schools exhibit higher graduation and college attendance rates," said Ron Zimmer, co-author of the study and a senior policy researcher at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. "If the educational community is to learn from charter schools, we need to explore further the factors that lead to these results."

Charter schools are publicly funded schools that operate outside direct school district control and are intended to provide educational choice to families, reduce bureaucratic constraints on educators and provide competitive pressure to conventional public schools. Forty states and the District of Columbia have charter-school laws, and more than 4,000 charter schools operate in the United States, enrolling more than 1 million students.

"The strongly positive attainment results for Chicago's multi-grade charter high schools suggest that test scores alone may not fully measure the benefits of charter schools for their students," said Brian Gill, a study co-author and a senior social scientist at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. The authors contend that additional research is needed before it can be determined how charter high schools produced these results and whether district-run schools can produce positive effects by incorporating middle school and, perhaps, elementary grades onto the same campus.

The study also found that in grades K-8, Chicago charter schools are doing about as well as the city's traditional public schools in raising student achievement as measured by test score, but that charters do not do well in test score achievement during their first year of operation. On average, the prior achievement levels of students transferring to charter schools differ only slightly from the citywide average and from the achievement levels of peers in the district-managed Chicago public schools they departed. In addition, charter schools in Chicago are not having major effects on the sorting of students by race, ethnicity or achievement and while charter schools have been criticized for "skimming the cream" by attracting the top public school students, this was not the case in Chicago.

The study includes data from the 1997-98 through 2006-07 school years, except for graduation and college attainment data, which included 1997-98 through 2005-06. The full report, "Achievement and Attainment in Chicago Charter Schools," and a report summary are available at www.rand.org.

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9 May, 2008

The age of educational romanticism

by Charles Murray

On requiring every child to be above average

This is the story of educational romanticism in elementary and secondary schools —its rise, its etiology, and, we have reason to hope, its approaching demise.

Educational romanticism consists of the belief that just about all children who are not doing well in school have the potential to do much better. Correlatively, educational romantics believe that the academic achievement of children is determined mainly by the opportunities they receive; that innate intellectual limits (if they exist at all) play a minor role; and that the current K-12 schools have huge room for improvement.

Educational romanticism characterizes reformers of both Left and Right, though in different ways. Educational romantics of the Left focus on race, class, and gender. It is children of color, children of poor parents, and girls whose performance is artificially depressed, and their academic achievement will blossom as soon as they are liberated from the racism, classism, and sexism embedded in American education. Those of the Right see public education as an ineffectual monopoly, and think that educational achievement will blossom when school choice liberates children from politically correct curricula and obdurate teachers’ unions.

In public discourse, the leading symptom of educational romanticism is silence on the role of intellectual limits even when the topic screams for their discussion. Try to think of the last time you encountered a news story that mentioned low intellectual ability as the reason why some students do not perform at grade level. I doubt if you can. Whether analyzed by the news media, school superintendents, or politicians, the problems facing low-performing students are always that they have come from disadvantaged backgrounds, or have gone to bad schools, or grown up in peer cultures that do not value educational achievement. The problem is never that they just aren’t smart enough.

The apotheosis of educational romanticism occurred on January 8, 2002, when a Republican president of the United States, surrounded by approving legislators from both parties, signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act, which had this as the Statement of Purpose for its key title:

The purpose of this title is to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education and reach, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging State academic achievement standards and state academic assessments.

I added the italics. All means exactly that: everybody, right down to the bottom level of ability. The language of the 2002 law made no provision for any exclusions. The Act requires that this goal be met “not later than 12 years after the end of the 2001–2002 school year.”

We are not talking about a political speech or a campaign promise. The United States Congress, acting with large bipartisan majorities, at the urging of the President, enacted as the law of the land that all children are to be above average. I do not exaggerate. When No Child Left Behind began in 2002, the nation already possessed operational definitions of proficient in the math and reading tests administered under the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, pronounced “nape”). NAEP is seen as the gold standard in educational testing. Only about 30 percent of American students were proficient in either reading or math by NAEP’s definitions when No Child Left Behind began. In other words, by NAEP’s standard, all students are not just to be brought to the average that existed when No Child Left Behind was enacted. All of them are to reach the level of students at the seventieth percentile.

Many laws are too optimistic, but the No Child Left Behind Act transcended optimism. It set a goal that was devoid of any contact with reality. How did we get to that point?

I begin by briefly making the case that educational romanticism is in fact out of touch with reality. I will call on some specific bodies of scholarly evidence, but nothing I say will come as a surprise to parents of children who are more than a few years into elementary school. Exceptions exist, but the overwhelmingly common parental experience is that even in preschool our children began to exhibit profiles of abilities. When we observed a strength we tried to build on it, and when we observed a weakness we tried to remediate it or find someone who could. But whatever profiles we observed when our children were still quite young could only be tweaked. Our children with dyslexia, for example, could be taught strategies for coping, but reading never became easy for them. If specific learning disabilities were not involved, then nothing much changed no matter how hard we tried. School performance might have risen or fallen because of other things going on in their lives—emotional problems, peer pressures in either direction, or distractions because of a family crisis, for example—but the underlying profiles of abilities that our children took into elementary school didn’t look much different when they got to middle school and high school.

That common experience of parents conforms to everything that is known scientifically about the nature of intellectual ability. A lively debate continues about the malleability of intellectual ability in infants and toddlers, but few make ambitious claims for the malleability of intellectual ability after children enter elementary school. There are no examples of intensive in-school programs that permanently raise intellectual ability during the K-12 years (minor and temporary practice effects are the most that have been demonstrated).

No one disputes the empirical predictiveness of tests of intellectual ability—IQ tests—for large groups. If a classroom of first-graders is given a full-scale IQ test that requires no literacy and no mathematics, the correlation of those scores with scores on reading and math tests at age seventeen is going to be high. Such correlations will be equally high whether the class consists of rich children or poor, black or white, male or female. They will be high no matter how hard the teachers have worked. Scores on tests of reading and math track with intellectual ability, no matter what.

That brings us to an indispensable tenet of educational romanticism: The public schools are so bad that large gains in student performance are possible even within the constraints of intellectual ability. A large and unrefuted body of evidence says that this indispensable tenet is incorrect. Differences among schools do not have much effect on test scores in reading and mathematics. This finding is not well known by the general public (parents could spend less time fretting over their children’s school if it were), and needs some explanation.

When Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, it included a mandate for a nationwide study to assess the effects of inequality of educational opportunity on student achievement. The study, led by the sociologist James Coleman, was one of the most ambitious in the history of social science. The sample consisted of 645,000 students. Data were collected not only about the students’ personal school histories, but also about their parents’ socioeconomic backgrounds, their neighborhoods, the curricula and facilities of their schools, and the qualifications of the teachers within those schools.

Before Coleman’s team set to work, everybody expected that the study would document a relationship between the quality of schools and the academic achievement of the students in those schools. To everyone’s shock, the Coleman Report instead found that the quality of schools explains almost nothing about differences in academic achievement. Family background was by far the most important factor in determining student achievement. The Coleman Report came under intense fire, but re- analyses of the Coleman data and the collection of new data in the decades since it appeared support its finding that the quality of public schools doesn’t make much difference in student achievement.

In thinking about the explanation for this counter-intuitive result, it is important not to confuse your idea of a bad public school with the worst-of-the-worst inner-city schools that are the subject of horror stories. When schools are as bad as they are in the inner-city neighborhoods of Detroit, Washington, and a few other large cities, they certainly have a depressing effect on student achievement. Getting students out of those schools should be a top policy priority. But only a few percent of the nation’s students attend such schools. In what might be called a “normally bad” public school, a lot of the slack has been taken out of the room for improvement. The normally bad school maintains a reasonably orderly learning environment and offers a standard range of courses taught with standard textbooks. Most of the teachers aren’t terrible; they’re just mediocre. Those raw materials give students most of the education they are going to absorb regardless of where they go to school. Excellent schools with excellent teachers will augment their learning, and are a better experience for children in many other ways as well. But an excellent school’s effects on mean test scores for the student body as a whole will not be dramatic. Readers who attended normally bad K-12 schools and then went to selective colleges are likely to understand why: Your classmates who had gone to Phillips Exeter had taken much better courses than your school offered, and you may have envied their good luck, but you had read a lot on your own, you weren’t that far behind, and you caught up quickly.

To sum up, a massive body of evidence says that reading and mathematics achievement have strong ties to underlying intellectual ability, that we do not know how to change intellectual ability after children reach school, and that the quality of schooling within the normal range of schools does not have much effect on student achievement. To put it another way, we have every reason to think—and already did when the No Child Left Behind Act was passed—that the notion of making all children proficient in math and reading is ridiculous. Such a feat is not possible even for an experimental school with unlimited funding, let alone for public schools operating in the real world. By NAEP’s definition of proficiency, we probably cannot make even half of the students proficient.

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Texas demands faith in Darwinism

Regulators reject teaching from team of Ph.Ds

The state of Texas has decided that a graduate school with a faculty sporting Ph.Ds from UCLA, Penn State, the University of Montana, Colorado State, Case Western and Indiana University, with a few lowly Ed.D. degrees thrown it, isn't qualified to grant master's degrees because it teaches students to evaluate thoroughly the pluses - and minuses - of evolution and creation.

The verdict came just a week ago from the Texas Higher Education Consulting Board, which rejected an application from the Institute for Creation Research Graduate School for a Certificate of Authority to grant degrees.

The rejection came on the recommendation of Commissioner Raymund Paredes despite earlier approval recommendations from a site team dispatched by the state agency to evaluate the education offerings as well as the agency's advisory committee. In a case that appears to be an example of the academic censoring described in Ben Stein's movie "Expelled," state officials even read into the record for the agency's hearing a state statute regarding "fraudulent" education programs without giving supporters of the ICR program an opportunity to explain or respond. "Expelled" covers the following key questions:

Were we designed or are we simply products of random chance, mutations and evolution occurring without any plan over billions of years?

Is the debate over origins settled?

How should science deal with what appears to be evidence of design?

What should be taught to children and college students about our origins?

Is there any room for dissent from the evolutionary point of view?

Is it appropriate for eminent scientists who depart from strict evolutionary dogma to be fired and blacklisted, as is occurring in academia today?

Should government schools and other institutions be engaged in promoting the secular, materialistic worldview to the total exclusion of differing points of view?

Is science so advanced and so certain that it should be exempt from the societal norms of open dialogue and free debate?

Why is it simply inconceivable and unacceptable for some evolutionists to consider the possibility - no matter how remote - that our world might actually have a Creator?

"This is the second time in 18 years that a state's top educational authority has attempted to thwart the Institute for Creation Research's ability to offer master's degrees in science and science education," said a statement from the Answers in Genesis organization. "Such a setback for a school - which has several qualified Ph.D. scientists on its faculty - merely confirms what the just-released film 'Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed' has been exposing: academia will not tolerate any challenge to evolutionist orthodoxy and will suppress the liberties of Darwin-doubters," AIG said.

ICR has been issuing master's degrees in California since 1981. In 1990 it overcame a challenge from state educational officials who tried to deny the school the opportunity to offer degrees. "ICR eventually won approval in a federal court," Answers in Genesis said. "Due to its recent move to Texas, ICR had to apply to the THECB for similar authorization . and once again found itself running another educational gauntlet."

According to the Dallas Morning News, Henry Morris III, the chief executive officer for the ICRGS, said the school prepares students to "understand both sides of the scientific perspective, although we do favor the creationist view." After being rejected, he said the institute may revise its application or pursue a court action. "We will pursue due process," he told the board. "We will no doubt see you in the future." Under state procedures, the ICRGS now would have 45 days to file an appeal, or 180 days to begin a new application.

According to Answers in Genesis: "ICR has argued that its quality faculty and rigorous program - presented in a creationist framework - students to become effective science teachers. . Paredes has claimed that what ICR teaches is contrary to what is required in Texas's public schools, and that because ICR's program insists on accepting the biblical account of creation, it inadequately covers science. ICR counters with the observation that its students learn all about evolution, the scientific method, etc. - but that they are also exposed to the scientific problems with evolution." It was Joe Stafford, assistant commissioner for academic affairs in Texas, who during the hearing read into the record a Texas Education Code statute about prevent "fraudulent" colleges, but ICRGS officials were denied any opportunity to respond to that allegation.

Among the 13 faculty members listed by the ICRGS, 10 have earned Ph.Ds in their fields of expertise, another is a doctor of veterinary medicine and two more have doctorates in education.

Going into the hearing, officials from ICRGS said they had revamped their offerings "to meet, and in some areas to exceed, virtually all of the AAAS Project 2061 Benchmarks (in science, mathematics, technology, etc.) and the National Science Education Standards." However, it had a level of concern "about whether its public viewpoints have or will become the subject of unequal (or otherwise improper) discriminatory treatment in conjunction with the processing of ICRGS's application." "The ICRGS is concerned that educational politics may unduly influence the processing of ICRGS's application in a manner that chills free speech, and thus dampens postsecondary education diversity, perhaps facilitating the promotion of a postsecondary education market 'monopoly,'" the organization said.

On the Dallas newspaper's forum, opinions were divided: "They rightly rejected the attempt by the Institute of Creation Research to inject religion into scientific teaching," wrote David Alkek. But Daniel DeVelde said, "Good educators should want to give a complete education, including both evolution and intelligent design. Many scientists and educators should want to put both on the table for examination. Good education should explore all theories, not just the one someone happens to like."

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8 May, 2008

Dartmouth's 'Hostile' Environment

An academic nutcase with no concept of academic values -- or much else

Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world. The latest spectacle is an Ivy League professor threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their "anti-intellectualism" violated her civil rights. Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of "French narrative theory" that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional expose, which she promises will "name names."

The trauma was so intense that in March Ms. Venkatesan quit Dartmouth and decamped for Northwestern. She declined to comment for this piece, pointing instead to the multiple interviews she conducted with the campus press.

Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument. "My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful," she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review. "They'd argue with your ideas." [How awful!!] This caused "subversiveness," a principle English professors usually favor.

Ms. Venkatesan's scholarly specialty is "science studies," which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, "teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth." She continues: "Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct."

The agenda of Ms. Venkatesan's seminar, then, was to "problematize" technology and the life sciences. Students told me that most of the "problems" owed to her impenetrable lectures and various eruptions when students indicated skepticism of literary theory. She counters that such skepticism was "intolerant of ideas" and "questioned my knowledge in very inappropriate ways." Ms. Venkatesan, who is of South Asian descent, also alleges that critics were motivated by racism, though it is unclear why.

After a winter of discontent, the snapping point came while Ms. Venkatesan was lecturing on "ecofeminism," which holds, in part, that scientific advancements benefit the patriarchy but leave women out. One student took issue, and reasonably so - actually, empirically so. But "these weren't thoughtful statements," Ms. Venkatesan protests. "They were irrational." The class thought otherwise. Following what she calls the student's "diatribe," several of his classmates applauded. Ms. Venkatesan informed her pupils that their behavior was "fascist demagoguery." Then, after consulting a physician about "intellectual distress," she cancelled classes for a week. Thus the pending litigation.

Such conduct is hardly representative of the professoriate at Dartmouth, my alma mater. Faculty members tend to be professional. They also tend to be sane. That said, even at - or especially at - putatively superior schools, students are spoiled for choice when it comes to professors who share ideologies like Ms. Venkatesan's. The main result is to make coursework pathetically easy. Like filling in a Mad Libs, just patch something together about "interrogating heteronormativity," or whatever, and wait for the returns to start rolling in. I once wrote a term paper for a lit-crit course where I "deconstructed" the MTV program "Pimp My Ride." A typical passage: "Each episode is a text of inescapable complexity . . . Our received notions of what constitutes a ride are constantly subverted and undermined." It received an A.

Where the standards are always minimum, most kids simply float along with the academic drafts, avoid as much work as possible and accept the inflated grade. Why not? It's effortless, and there are better ways to spend time than thinking deeply about ecofeminism.

The remarkable thing about the Venkatesan affair, to me, is that her students cared enough to argue. Normally they would express their boredom with the material by answering emails on their laptops or falling asleep. But here they staged a rebellion, a French Counter-Revolution against Professor Defarge. Maybe, despite the professor's best efforts, there's life in American colleges yet.

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Homosexual propaganda disallowed

A rather amazing foray into theology by a university is ruled unconstitutional

A federal judge has ruled that the Georgia Institute of Technology had materials in its office to support gay students that amounted to unconstitutional support for some religious groups over others. The case may have no practical impact at Georgia Tech as the materials in question are already gone. But the legal group that brought the suit and other analysts agree that such materials may well exist at other public colleges and may now become the focus of more scrutiny or legal battles. The Georgia Tech ruling is believed to be the first of its kind.

The ruling came in a case involving a range of issues over speech codes and support for religious groups at Georgia Tech - issues that mirror those being raised at other public colleges and many of which were resolved in earlier rulings or agreements between the parties in the case. The new part of the ruling, however, focused on a set of materials used in the "Safe Space" program at Georgia Tech, a part of the institute's diversity office designed to support gay and lesbian students.

The case was filed on behalf of two Georgia Tech students, assisted by the Alliance Defense Fund, a legal group that has sued many public colleges accusing them of violating the rights of religious students. The portion of the suit about Safe Space argued that materials at the public university were effectively religious in that they endorsed some faiths over others - and that these materials were as a result unconstitutional. Judge J. Owen Forrester agreed.

The materials in question dealt with issues that may be faced by religious gay students, or by gay students challenged about the sexuality by people from different faiths. One passage cited in the ruling says that "historically, Biblical passages taken out of context have been used to justify such things as slavery, the inferior status of women, and the persecution of religious minorities." Such attitudes have led some religious groups to declare "that homosexuality is immoral," the group's materials state, while others "have begun to look at sexual relationships in terms of the love, mutual support, commitments and the responsibility of the partners rather than the sex of the individuals involved."

In another section, the materials discuss specific faiths, noting which faiths recognize same-sex unions, and the conditions under which some faiths will ordain gay clergy. While the Episcopal Church is praised as "more receptive to gay worshipers than many other Christian denominations," the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is described as having "the most anti-gay policies of any religion widely practiced in the United States." The section on Roman Catholic belief also notes that some theologians have argued, "much to the embarrassment of the Vatican," that the medieval church recognized unions for same-sex couples.

In his ruling, Judge Forrester noted that Safe Space is not just one among many student groups, but one with close ties - financial and staffing - to the university. In this context, he said, it is irrelevant that officials involved in the program stressed that the materials in question had no religious purpose, and were simply motivated by a desire to help students understand the views of different religious groups on questions of sexuality.

Because of the close ties to the university, Judge Forrester said, the issue is the "clear preference of one religion over another contained" in the Safe Space materials, which he said was clearly unconstitutional. The decision ordered Georgia Tech to remove the materials in question. A statement from the university said that it "disagrees" with the decision, but that it is "moot" because the materials are no longer used by the Safe Space program.

Nate Kellum, a lawyer at the Alliance Defense Fund, said that the issues are not moot elsewhere. While the exact names of programs and the materials they use may vary, "these kinds of things are all over the place," he said, and other public colleges would be well advised to note this week's decision. Even in other parts of the country, where a ruling by a single federal judge would not be binding, he said, "I think the logic and reasoning would support the idea that this practice is unconstitutional."

A professor making comments in a classroom similar to those in the Safe Space materials would not be unconstitutional, Kellum said, because such statements would not carry the same weight as coming from the institution. He added that his group was not opposed to all services public colleges offer for gay students. "The problem with this was that the university was denigrating firmly held religious beliefs," he said. The Safe Space materials "held in high regard certain denominations that found no moral implications in homosexual relations, but denigrated those that did find moral implications."

Brian Moulton, a lawyer for the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay rights group, agreed that the Safe Space materials were problematic. He noted that nothing in the decision makes it impossible for a public college to offer programs for gay students, and that the only limitations concern discussion of religion. The language used in the materials about religions "did very much sound like taking sides," which is "very problematic with public funds."

Others were more critical of the decision. Steve Sanders, a Chicago appellate lawyer and former public university administrator, said that some of the materials at issue "might strike some readers as rather shallow and tendentious," but he added that "I think you have to squint awfully hard to conclude that, as a First Amendment matter, they either denigrate or proselytize on behalf of any particular religious perspective. While the materials may betray a certain political or cultural point of view and we can debate the extent to which universities should be in that business, I think it was something of a stretch for the court to say they amounted to government favoritism toward one set of religious beliefs at the expense of another."

Sanders also noted that "religious activist groups" like those frequently supported by the Alliance Defense Fund "have properly sought to contribute their perspective on homosexuality to the larger market place of ideas" and that these groups "understandably employ religious texts and religious concepts," when they do so. He added that "I read the Georgia Tech Safe Space materials not as a foray into theology for its own sake, but rather as an effort to engage and critique the claims made by anti-gay religious groups."

Sanders said that "some might see it as a bit hypocritical for a religiously partisan group like the Alliance Defense Fund," which says it wants to promote "robust public debate," to "show this sort of hypersensitivity and file a lawsuit when a group like Safe Space criticizes those perspectives." The suit, he added, "raises the suspicion that this isn't so much about having an open and robust debate as it is about using the tools of law to shut down the other side."

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7 May, 2008

Value of college tuition is called into question

As college tuitions continue to climb, a study released today fuels concerns about whether the investment in higher education by families and taxpayers translates into better results. Students are a growing source of revenue for colleges, but little of that money is going into classroom instruction, says the report by the Delta Cost Project, a Washington-based non-profit. The study also finds that the percentage of students who complete a degree hasn't kept pace with increases in enrollments, revenue and total spending.

Leaders in higher education typically argue that spending increases are necessary to maintain educational quality, but "what we see across a broad range of indicators is that states and institutions are spending money in areas that may not be in line with the public priority of preparing more graduates," report author Jane Wellman says. The report is based on Department of Education data across 18 years from nearly 2,000 institutions representing 90% of students.

The study examined only operating expenses, which include instructional costs - primarily faculty salaries and benefits. The fastest-growing operating expenses are related to research, public outreach and financial aid, the report says. Other examples are student services, maintenance and academic support. Bill Troutt, president of Rhodes College in Memphis and chairman of a congressional college cost commission a decade ago, suggests classroom instruction shouldn't be the only focus. "We are making a very significant investment here in affordability," he says. Troutt also says the study should have included capital costs, such as construction and technology - factors he says influence student learning. "I think it's fair to calculate those in giving families a picture of what the true cost of education is," he says.

For the current school year, sticker price increases ranged from 4.2% at community colleges to 6.6% at public four-year institutions, College Board data show.

The report does not address the quality of the education a student receives, but completion rates are drawing more attention in a competitive global economy. The United States spends more per student than any other industrialized nation, yet it ranks at the bottom in degree completion (54%), says a 2007 report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The organization average is 71%; the high is 91% in Japan. "We absolutely must talk about productivity - the linkage between resources and results - if our country is serious about competing globally and maintaining our quality of life," says Travis Reindl of Jobs for the Future, a Boston-based non-profit group.

Richard Vedder of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity says findings support calls by a federally appointed commission on which he sat to hold colleges more accountable for student achievement. "I'm hoping the policymaking public will say we've got to do something about this," such as making funding contingent on academic performance.

Source




Ivy Leaguers are bright - but nice?

For my family, the college application process this year was a happy one - my younger sister was accepted at an Ivy League school. I was thrilled for her and excited to answer questions about my own university experience. But when she asked me what students at the "top" colleges were like, I realized I was disturbed by my answer.

During four years at Princeton University and nearly a year at Yale Law School, I have been surrounded by students who dazzle. These are the students for whom application processes were made. They include published novelists, acclaimed musicians, and Olympic medalists. They include entrepreneurs, founders of human rights groups, and political activists. If they have hobbies such as stamp collecting and belly dancing, by golly, they are the best stamp collectors and belly dancers in America!

These youths live a life of superlatives, a life in which being No. 1 is not just an aspiration but the status quo. They can be inspirational, but they are not always nice people. You know what I mean. I mean the kind of "nice" that involves showing compassion not merely because membership in community service groups demands it. The kind of "nice" that involves lending a textbook to a friend who doesn't have one. The kind of selfless, genuine "nice" that makes this world a better place - but won't get you accepted to college.

Of course, top universities accept hundreds of individuals who have demonstrated the highest levels of citizenship. These teenagers have volunteered in more food banks, sponsored more fund-raisers, and lobbied more officials than any previous generation. They earn, rightfully, the gratitude of their communities and the plethora of honors that come with it. Colleges at the top of US News and World Report's rankings would balk at the notion that these students are anything but the best and the brightest.

I'm not saying different [An adjective as a predicate?? This girl is among the brightest but has not been taught elementary grammar]. I'm saying that sometimes some of these students will denounce world hunger but be unfriendly to the homeless. They will debate environmental policy but never offer to take out the trash. They will believe vehemently in many causes but roll their eyes when reminded to be humble, to be generous, and to "do what is right."

It is these people, though, who often climb America's ladder of success. They rise to the top, partly on their own merits yet also partly on the backs of equally deserving but "nicer" people who let them steal the spotlight. Before they, or we, know it, they are the politicians and corporate executives subverting the very moral positions they espouse. They are the many figureheads who purport to be leaders even as they embarrass our country.

Watching the race for the presidency, I cannot help but wonder whether our candidates, with their prestigious degrees and impressive credentials, are nice people. I wonder if, in their trek to the top, they have pushed aside the kind of quietly brilliant altruists who mean what they say and say what they mean. I wonder if our society is crippling itself by subjecting its youths to an almost Darwinian college selection process.

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An Australian university lurches Left -- in the usual simplistic Leftist way

Macquarie University students will be forced to "do good" and "change the world" -- but what has that got to do with academic ability or achievement? And what if I think that I "do good" simply by entering one of the professions? The definition of "doing good" is unclear but seems to be very unsophisticated for a university. I am glad that I was able to concentrate on my studies when I was there. And what about all the students who have to work their way through university? How are they going to fit in all this crap?

All students at a leading university will have to undertake volunteer work and study subjects from the arts and sciences under an overhaul of its curriculum designed to provide a broader education and more socially aware graduates. In a first for an Australian university, Macquarie University Vice Chancellor Steven Schwartz today will announce a partnership with Australia Volunteers International that will create a mini peace corps, giving undergraduate students the opportunity to do volunteer work overseas.

Called the Global Futures Program, it will develop programs with local communities throughout Australia, the South Pacific and Southeast Asia. Some form of community work will be compulsory for all undergraduate students at Macquarie under the new curriculum, to start in 2010. In addition, the university will require all undergraduate students to study subjects from the humanities, social sciences and sciences so that arts students must take science subjects and science students must take arts subjects.

The university, in northern Sydney, had also considered making the learning of a foreign language compulsory but it was not feasible at this stage. Professor Schwartz told The Australian that the new curriculum was based on three themes of place, planet and participation, and was designed to provide students with a broader education than one geared solely to a vocation and getting a job. "Universities are more than just narrow vocational schools; they have the opportunity to change the world, to shape society and shape democracy [Is that what the taxpayer is paying for? And what if the student is content with the world as it is and does not WANT to change it -- preferring to concentrate on more personal things? Is there no place for such a person in a university? It would seem gross political bigotry to say so!]," he said. "It's about education for life not just for a job. We're trying to infuse the institution with more than just a utilitarian vocational mission as one that also makes difference to a more democratic and inclusive society."

Professor Schwartz said the new curriculum developed the university's commitment to social inclusion and equity, and fitted in with programs already in place at the university, such as MULTILIT, a remedial literacy program being used in Queensland's Cape York, and the Teach for Australia scheme. Macquarie University, in partnership with Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson's Cape York Institute, is developing the Teach for Australia program. It is based on similar schemes in the US and Britain to recruit the brightest graduates to teach for a short time in disadvantaged schools before they start their professional careers.

Macquarie's focus on a broader education follows the restructure at Melbourne University, called the Melbourne Model and based on US college degrees, which offers six broad undergraduate degrees followed by a graduate professional degree in specialist areas such as law or medicine.

Professor Schwartz said providing an education based purely on skills was inadequate. "I used to be a dean of medicine and I believe probably a lot of skills we taught students were obsolete before they graduated," he said. "Our students graduating this year will retire about 2050. We don't know what the world will look like in 2015, let alone 2050. "At Macquarie, we want to give students the right skills to get ahead in the community and we want to give them employable skills but we also want to make them open to equity issues, to social progress and social justice in terms of equal opportunity."

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6 May, 2008

McCain's School Choice Opportunity

If only Jeremiah Wright had got the right conspiracy. When Barack Obama's pastor was caught on tape accusing the government of inventing HIV for "genocide against people of color," it was dismissed as another crazy conspiracy theory - which of course it was. But what if the Rev. Wright had used his pulpit to direct a little fire-and-brimstone against a very real outrage: a public-school system that's depriving millions of children of the education they need to compete in the 21st century economy?

Scarcely half of American children in our 50 largest cities will leave their public schools with a high-school diploma in hand, according to a study released by America's Promise Alliance. These children are disproportionately African-American. Their homes are disproportionately located in our largest public school districts. And the failure is a scar on this great land of opportunity.

Alma and Colin Powell, leaders in the alliance that produced this report, spoke about the human blight that can follow the lack of a basic education in an op-ed in the Washington Times. "Students who drop out," they wrote, "are more likely to be incarcerated, to rely on public programs and social services and to go without health insurance than their fellow students who graduate."

That isn't the intent of those who administer this system. But that is the result. And only a latter-day Bull Connor could be happy with the way our inner-city public schools are consigning millions of African Americans to the margins of American opportunity and prosperity.

And it gets worse. One of the few hopeful alternatives in these cities are the Catholic schools, which take the very same students and show that they can learn if given the chance. One University of Chicago researcher found that minority students at Catholic schools are 42% likelier to complete high school than their public school counterparts - and 2 1/2 times more likely to earn a college degree. In difficult circumstances, and for an increasingly non-Catholic student body, these schools are doing heroic work. Unfortunately, another study released this month, by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, reports that Catholic schools are closing at an alarming rate: More than 1,300 since 1990. Most are located in our cities.

These numbers were behind the special White House summit on Inner-City Schoolchildren and Faith-Based Schools convened last Thursday. The emphasis on faith-based schools is a reflection of practicality, because turning around a failing public school or starting up a new one is difficult, costly and takes time that these children can't afford. "Many of the parents I know in D.C. are looking for a safe place for their children," says Virginia Walden-Ford, a summit participant and leader with the Black Alliance for Educational Options. "Their children can't afford to wait - they need a place now."

That's the education problem. The political problem has three parts. First, though polls show that African Americans generally favor school choice, they tend not to vote for pro-school-choice candidates who are mainly Republican. Second, suburban voters of both parties are not enthusiastic about school choice. Many of these voters see increasing options for inner city kids as enabling blacks and Latinos to find their way into their children's schools. And of course, the teachers unions devote their considerable resources to fighting any measure that increases accountability or gives parents more options.

So when politicians have to choose between a teachers union and some African-American mom who would like to take her son out of a failing public school, guess who usually wins?

This system has had remarkable staying power; but the cracks are appearing. In cities like Washington, D.C., and Newark, N.J., African-American mayors like Anthony Williams and Cory Booker - Democrats both - have taken courageous stands to offer children more and better school options. And these brave souls are being joined by a growing number of parents, pastors and advocates who recognize that the status quo is cheating their children out of a chance at the American Dream.

There's a good opening here for John McCain. As a senator, he has been a forceful voice for giving lower-income moms and dads the same options for their children that wealthier parents already enjoy. What if he took this campaign into the heart of our cities - and gave a little straight talk about the scandal that their public-school systems represent in this great land of opportunity?

Hillary Clinton can't do it for the same reason that Barack Obama can't: They cannot offend the teachers unions that are arguably the most powerful constituents in their party. John McCain can. Will he?

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Can schools teach kids to think?

The introduction of `thinking skills' in British schools treats educational thought as a learned behaviour. But children are not dogs to be trained.

From September 2008, pupils starting secondary school in England are going to be taught to think. This begs the question, what have schools been doing up until now? Nevertheless, from now on young people are to be explicitly taught thinking skills. It is tempting to believe that this will result in the opening up of a new world of intellectual possibilities for young minds. but paradoxically, it is more likely to convince teachers and pupils alike that thinking is a conditioned reflex that just needs to be trained.

The promotion of the teaching of thinking skills is not new to education. The UK government has been encouraging the uptake of these ideas in secondary schools, as part of its attempt to drive up standards, for the past five years (1). But now the skills-based approach to learning has taken centre stage with the launch of the new national curriculum for 11- to 14-year-olds. The UK Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) published a `framework of personal, learning and thinking skills'. As the QCA says, this will give young people the skills `to enter work and adult life as confident and capable individuals'. According to the framework, pupils are to be encouraged to become `reflective learners', `creative thinkers', `team workers', `self-managers', `independent enquirers' and `effective participators'. This is the language of management training, not education. Deriving from the government's obsession with making education relevant to the perceived needs of business and society, the introduction of the explicit teaching of `thinking skills' is a political project.

The new national curriculum presents school education as a series of outcomes (2). Each outcome is explicitly a vision of the type of young people the QCA thinks society needs and wants. The actual subject matter of education only comes as an afterthought, hidden as a set of abbreviations in a minor strap line under `statutory expectations'. Clearly, according to the QCA, education is not about the transmission of knowledge. In fact, knowledge either gets in the way of learning transferable skills, or subjects are included only because they allow skills to be developed.

But surely introducing the teaching of thinking skills in the curriculum will improve pupils' chances of a good education? I beg to differ - for two reasons. First, the attempt to train pupils to think is based on a cognitive model of the human being as a biological machine. The attempt to teach thinking skills implies that thought is a learned behaviour, like a dog learning a trick. Once the trick is learned, apparently it happens automatically and, by definition, needs no further thought. The promotion of thinking skills is an attack on intellectual life, on thought itself.

Secondly, the promise of thinking skills is a hollow one. Even in its own terms, the development of thinking skills is about conditioning individual behaviour. It reduces the scope for creativity, the very thing it aspires to promote. We can't conjure up good ideas just by sitting down for half an hour and thinking about creating new ideas. The best that the thinking-skills approach has to offer is the illusion that good ideas are already there, just waiting for us to find them. This traps thought in our own heads. Creativity, like thought, is the result of an active engagement with society and with ideas themselves, not the action of a single mind trained inside a classroom environment.

During a recent training day for schoolteachers, I was asked to take part in an exercise based on (3) the approach to problem-solving developed in the book Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono, a well-known British physician, author, inventor and consultant. For this exercise we were given a problem and a card with one of the six hats explained on it. Each hat involves taking a different perspective (not necessarily your own) when discussing the problem at hand. The perspectives ranged from emotional, critical, objective, positive, creative to organisational. By discussing a problem from all these different perspectives, we are meant to arrive at `the answer', if it exists, in a faster, more systematic fashion.

The exercise was trivial, but what struck me was the introduction of de Bono into the classroom. Again, this is explicitly the language of management training rather than education. From this management perspective, knowledge is not considered to be very important. After all, business and management decisions are not made in the pursuit of knowledge - rather they are made in order to develop a position that can be defended and acted on. In the business world, once a decision is taken it must be transparent and accountable. Above all, decisions must be taken positively and leave no room for criticism. That is fine for management circles - but it is the very antithesis of the intellectual pursuit of knowledge, which must be more open-ended, more falsifiable, more open to continuing debate and development. De Bono made his name in the field of management consultancy - and what does that have to do with education?

De Bono himself is explicit about his suspicion of intellectualism. He says: `A true intellectual has as deep a fear of simplicity as a farmer has of droughts.' (4) His approach is the solution of problems in simple terms in the here and now. His approach is completely divorced from the intellectual tradition of human thought. In fact, argument and criticism - the tools of philosophers and thinkers in any serious field of knowledge - are to be dispensed with in the de Bono outlook, since they apparently lead to a `dangerous arrogance'. Instead, de Bono wants us to focus on positive, creative thinking and, as he calls it, `operacy'. By `operacy', he means `the skills of doing'. He warns us: `On a personal level, youngsters who do not acquire the skills of operacy will need to remain in an academic setting.'

It is no surprise, then, that de Bono is a fervent critic of school-based education. His books on education stress that his methods and not formal academic education are the real key to success. As he says in Teach Your Child How To Think, `Do not wait for school to do it. Where is "thinking" in the curriculum?' (5) He will be pleased to see that thinking is now included in the new national curriculum, and it's the kind of thinking he will approve of - a pared-down, simplistic view of thinking as a means to solving problems and `being creative'. In other words: anti-intellectual thinking.

Why are explicitly anti-intellectual thinkers like de Bono being included in school-training exercises and the development of the new curriculum? Why is thinking being taught as a skill separate and distinct from the pursuit of knowledge and education more broadly? These are worrying developments indeed, which are likely further to corrode excellence and ambition in British schools, and churn out children who are `skilled' but not very thoughtful or truly reflective. The paradox is that now, when we have all become obsessed with education, formal education is being torn down brick by brick. Learning about the intellectual tradition from which this society emerged is the best way to give young people a sense of where and who they are. This in turn will give them the basis upon which to struggle for a better society. No amount of empty-headed `brainstorming' sessions is going to bring about those kinds of ideas.

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Homeschoolers in court: We're constitutional

'Parents have a protected liberty interest to direct the education of their children'

An amicus brief has been filed in a California court case that at one point threatened homeschooling by hundreds of thousands of people statewide, and it argues the U.S. and California Constitutions both recognize the fundamental rights of parents to direct the education of their children. WND broke the story at the end of February when a ruling concluded parents in the state held neither a statutory right nor a constitutional right to provide homeschooling to their own children.

That ruling from the California Court of Appeal for the 2nd Appellate District was vacated when the court granted a petition to rehear the case, and the new filing is from the Pacific Justice Institute on behalf of Sunland Christian Academy, the private school that offers the independent program in which the family's children were enrolled. The father in the case is represented separately by the United States Justice Foundation and the Alliance Defense Fund, which have been working on the case's main arguments to the court.

"The Fifth, Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, as well as Article 1, [paragraphs] 1 and 7, of the California Constitution, protect the fundamental due process and privacy liberties of Californians," according to the Pacific Justice brief which cited court cases addressing the right to marry, establish a home and bring up children, the right for parents to educate children as they choose, the "private realm of family life," and others. "The areas represent 'a realm of personal liberty' which the government may not enter," said the filing.

"Our legal team has put in many long hours to ensure that the voice of homeschooling families is heard clearly and persuasively in the Court of Appeal," said Brad Dacus, president of PJI. "It is absolutely essential that our judicial system continues to recognize parents' age-old rights to determine how best to raise and educate their own children."

The original opinion, written by Appeals Court Judge H. Walt Croskey, said: "We find no reason to strike down the Legislature's evaluation of what constitutes an adequate education scheme sufficient to promote the 'general diffusion of knowledge and intelligence. . We agree . 'the educational program of the State of California was designed to promote the general welfare of all the people and was not designed to accommodate the personal ideas of any individual in the field of education.'" The appeals ruling said California law requires "persons between the ages of six and 18" to be in school, "the public full-time day school," with exemptions being allowed for those in a "private full-time day school" or those "instructed by a tutor who holds a valid state teaching credential for the grade being taught."

Homeschool advocates immediately expressed concern the original ruling would leave parents who educate their children at home liable criminally as well as open to civil charges for child neglect that could create the potential for fines, court-ordered parenting classes or even the loss of custody under extreme circumstances. But the appeals court vacated the opinion, ordering a new hearing. Sunland had asked for permission to participate formally in the case, since the children involved were registered in its program, but the court declined. It did grant Sunland, which is represented by Pacific Justice, permission to file an amicus brief on the issues.

The Pacific Justice brief notes the state already recognizes private schools including those with independent study programs, and Sunland has been approved by the formal regulatory procedures in the state. "Parents have a constitutionally protected liberty interest to direct the upbringing and education of their children," the brief said. "Thus to avoid finding the compulsory education laws unconstitutional, the courts should seek to interpret the statutory scheme in a manner that does not intrude upon this fundamental right."

The argument continued, "The Supreme Court of the United States has long held that the interest of parents to direct and manage the education and upbringing of their children is a fundamental right protected by the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. ... California courts have also invoked the principles ... that personal liberty is a fundamental interest, second only to life itself, as an interest protected under both the California and United States Constitutions."

The appeals court also, in its order for a rehearing, expanded the case far beyond the original family situation involved to include an evaluation of whether the state laws regarding homeschooling allow that activity, and whether the state is in conflict with any U.S. Constitution provisions regrading homeschooling. Additionally, the court asked the state's superintendent of public instruction, the California State Board of Education, the Los Angeles school district, the California Teachers Association and the Los Angeles teachers' union for their opinions on homeschooling. Other homeschooling interests were told they could file briefs, and the court said they would be considered. Oral arguments are scheduled in June.

The original opinion arose from a dependency case brought in juvenile court. In the process, attorneys assigned by the court to the family's two younger children sought a court order for them to be enrolled in a public or qualifying private school. The district court denied the request citing parental rights, but the appellate court overturned the decision and granted the attorneys' request. The appeals court concluded the parents held neither a statutory right nor a constitutional right to provide homeschooling to their own children in the opinion that later was vacated. "Parents have a fundamental right to make educational choices for their children," said Gary McCaleb, a senior counsel for the ADF. "Because this ruling impacts all of Californians, we believe the case deserves a second look." "Another look at this case will help ensure that the fundamental rights of parents are fully protected," Kreep added.

Also involved in the case on behalf of the parents is the Home School Legal Defense Association, which said it would seek permission to file amicus briefs on the issues. A long list of homeschool groups working in the state previously released a statement on the issue that could affect 200,000 students. Joining were the California Homeschool Network, Christian Home Educators Association of California, Private and Home Educators of California and HomeSchool Association of California. "We are united in the goal of protecting the right of parents to teach their children private at home without additional governmental interference," the statement said. "We believe that children deserve to learn in the environment that best meets their individual needs. We support the right of parents to direct their children's education including, if they desire, teaching their children privately at home apart from any public school program and without a teaching credential."

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said the president has supported homeschoolers in the past.

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5 May, 2008

Candidates stump for school choice

If Barack Obama wins the Democratic nomination, Americans will have two presidential candidates who are open to school choice measures. Barack Obama went on Fox News Sunday this week and said, "We should be experimenting with charter schools" and "different ways of compensating teachers" - beliefs he's long held but not always trumpeted, The New Republic's Josh Patashnik says. Obama advocated charter schools and performance-pay for teachers in Illinois, and has even hinted that he wouldn't rule out the idea of school vouchers.

John McCain visited New Orleans Thursday on his "It's Time for Action" tour, stopping in cities the campaign said the federal government has forgotten, but where local solutions are working.

New Orleans has become a proving ground for charter schools in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. According to the campaign, it has the highest percentage of students in charter schools among U.S. Cities. Most of the city's students now attend charter schools. Last year, students in New Orleans charter schools out-scored their peers in traditional public schools on a standardized test.

A president friendly to charter schools could spur the already-growing charter school movement. The number of charter schools nationwide grew by 11 percent in 2006, serving a student body that is on average 53 percent minority and 54 percent low-income, according a survey from the Center for Education Reform.

In Grand Rapids, Mich., J.C. Huizenga, the founder of National Heritage Academies, a national chain of 55 K-8 charter schools located in six states, recently announced plans to started a college prep high school to go head-to head with a new public college prep school.

Chicago school teacher Will Okun recently described his frustrations with traditional city schools in an blog post entitled "The Mire." The Chicago Public Schools have 27 charter schools on 48 campuses. Hundreds are on the waiting lists, and the city plans for more by 2010.

Okun, while cautioning parents and policy-makers to remember the students left behind in the public schools, describes parents desperate to pull their children from traditional schools:

Charter-school parents speak of higher graduation rates, better facilities, more extracurricular opportunities, caring teachers, and stricter discipline. Most importantly, these parents speak of charter schools with a sense of hope and purpose that no longer exists in most public high schools on the West Side. . I do not blame parents for wanting to surround their children with other children and parents who give education top priority."

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Corrupt university professors still on the payroll

This is not how West Virginia University wanted to build its national reputation. Six months after his inauguration, President Mike Garrison is struggling to hold his administration together - and keep his job - amid a scandal that erupted after the school granted Gov. Joe Manchin's daughter a master's degree she didn't earn.

Two top university officials resigned last weekend over their part in the episode. Major donors have canceled plans to donate millions. Members of the Faculty Senate are planning a no-confidence vote on Garrison next week. And critics inside and outside the university have demanded the president resign over what appears to be an instance in which political pull influenced the awarding of a degree. "If you have smart officials, they know this would be one of the quickest ways to ruin the reputation of the university," said Thomas Morawetz, a professor and authority on ethics at the University of Connecticut law school. "It is a serious violation of norms."

With more than 27,000 students, West Virginia is the pride of a state where people say they "bleed blue and gold." Mountaineer alumni include the governor and NBA Hall of Famer Jerry West. The university has helped generations of West Virginians - many of them the sons and daughters of coal miners and steelworkers - lift themselves up in a poor state. But it also perennially ranks among the nation's top party schools.

Now some fear the scandal threatens the university's effort to improve its academic reputation and turn itself into a national research powerhouse. Garrison himself has made high-tech research a priority, successfully lobbying the state Legislature for a multimillion-dollar "bucks for brains" program. An editorial in the student newspaper, The Daily Athenaeum, said the administration has "trivialized all degrees this university has awarded and will award." "I suppose this is the price paid for attending a university with such an intimate connection to its state, a final reminder of how dirty West Virginia can be, and not just from the coal dust of economic fallout," student columnist Chad Wilcox wrote separately.

The scandal cracked wide open last week after an investigative panel issued a report saying the university showed "seriously flawed" judgment last fall in retroactively awarding an executive master's of business administration degree to Heather Bresch, who attended the school in 1998 but did not earn enough credits. The panel said the business school gave Bresch credit for classes she didn't take, and assigned grades "simply pulled from thin air," giving her special treatment because of who she is. The degree has since been rescinded. The governor, a Democrat, has denied exerting any pressure and said he first learned of the dispute only after it became a news story. Bresch told The Associated Press that she believes she did nothing wrong.

Bresch, 38, is not only the governor's daughter. She is chief operating officer of generic drug maker Mylan Inc., a major West Virginia benefactor with a lab in Morgantown that employs about 2,000 people. Mylan was one of the companies that raised the money to create the Executive MBA program, which is for full-time executives. Mylan's chairman, Milan "Mike" Puskar, is a Manchin supporter and one of West Virginia's biggest contributors. The business school deanship is endowed in Puskar's name, and the football stadium was named for him after he donated $20 million in 2003.

Bresch is also a friend and former high school and West Virginia classmate of Garrison. He, in turn, worked for Democratic former Gov. Bob Wise and was once a Mylan lobbyist. Now, Garrison - who was a 38-year-old lawyer with much stronger political credentials than academic ones when he was tapped for the presidency - finds himself the target of critics among the faculty, alumni and the state Republican Party. Garrison should resign, and "he needs to take all his cronies with him," said GOP chairman Dr. Doug McKinney. "They've shown there's entirely too much connection between the statehouse and the president's office."

One philanthropic group, the McGee Foundation, has dropped plans to donate $1 million in cash and an additional $1 million worth of art, and other, smaller donors have threatened similar action, officials said.

Garrison said this week that he will not resign. "I was not involved in any way in the decision," he said. And the university Board of Governors - which hired him and has the power to fire him - issued a statement affirming its "full support" of Garrison. The governor also said he believes Garrison should not step down.

The resignations of Provost Gerald Lang and R. Stephen Sears, dean of the business school, have not satisfied the most vocal of the critics, particularly since Lang and Sears will remain as tenured professors, with Lang earning nearly $200,000 a year and Sears almost $160,000. Lang presided over the meeting last October during which Sears made the final decision to grant the governor's daughter a degree. "It's nice that the dean and provost were offered up as sacrificial lambs, but the cancer is still there," said Peter Kalis, a lawyer and 1972 graduate. He said Garrison and the chairman of the Board of Governors must go, too, if the university is to "reclaim its independence and integrity."

The scandal is not the first major crisis of Garrison's young administration: Football coach Rich Rodriguez abruptly left in December for a job at Michigan, complaining that the university broke a promise to give him greater control over the football program. Rodriguez and West Virginia are now locked in bitter public feud and a lawsuit over a penalty clause in his contract that says he owes the university $4 million for leaving early. Rodriguez claims Garrison had assured him privately that he would not enforce the clause; Garrison denies that.

On Thursday morning, protesters showed up for a speech on campus by former President Clinton. "Mountaineers always free; Mountaineers earn degrees; Garrison must go," read one sign. Another sign bore a drawing of a diploma and the words: "Free while they last."

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The Left's grip on learning

Comment from Australia by Imre Salusinszky



When I abandoned university teaching at the beginning of 2003, after 20 years, I was careful not to construct a "God that failed" narrative around my reasons for going. You know what I mean: how the university system let me down, by its surrender to political correctness, or managerialism, or economic rationalism, or whatever.

In fact, while all those forces had some impact on the working lives of academics between 1983 and 2003, universities remained outstanding places to work. There are few jobs, possibly none, that allow their employees as much freedom to pursue their own interests. And within the constraints of increased demands for accountability -- demands that have affected every sector of the workforce, not just tertiary education -- universities in Australia continue to provide supportive environments for teaching and research.

I left for largely personal reasons and without a trace of bitterness or resentment. That said, there were irritating, almost daily incidents on campus that confirmed the takeover of universities by the world view of the green Left. For example, there was the exchange student from the US who, close to tears, told me of how, during a role-playing exercise in a drama class, his tutor had instructed him, in front of the other students: "You're an American, so you play thebully."

Then there was the honorary degree proffered to anti-nuclear messiah Helen Caldicott. Modern universities are creatures of the Enlightenment and should advance its aims. If there is a more potent counter-Enlightenment figure in Australia today than Caldicott, I can't think of him or her. At the time she was honoured, I mused on the confused response I would surely have elicited from the relevant committee if I had nominated a true Enlightenment figure and a genuine intellectual, such as Paddy McGuinness, for a doctorate.

And speaking of the counter-Enlightenment, every election would see the doors of some of my colleagues in the humanities faculty plastered with Greens propaganda, with several standing as candidates.

All of this was harmless, up to a point. One of the lessons life has taught me is that the inherent qualities of human beings -- their decency or mendacity, goodwill or nastiness -- cannot easily be read from their political opinions. I got on well with my colleagues and, even after I "came out" as a supporter of microeconomic reform and started moonlighting as a columnist who specialised in sending up the cultural Left, most of them seemed well disposed towards me.

Along with much else, the situation in universities, and my own situation, shifted ground after 9/11. Following the terror attacks, the cultural Left (as distinct from the mainstream political Left) made the classic misjudgment it has made whenever democracy and fascism have come into conflict in the past century: it refused to pick sides on the principle that anybody who attacks the US and its allies cannot be all bad.

My colleagues' expressions of horror at the loss of life on 9/11 were heartfelt, but were almost always followed by a subordinate clause beginning -- like this one -- with but. Exactly a week after the attacks, I received an email from the academics' union representative on campus inviting me to a candlelight "vigil for justice and peace" in support of the victims of 9/11: not the 3000 victims of the terror attacks, but the arbitrary and so far hypothetical victims the Great Satan was about to unleash his fury upon.

"We have all been saddened, horrified, at the events in the US last week," the email began. "Many of us are now extremely worried about the talk of war and vengeance on the yet unidentified enemy, and the escalation of violence that may occur if bombing of towns and cities in targeted countries occurs." The email went on to encourage union members to attend the vigil, "if you would like to stand up and be counted and send a message to our civic leaders and fellow Australians that indiscriminate violence against 'suspects' will not be OK, that the targeting of Muslims, Arabs, Afghanis or other people of a certain ethnicity, as undesirable, is not OK, or if you just want to be with others who are sad, worried and concerned about war and justice." I didn't. Events such as this, while they did not cause me to leave the university, certainly did not incline me to linger.

So what has prompted these autobiographical meanderings? It is that the Young Liberals have launched a campaign, under the banner Make Education Fair, in which they are asking university students to report examples of political bias by their lecturers, with a view to holding a Senate inquiry into the issue. The Young Libs have already been accused of a sinister exercise in McCarthyism, but that tends to be the response whenever the question of bias in public institutions -- schools, universities, public broadcasting, museums and galleries -- is raised. Those for whom diversity is a key buzzword appear to flee the concept when it is applied to them.

I don't think there is anything wrong with left-leaning academics or ABC broadcasters. I don't think they need to be disciplined, far less sacked. But the dangers of allowing the political spectrum in these institutions to begin at Bob Brown and veer left from there are manifold. It leads to a bifurcated culture in which intellectuals lose contact with the mainstream and frequently develop a sense of hostility and embattlement towards it. Second, it means students are not being introduced to some of the most exciting intellectual ideas of our time, those associated with free-market economics and contemporaryliberalism.

And in the longer term, the effect of an undiluted green gospel, presented as a curriculum in schools and universities, could be devastating. If the idea is allowed to take hold unchallenged that, rather than wealth creation, it is the effort to limit and regulate wealth creation that underwrites our wellbeing, future generations will have a much lower standard of living than we enjoy.

Rather than sinister, I regard the Young Libs' campaign as quixotic. You won't, and shouldn't, change the beliefs of people who work in universities or other public institutions; rather, you should try and make sure there are a range of beliefs represented. Diversity really is the point. But when it is those already in place who control recruitment, courtesy of staff capture, the possibilities of cultural change quickly recede.

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4 May, 2008

Do you want underqualified people designing the bridges you drive over?

That in essence is what is proposed by the reality-defiant author below. The standard way of getting more "minorities" (blacks) into a given field is to give them meaningless bits of paper which say they are qualified when they are not. Why? Because no-one yet has found any other way of doing it. Such nonsense is not always very harmful but in this case it could be. Note that there are already plenty of "minorities" (Asians) in the professions

In confronting the "gathering storm" of declining competitiveness in the global marketplace, policy makers and business leaders often point to the importance of foreign students and international education in boosting both research and the American work force. A new report released on Thursday argues instead that the solution lies at home, "untapped," waiting for the nation to wake up to the "quiet crisis" of minority underrepresentation in engineering-related fields.

"We find ourselves at this moment in history with the number of engineering graduates at one of its lowest levels of the past 20 years, and yet a time when the demand for young people prepared to work in America's high-technology industries has never been higher," wrote John Brooks Slaughter, president and CEO of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, which sponsored the report through a grant from the Motorola Foundation.

The report, whose title, "Confronting the `New' American Dilemma," refers to a landmark 1944 study on race relations by the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, argues that the mismatch been the demands of science and engineering fields and the graduates produced by American colleges and universities must be addressed by boosting the number of underrepresented minorities pursuing those degrees.

While the percentage and number of such minorities (defined as African Americans, Latinos/as and American Indians/Alaska Natives) earning degrees in science, technology, mathematics and engineering - or STEM - fields has generally increased over the years, the report notes the daunting obstacles that confront policy makers and educators seeking to increase the diversity of graduate students, professors and scientists in private industry who have made it through the pipeline. According to NACME, only a fraction of underrepresented minorities graduate high school "eligible" to seriously pursue engineering at the college level, a reality the report dubs "the 4 percent problem."

In 2002, according to the report, 28,000 out of about 690,000 minority students who graduated from high school that year had taken enough required math and science courses to qualify them for a college program in engineering. And of that pool, only 17,000 enrolled in engineering programs as freshmen, compared with 107,000 first-year students at such institutions. "That same year," the report states, "4,136 Latinos, 2,982 African Americans, and 308 American Indians received baccalaureate degrees in engineering out of a total of 60,639 minority graduates" - just over 12 percent combined out of the total minority graduation pool, including Asian Americans and other groups.

The report itself is part of a broader campaign by the engineering association to promote wide-ranging policy reforms in education, from K-12 to graduate school. The organization envisions a broad-based partnership between government, business and education leaders to expand access, boost funding and support diversity programs for underrepresented minorities.

Among the report's "calls to action," for example, are strengthening STEM education early on in school and improving guidance counselors' "knowledge of STEM careers and college programs and have them send the message to students that STEM careers pay in terms of salary, prestige, and challenge." It also targets financial aid and affirmative action programs, and calls for "policies to totally transform the education system to emphasize active, hands-on, project-based learning rather than lecture and rote memorization."

That might be a reference to the educational systems of some Asian countries that send students to American colleges and graduate programs in STEM fields. At a panel announcing the report's release on Capitol Hill on Thursday, several participants seemed to pit the success of underrepresented minorities against that of foreign students studying at American colleges, with the implicit suggestion that lawmakers should focus instead on the latent potential of African American, Latino and Native American students. "I think it's a smokescreen," said Lisa M. Frehill, the executive director of the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology, which conducted the research for the report, referring to the willingness of colleges to accept foreign students as compared to the educational attainment of underrepresented minorities.

Most of the data come from various government agencies, including the Census Bureau and the National Center for Education Statistics. To take a 2005 snapshot illustrating the dilemmas confronting educators, the report provides the exact number of minority graduates at each degree level. To African-American females, there were 1,074 engineering bachelor's degrees awarded that year, compared with 2,111 for males. Females were awarded 282 master's degrees in engineering compared to 592 for males, while 26 black females earned Ph.D.s in engineering, compared with 74 black males.

For Latinos, the numbers are similar: 1,155 bachelor's degrees awarded to women and 3,459 to men; 315 master's degrees to women and 837 to men; at the doctoral level, 28 women earned their degrees and 70 men. The numbers for American Indians and Alaska Natives remain in the single digits at the Ph.D. level, with degrees awarded to eight males and a single female. Those numbers are not available in the report for 2006 because of a new policy that withholds some data on minority doctorates for privacy reasons. Some other statistics uncovered in the report:

* The number of engineering degrees as a proportion of all bachelor's degrees awarded declined from 1995 to 2005 for all ethnic groups except for American Indians and Alaska Natives. For African Americans, that proportion declined to 2.5 percent from 3.3 percent of all degrees, while for Latinos it declined to 4.2 percent - about the level for non-Hispanic whites - from 5.5 percent in 1995.

* At the associate degree level, the percentage of engineering degrees earned by African Americans rose to over 10 percent from about 4 percent between 1991 and 2005. That percentage increased from 6 percent to 9 percent over the same period at the bachelor's degree level.

* The top institutions awarding engineering bachelor's degrees to African Americans are all historically black universities: North Carolina A&T State University, Tennessee State University, Prairie View A&M University, Florida A&M University and Morgan State University.

* The gap between white and black educational attainment has narrowed over the years, "but not disappeared," according to the report. In 2004, 17.6 percent of African Americans and 30.6 percent of non-Hispanic whites held a bachelor's degree or higher.

So far, the report is not available online, but supplementary materials have been posted at the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology's Web site.

Source




British private school demand is highest for five years despite big fee rises

Brits desperate to get their kids out of dangerous, anarchic and incompetent government schools

Independent schools have had the biggest increase in pupil numbers in five years as parents dig deep to avoid the state system. Although successive above-inflation fee increases have driven the average cost of private education to more than o11,000 a year, the number of children enrolled in schools belonging to the Independent Schools Council (ISC) has risen to a record 511,677. This is despite a fall in the number of English children of school age and in the number of overseas pupils, and fears that the credit crunch could lead to recession.

The increase has been driven by a big expansion of provision in the nursery sector, as growing numbers of preparatory schools have decided to accept three-year-olds. Longer working hours, commuting and the rising costs of formal childcare have persuaded more parents to turn to independent schools for a preschool education.

Deborah Odysseas-Bailey, chairwoman of the Independent Schools Association and headmistress of Babbington House school in Kent, which has a nursery, said parents were now putting children's names down for school at birth, if not before. "Parents are buying into independent education at a much earlier age. Once they are in, they wish to remain," she said.

Figures also show a strong rise in the number of sixth formers in the independent sector. Barnard Trafford, chairman of the HMC group of elite independent schools and headmaster of Wolverhampton Grammar, said this was because such schools offered a broader education and wider range of subjects, including modern languages, classics and the sciences at A level.

The increase in demand for a private education comes against a 6.2 per cent increase in school fees, according to the ISC annual census. At the top end of the scale, there are now 14 boarding schools and one day school charging more than o27,000 a year.

Vicky Tuck, president of the Girls' Schools Association and principal of the Cheltenham Ladies' College, attributed the rise in part to the spread of new technology. "Parents are quite worried about the isolated lifestyles teenagers can grow into, stuck in their bedrooms with all their gadgets. What they love about boarding is the strength of the community. At the same time, the new technology that pupils do have in boarding school makes it easier to keep in touch."

Head teachers said that parents were willing to make huge financial sacrifices. Several, however, expressed concerns that the economic slowdown might start to affect enrolments from next year. Mrs Tuck said that Cheltenham Ladies' College had deliberately kept its fee increase to 4 per cent this year, in anticipation of harder times. At the City of London School for Boys, the headmaster, David Levin, said: "We needed to start making things easier for parents so we kept our fee increase down to 2 per cent."

Nick Dorey, chairman-elect of the Society of Headmasters and Headmis-tresses of Independent Schools and head of Bethany School in Kent, said that parents were getting help from grandparents or by remortgaging. "That can't go on for ever. If the market falls, that will affect the amount of equity in people's houses that they can convert into school fees," he said. The ISC census is based on returns from 1,271 schools that belong to the council, representing 80 per cent of privately educated pupils.

Source




Australia: Independent Schools' call to deregulate education system

There's little chance of any of this happening but it's encouraging to see such thinking getting an airing

THE State Government should put the building and running of new schools out to open tender and release all details of individual funding, a new report on Queensland's education system urges. The report, commissioned by the Independent Schools Queensland lobby, lashes the present system, which it says ensures the Government has a conflict of interest because it delivers and regulates education services. It accuses the Government of using its regulatory and financial powers to restrict the supply and funding of private schooling at a time of severe pressure on the system, caused by population growth and the ageing of the teacher workforce.

Written by policy analyst Dr Scott Prasser, the report warns that, as with water supply, health and infrastructure, school education may be the next crisis the Government will have to tackle unless it changes the system. Calling for a more deregulated model of school education, it says that one in three of all Queensland school students attend non-government schools, but the sector is still treated as an "appendage" to the system. "There is a clear but largely unacknowledged conflict of interest between the State Government as a supplier of education services and a regulator of the public and non-government school sectors," the report says.

Dr Prasser, from the University of the Sunshine Coast, said the Government also should encourage more community involvement in the running of schools and the development of schools policy. Independent Schools Queensland executive director John Roulston said the group has commissioned the report to "promote informed debate" on school education policy issues.

Premier Anna Bligh said she would examine the report. Education Minister Rod Welford also received a copy of the report yesterday but had not read it. The report does not avoid criticising the private school system, saying all school sectors had resisted any moves to release more comprehensive school performance data to the public. "The public release of school performance data is one of the first steps needed to obtain a better appreciation of what is working in education," the report said.

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3 May, 2008

A Professor Sues His Students

He objects to being called a racist by black students because he criticizes affirmative action

On bad days, there are no doubt plenty of professors who have joked about suing students. But it is pretty rare that somebody actually does so. A law professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock has - and the ramifications could extend well beyond his dispute. Richard J. Peltz is suing two students who are involved in the university's chapter of the Black Law Student Association, the association itself, and another individual who is affiliated with a black lawyers' group. Peltz charges them with defamation, saying that his comments about affirmative action were used unfairly to accuse him of racism in a way that tarnished his reputation.

Suing students for what they have said about you is rare if not unheard of, but the topic has suddenly come up not only at Little Rock's law school, but at Dartmouth College. There, a former instructor recently sent several former students e-mail indicating that she was planning a suit. Robert B. Donin, general counsel of the college, issued a statement in which he said: "We have determined that there is no basis for such action, and we have advised the students and faculty members of this."

Since the suit that has been filed in Arkansas and has been reported by The Arkansas Democrat Gazette, students and faculty there have considered the ramifications - but mostly among themselves. There is considerable concern at the university - and some elsewhere - about what it means to open exchange of ideas to have a professor sue his students.

The dispute over Peltz concerns his opposition to affirmative action - and how he expressed it. Complicating matters is that no one who was present when the statements were actually made is discussing them. Those Peltz sued did not respond to messages, and he was willing to e-mail only a very general discussion of what happened. In examples of the defamatory material that were submitted with his suit, however, the view of the black student organization about his actions becomes clear.

In a memo sent to Charles Goldner, dean of the law school, the students accuse Peltz of engaging in a "rant" about affirmative action, of saying that affirmative action helps "unqualified black people," of displaying a satirical article from The Onion about the death of Rosa Parks, of allowing a student to give "incorrect facts" about a key affirmative action case, of passing out a form on which he asked for students' name and race and linking this form to grades, and of denigrating black students in a debate about affirmative action, among other charges. The student memo said that the organization had "no problem with the difference of opinion about affirmative action," but that Peltz's actions were "hateful and inciting speech" and were used "to attack and demean the black students in class."

The black student group demanded that Peltz be "openly reprimanded," that he be barred from teaching constitutional law "or any other required course where black students would be forced to have him as a professor," that the university mention in his personnel file that he is unable "to deal fairly with black students," and that he be required to attend diversity training.

While Peltz in an e-mail said he could not discuss the case in detail, he suggested - as have his supporters - that the accusations that he was unfair to black students were a misrepresentation of his criticism of affirmative action. For example, he said that he was invited by the Black Law Students Association to debate affirmative action and to take the anti- position.

And while not relating this action directly to what is described in the suit, he wrote the following by e-mail about what may be the form asking for students' race. "Unrelated to the debate and in the ordinary course of my Constitutional Law class in the fall of 2005, I taught the usual and scheduled material on affirmative action. To stimulate discussion, I presented students with an exercise by handing out a adapted version of the form that the Arkansas state government uses to hire personnel. All students were offered credit to participate. Responding to skeptical student questions, I argued in favor of affirmative action. My teaching method spurred a productive class discussion."

After Peltz filed the suit, he was removed from teaching all required courses - a fact that the university confirmed but declined to explain, saying that it related both to personnel issues and litigation. Goldner, the dean, sent students and professors an e-mail in which he said that "we recognize that an individual is within his or her rights to file claims in our courts. We also take seriously our obligation to provide our students the environment they need in order to receive the best possible education. Part of that obligation includes working to be an institution in which all members - faculty, students, and staff - are free to openly voice opinions and concerns." Goldner pledged to continue to work to create a "diverse and inclusive community."

Jonathan Knight, who handles academic freedom and governance issues for the American Association of University Professors, said he was concerned about the suit - regardless of whether Peltz was unfairly maligned by his students. "A suit like this, as I'm sure the professor knows, can have troubling implications for academic freedom," Knight said. "When you ask a court to become involved in making judgments about the metes and bounds of free expression on campus, it can be dangerous." He noted, for example, that legal standards about the free exchange of ideas - some of them unpleasant - "are not co-equal with the standards of the academic community."

Generally, Knight said that the worries about courts settling such matters are such that professors need to be "thickly armored" when it comes to comments from colleagues or students. If a professor is being unfairly criticized, it is far better for fellow faculty members or a dean to come to his or her defense than for the scholar to go to court, Knight said.

Noting that professors "typically do not restrain themselves" when talking about other professors' research, Knight said that "when one enters the academic community, it's with the understanding that lots of things might well be said which cast one in a very unpleasant light."

Source




French primary schools return to tables

French primary school children will be learning multiplication tables by rote and conjugating verbs in the pluperfect tense under a back-to-basics programme to be introduced after the summer holidays.

Critics denouced Xavier Darcos, the Education Minister who developed the plan, as old-fashioned, out-of-touch and reactionary, and unions called for a strike over the reform. He responded by saying: "It's not by listening to a great pianist for hours on end that you become one, it's by doing your scales."

The programme is an attempt to prioritise French and mathematics on a primary school curriculum that has been loaded with subjects such as the history of cinema and discovery of the world. Teachers have been told to provide ten hours of French lessons a week to six and seven-year-olds and eight hours to eight to ten-year-olds. All primary school children will be taught five hours of mathematics a week.

Source




Row over British plans to recycle 24,000 failing teachers

Up to 24,000 incompetent teachers should be removed from their classrooms and put to work in neighbouring schools, according to the body responsible for upholding teaching standards. Keith Bartley, the chief executive of the General Teaching Council for England, said that urgent action was needed to retrain teachers who had "more bad days than good". He said that it was unacceptable that only 46 teachers, from a workforce of half a million, had been judged incompetent since 2001.

In an interview with The Times, Mr Bartley said that he had drawn up draft proposals to tackle the problem in response to a call by Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, in his ten-year Children's Plan, for the GTCE to root out teachers whose "competence falls to unacceptably low levels". Mr Bartley's comments provoked immediate criticism from teachers' leaders and parents, who said that it was unfair to expect pupils and schools to take on teachers judged to have failed elsewhere.

At present one of the best-kept secrets of the teaching profession is that head teachers routinely encourage sub-standard teachers to resign, allowing them to transfer, often with a passable job reference, to another school. This is easier than embarking on lengthy and stressful incompetence procedures, but it shifts the problem elsewhere.

Mr Bartley said that it was impossible to say for sure how many incompetent teachers there were, although some estimates put the number as high as 24,000 - roughly one per school. Mr Bartley said that on his visits to schools he often came across teachers who felt "oppressed" by continually changing educational policy and everyday tasks, having lost the bigger vision of what teaching was about. "We know we have the best-qualified teachers we have ever had," he said. "We are not talking about a system in crisis. But there's a band of teachers who have more bad days than good. The issue is how do we energise people in the profession so that they don't drop into the routine."

Under draft proposals drawn up by Mr Bartley, head teachers would be able to refer incompetent teachers to an independent agency that would in turn place the teacher in a nearby school. There, the teacher would be given intensive retraining and support and the chance to prove themselves. He said that evidence from cases heard by the GTCE suggested that incompetence was often a matter of context. "A teacher may be incompetent in one area, but not in all areas." He added that it should be a given that all competent teachers sought constantly to improve and developtheir and practice. It was part of a wider move to improve the overall standards of teaching and went hand in hand with plans to encourage all teachers to study for masters degrees.

John Dunford, of the Association of School and College Leaders, said that heads would want to help teachers to find a school that suited them. "But they can't just go from school to school, because heads would be reluctant to take the risk that a teacher found incompetent in one setting might be less competent in another."

Margaret Morrissey, of the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations, said: "If these teachers are incompetent, parents will immediately say: what effect has this had on my child's education?"

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said that it was keen to ensure that such teachers were helped to improve as quickly as possible. "We are clear that simply moving poor-quality teachers around is unacceptable and those who do not quickly improve will be helped to leave the profession."

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2 May, 2008

This is how bad some British schools are

A father threw himself under a train because he wrongly thought that he had failed to enrol his daughter into her chosen secondary school, an inquest was told yesterday. Steve Don, 43, believed that he was an "unfit parent" because he had been unsuccessful in getting his 11-year-old daughter into a secondary school near their Brighton home.

The surveyor, who had no history of depression, had complained to his family that repeated attempts to contact the local education authority had been met with silence. He handed his daughter over to social services hours before jumping into the path of a train at a level crossing in East Sussex.

On the day of his suicide Mr Don told his wife: "They would not listen to me alive, perhaps they will if I was dead." But it emerged that Brighton & Hove City Council had backed down and awarded his daughter, Bethany, a place at a school a few minutes' walk from her home only hours before Mr Don died. His wife, Lorraine Wilson, 44, told him the news over the telephone but he refused to believe it. Two hours later he was dead.

In a statement read to the court, Mrs Wilson, an office manager, said: "He did take his life and this was due to the local education authority not agreeing to meet him." The family had wanted their daughter to go to the Dorothy Stringer School but in 2005 she was placed at Falmer School, five miles away. The couple appealed but this was rejected by an independent panel. They applied again for Varndean School, which is within walking distance of their ground-floor flat. Hours before Mr Don killed himself in September 2005, the council called his wife to say that it had found their daughter a place at the Varndean School.

Concluding that Mr Don committed suicide, Alan Craze, the East Sussex Coroner, said "I have made a decision not to hold an inquiry into matters relating to the decision as to which secondary school this particular child should go to." A council spokesman said: "The reason Mr Don's original preferences were turned down was because he'd sent his form in after our published deadline. Our rules clearly say we have to consider all applications that come in by deadline before late ones."

Source




Queer perspective

This story from Saturday could have been a Bottom Story of the Day, but it's so amusing it's worth giving a longer treatment: "School officials said Friday was uneventful for Tampa Bay area students observing a 'Day of Silence' protest organized by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network," reports the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times.

Participants "moved quietly between classes, undisturbed by teachers or classmates." A spokesman for the Hillsborough School District (Tampa) said, "I haven't had any parent calls, teacher calls or non-parent calls. It's just been really quiet.'' A spokesman for the Pinellas (St. Petersburg) district "was unaware of any incidents related to the Day of Silence." If that's not nothing enough, the paper reports that "at Palm Harbor University High School, dozens of students wore purple ribbons--and were largely ignored":

Brittany Moore, the 17-year-old president of the school's Gay-Straight Alliance, said she wished there had been more of a response. Still, Moore said, it was better than the past two years, when students verbally assaulted those who participated in the event.

Hmm, she "wished there had been more of a response," but in previous years, when people talked to her, she complained of being "verbally assaulted." Maybe this idea needs a bit of a rethink.

Source




Homosexuals lose one in Australia

THE DECISION to ban students from escorting gay partners to the Anglican Church Grammar School formal next month has been fully endorsed by the school council. Up to eight students had wanted to take boyfriends and raised the issue with a senior staff member, who passed the request to Churchie headmaster Jonathan Hensman. At the time Mr Hensman said it was not appropriate for students to take a same-sex partner because escorting a young woman to a formal was part of the boys' education. But after reports in The Courier-Mail Mr Hensman referred the matter to the school council.

A brief statement posted on the Churchie website yesterday said the council "strongly supported the headmaster's position on the school's education programs in social settings". Council members also "thanked the headmaster for his leadership and his ongoing commitment to the highest standards of education for Churchie boys". The nine-member council is chaired by company director Barry Kelly and includes Mr Hensman. Anglican Archbishop Phillip Aspinall is the council president but a spokesman said he took no part in the discussions.

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1 May, 2008

EDUCATION IN AUSTRALIA

Lots of news from the education scene in Australia at the moment so I am concentrating on articles in that realm today

MORE ON AUSTRALIA'S ALLEGED "MADRASSA"

Two current articles belolw:

An incompetent but hungry university boss

A recent comment from "The Australian" below. Disclosure: I have personal knowledge that many who knew O'Connor as a mediocre but ambitious academic at the University of Queensland were amazed when he was appointed VC by Griffith. I am myself a graduate of the University of Queensland

Would Ian O'Connor pass an undergraduate course? Compare and contrast these two paragraphs: "The primary doctrine of Unitarianism is Tawhid, or the uniqueness and unity of God. Wahhab also preached against a perceived moral decline and political weakness in the Arabian peninsula and condemned idolatry, the popular cult of saints, and shrine and tomb visitation." And: "The primary doctrine of Wahhabism is Tawhid, or the uniqueness and unity of God ... He preached against a 'perceived moral decline and political weakness' in the Arabian peninsula and condemned idolatry, the popular cult of saints, and shrine and tomb visitation."

The first appeared in The Australian on Thursday under the byline of Professor Ian O'Connor, vice-chancellor of Griffith University. The second is from Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia blocked by some secondary schools to discourage students from sloppy research.

A former social worker who climbed the academic ladder rapidly, Professor O'Connor has admitted lifting the information and confusing strands of Islam. His stumbles came in attempting to defend his university's imprudent decision to ask for more than a million dollars from the repressive Saudi Arabian Government.

Professor O'Connor also appears to have breached his university's standards on plagiarism. If sprung, a student doing the same thing would surely be reprimanded. Many a career, including that of former Monash University vice-chancellor, Professor David Robinson, has been cut short through more serious allegations of the same behaviour. In 2002, Professor Robinson stood down after claims he plagiarised material for a book published 20 years earlier.

On the Griffith website, Professor O'Connor says the slip-up was not intentional and that his article "was not as a piece of academic scholarship" and "therefore did not follow normal citation methods used in academic publications". Not good enough for a vice-chancellor. The fully referenced version of the article also appears on the Griffith website. Three of the seven references are to Wikipedia, which in most institutions, including secondary schools, would earn a "D" for effort.

Professor O'Connor should heed the advice of his underling, Griffith University Council member Dr Dwight Zakus -- a senior lecturer in the Department of Tourism, Leisure, Hotel and Sports Management. He said he "strongly discouraged" his students from using Wikipedia because it is "a blog site, you can add and change (the information) and you're not sure of the veracity of the information there".

Professor O'Connor has yet to justify his taking the begging bowl to a repressive regime that punishes by stoning, beheading and amputation, and bars women from driving and most forms of normal life. Worse still, his university offered the Saudis a say in how the money would be spent then offered to keep it all secret. Academic freedom, like most basic freedoms, is anathema to the Saudis, who have no place influencing Islamic studies in Australia.

Source

Saudi funds not a secret deal: Abdalla

The Griffith University academic at the heart of a funding controversy has defended the decision to accept $100,000 from the repressive Saudi Arabian Government to help finance Islamic studies. Mohamad Abdalla told the HES the money for the Griffith Islamic research unit he leads had come with no strings attached, had been acquired openly and without secrecy and there was nothing wrong with it. But he conceded the furore over a separate tranche of funding he sought - $1.37 million - had given him pause for thought. Were the Saudis to approve the money, he would recommend the university not accept it. "I would say no, don't take the money," Dr Abdalla said.

Dismissing as farcical the idea that accepting money from the Saudi Government could compromise the unit, he would not rule out accepting further funds from the same source at a later time, when the furore had died down. "If they offer it I will consider it," Dr Abdalla said.

Debate rose over the funding when The Australian's Richard Kerbaj revealed the Saudis had been offered some discretion in how the money would be spent and had also been offered anonymity over the donation. When vice-chancellor Ian O'Connor defended the university's pursuit of Saudi funding in an opinion article, he came under fire for using Wikipedia as a main source and for his confused interpretation of Islam.

Under fire for the propriety of his actions, Dr Abdalla was also forced to deny he was the Brisbane leader of the contentious Tablighi Jamaat movement, as had been reported. Although sympathetic to its ideals and acknowledging the group was represented at the Kuraby mosque, where he was a leader, he was not one of its leaders, he said.

Commentators who bought into the debate included Stephen Crittenden of the ABC's The Religion Report, who wrote: "What the Saudi Government really wants is the legitimacy that comes from being associated with a Western university. There is not a shred of evidence that it has any interest in progressive reform." The Australian Strategic Policy Institute's National Security Project director Carl Ungerer was also among those incredulous that any donation from Saudi Arabia would be considered acceptable. "It is naive to think that Saudi Arabian funding is not going to be problematic given we know the Saudi Government and its agencies have funded Wahhabist educational institutions around the world," Dr Ungerer said. "It's one of the major problems we have in the ongoing 'hearts and minds' campaign in the Muslim world."

Another Muslim academic, the University of Melbourne's Sultan of Oman professor of Arab and Islamic studies Abdullah Saeed, is an associate of Dr Abdalla through their joint involvement in the National Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies and agreed funding was a sensitive area. "In the current climate one has to be very careful," Professor Saeed, the centre's lead director, said.

The Australian also reported last week that the Higher Education Funding Council for England was concerned about Saudi funding and the US Congress was examining Saudi donations to colleges. MI5 had also reportedly warned Prime Minister Gordon Brown that funding from Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries had caused a "dangerous increase in the spread of extremism in leading university campuses". At the same time The Guardian newspaper reported that HEFCE was considering a virtual centre of excellence networking academics, faith and community Islamic groups to boost Islamic studies.

The controversy has also drawn out defenders of Dr Abdalla. The Queensland Forum for Christians, Jews and Muslims praised his "ability to build bridges between the Muslim community and people of other faiths" and said it was "greatly saddened to see Dr Abdalla's integrity questioned". Uniting Church of Queensland moderator David Pitman said DrAbdalla was "an outstanding scholar and a person of great integrity" making a significant contribution to the life of the nation.

Islamic Council of Queensland president Suliman Sabdia, on behalf of 13 other signatories,wrote a letter to The Australian warning a repercussion of the reporting of the issue "could be increasing Islamophobia and a consequent decline in thousands of Muslim students coming to Australia, not only to study but also to experience our way of life".

Source




Political correctness betrays migrant students

Migrant graduates are failing to get jobs because they can't speak much English -- but they have enough English to get an Australian university degree! How come? Because it would be "discriminatory" for the university to notice how well they speak English! In one recent case my alma mater hired a Chinese lecturer to teach law despite the fact that the students he was allegedly teaching could not understand a word of his version of English! How stupid can you get?

Another problem is that an unofficial "affirmative action" policy prevails -- less is asked of students from Asia -- which, as always, just devalues their qualifications

Fewer than a quarter of young, degree-educated migrants are finding skilled or professional jobs in their areas of study, and graduates are leaving university with poor academic standards and minimal English. A study by Monash University academics Bob Birrell and Ernest Healy found the problem was particularly acute among students from non-English-speaking backgrounds who had studied at Australian universities. Only 22 per cent of Australian-trained graduates aged between 20 and 29 who were migrants from non-English speaking countries were in professional roles in 2006. The figure compared with 57 per cent for English-speaking migrants and 64 per cent for Australian-born graduates.

The study suggests skilled migrants are satisfying immigration and university officials about the usefulness of their qualifications, but are failing to convince employers.

Overall, 38 per cent of skilled migrants were in professional roles in 2006, Professor Birrell said. But just 29 per cent of migrants from non-English-speaking countries found professional work. This compared with 63 per cent of skilled migrants from English-speaking countries.

Professor Birrell said the figures, which are based on census data, showed the skilled migration program was failing in its fundamental objective of combating the skills crisis. He said the students' poor English skills and the application of diminished academic standards were the main reasons universities were producing overseas graduates with skills and qualifications that were of little interest to employers. "The biggest problem is poor English and the lack of occupational experience," Professor Birrell said. "It also raises questions about courses that are being reduced in demand or complexity to cater for overseas-trained students."

The study, to be published in the Monash journal People and Place, looked at 212,812 degree-qualified migrants who arrived in Australia between 2001 and 2006. Of those, 90,416 were aged 20 to 29, most of them former overseas students who had studied in Australia. The remaining 122,396 migrants were aged 30 to 64. In both categories, most came from non-English speaking backgrounds. Young Chinese students fared the worst, with only 16 per cent working in professional roles.

Professor Birrell said many of the young, Australian-educated migrants took degrees in accounting, one of the professions most in demand, but only a minority ended up working as accountants. He called for a review of the way the skilled migration program was administered.

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Taunts at Chinese Australian kids centre of complaint

PLAYGROUND taunts against Chinese Australian children are at the centre of a major court battle over complaints of school racism. A family has taken its case to the Supreme Court after three brothers were allegedly derided with comments including "ching chong Chinaman" at their Sydney primary school. The trio, aged 7, 9 and 10 at the time and who cannot be identified, claim the playground "bullies" teased them repeatedly, saying they hated Asians and Asian restaurants should be bombed to make way for "McDonald's and Kentucky Fried outlets".' The oldest was also allegedly threatened with a pair of scissors by a boy who said: "I'm going to kill you."

The Education Department has been fighting the case since the allegations were first made to the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board in 2000. The family is taking Supreme Court action in a bid to have the case reopened in the Administrative Decisions Tribunal - and the outcome could have serious ramifications for schools across the state. It follows the landmark $1 million award to bullying victim Benjamin Cox after it was found the department had failed to protect him in the '60s.

After an ADT hearing two years ago the family of Chinese descent was awarded $6000 in damages and the school - Excelsior Public at Castle Hill - was ordered to apologise. But the decision was overturned on appeal last year when it was ruled teachers could not be held liable if they failed to respond to racist insults in the playground. Teachers said they did not believe the gibes were racist because they were "silly talk" between children.

The department said the boys responsible had been disciplined but the school was accused of failing to provide a safe learning environment. Staff said the case put teachers under extreme stress, raising complex issues around the context in which playground comments become racist. A departmental spokesman said discrimination of any kind against students or staff in public schools and TAFEs was not tolerated [Except when it is]. "Comprehensive policies, including tough disciplinary measures, have been developed to handle such cases. The ADT appeal panel found the department appropriately handled events occurring almost 10 years ago," he said.

Teachers' Federation president Maree O'Halloran said a Supreme Court decision could change department guidelines.

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High quality education for all?

That's what Leftists will tell you government schools are for -- but it is not so, never has been and never will be. Reality is not like that

Proximity to sought-after primary schools in Brisbane's dress circle suburbs has become the latest must-have selling point in the tough property market.

Just being in the catchment area for the most popular schools can add up to $70,000 to the value of your house, say agents - and buyers are lining up.

At both Wilston and Ascot state schools - and others such as Eagle Junction - the desperation to get their children on the rolls has been so great parents have been known to lie and cheat to succeed. "They fight fiercely to get in," one agent said. Fake addresses were one ploy, or getting a lease and breaking it after a month; using friends' houses as a mailing address, or even granny flats, guest cottages, business offices and investment properties have been used in a bid to get proof-of-residence documents.

Some parents said, apart from the schools' reputations, there was a social benefit in getting their children on the roll at blue-chip state schools. Not only is it good for the kids but parents get to rub shoulders with Brisbane's business and social elite. One mother of an Ascot child said: "It's one of the only private schools you don't pay fees for."

Education Minister Rod Welford said it was "extreme" for people to buy into a particular area simply because of the name of the primary school. "Most schools are within range of each other in terms of the quality of education," Mr Welford said.

But residential research director at RP Data Tim Lawless said it was clear the demand for properties within well regarded public school zones had a profound influence on property prices. "Take the example of Wilston where the local state school enjoys an enviable reputation. Median house prices within the suburb of Wilston have risen by 18.7 per cent over the last year and by 13.5 per cent per annum (on average) over the last five years," Mr Lawless he said. Agent and the mother of an Ascot student, Kim Josephson said the catchment was a primary motivator for many buyers. "If they have $2 million to spend they may buy a lesser house in the Ascot catchment rather than a better one outside," she said. "There is a nice sense of community. It would be easy to paint it as shallow and cliquey, but that has not been my experience at all. My little boy is getting a lovely education there."

Wilston State School principal Leann Griffith-Baker said she saw the school being used to market properties within its catchment every week and put it down to academic excellence and a sense of community. She said parents made a huge financial commitment to buy in the area and some had moved a few streets just to get into the catchment. "But people do invest for schools in the private ranks as well. When they apply to Gregory Terrace of St whatever they pay $1000 just to get on the waiting list," she said.

According to agent Liz Fell there's a huge demand for Wilston's catchment. "I've got two buyers who have been on my books for six to eight months. They won't compromise on being in the catchment even though Windsor, down the road, is a good school. "If you're in walking distance it's an even hotter prospect."

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The reliable high standards of government schools (NOT)

The Torres Stait and Cape York areas are primarily inhabited by blacks (Sorry: "Indigenous people"). The Leftist Queensland government is big on talk about black welfare but deeds speak louder than words -- revealing once again what Leftists REALLY think about blacks

TEACHERS in the Torres Strait will be the first to strike this week over "untenable living conditions" in far north Queensland. Some teachers on Cape York have been without hot water since the beginning of the year while many throughout north Queensland face security issues. Broken locks, security doors and airconditioners, mouldy furniture and collapsed water-damaged walls and floors are all common teacher complaints, according to the Queensland Teachers' Union.

QTU state secretary Steve Ryan said an extra $5 million for maintenance and housing stock was needed to lift living standards to an acceptable level. Stop work meetings will be held from 2pm to 3pm tomorrow in the Torres Strait. Teachers around Cape York and the Gulf of Carpentaria will stop work on Wednesday between 2pm and 3pm. Mr Ryan said they will call on the State Government to guarantee sufficient, secure and regularly maintained accommodation backed by a significant funding increase in the state budget. Rolling 24-hour stoppages will be considered if that funding is not increased.

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