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30 November, 2005

Government education: Road to hell?

Good intentions will surely be the downfall of individual liberty and personal freedom. The greatest motivation that mankind has to abandon the principles of freedom is simply being afraid. And, fear plays right into the hands of legislators that use good intentions, whether quite sincere or merely conjured, to usurp individual freedoms and parley them into collective power. The consequences of this exchange is a bloated beast called Bureaucracy controlled by a tyrant, or group of tyrants, that seek to enslave the masses for their own good. In other words, Freedom dies. Remember my personal credo, "More government ALWAYS translates into Less freedom." In no area is this more evident than the realm of government education.

Education is only one of the areas where good intentions have proven less than sufficient to cure the ills of society. It was with the very best of intentions that legislators decided to take upon themselves the responsibility of providing a free education to every child in America. Has a nobler thought ever been conceived in human mind than the desire to see America's offspring properly prepared to face an ever-changing world? However, the consequence of such feel-good philosophy is a false sense of security, born in the supposition that the State can do something, anything, better than the individual. Freedom is relinquished willingly for nothing more than a promise that government can provide something to individuals that the individuals themselves cannot procure on their own. And the children suffer the most.

The worst consequence of passing responsibility of educating young minds from personal to collective is the task is botched so horribly. Some children are educated quite well in a state-supported system but most barely receive an average level of education. And, far too many fall through the expansive cracks of society that are the floorboards of a bloated bureaucracy grown so large it has become impossible to keep track of everyone. The result of all the good intentions of providing adequate education to children is a twelve-year factory system that produces more than its fair share of functional illiterates. Why do you think the majority of congressmen/women have their children in private institutions? These children are not trained to take charge of governing themselves; but rather, they are almost programmed to be willing taxpayers that obey a ruling elite. Seems we have been there before and it required armed revolution to free an oppressed people. Sound familiar?

So, which is better? Giving your precious children to the State and expecting something you are not likely to receive; or, taking back the responsibility of educating your own young, making sure YOU are satisfied that your loved ones are properly equipped to face the cold, cruel world? Nothing as important as educating a child should be left to government agencies that only have a mandate to provide minimal education to the children whose minds they are charged with filling. The State has no incentive to educate children other than to ensure the perpetuation of governmental power. Willing subjects are much easier to rule, after all. By giving into the good intentions of supposedly well-meaning elected representatives we allow the State to churn out generation after generation of willing slaves that will worship at the altar of the false-deity Security, and believe the lie that the State can provide them their necessities. The consequences again are just too great to ignore. Slavery is unacceptable even if it is of the subtle sort!

When we allow the responsibility of educating our beautiful children to be assumed by the State, we contribute to the agonizingly slow death of Freedom by allowing the government to control the path of each new generation. Good intentions have created a system that takes in free individuals and renders dependent servants of them. Good intentions that have allowed our children to be poorly educated.

There are no easy answers to all of life's problems, but we should not allow that to become sufficient reason for believing the lie that the State can handle any problem better than individuals. There is simply no evidence to support the claim. We must stop allowing good intentions to be used to justify every great debacle while ignoring the cost in taxpayer's dollars and human lives. We must learn from our mistakes and start thinking more about the consequences before we allow ourselves to be swept away by the tsunami caused by the sudden social shifts born in good intentions. Perhaps there is no truer adage than the one that cautions: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

Source



Chicago Mayor Loves Socialist Education

For years now Richard Daley, Mayor of Chicago has enjoyed a growing reputation among the political Leftists in this country. He has been one of the leading local and national proponents of "victim disarmament" (he calls it gun control). Daley's rationale seems to be that if only the honest people would all just turn in their firearms then the gangbangers would not have to worry about shooting them when they committed robbery or mayhem because they would all know that none of the honest people had anything left to defened themselves with. Cuts down on the murder rate, you know.

I doubt if Mr. Daley really expects the gang members to dutifully fork over their illegal firearms, but then, again, he seeems more interested in keeping honest folks disarmed than he is in taking illegal weapons away from gang members. But, then, this is a mindset quite in keeping with the socialist worldview.

And Mr. Daley continues to demonstrate his socialist proclivities in other areas. A while back, he vacationed in Red China, and while there he took a look at the Red Chinese educational system--which, by the way, he was really impressed with. It seems the Reds keep their children in government schools for 250 days a year--mostly all year, and that really appealed to Daley. Mayor Daley would like to do the same thing in Chicago--make the kids go for 250 days a year, all year. Writer Jack Duggan, commenting about this on LewRockwell.com has noted: "Daley somehow thinks that six days of mediocrity would be much better than five days of mediocrity. And he wants to extend from 180 days per year to the Communists' 250. It seems the plan is to force kids to become good and obedient little robot socialists. Just imagine, publik skool not only for 6 days a week, but for longer hours each day, and then for 12 months a year. Sobering, isn't it?" Frightening would be a more apt description!

Of course the Chicago Teachers Union would be in support of such a program. And the teachers would have to get a hefty pay raise because of all those extra hours, but, then, most of them also suffer from a socialist world view as does Daley and so they are more than happy to go along. Anything to increase the amount of propaganda they can force down the kids' throats under the guise of "quality education." Duggan has it right--the aim is to create obedient little socialist robots.

And for the teachers to get more money, why, naturally the property taxes would have to be raised, but, hey, isn't that a small price to pay for getting your kid thoroughly brainwashed, er, I mean "educated"?

We should ask these folks if they know anything or are willing to discuss the real foundations of the government school system in this country. If we do they will probably speak in glowing terms about Horace Mann, the "father of the common schools." What they won't tell you is that Horace Mann was a Unitarian (one who did not accept the Deity of Jesus Christ) and that part of the reason Mann was so hot to establish statist education in New England, where he lived, was that he saw it as something to oppose the Christian schools in his area. In other words, public, or government education was a reaction against Christian education.

Another strong proponent of government schooling was Karl Marx, who advocated, in his "Communist Manifesto" that "Free education for all children in public schools" should be the order of the day. So, with the endorsement of Unitarians and Communists, our government school system has become the order of the day, and our kids have suffered under this monstrosity since the 1830s.

Mr. Duggan has stated that: "The irony of this situation is that most publik skool teachers are themselves graduates of the same system. They can't spell much better than their students. so the students will grow up dumb and dumber and not able to get a decent-paying job..." And, no doubt, those graduating from the teacher's colleges will get a diploma that reads: "Last weak I culdnt even spell teecher--now I are one."

Let us hope that someone in Chicago can find some way to get Mr. Daley's educational desires deep-sixed. If not, I can see this becoming a pilot program for government schools all across the country. Government education already has too many hours per day to brainwash children. They don't need more. Actually what we really need is for a growing number of parents to remove their children from the government schools and to begin to teach them at home, where they can get some real education rather than the cunningly devised socialist fables they are fed in government indoctrination centers we call public schools.

Source

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

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

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

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29 November, 2005

POSSIBLE HIATUS

I go into hospital for a rather large surgical procedure today. It is however day surgery so I hope to be back home by the evening and blogging away as usual. If that proves too optimistic, however, this blog may not be updated for a day or so.



CALIFORNIA EDUCATION BUREAUCRATS WOULD SURVIVE A NUCLEAR WINTER

Enrollment drops, teachers leave, but administrators stay. That's the story at most of the 25 school districts with declining enrollment in the Sacramento region, according to a Bee analysis of state education data. Just eight of those districts reported to the state that they had cut administrators between the school years 1999-2000 and 2004-2005, even though the districts lost about 5,000 students during that period. Five of the 25 districts added administrators. And although most of those districts aren't cutting administrator positions, they are employing fewer teachers. Twenty-two of the 25 districts have fewer teachers today than they did five years ago, state data show.

Some districts can justify those numbers because their enrollment dropped incrementally, said James W. Guthrie, a professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., who taught at the University of California, Berkeley, for almost three decades. But the five districts that added administrators and another five in which administration ranks remained the same while enrollment dropped by more than 10 percent have some explaining to do, he said. "If you didn't cut, why? If you added, why?" Guthrie asked. "The burden of proof ought to be on why they haven't reduced their administrative staff."

Administrators defend the numbers by pointing to new federal and state initiatives that they say create more work. They also cite the difficulty of cutting supervisory staff in small districts. "You happen to be looking at the period of time when the state is rolling out high-stakes accountability," said Bob Wells, executive director of the Association of California School Administrators. "There are in fact more things to do that are administrative in nature."

Even though California continues to grow each year, about 40 percent of the school districts in the state are losing students. The reasons vary. In some places, high urban home prices cause young families to head for the suburbs. Rural districts often shrink as residents move to places with more jobs. And some areas have static, older populations without many kids.

The amount of funding a district gets is closely tied to the number of students it teaches. So schools with fewer students usually find themselves slicing up a smaller pie. And if the number of administrators in a shrinking district grows or stays the same, a bigger piece of that pie goes toward paying supervisors. That's exactly what has happened at most of the districts that are losing enrollment, but not losing administrators, in the Sacramento region, state data show.

More here



BRITISH CONFUSION OVER RELIGIOUS SCHOOLS

Multiculturalism, for so long the mantra of the left and the government when dealing with the issue of race, seems to have run out of steam. Margaret Hodge, minister for employment and welfare reform and MP for Barking in East London, seemed to echo the sentiment of many when she said that faith schools should promote integration, not segregation.

But this comes at the moment the government seems determined to fund more and more faith schools. David Bell, the chief inspector for the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), has called for the government to fund more of the 120 independent Muslim schools in Britain, to ensure that they can be regulated. There is a growing fear that faith schools will become detached from British society and could become hotbeds of anti-Western dissent.

Of course there are those who just dismiss faith schools altogether. The British Humanist Association has welcomed Hodge's statement, which it says acknowledges what it has been saying for many years: 'faith schools are a key cause of segregation.' However, it complains that Hodge did not include atheists in her catalogue of those kept out of faith schools: 'We are, however, disappointed that Ms Hodge mentions only that children of "other faiths" should not be excluded. Sixty-five per cent of 12- to 19-year-olds describe themselves as having no religion - are they to continue to be excluded from learning with their peers?'

This spat over faith schools reveals the rotten core at the heart of British education. Despite the rhetoric, there is no vision for schools in this country. When the government sees it as necessary to fund more faith schools, it does so because at least such schools can unashamedly promote some values. They have an ethos and a credo that they can promote. The 'multicultural comprehensive', by contrast, is a confused place, not knowing whether Christmas is offensive or Muslims should be allowed to wear religious garments as part of their uniform. The only value it aspires to is to have no values - which it refers to as 'tolerance'. Hodge attacked religious schools for being intolerant, saying: 'We need Ofsted to ensure the curriculum and values of faith schools are consistent with the national curriculum and with promoting tolerance.'

How a set of absolute moral and religious beliefs fits in with any notion of tolerance is beyond me. Unless, of course, you adopt the multiculturalist perspective - according to which tolerance means an appreciation of 'other values', without accepting them yourself. It means denying the right to criticise believers for their values, but denouncing anyone who evangelises belief to us. It is both a separation from other cultures and a failure to define our own culture. If we were to define our culture as apart from other religious cultures we would no doubt be subject to the government's new religious hatred legislation.

As far as faith schools go, I find the arguments put forward by the secularists particularly unconvincing. By taking the stance that all faith schools should be abolished, the British Humanist Association ends up suggesting that multicultural comprehensives are better than faith schools. But a system that denies the possibility of belief to its pupils, and offers nothing but cynicism and intellectual paralysis, can hardly be said to be good. At least a child brought up in a Catholic or Jewish school has a God to rail against. All state schools offer is the certainty that there is no truth other than the impossibility of knowing - a kind of postmodern purgatory.

But for Muslims, the promise of religious schools is a trap they could well do without. The ghettoisation of Muslims into faith-based communities can only reinforce the estrangement that young British Asians already feel. Some of them turn to religion and the symbols of religion as the easy route to rebellion. But this is a script largely written for them by an establishment that avoids engagement with young Asians.

Instead of promoting values around which we can fight to build a future for all, we have collapsed into looking for enemies in every community. Some young Asians appear ready to act out the worst fantasies of Hodge and co - but the political elite must bear the bulk of the responsibility for the Islamicisation of Britain's Asian youth.

Source

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

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

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

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28 November, 2005

VIRGINIA: A NICE LITTLE WIN FOR REAL TOLERANCE

Don't expect it to extend to the Ivy League any time soon, however

Warren County Community College adjunct English professor, John Daly resigned last night before the school's board of trustees began an emergency meeting to discuss the professor's fate. On November 13, Daly sent an email to student Rebecca Beach vowing "to expose [her] right-wing, anti-people politics until groups like [Rebecca's] won't dare show their face on a college campus." In addition, Daly said that "Real freedom will come when soldiers in Iraq turn their guns on their superiors."

School president William Austin said that he will incorporate tolerance seminars for professors during the next faculty in-service day to shield students from this type of harassment, as requested by Young America's Foundation. Rebecca Beach has called for Austin to select Young America's Foundation President Ron Robinson as the one to teach leftists how to be tolerant toward conservatives. Robinson has dedicated his career to defending free speech on college campuses. "More colleges and universities need to follow the lead of WCCC and integrate tolerance training for insensitive leftists," says Young America's Foundation Spokesman Jason Mattera. "John Daly is yet another Ward Churchill. Academia is filled with intolerant leftists who openly show hostility toward conservatism."

Daly's email to Rebecca came after she sent a note to faculty announcing the appearance of decorated war hero Lt. Col. Scott Rutter to discuss America's accomplishments in Iraq.

Young America's Foundation will continue to monitor and expose similar instances of leftist intolerance through our online service, "Activist 411 - Activism Made Easy." This resource helps students, like Rebecca Beach, by providing them with advice on how to advance conservative ideas effectively and reveal intolerant professors, administrators, and other left-wing elements who attempt to intimidate and silence young conservative activists.

As the principal outreach organization of the Conservative Movement for 35 years, Young America's Foundation introduces thousands of young people to conservative ideas through national conferences, campus lectures and activism programs, internships, and seminars at the Reagan Ranch. Young America's Foundation preserves the Reagan Ranch as a premier presidential property and living tribute to Ronald Reagan's life and ideas.

Source



CHINESE EDUCATIONAL SUCCESS IN AUSTRALIA

The immigration success story continues apace, with students of Chinese background securing one third of the places in Sydney's selective academic schools. Nine out of 10 students at James Ruse Agricultural High School - NSW's top-performing school - have a non-English-speaking background, predominantly Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean language groups. And after decades of mass migration, thousands of students in government selective schools speak more than 30 different languages at home, from Arabic to Vietnamese. Across the city, students from a migrant background - mainly from Asia - account for two-thirds of enrolments in selective schools, or 9451 out of 14,300 students.

However, the nationally agreed definition of "non-English-speaking background" is broad and includes many students whose parents were born in Australia. Students are classified as NESB if they or their parents speak a language other than English at home.

The Herald has analysed the cultural mix of students in the 19 fully selective state schools using NSW Education Department data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. More than 5000 of the 16,000 selective school students say they have a Chinese-speaking heritage and all but 100 of those students live in Sydney, where 4.9 per cent of the population speaks a Chinese language. The next largest language groups are Korean (601 students), Vietnamese (528), Tamil (436), Tagalog (284), Hindi (284), Singhalese (225), Greek (151), Russian (146) and Arabic (137). The dominance of students from non-English-speaking backgrounds ranges from 92.3 per cent of enrolments at James Ruse and 83.6 per cent at Sydney Boys High to 12.7 per cent at Gosford High.

Lynne Irving, the principal of Sydney Technical High at Bexley, said her school represented the changing demographic. "We reflect what the community looks like," she said. "Irrespective of the national background, the students all have a very high work ethic and they're very well supported by their parents."

Author Don Aitkin said the performance of many students from Asian backgrounds followed the success enjoyed by previous waves of migrant children. "It's in effect a parental sacrifice in the interests of the child," he said. The migrant parents would typically "work their butts off" so their children could get a good education. The children were aware of this and would often forgo "present gratification" like going to the beach to study hard. "And nothing has changed … What you are seeing is only the newest phase of it," he said.

More than 13,000 students this year competed in an entry test for 3308 selective school places in year 7 in 2006. As well as the 19 fully selective schools, there are another dozen schools that teach high achievers in some classes. Students must be Australian citizens or permanent residents. Newly arrived migrants often excel in the difficult test. This year 83 students who could not speak English when they came to Australia less than four years ago won a place for next term

Source

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

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

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

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27 November, 2005

IN NYC TEACHERS COME FIRST AND STUDENTS A DISTANT SECOND

Still, it must be hard to get anyone decent to teach in their shitty public schools so perhaps the principals are doing what they have to do until school discipline is reformed

"Nearly 40 percent of all public school principals in the city acknowledged "passing the lemon" - urging incompetent, tenured teachers to relocate to another school instead of trying to have them fired, according to a new study released yesterday. The practice has been a convenient way for principals to bypass the lengthy firing process for teachers outlined in state law and teachers' contracts.

According to the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit consulting firm that helps school districts recruit and train teachers, 37 percent of the 434 principals surveyed last year admitted trying to push off poor teachers to other schools. Michelle Rhee, CEO of the organization, said the practice "may be a rational response to the inability to remove tenured teachers for poor performance."

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein said the findings helped shape the new teachers' contract, which was ratified this month. It eliminated the right of senior teachers to transfer to other schools - often pushing out well-regarded novice teachers in the process. The senior teachers would often exercise their right to leave - after getting a pointed suggestion from their principal. The city Department of Education estimated that about 500 tenured teachers used their seniority to transfer to another school without the approval of the new school's principal.

About 2,300 more tenured teachers last year went to new schools under different plans in which seniority was also a factor. Nearly a quarter of principals surveyed reported losing at least one handpicked beginning teacher to a senior teacher because of the transfer rules.

Teachers union president Randi Weingarten called the report "anti-teacher" and accused the organization of bias because it did not seek input from the union. "Taken out of its protective clothing, this is simply a report that shills for management's demands, not for a new teacher's needs," she said.

Principals union president Jill Levy, who's in contract talks with the city, acknowledged that principals have tried to pass off inept teachers to other schools. But she said they only did so because the system did not support efforts to fire them".

Source (Newmark compares this policy with the Catholic Church's policy of just shifting pedophile priests from place to place)



TESTING TAKING OFF IN AUSTRALIA

Five-year-old children will be tested for basic reading skills twice a year under a national plan to help struggling students. Describing the current state of early childhood and kindergarten education as "a mess", Education Minister Brendan Nelson said the literacy tests would provide parents with results while their children were still identifying words and developing reading skills. Pre-empting a national literacy report to be released soon, Dr Nelson backed the investigation's recommendation of a national testing regime for under-8s. "When a child comes into the system, you have got to have some idea of what their reading skills may be," he told The Weekend Australian. "How is a teacher to know who to concentrate on? "You worry about them all but you've surely got to identify the ones you have got to start from scratch on."

The long-awaited report, Teaching Reading, was commissioned by Dr Nelson amid fears that current teaching methods were failing Australia's children. The minister is expected to announce a shake-up of teacher training in universities when the report is released on December 8.

The report's author, Ken Rowe, said yesterday there was no national regime to test children when they first attended school. "South Australia and Victoria have been doing this for quite a few years," he said. "Some children are even tested when they are 4 1/2. "The idea is they get some sort of indication of their cognitive development - whether they can identify letters, whether they can recognise their own name. "There's currently no national consistency on this. This would give teachers the basics of what they need to know about a child's skills."

His report is expected to include an explicit warning that Australia's schools should embrace "systematic, direct phonics instruction so that children master the essential alphabetic code-breaking skill required for foundational reading proficiency". There has been a controversial debate over which of two approaches is better - the phonics instruction method or the "whole language" method, a "holistic" approach in which children are immersed in language and words, instead of learning first to break down words.

Opposition education spokeswoman Jenny Macklin said: "If Brendan Nelson is going to impose a new test on five-year-olds, he must accompany it with additional resources for teachers so that the students requiring extra help actually get it."

Dr Nelson also signalled debate over a shake-up of early childhood education. "Personally, I think that early childhood education is a mess," he said. "It's a question of luck, in many cases, as to where you live in Australia and whether your child will get access to early childhood education and, if so, what the quality will be. "Some of the parents have said to me: 'What are you going to do about children who don't know what a book is?' "I've often said to the university people, who have a voracious appetite for money: 'If you had serious new money to invest in education in Australia, would you get a better human and economic return for it if you invested it in universities or early childhood?' That's a good question."

Dr Nelson also revealed that preliminary results from a controversial tutorial voucher scheme for children have shown a rapid improvement in their reading age of between 12 and 18 months after one-on-one help. Outlining a timetable to work towards a national Year 12 system, known as an Australian Certificate of Education, by 2007, Dr Nelson also indicated that his reform agenda was beginning to secure the support of previously hostile states. The proposal would build on the existing state-based exams, rather than force students to sit more tests. But it would deliver a national approach on key subject areas such as maths, chemistry, physics and English.

Parents forced to move interstate for work could be confident under the new system that their child would have a better chance of settling in, without the stress and upheaval of a different curriculum, Dr Nelson said. "Why can't we have common language, common units of assessment, common standards in core areas?" Dr Nelson maintains that the changes, which would require the agreement of the states, would not require a rigid, inflexible national curriculum across all subjects. "But in some areas, surely, elements of mathematics, physics and chemistry are common to everyone," he said

Source

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

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

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

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26 November, 2005

ATTEMPT TO ERASE AMERICAN HISTORY FROM AMERICAN SCHOOLS

The Carson City (NV) school district says 11th-grade history teachers should start teaching American history at the Civil War period and move forward. But one experienced, award-winning teacher is standing up to this History-Lite policy and is insisting on teaching about our nation's colonial and Founding eras. And he might lose his job over it. Citizen Outreach is asking people to sign an online petition to save his job.

What is the historian's version of the Hippocratic Oath? Herodotus as "The Father of History" has not left us one as far as I know. Given the disturbing trends towards disparaging the teaching of historical facts in public schools, we may want to consider writing such an oath regarding the sacred duty history teachers have to impart our heritage to the next generation. Perhaps it could read, "I will not water down history content or the methodology of teaching history to conform to any given educational fad or political correctness that slashes and burns through our subject. Our foremost duty is to the integrity of history facts and the best interests of our students."

In addition to our new oath, we could consider forming the history police to investigate pressures put on history teachers in public schools to cut corners lest they rock the boat. I am only half joking. One has only to watch The Tonight's Show "Jaywalking" where Jay Leno asks people on the streets the most basic of history questions to concur our graduates of public schools do not know historical facts.

In reality and to the astonishment of many, teachers are told not to be "fact-fixated" when teaching of history. The word "facts" is almost used as an expletive in modern education. We are told students need to have a "feel" for the period and jump right into critical thinking and dialog with each other. "Facts" we are told only promote lower order thinking and are a waste of time as facts change in an ever changing world. Wow! What nonsense.

Whisper the nonsense part if you are a history teacher in a public school. Those of us fixated on facts are labeled "Neanderthals" and "dinosaurs" in American public education's version of the Cultural Revolution. Today's educational Young Turks are taught to look with disdain on the factual dinosaurs by the schools of education that control the licensing of teachers.

Another disturbing trend in modern education is the focus on social history to the point that students can receive good grades on a historical topic and never learn or cover the major events. Jay Matthews, in the Washington Post (May 28, 2004) article: "Students Don't Know Much About WW II Except the Internment Camps," gave such an example. Teachers are pressured to cover these issues at the expense of the dates, battles, and leaders to the point that many of the history teaching staff have weak backgrounds in these basics. This in turn reinforces the trend not to cover the Molotov-Ribbentropp Pact, Pearl Harbor, and Stalingrad in any detail or with real meaning.

I currently find myself in a rather interesting predicament of resisting the cutting of U.S. history content and being forced to apply questionable educational methods. I have been told to "play ball or else" by school district authorities. I rock the boat of public school history education in my little part of the world because I know how to swim. I understand others in the boat resent it being rocked, but wonder where compromise begins and selling out ends. We all have different beltlines. Mine has been reached.

I pointed out serious errors of my school district in addressing the state history standards (which I helped author) . In retaliation school officials have rated me unsatisfactory and are intent on making me an example of what happens when a teacher steps out of line. My years of experience including being a Fulbright teacher and Madison Fellow have been denigrated by district administration as not relevant to being a good teacher in their attempt to marginalize me and my objections. The two history textbooks I have written in the last two years are dismissed as simply having to do with "content" and are also considered irrelevant to what they call education.

While this appears backwards and rather confusing to most, it makes perfect sense in the minds of too many in public education. It is a fundamental ideological struggle for the control of the teaching of history, a struggle between content-oriented historians versus the educational methodologists that are set to apply their process style of teaching that manipulates content at will. They have the tail wagging the dog with the allure of not having to bother with the years of historical study required to be (formerly) fully competent to teach history.

The premise of traditional historical education is to learn the key people, places, and events and only then build upon these solid foundations toward "real" critical thinking regarding the topic. This teacher-centered model of instruction is considered "bad" teaching by student-centered theorists. With student-centered teaching, students "share" their ideas and feelings in groups, as Heather MacDonald wrote in her 1998 work, The Flaw in Student-Centered Learning:

In such a classroom, the teacher is not supposed to teach, since teaching is considered too hierarchical and authoritarian. Worse, traditional lecturing presumes that the teacher actually knows something the students don't, an idea that is anathema to ed-school egalitarianism. The ideal student-centered classroom lacks a fixed curriculum. The student's own interests determine what he or she learns, with the teacher acting as mere "facilitator."

The use of the word "facilitator" exposes the key ideological difference of the methodology. While states still issue "teaching" licenses, the new teachers are not being trained to teach, rather facilitate. I can assume the people on the streets interviewed by Jay Leno were facilitated and not taught history.

Admittedly, forming a history police may be too far-fetched. They would be unnecessary if we had historical ethics and stood by them. Let's toy with the idea of a historian's oath. We should definitely look towards taking the power of licensing history teachers from schools of education and require them to obtain the stamp of approval from hard core history Neanderthals like us, assuming there are any of us left.

Source



BRITISH GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS CANNOT PROPERLY EDUCATE EVEN THE BRIGHTEST KIDS

The educational apartheid dividing state and independent schools was laid bare yesterday by new research into the achievements of bright children. The most able children are only half as likely to achieve top grades at A level in state schools as they are in the fee-paying sector, a government adviser told head teachers. Pupils in private schools who were among the country's brightest 5 per cent at age 11 were virtually certain to get three A grades in their A levels at 18, putting them in contention for places at Oxford and Cambridge. But only a third of the most able 5 per cent went on to achieve the same results in state schools.

The research was presented by David Jesson, an education evaluator based at York University, who said that the state system was suffering a "severe talent drain". He told heads at the annual conference in Birmingham of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT), which represents 2,422 state secondary schools, that Britain's future economic success depended on identifying and nurturing such children.

The findings present a huge challenge to Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, as she fights to win Labour support for reform of secondary schools. Many backbench MPs are suspicious that plans to turn comprehensives into independent trust schools will lead some to introduce "backdoor selection" of bright children.

Professor Jesson's findings came from research that tracked the progress of the brightest 5 per cent of pupils between 1999 and 2004, based on scores in national curriculum tests of English, mathematics and science at age 11 in primary schools. He was given access to the data by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES). Professor Jesson said that it was a myth that the brightest children attended private schools. In fact, of the 37,500 children in the top 5 per cent, 30,000 went on to state secondaries and 7,500 were educated privately. By the age 16, all 7,500 in fee-paying schools had achieved at least five GCSE grades A* or A. But only 20,000 of the original cohort in state schools reached this standard.

The professor said that 13,000 students in state schools achieved three A grades at A level. In independent schools, the number was 7,600. "At age 11, 7 per cent of all pupils are in independent schools. By age 16, 25 per cent of those achieving five A* or A grades are in independent schools. At 18, 33 per cent of those with three As at A level are in independent schools, and 44 per cent of Oxbridge entrants," Professor Jesson said. "There is the evidence not merely of a state-independent school divide, but of a state-independent divide on pupils who are similar. This is evidence of a severe talent drain."

Oxbridge admitted 3,500 candidates from the state sector in 2004 and 2,600 from independent schools. Bright children in independent schools therefore had a 1-in-3 chance of getting into Oxbridge compared with a less than 1-in-8 chance for students in the state sector

Source



Australia: Music plays second fiddle to other subjects

The majority of Australian children are deprived of adequate music education at school, according to a damning national report that political leaders say reveals a crisis in music teaching. The National Review of School Music Education found that two-thirds of schools rate their music classes as variable to very poor, and about one in 10 schools - or more than 900 across the country - offer no formal music classes at all. The review, commissioned by the Federal Government last year, also reported that a third of schools had great difficulty finding teachers who were properly trained in music. Only 6 per cent of schools made any effort to nurture students gifted in music.

The federal Education Minister, Brendan Nelson, conceded yesterday that his Government was partly responsible for the "inconsistent and inequitable" way music was taught to young Australians. But he also hit out at states and universities for treating music as "some kind of desirable add-on in school education rather than being a foundation of it". Dr Nelson, who described the review as "disturbing at best", will convene a national music education summit early next year to debate recommendations in the review, which calls for strict benchmarks in all school music curriculums. "There will also be major reform in the way in which Australian teachers are trained in universities," he said. Dr Nelson said he would refer the report to Teaching Australia, which is developing an accreditation system for education faculties.

The chairwoman of the review's steering committee, Professor Margaret Seares, who is also deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Western Australia, lamented the fact that governments had been ignoring reviews of music education since the 1970s. She said that for too many years schools had been allowed to treat music as a diversion for tired teachers and bored students. Research cited in the review showed that music tuition engaged all students, lifted their self-esteem and improved their academic achievements, she said.

But a spokeswoman for the NSW Education Minister, Carmel Tebbutt, cited a 20 per cent rise in enrolments in HSC Music 1 since 2001 as evidence that the state was taking music seriously. "All students between kindergarten and year 6 do it and high school students must study 100 hours of music above the national average," the spokeswoman said. "Education in music is no less important than learning how to read, write, count and communicate."

The Federal Opposition spokeswoman for education, Jenny Macklin, and the Opposition spokesman for the arts, Peter Garrett, said Dr Nelson should stop blaming the states and work with them. "The federal Education Minister's response to this $346,000 report is to organise a summit next year to discuss the issues in music education. Nearly 1200 submissions and 4700 petitions should be enough for Brendan Nelson to take action now," the pair said in a statement.

Dr Nelson, a Slim Dusty devotee and amateur guitar strummer, declared that every Australian child should have an opportunity to learn an instrument and be given the "courage to express [their] emotions". "It is extremely important that all of us appreciate that [this is] the way in which we will pass the soul from our generation to the next." Dr Nelson has allocated $400,000 to the Australian Society for Music Education over four years to set up an award system for outstanding music teachers. A further $500,000 will be committed to improving curriculums.

Source

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

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

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

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25 November, 2005

BURY THE PROBLEM, APPOINT A COMMISSION

Some straight-shooting comments on American higher education lifted from Stephen Karlson, who is in a position to know. Lots of links worth following

University Diaries recommends this Neal McCluskey column in National Review. Mr McCluskey is skeptical about the Spellings Commission on Higher Education doing anything substantive.

In September, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced the formation of a commission tasked with designing a "national strategy for higher education" to prepare us for the 21st century.

The commission is composed entirely of people in academia, government or big business, all of whom benefit when taxpayer money is shoveled into higher education. Its recommendations are therefore almost a foregone conclusion: The federal government should spend more on student aid supposedly to ensure, as Spellings demands, that we have a workforce for the 21st century, and on "basic" research that businesses want done but on which they would rather not risk their own money.

Of course, with a unified national strategy two more things will come: federal control of academia and an end to the competition for students that has driven innovation in American higher education and made it the envy of the world. It's the worst thing we could do according to a recent analysis by The Economist, which concluded that for a higher education system to succeed, it must "first: diversify [its] sources of income" and "second: let a thousand academic flowers bloom. Universities. should have to compete for customers."

Unfortunately, we are heading in the opposite direction. Think No Child Left Behind for the Ivy League. "Many people don't realize that federal dollars. make up about one-third of our nation's total annual investment in higher education," Secretary Spellings declared as she announced the formation of her commission. "By comparison, the federal government's investment in K-12 education represents less than 10 percent of total spending. But unlike K-12 education, we don't really ask many questions about what we're getting for our investment in higher education."

If the commission is going to be anything other than an exercise in public choice, it behooves interested parties to suggest courses of action and point out omissions.

The academy is broken, and the commission ought to understand why.

The commission ought to know, for example, about universities diversifying their sources of income by rescheduling football games to suit the broadcasters at ESPN and competing for customers with climbing walls, coreless curricula, and nonexistent admission standards. A post at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni lays down a marker.

As part of her ongoing investigation into American higher education, Margaret Spellings ought to consider the incuriousness of contemporary college students alongside the decline of liberal education and the spiralling costs of a bachelor's degree. It's a difficult, perhaps impossible, thing to quantify, but it is nonetheless a phenomenon that is every bit as current as the declining quality of higher education, and every bit as troubling. If we are to reform American higher education in a meaningful way, it will not be enough simply to reshape curriculum and costs along idealized lines. It will be necessary to envision this reshaping in the context of the modern undergraduate's intellectual sensibility. It cannot be taken for granted that this sensibility is inherently curious, inherently interested in learning, or inherently responsive either to the spirit of inquiry or to the more mundane spirit of intellectual respectability. Liberal education, in its tradition conception, is predicated on the idea that those engaged in it care deeply about questions, about exploring ideas, about discovery; it also presumes that those engaged in it want very much to acquire a breadth and depth of general knowledge that will save them from personal and professional embarrassment later on; it also assumes implicitly that a desire to avoid shame animates on some level students' quest for cultural literacy. Students must bring a certain type of determination, as well as a certain horror of ignorance, to their studies if liberal education is to be successful. In the absence of that determination, it's a real question whether liberal education may properly be said to exist.

The commission ought to know that a conclusion satisfactory to everybody may not be possible. There are two posts at SCSU Scholars that bear on workforce preparation and the future of higher education. One focuses on the continuing difficulties businesses face in finding skilled workers.

Firms are spending more in making investments in their own workforce. This demand for skilled labor will quite possibly also lead to increased demand for older workers, which would soften the blow raising retirement ages or the age at which one qualifies fully for Social Security. Indeed, what sense does it make to give skilled labor an incentive to not work?

What does that say about the academy's efforts at workforce development, all those business majors notwithstanding?

Another post links to a temporarily free Chronicle of Higher Education article on the battle between the University of Wisconsin System and the Wisconsin Legislature.

Along with paying a price for some political and management decisions that its own administrators concede were ill advised, the Wisconsin system appears to be feeling a backlash from broader higher-education trends. Those include rising tuition and admissions requirements, which have left many Wisconsinites feeling shut out of the system; tight state budgets and escalating costs, which have brought its expenditures under intense scrutiny; and a growing divide between the culture of colleges and the way the rest of society thinks and operates.

You think?

Much of the article touches on Culture Wars topics where the university appears to have done everything possible to be as transgressive as possible. But focus on this:

The system's enrollments from working-class and poor families have dropped substantially, and both Republican and Democratic lawmakers say taxpayers complain that many campuses have shut out their children by raising their tuition and admissions standards too high.

Herein lies a conflict the commission ought to be aware of. To the extent that university degrees augment human capital, those degrees are private benefits, and it makes economic sense for the beneficiary to bear the burden. To the extent that more rigorous curricula augment human capital, it makes economic sense for the university to avoid enrolling "clients" whose primary interest is getting wasted. And perhaps the local common schools have failed at their job of preparing Wisconsin's children for college.

Finally, the commission ought to know that the academy's common practice of admitting the unprepared and calling it "access" is sapping the morale of the faculty. Although each of the following sites is anonymous, allowing the poster to get away with characterizations of students that I consider impolitic, the frustration, irritation, and attempts at grim humor brought about by the antics of the unprepared, who nonetheless consider themselves entitled, are clear enough



EVEN BIG BRIBES DON'T MAKE MANY BRITS WANT TO TEACH IN BRITAIN'S "SINK" SCHOOLS

If it weren't for brave teachers from overseas -- particularly Australia -- lots of London schools would be very short of teachers

The Government has missed its target for the recruitment of trainee teachers in priority subjects despite millions of pounds spent on "golden hellos" and other incentives. Graduates in modern languages, science and mathematics are continuing to reject teaching as a career, according to official figures released yesterday. The target set by the Department for Education was missed by nine per cent in the seven subject areas designated as "priority" because too few young people were willing and qualified to teach them.

The least successful recruitment was in modern languages, where the target was missed by 17 per cent, or 323 trainee places. In maths, the target was missed by 12 per cent, 292 recruits, and in science it was missed by seven per cent, 214 recruits. Trainees in these priority subjects receive special payments of between o2,500 and o5,000 after their first year and can command higher salaries.

Competition from other sectors for a dwindling number of graduates in these key areas was a factor, said the Teacher Training and Development Agency, which oversees recruitment and training. In addition, the trend towards "studies" and combined degrees, such as French with business studies or degrees in forensic science instead of chemistry or physics has led to fewer graduates with sufficient knowledge to teach the subjects, the agency says.

It is to provide 14-week "booster" courses next year for a total of 700 graduates with science and language-related degrees where the amount of subject knowledge required is insufficient to meet the entry requirements for post-graduate teacher training courses.

Ed Davey, for the Liberal Democrats, said young people were being discouraged from teaching by Whitehall's "micro-management" of the classroom. "This Government spews out initiatives, strategies and White Papers but can't get the basics right," he said. "More teachers in maths, science and modern languages are critical to improving secondary education. "This ought to be a far higher priority than structural change."

Source



Disillusioned Australian mother opens own school

A mother of four disillusioned with the Victoria's primary schools has opened her own. Elisa Russell began the primary school, called Hypatia, last month after being unhappy with her children's progress. "We have had experiences with alternative and mainstream education but it just didn't work for us," Mrs Russell said. "We pulled the kids out and I home-schooled them as we started looking around, but we just didn't find anything that suited us as a family. "So we decided we would open a school and try a pilot program with our kids."

Mrs Russell said her three eldest children - Eleanor, 6, Fionnbarr, 5, and Greer, 4 - are the school's only students and are taught by one teacher. But she is hoping to enrol another 15 students next year and hire another two teachers. Mrs Russell said the school is based on Socratic education - treating children as thinkers rather than empty vessels, and allowing them to find the truth for themselves. "The most ground-breaking thing about the school is that it is one teacher to five students," she said. Mrs Russell, 33, also said the school would group students and teach them based on academic level, not age.

Annual fees would start from $9000 for three days a week and $12,000 for five days a week. Mrs Russell said the school was also family friendly, with more flexible hours than traditional schools. She said she has had huge interest in the school, with more than 50 calls from interested parents. The school is renting classrooms from Alia College's secondary campus in Hawthorn.

Mrs Russell said her children were loving it. "For the children it is going fantastically," she said. "Academically they are doing very well, but any child would excel in that environment where there is one-on-one learning with teachers."

Mrs Russell said she was applying to register the school with the Registered Schools Board of Victoria but it was expected to take some time. She said until the registration came through they could teach up to 15 students because it was classed as a home schooling environment.

Source

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

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

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

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



24 November, 2005

GIFTED CHILDREN GETTING RECOGNIZED

It is the Davidsons' other, related aim that calls forth a different kind of fervor. Authors (with Laura Vanderkam) of a book called "Genius Denied: How to Stop Wasting Our Brightest Minds" (2004), they are on a mission to remedy what they are convinced is a widespread neglect of exceptionally talented children. That means challenging the American myth that they are weirdos or Wunderkinder best left to their own devices or made to march with the crowd. "By denying our most intelligent students an education appropriate to their abilities," Jan Davidson warns a nation in the midst of a No Child Left Behind crusade, "we may also be denying civilization a giant leap forward." Precocious children are not only avid learners eager for more than ordinary schools often provide, the Davidsons emphasize; they are also a precious - and imperiled - resource for the future. The Davidsons, joined by many other advocates of the gifted, maintain that it is these precocious children who, if handled right, will be the creative adults propelling the nation ahead in an ever more competitive world. As things stand, the argument goes, the highly gifted child is an endangered species in need of outspoken champions like the Davidsons, who are role models for the "supportive, advocating parent" they endorse.

The youths have their chance to engage in advocacy, too, and the Davidsons had selected very personable prodigies to visit Washington to publicize the don't-hold-children-back message. (Video presentations are part of the fellowship application process.) "Rounded like an egg" is the simile John Zhou used in the SAT-prep classes he taught (though he himself, a perfect scorer, didn't take any), where he recommends blending a well-honed talent with other interests to "erase the image of the nerd or the geek" - a balanced profile the Davidsons would surely endorse. Their fellows fitted it and proved ideal ambassadors of well-tended youthful brilliance. Admirably poised, they were getting precocious practice for the future eminence that, they were told more than once that day, awaits them.

The Davidsons are not the first Americans dedicated to cultivating early promise and dismantling the popular image of highly gifted children as misfits, an affront to a nation founded on egalitarian principles. More than three-quarters of a century ago, the Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman, armed with his newly minted I.Q. test, set out to challenge the myth that unusually intelligent and talented children are "puny, overspecialized in their abilities and interests, emotionally unstable, socially unadaptable, psychotic and morally undependable." His longitudinal "Genetic Studies of Genius" aimed to prove the opposite: highly gifted youths tended not only to enjoy more wholesome childhoods than ordinary kids but also to become extraordinary adults. His labors have since helped spawn a rich field of research and outreach devoted to exceptionally gifted children - though you might not guess it from the embattled rhetoric employed by gifted-child advocates in general, not just the Davidson Institute.

The lament uttered half a century ago that in philistine America "there are no little leagues of the mind" could not be made in our turn-of-the-millennium meritocracy. Thanks precisely to programs like those run by the Davidson Institute, there is what you might call a farm system devoted to finding talent and developing it, and though the process isn't streamlined, it has become ever more extensive. You merely have to look at the r‚sum‚s of the Davidson Fellows, which list a stunning array of distinctions - from music and Intel competitions to math and science olympiads to participation in highly selective summer programs. Even as they sound the alarm, prominent advocates themselves celebrate the widening span of resources. Consider, for example, "A Nation Deceived," the Templeton National Report on Acceleration issued last year and subtitled, "How Schools Hold Back America's Brightest Students." In its brief for more grade skipping and subject acceleration, it indicts an educational system that indeed gives talented students short shrift. (Federal money for the "gifted and talented" is minuscule compared with the quarter billion in this year's No Child Left Behind budget, and state and local efforts, though often better, are uneven.) Yet in the course of promoting the benefits of leaping ahead, "A Nation Deceived" also extols "a whole host of outside-of-school opportunities, including award ceremonies, summer programs, after-school or Saturday programs, distance-learning programs and weekend workshops and seminars," to which the talent search serves as a "gateway" for the topmost students, who also have a variety of early college options to consider, like California State University at Los Angeles's lively early-entrance program. Julian Stanley, a Johns Hopkins psychology professor and a pioneer of the gifted-child movement, marveled not long before he died last summer at age 87 at how a dearth of opportunities had given way to a "wealth of facilitative options."

More here



Cash incentives for university study in Australia

And I know it's true: My son got a small scholarship to study mathematics at university level after he got good grades in an advanced placements class during his final High School year

Thousands of university scholarships are on offer to this year's Queensland school leavers as the wheel turns full circle. Scholarships were last offered on a large scale in the early 1970s before the Whitlam Labor Government abolished university fees. While a record number of students have nominated for full-fee courses next year, thousands of others will apply for financial-hardship scholarships offered by the Federal Government and individual universities to defray costs for lower-income families. Students can also apply for an increasing number of academic excellence scholarships offered by universities and industry this year.

Since the introduction of financial hardships scholarships last year, the Federal Government has awarded in Queensland more than 1850 Commonwealth means-tested Education Costs Scholarships worth $2080, and almost 1600 Commonwealth Accommodation Scholarships, valued at $4161 open to rural and remote students. Applications for next year's Commonwealth scholarships close in February. A University of Queensland spokeswoman said yesterday the university offered additional needs-based scholarships under the same criteria as the Commonwealth. "We are recognising the fact that with the increase in costs in attending university, more and more students are requiring assistance," the spokeswoman said.

The University of Queensland will offer for the first time Fee-Pay Scholarships to offset the new Student Contribution, formerly known as HECS debt. It also offers means-tested Excellence Scholarships, valued at $6000 a year, UQ Link Residential Support Scholarships for students nominated by their school, as well as scholarships offered by individual faculties and schools.

For the first time, the Queensland Resources Council will offer four $40,000 scholarships to entice school leavers into an approved engineering, earth science or environmental science degree at any Queensland university. At the Queensland University of Technology, OP1 and OP2 students can apply for 50 new Vice-Chancellor Scholarships, worth $5000 a year. In the QUT Science Faculty, a Dean's Scholars Accelerated Honours Program, valued at $9000, will be open to OP1 students. Engineering scholarships for high achievers and law scholarships for financially disadvantaged students are among 90 different scholarships and bursaries being offered at QUT next year. Griffith University will award 15 Academic Excellence Scholarships and six sports scholarships, each valued at $15,000 to $25,000, as well as hardship and faculty scholarships. The University of Southern Queensland is offering accommodation scholarships, at $1000 a semester, to students attending its new Springfield campus near Ipswich.

Source



PHYSICS DYING IN BRITAIN

And this in the country where Rutherford first split the atom

Physics is fast disappearing from schools in England and Wales, with only a quarter now having a teacher with a degree in the subject, according to a study. The number of pupils taking physics has fallen by almost 40 per cent in the past 20 years. To make matters worse, almost half of the country's physics teachers will be retiring in the next decade. As a result the Institute of Physics is preparing to offer 300 bursaries to prospective students of the subject.

The findings, from the University of Buckingham, have alarmed academics and scientists. "The science community is in danger of sleep-walking into the loss of one of the greatest branches of knowledge that we possess," Alan Smithers, one of the report's authors, said. "The challenge is to secure physics for the future and educate everyone in science as a whole." Professor Smithers says that the dramatic decline in physics is directly linked to the introduction of the national curriculum in 1988. Since then pupils at state schools have had to study all three sciences at GCSE or take the combined science exam, which imparts only a little of chemistry, biology and physics. In independent schools, where pupils do not have to follow the national curriculum, they may choose to study only one science.

While 60 per cent of biology students are women, they comprise only 20 per cent of physics students. However, with more women than men attracted to teaching, science teachers are frequently not experts in physics. As a result they have less enthusiasm for the subject. The study also shows that a teacher's expertise in a subject is the second most powerful predictor of pupil achievement in GCSE and A level physics, after pupil ability.

"Independent schools have the freedom to offer any combination of sciences and that should be extended to maintained schools," Professor Smithers said. "But many physics graduates don't want to teach biology." The result is that the number of pupils taking physics A level has fallen from 46,606 in 1985 to 28,698 last year. Professor Smithers also says that better-qualified teachers are attracted to working in independent schools. That claim has been borne out in his latest research, with the disclosure that nearly a quarter (23.5 per cent) of 11 to 16-year-olds have no teacher who has studied physics at university, while two thirds of physics teachers at independent schools have a joint honours in the subject.

He concludes that "pupils from low-income homes tend to be concentrated in those schools least likely to offer GCSE physics and with the least well-qualified teachers". Robert Kirby-Harris, the chief executive of the Institute of Physics, blames part of the decline on league tables, and the tendency for some schools to pick only the brightest to study physics, in the fear that others may fail. "Physics is seen as a hard subject so average students are often dissuaded from taking it. I really think the dysfunctional element of league tables is a factor in putting young people off studying physics," he said.

Between 1994 and 2004, more than 30 per cent of the physics departments in Britain disappeared. Last year Newcastle became the first member of the elite Russell Group of universities to announce that it would no longer accept applications to study undergraduate physics. In order to boost the number from lower income backgrounds, the Institute of Physics is offering 300 bursaries of 1,000 pounds each next year to budding physicists.

More here

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

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

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

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



23 November, 2005

California: Contracts hold back schools

Imagine you're a manager and you have to fill two of every five openings with specific candidates or candidates from a predetermined pool, regardless of their qualifications and fit for the job. That's what principals in the nation's public schools are asked to do, according to a new report that faults union contracts for preventing administrators from hiring the best teachers.

The San Diego Unified School District was one of five studied by the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit organization that works with urban districts to improve teacher recruitment, training and support. The report was praised by California Secretary of Education Alan Bersin, San Diego Unified's former superintendent, for bringing to light a bureaucratic issue that he said hurts student achievement. But it also drew fierce criticism from union leaders, who see it as another attempt at union bashing. They contend that the report unfairly blames teachers for failures in public schools, when many other factors are responsible for student achievement.

"I know what we need. We need smaller class sizes. We need safe working conditions in urban schools. We need to make sure we have abundant supplies, materials, and microscopes for our students, and we need strong administrators who are supportive of learning environments," said Barbara Kerr, president of the California Teachers Association. Terry Pesta, president of the San Diego Education Association, agreed. And San Diego school board member John de Beck said principals sometimes are the problem, not teachers. He has heard of cases where principals harass or arbitrarily remove teachers. "You can't fix something wrong by giving the principal more power to do wrong," he said.

Union contracts in urban districts commonly include seniority provisions that guarantee incumbent teachers first dibs on job openings. In San Diego, for example, teachers who lose their jobs when low enrollment or academic underperformance prompts a campus closure are guaranteed placement elsewhere. Contracts also typically give teachers who are cut from their campuses because of an enrollment drop or budget reductions high priority to fill vacancies. Teachers who voluntarily seek transfers are also given priority over outside candidates, regardless of their qualifications. These contract provisions, the report says, hurt students, principals and fellow teachers by forcing teachers onto campuses that may not be right for them.

Robin Stern, principal of Hearst Elementary School in Del Cerro and president of the Administrators Association of San Diego, said that this year she was assigned two teachers from King Elementary, a school that closed because of underperformance and reopened as a charter. Stern said she did not have a chance to interview the teachers. Fortunately, she said, the teachers turned out great.

Other principals are not so lucky. According to the study, 26 percent of San Diego principals surveyed said that all or almost all of the surplus teachers foisted on them have been unsatisfactory. Twenty-one percent reported that more than half of the voluntary transfers were unsatisfactory. The reason, the report said, is some principals get rid of undesirable teachers by putting them on transfer and surplus lists to avoid the time-consuming process of terminating them. Last school year, 880 San Diego teachers were on the voluntary transfer and surplus list. This year, there were 1,615. In San Diego, a quarter of the principals reported that they either had encouraged a poorly performing teacher to transfer or placed one on the surplus list.

Firing a teacher can take a few years because a principal must document deficiencies and provide opportunities to improve. A teacher can contest the dismissal at a trial-like hearing. From 2003 to 2005, only six San Diego teachers were dismissed out of 38 recommended for removal, mostly because of professional incompetence. Those not dismissed either resigned, retired or settled with the district. Nearly half of San Diego principals also reported that they tried to hide vacancies from the district's human resources department to avoid filling them with voluntary transfers or surplus teachers.

Stern of Hearst Elementary believes it's rare for principals to try to circumvent contract provisions, but she acknowledges they do limit hiring choices. "We are very much bound by the contract," she said. A particular concern, she said, is when declining enrollment and budget reductions force teacher cuts. Principals are required to remove the least senior teacher, regardless of their performance, unless someone else volunteers to leave. "Schools all over the district are suffering from declining enrollment, and they are losing wonderful teachers they'd love to keep," she said.

The contract provisions are unfair to principals, because they are held accountable for student achievement when they don't have full control over hiring, said Julie White, director of communications for the Association of California School Administrators. Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, principals can be removed if their school consistently fails to make adequate progress. "Today's principal is not like today's CEO," White said. "They don't have the discretion to come into a situation, rearrange and reconfigure. It's not like that in public education, and it never has been."

However, some school districts across the nation are beginning to negotiate changes to their teacher contracts for more staffing flexibility. The New York City public school system recently adopted a contract that eliminates seniority transfer rules and the placement of surplus teachers into jobs without a school's consent.

The report noted that principals need to be held accountable if they are given more hiring power. It recommends that a formal process be created so teachers can provide annual feedback to the district's superintendent about their principal's performance. Another recommendation is to involve teachers and other school staff in hiring decisions. The report further acknowledges that fixing staffing problems will not by itself cure all the ills in public education. But they believe it will go a long way toward improving teacher quality.

Research has consistently shown the quality of instruction determines to a large extent whether students succeed or fail. "The fact of the matter is kids who have three or four strong teachers in a row will soar no matter what their family background is, whereas kids who have two weak teachers in a row never recover," said Kati Haycock, director of The Education Trust, which has done studies on how teacher qualifications affect student achievement.

Source



WHOLESALE CHEATING IN BRITISH "COURSEWORK": BACK TO EXAMS?

As if already low standards were not enough

Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, demanded a wholesale review of coursework in A levels and GCSEs yesterday after the examinations watchdog found evidence of widespread cheating. A two-year review of more than a dozen subjects carried out by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has revealed a virtual free-for-all among students, teachers and parents in carrying out assignments. Coursework is an integral part of A levels and GCSEs, making up between 20 and 60 per cent of the marks allocated. The revelations cast doubt on the continually rising grades for both sets of exams and raise questions about the credibility of vocational qualifications.

In one of the most fundamental rethinks to public examinations in a generation, Ms Kelly has called for the QCA to reconsider coursework on a "subject by subject basis" and for it to be used only "where it is the most valid way of assessing subject specific skills". In a letter to Ken Boston, chief executive of the QCA, Ms Kelly clearly hinted it should be dropped from maths and science GCSEs, saying coursework should not be "the favoured approach where its primary purpose is to assess knowledge and skills which can equally well be assessed in other ways".

During the review, two thirds of maths teachers told the QCA that coursework - which is often done from home - was "sometimes problematic" as students could easily find answers on the internet or get siblings and parents to do the work for them. The in-depth investigation into subjects from English to history, maths and religious studies, revealed that plagiarism via the internet, collusion and "coursework cloning", where teachers give students too much help, were some of the ways pupils attempted to improve their grades.

At GCSE level, one in 20 parents admitted to doing their children's coursework, with fewer doing the same at A level. But it was the use of the internet that posed the greatest threat, according to Dr Boston. "In a very small proportion of cases there is deliberate malpractice," he said. "The availability of the internet is a powerful aid to learning but carries risks of plagiarism."

As well as issuing advice to exam boards, the QCA has appointed a taskforce to clear up confusion about how much help is allowed. Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, which has been a strong critic of coursework, said that Ms Kelly's decision was "a step in the right direction". "Coursework is obviously open to cheating and there should be much more emphasis, and more marks, on proper invigilated exams. Most youngsters can get well on the way to achieving a decent pass before they even take an exam, so coursework must have played a part in grade inflation over the years," he said. Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, said the review was very sensible

Source



MODERN EDUCATION DESPISES OUR OWN CULTURE

American institutions - documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and the concepts of checks and balances, separation of powers, federalism and subsidiarity - make the United States a novus ordo seclorum, new and a perpetual source of renewal, precisely by conforming to the great tradition of political philosophy. Our culture is rooted in a realization that history is a conversation in which not only are we but one voice, but in which we are obliged to earn our right to speak. This requires that we listen and then, since silence means death to a culture, contribute something of value. It is this outward focus, this adherence to tradition, that is the lifeblood of our culture. And to be traditional is essentially to look beyond the given moment - not only to learn from the past, but to plan for the future.

This is why each generation must conserve those things that are essential - for us, the institutions that define our nation - and pass them on to its youth. A culture must continually unfold, as it were, to impress each subsequent group of people who are to become responsible "carriers" of the nation's symbols and so the preservers of true American culture. This unfolding and passing on is our charge - it is the charge to educate our youth.

Liberal education, a philosophy of education interested in objective and abiding truths about mankind that attempts, essentially, to teach the student how to learn, battles the propensity a culture has to turn in upon itself by drawing the student out of himself. Liberal education strives to free the student of that which is unecessary - to free him from the trite, the perverse, and the banal. This is an emptiness most readily found by measuring the world, not by standards set by objective reality, but by man's own ego. And yet, this is the emptiness found in most universities - indeed, it is occassionally their ideal. Behind the veil of self-discovery and multi-culturalism, as well as the lure of various student activist organizations and extra-curricular activities, all most run-of-the-mill universities seem to offer students today is the opportunity for the student to discover that his opinions bear as much weight, not only as those of his fellows at university, students and professors alike, but as all the great tradition of thinkers, most of whom he may never confront in his studies, as they've been replaced in the curriculum by the opus of a twenty-four year old feminist vegan who just last week won the Nobel Prize for Multi-Diverse Cultural Sensitivity. And why? It would seem to be because she's so "outside the box," but the truth is, it's because she spouts the exact same thing that everyone else does. She's what you read when you lack boldness as a student - she's for the comfort seekers who want nothing more than to rail against traditionalists while staring in the mirror.

It is this incestuous tendency toward narcissism that threatens the American ideal, and its destruction is nowhere more apparent than in our colleges and universities - places of learning through which our culture is meant to be preserved. The belief that there is no greater moment than the present spoils the mind of the student more than almost any other, by shutting the student off from the past and so making it impossible for him to contribute to the future. To be enamored of only the present moment is truly a fruitless enterprise, and yet it is the narcissism of the "given moment" that is passed on in university today.

Milan Kundera lends us a great term to describe this sterile egotism: kitsch. Kitsch is the essence of the modern crisis of narcissism. It is "the need to gaze into the mirror of the beautifying lie and to be moved to tears of gratification at one's own reflection." This, too, is the narcissistic plight of Tate's Alice, an image of modern man plunging into himself, to the abandonment and denial of the objective and transcendent reality of the cosmos - that is, anything and everything that is other than himself.

University students need not, contrary to popular belief, be learning to more fully appreciate themselves and value their own opinions. They require, rather, to be free of themselves and their own opinions for a time in an attempt to inform themselves - not only to amass information, since, indeed, that is not really what is important anyway, but to learn how to view the world, how to view reality. They ought to be receiving that education that will allow them to be worthy carriers of our culture's symbols, and more practically and to the same end, able participants in the political community.

More here

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

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

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

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



22 November, 2005

ANOTHER POLITICAL ATTACK ON A CONSERVATIVE TEACHER

Post lifted from Anti-Protestor

Political writer, blogger and Rockville High School Teacher Michael Calderon has apparently declared war on Justin Raimondo and his gaggle of neo-fascist pseudo-intellectual hacks at Antiwar.com.

Calderon recently set up a new feature on his blog called Guttersnipe Alley and it appears that the ever-entertaining Raimondo is its main topic.

Earlier this year, Raimondo defamed Calderon by repeatedly misrepresenting a provocative piece Calderon had posted on the now-defunct Moonbat Central blog run by Raimondo's nemesis, David Horowitz.

Raimondo penned a misleading response to Calderon's article and posted Calderon's employer's phone and email numbers on the Antiwar.com website. He then urged Antiwar.com's readers to contact Michael's employer to voice displeasure with the Moonbat Central article. When, according to Raimondo, people had trouble contacting Calderon's employer, Raimondo then posted additional contact numbers to Calderon's employer. (Can you say deliberate tortious interference?...)

As a result of the controversy caused by the barrage of phone calls and emails sent by Antiwar.com readers at Raimondo's direction to Calderon's principal, Dr. Debra Munk, Calderon was recently suspended without pay from his teaching position in the Montgomery County, Maryland school system.

A recent article in the school newspaper, The Rampage, describes Calderon as a popular and exemplary History teacher. "I felt he was an excellent teacher...he always encouraged his students to express their point of view," said retired Rockville High School social studies teacher Rita Brill in defense of Calderon.

In spite of Calderon's competency and popularity, Rockville High School has apparently taken the cowardly route by suspending him due to the controversy caused by Justin Raimondo. For what it's worth, based on Calderon's political writing, it's obvious that he's a Conservative. The Montgomery County School Department is considered by many to be among the most left-wing school districts in the country.

A Dope-smoking mullet afficianado edits Antiwar.com and it's normally a very strange scene at the Antiwar.com fun-house, as a graphic, in-depth San Francisco Weekly article shows. Justin Raimondo has a well-deserved reputation as a mendacious, petty jerk--a kind of prissy miscreant who delights in personally attacking and throwing low blows at his intellectual superiors, which are everyone and every thing above the planaria on the intellectual food chain.

Nevertheless, the Montgomery County School Board has seen fit to punish one of its star teachers based on attacks that emanated from the disreputable Raimondo and the nutters orbiting him.

The SF Weekly, a paper normally sympathetic to anti-Bush anti-Israel types like Raimondo, portrays him as a power-mad attention freak, and a blog comment on the Protein Wisdom website implies that Justin was once a gay prosititute. An anonymous source personally acquainted with Raimondo confirms this to be a well-known fact within the San Francisco area, where Raimondo lives. That bit of information is significant because Raimondo once actually had the nerve to publicly excoriate "outed" journalist Jeff Gannon for having once worked as a gay prostitute.

What I'm hearing through the blog grapevine is that, this time, Raimondo has bitten off more than he can chew by directly messing with Rockville High School teacher Michael Calderon's livelihood. As a result, for Justin Raimondo, it looks like a new and exciting career might just be in the works.



The New White Flight: In Silicon Valley, two high schools with outstanding academic reputations are losing white students as Asian students move in. Why?

By most measures, Monta Vista High here and Lynbrook High, in nearby San Jose, are among the nation's top public high schools. Both boast stellar test scores, an array of advanced-placement classes and a track record of sending graduates from the affluent suburbs of Silicon Valley to prestigious colleges. But locally, they're also known for something else: white flight. Over the past 10 years, the proportion of white students at Lynbrook has fallen by nearly half, to 25% of the student body. At Monta Vista, white students make up less than one-third of the population, down from 45% -- this in a town that's half white. Some white Cupertino parents are instead sending their children to private schools or moving them to other, whiter public schools. More commonly, young white families in Silicon Valley say they are avoiding Cupertino altogether.

Whites aren't quitting the schools because the schools are failing academically. Quite the contrary: Many white parents say they're leaving because the schools are too academically driven and too narrowly invested in subjects such as math and science at the expense of liberal arts and extracurriculars like sports and other personal interests. The two schools, put another way that parents rarely articulate so bluntly, are too Asian.

Cathy Gatley, co-president of Monta Vista High School's parent-teacher association, recently dissuaded a family with a young child from moving to Cupertino because there are so few young white kids left in the public schools. "This may not sound good," she confides, "but their child may be the only Caucasian kid in the class." All of Ms. Gatley's four children have attended or are currently attending Monta Vista. One son, Andrew, 17 years old, took the high-school exit exam last summer and left the school to avoid the academic pressure. He is currently working in a pet-supply store. Ms. Gatley, who is white, says she probably wouldn't have moved to Cupertino if she had anticipated how much it would change.

In the 1960s, the term "white flight" emerged to describe the rapid exodus of whites from big cities into the suburbs, a process that often resulted in the economic degradation of the remaining community. Back then, the phenomenon was mostly believed to be sparked by the growth in the population of African-Americans, and to a lesser degree Hispanics, in some major cities. But this modern incarnation is different. Across the country, Asian-Americans have by and large been successful and accepted into middle- and upper-class communities. Silicon Valley has kept Cupertino's economy stable, and the town is almost indistinguishable from many of the suburbs around it. The shrinking number of white students hasn't hurt the academic standards of Cupertino's schools -- in fact the opposite is true.

This time the effect is more subtle: Some Asians believe that the resulting lack of diversity creates an atmosphere that is too sheltering for their children, leaving then unprepared for life in a country that is only 4% Asian overall. Moreover, many Asians share some of their white counterpart's concerns. Both groups finger newer Asian immigrants for the schools' intense competitiveness.

Some whites fear that by avoiding schools with large Asian populations parents are short-changing their own children, giving them the idea that they can't compete with Asian kids. "My parents never let me think that because I'm Caucasian, I'm not going to succeed," says Jessie Hogin, a white Monta Vista graduate.

The white exodus clearly involves race-based presumptions, not all of which are positive. One example: Asian parents are too competitive. That sounds like racism to many of Cupertino's Asian residents, who resent the fact that their growing numbers and success are causing many white families to boycott the town altogether. "It's a stereotype of Asian parents," says Pei-Pei Yow, a Hewlett-Packard Co. manager and Chinese-American community leader who sent two kids to Monta Vista. It's like other familiar biases, she says: "You can't say everybody from the South is a redneck."

Jane Doherty, a retirement-community administrator, chose to send her two boys elsewhere. When her family moved to Cupertino from Indiana over a decade ago, Ms. Doherty says her top priority was moving into a good public-school district. She paid no heed to a real-estate agent who told her of the town's burgeoning Asian population. She says she began to reconsider after her elder son, Matthew, entered Kennedy, the middle school that feeds Monta Vista. As he played soccer, Ms. Doherty watched a line of cars across the street deposit Asian kids for after-school study. She also attended a Monta Vista parents' night and came away worrying about the school's focus on test scores and the big-name colleges its graduates attend. "My sense is that at Monta Vista you're competing against the child beside you," she says. Ms. Doherty says she believes the issue stems more from recent immigrants than Asians as a whole. "Obviously, the concentration of Asian students is really high, and it does flavor the school," she says.

When Matthew, now a student at Notre Dame, finished middle school eight years ago, Ms. Doherty decided to send him to Bellarmine College Preparatory, a Jesuit school that she says has a culture that "values the whole child." It's also 55% white and 24% Asian. Her younger son, Kevin, followed suit. Kevin Doherty, 17, says he's happy his mother made the switch. Many of his old friends at Kennedy aren't happy at Monta Vista, he says. "Kids at Bellarmine have a lot of pressure to do well, too, but they want to learn and do something they want to do."

While California has seen the most pronounced cases of suburban segregation, some of the developments in Cupertino are also starting to surface in other parts of the U.S. At Thomas S. Wootton High School in Rockville, Md., known flippantly to some locals as "Won Ton," roughly 35% of students are of Asian descent. People who don't know the school tend to make assumptions about its academics, says Principal Michael Doran. "Certain stereotypes come to mind -- 'those people are good at math,' " he says.

In Tenafly, N.J., a well-to-do bedroom community near New York, the local high school says it expects Asian students to make up about 36% of its total in the next five years, compared with 27% today. The district still attracts families of all backgrounds, but Asians are particularly intent that their kids work hard and excel, says Anat Eisenberg, a local Coldwell Banker real-estate agent. "Everybody is caught into this process of driving their kids." Lawrence Mayer, Tenafly High's vice principal, says he's never heard such concerns.

Perched on the western end of the Santa Clara valley, Cupertino was for many years a primarily rural area known for its many fruit orchards. The beginnings of the tech industry brought suburbanization, and Cupertino then became a very white, quintessentially middle-class town of mostly modest ranch homes, populated by engineers and their families. Apple Computer Inc. planted its headquarters there. As the high-tech industry prospered, so did Cupertino. Today, the orchards are a memory, replaced by numerous shopping malls and subdivisions that are home to Silicon Valley's prosperous upper-middle class. While the architecture in Cupertino is largely the same as in neighboring communities, the town of about 50,000 people now boasts Indian restaurants, tutoring centers and Asian grocers. Parents say Cupertino's top schools have become more academically intense over the past 10 years. Asian immigrants have surged into the town, granting it a reputation -- particularly among recent Chinese and South Asian immigrants -- as a Bay Area locale of choice. Cupertino is now 41% Asian, up from 24% in 1998.

Some students struggle in Cupertino's high schools who might not elsewhere. Monta Vista's Academic Performance Index, which compares the academic performance of California's schools, reached an all-time high of 924 out of 1,000 this year, making it one of the highest-scoring high schools in Northern California. Grades are so high that a 'B' average puts a student in the bottom third of a class. "We have great students, which has a lot of upsides," says April Scott, Monta Vista's principal. "The downside is what the kids with a 3.0 GPA think of themselves."

Ms. Scott and her counterpart at Lynbrook know what's said about their schools being too competitive and dominated by Asians. "It's easy to buy into those kinds of comments because they're loaded and powerful," says Ms. Scott, who adds that they paint an inaccurate picture of Monta Vista. Ms. Scott says many athletic programs are thriving and points to the school's many extracurricular activities. She also points out that white students represented 20% of the school's 29 National Merit Semifinalists this year.

Judy Hogin, Jessie's mother and a Cupertino real-estate agent, believes the school was good for her daughter, who is now a freshman at the University of California at San Diego. "I know it's frustrating to some people who have moved away," says Ms. Hogin, who is white. Jessie, she says, "rose to the challenge."

On a recent autumn day at Lynbrook, crowds of students spilled out of classrooms for midmorning break. Against a sea of Asian faces, the few white students were easy to pick out. One boy sat on a wall, his lighter hair and skin making him stand out from dozens of others around him. In another corner, four white male students lounged at a picnic table.

At Cupertino's top schools, administrators, parents and students say white students end up in the stereotyped role often applied to other minority groups: the underachievers. In one 9th-grade algebra class, Lynbrook's lowest-level math class, the students are an eclectic mix of whites, Asians and other racial and ethnic groups. "Take a good look," whispered Steve Rowley, superintendent of the Fremont Union High School District, which covers the city of Cupertino as well as portions of other neighboring cities. "This doesn't look like the other classes we're going to." On the second floor, in advanced-placement chemistry, only a couple of the 32 students are white and the rest are Asian. Some white parents, and even some students, say they suspect teachers don't take white kids as seriously as Asians. "Many of my Asian friends were convinced that if you were Asian, you had to confirm you were smart. If you were white, you had to prove it," says Arar Han, a Monta Vista graduate who recently co-edited "Asian American X," a book of coming-of-age essays by young Asian-Americans. Ms. Gatley, the Monta Vista PTA president, is more blunt: "White kids are thought of as the dumb kids," she says.

Cupertino's administrators and faculty, the majority of whom are white, adamantly say there's no discrimination against whites. The administrators say students of all races get along well. In fact, there's little evidence of any overt racial tension between students or between their parents. Mr. Rowley, the school superintendent, however, concedes that a perception exists that's sometimes called "the white-boy syndrome." He describes it as: "Kids who are white feel themselves a distinct minority against a majority culture." Mr. Rowley, who is white, enrolled his only son, Eddie, at Lynbrook. When Eddie started freshman geometry, the boy was frustrated to learn that many of the Asian students in his class had already taken the course in summer school, Mr. Rowley recalls. That gave them a big leg up.

To many of Cupertino's Asians, some of the assumptions made by white parents -- that Asians are excessively competitive and single-minded -- play into stereotypes. Top schools in nearby, whiter Palo Alto, which also have very high test scores, also feature heavy course loads, long hours of homework and overly stressed students, says Denise Pope, director of Stressed Out Students, a Stanford University program that has worked with schools in both Palo Alto and Cupertino. But whites don't seem to be avoiding those institutions, or making the same negative generalizations, Asian families note, suggesting that it's not academic competition that makes white parents uncomfortable but academic competition with Asian-Americans.

Some of Cupertino's Asian residents say they don't blame white families for leaving. After all, many of the town's Asians are fretting about the same issues. While acknowledging that the term Asian embraces a wide diversity of countries, cultures and languages, they say there's some truth to the criticisms levied against new immigrant parents, particularly those from countries such as China and India, who often put a lot of academic pressure on their children.

Some parents and students say these various forces are creating an unhealthy cultural isolation in the schools. Monta Vista graduate Mark Seto says he wouldn't send his kids to his alma mater. "It was a sheltered little world that didn't bear a whole lot of resemblance to what the rest of the country is like," says Mr. Seto, a Chinese-American who recently graduated from Yale University. As a result, he says, "college wasn't an academic adjustment. It was a cultural adjustment."

Hung Wei, a Chinese-American living in Cupertino, has become an active campaigner in the community, encouraging Asian parents to be more aware of their children's emotional development. Ms. Wei, who is co-president of Monta Vista's PTA with Ms. Gatley, says her activism stems from the suicide of her daughter, Diana. Ms. Wei says life in Cupertino and at Monta Vista didn't prepare the young woman for life at New York University. Diana moved there in 2004 and jumped to her death from a Manhattan building two months later. "We emphasize academics so much and protect our kids, I feel there's something lacking in our education," Ms. Wei says.

Cupertino schools are trying to address some of these issues. Monta Vista recently completed a series of seminars focused on such issues as helping parents communicate better with their kids, and Lynbrook last year revised its homework guidelines with the goal of eliminating excessive and unproductive assignments.

The moves haven't stemmed the flow of whites out of the schools. Four years ago, Lynn Rosener, a software consultant, transferred her elder son from Monta Vista to Homestead High, a Cupertino school with slightly lower test scores. At the new school, the white student body is declining at a slower rate than at Monta Vista and currently stands at 52% of the total. Friday-night football is a tradition, with big half-time shows and usually 1,000 people packing the stands. The school offers boys' volleyball, a sport at which Ms. Rosener's son was particularly talented. Monta Vista doesn't. "It does help to have a lower Asian population," says Homestead PTA President Mary Anne Norling. "I don't think our parents are as uptight as if my kids went to Monta Vista."

Source

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

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

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

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



21 November, 2005

CALIFORNIA HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION TO BECOME EVEN LESS MEANINGFUL?

Hard to believe it's possible

At their Dec. 14 meeting, Merced Union High School District trustees will have a tough decision to make: How will seniors who fail the California High School Exit Exam be treated at graduation time. Trustee Cappi Quigley, on her final night as a trustee after 20 years of service, does not want students who have worked hard at school and satisfied district course requirements but still fail the exit exam to suffer. The state says no diplomas without passing the test.

Quigley favors giving these students a certificate of completion allowing them to participate in June's commencement ceremonies. District Superintendent Robert Fore also favors "erring on the side of the kids where we can."

On the exit exam issue, Weimer said the board's direction must be clear-cut and precise to avoid future nightmares. State education officials leave graduation participation and certificate decisions to local districts and Weimer doubts if the state will intervene.

Golden Valley High School Principal Ralf Swenson said the state exit exam is insensitive to the needs of special education students, many who have failed it several times. He said there are ways at graduation rites to handle issuance of both certificates of completion and diplomas gracefully.

Assistant Superintendent Sylvia Smith said 223 students at six district schools failed the exit exam last March. Some of these students took the test again earlier this month and Smith is working to get the test given next February instead of March so results will be known by April.

Counselor Wayne Denno said the Merced High counseling staff does not believe students should take part in graduation if they don't satisfy all requirements, including passing the exit exam. He said there ultimately would be consequences if the graduation ceremony is perceived as less meaningful.

Source



Calls for overhaul of Australian State-run preschool systems

Preschools should operate under a national system to ensure uniform standards, parents should be issued with vouchers and social workers should be on hand to help those mothers who are dumping their children in childcare because they cannot cope. The demands have been made by Liberal backbenchers who say some state-run preschool systems are so poor that parents opt for long daycare, which fails to provide children with the basic literacy skills they need for primary school. The MPs claim the problem is exacerbated by subsidies which are provided for the commonwealth-run childcare system, but not preschool, which is operated by the states. "That preschooling year is so critical for a child's development ... so they can start their first year in primary schooling not having those early social adjustments," Liberal MP and Parliamentary Secretary Sharman Stone told The Weekend Australian. "A voucher system would mean that the parent would make a choice. "We give subsidies to childcare for a four-year-old but we don't for the same four-year-old in preschool." Ms Stone said the subsidy issue was having a "perverse outcome", with parents opting for childcare and children not receiving crucial education.

Former Howard government minister and western Sydney MP Jackie Kelly has also entered the debate, suggesting a large number of women who are not working are using childcare. She has called for social workers to help those mothers who see childcare as little more than respite. "Why is a mother at home not coping and needing respite from her own children? If it's respite childcare that you're seeking then let's include into those childcare centres some intervention, some parenting guidance and skills." She backed Ms Stone's call for a national approach to preschooling. "Long daycare basically makes sure your kid's fed, clothed and his nose is wiped but it isn't preparing them for school," Mrs Kelly said. "We need to look at a national preschool program because while in some states they have a very vibrant preschool program, in other states it's absolutely woeful so everyone opts for long daycare. "Some deal should come together at COAG about how we are going to progress in the future with the zero-to-fives in a more comprehensive Australia-wide system. "Childcare is national and that's why it's really taken off, but the preschool program, there's huge disparities between the states."

A spokesman for Family and Community Services Minister Kay Patterson said preschool education was being reviewed. "The minister is currently reviewing what access families have to preschool education. She believes that families should expect to receive the same access to preschool care wherever they live," he said. Mrs Kelly last week told the Liberal partyroom the Government needed to look at more innovative ways to provide care. She said the federal Government should provide more incentives, including tax deductions, for employers to set up childcare centres in workplaces. "I don't think we are being as innovative as we can be if the reality is, with an ageing population, we are going to need more women in the workforce for longer."

Source

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

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

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

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

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



20 November, 2005

UNWISE GENEROSITY TO UNIVERSITIES

Students at Yale University's School of Music--and aspiring musicians hoping to go there someday--must have been jumping for joy two weeks ago when the school announced that it had received an anonymous $100 million endowment gift that would guarantee them all free tuition. A few days later Tufts University, not to be outdone, announced that it had received its own $100 million gift. This one was from Pierre Omidyar, alumnus and founder of eBay, who did not specify how his money was to be used, only that the principal must be invested in "micro loans" to small business enterprises in poor countries in Asia and Africa.

It all sounds high-minded and worthy. But is it a good idea? Foundations, corporations and rich individuals have long given generously to colleges and universities. Some of our most distinguished--Duke, Vanderbilt, Stanford and the University of Chicago--were originally endowed by entrepreneurs or wealthy families. In a recent study, the Institute for Jewish and Community Research reported that nearly 60% of all gifts of more than $10 million are donated to academic institutions. And the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Americans last year contributed some $25 billion to colleges and universities. Is it any wonder that many academic institutions are sitting on vast repositories of endowed wealth? Today there are more than 50 institutions with endowments exceeding $1 billion.

Yet this explosion of money has been accompanied by a steady erosion in the quality of education, especially in the humanities. Many research organizations, including the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and the National Association of Scholars, have documented the elimination of the traditional core curriculum at most of our leading universities. We can no longer assume that college graduates possess even a rudimentary knowledge of history, for instance, or that they understand basic concepts like federalism or the separation of powers or, indeed, that they know about the ideas and events that have shaped our institutions. All this great wealth, donated with the best of intentions, appears to have had the perverse effect of liberating academic institutions to do a less than admirable job of educating the young.

And what do the young learn when they do learn? Entrepreneurs may give generously, but college faculties are today awash in antibusiness and anti-free-market prejudices, with scholarly publications beating the drum against globalization and the supposed depredations of capitalism. Not many faculty members would agree precisely with Ward Churchill, the University of Colorado professor who said that the victims of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center deserved their fate because they were working on behalf of the capitalist system. But, terrorism aside, his low opinion of America's economic system does not wildly diverge from that of professors everywhere. Meanwhile the diversity ideology so common on campuses today holds that the history of the U.S. is primarily one of exclusion and oppression, another Ward Churchillian theme.

All this is roughly quantifiable. A recent national survey of college faculty showed that 72% of professors held liberal and left-of-center views, while just 15% held conservative ones. This imbalance, surveys show, has grown worse since the early 1980s. It is a strange paradox indeed that academic opinion should have moved so far to the left in a period of unprecedented wealth and prosperity for colleges and universities themselves--let alone in a period of capitalism's triumph and communism's defeat.

Here is where the charitable giving comes in. These trends have taken hold in academia in part because too many donors have failed to exercise appropriate care when signing over their funds. Most donors have little understanding of the intricate workings of academic budgets or of the subterfuges that permit money to be spent on programs unrelated to intended purposes. (A little Economics 101 might help.) The anonymous donor to Yale earmarked the income from his gift to support student tuitions, but of course money is fungible: The gift will have the unintended effect of allowing Yale to move the substantial funds it now devotes to financial aid and to spend them on other purposes, possibly unrelated or antithetical. Many gifts to universities have this money-shifting effect.

Donors are often unaware that they are entitled to set aside their money for purposes of their own choosing, not just established categories. As former Yale provost Frank Turner has said: "Donor restrictions can call institutions of higher education to fulfill their highest ideals." A few diligent philanthropists, like publisher Philip Merrill and investor Sir John Templeton, craft careful agreements with universities before any checks are signed and then monitor their gifts regularly.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has published a short book, "The Intelligent Donor's Guide to College Giving," that lays out some basic ground rules for donating to higher education. These include placing clear restrictions on gifts, working with a particular professor (and, if possible, bypassing the development office) and avoiding endowments in perpetuity. As Sir John Templeton wisely said: "If you're giving while you're living, you're knowing where it's going."

Obviously, this sort of due diligence does require time and effort on the part of the donor, But if even a few more philanthropists were watching where their funds ended up, college officials would surely monitor their programs more carefully. There have been a few celebrated cases in recent years in which donors have asked for their funds to be returned after discovering that they were misused, and these cases have sent a shudder though the academic community.

In 1991, for example, Lee Bass donated $20 million to Yale to support a curriculum in Western Civilization but asked for (and received) his money back four years later when he discovered that Yale's faculty had little interest in teaching such courses. Princeton University may be ordered to return nearly $600 million to the Robertson family, which endowed a program a generation ago to train students for public service. In recent decades, it is alleged by the family, the university lost interest in this purpose but continued to spend the money anyway.

Just last week, a professor at Florida State University, Robert Holton, sued to get back some of the tens of millions of dollars that he earned from a drug patent and donated to the school for a new synthetic chemistry laboratory. The university simply scrapped plans for the building. "We're filing this lawsuit to save the university from itself," said Mr. Holton in a recent interview. Words for every donor to live by.

Source



Wanted: graduates who can teach children to read

And they spend 4 years allegedly learning how to be teachers!

Australia's universities are failing to deliver graduates who can teach children to read and are spending less than 10 per cent of lectures on basic literacy skills. A national survey of teacher education institutions has found that half of faculties devote just 5 per cent of course time to teaching reading, with students graduating without enough hands-on classroom experience. The inquiry, Teaching Reading, also says every child should be tested for literacy and reading skills when they start school and again twice yearly during their first three years. And it recommends that school results travel with the estimated 100,000 school-age children who moved interstate each year so teachers can track their progress. A confidential student identifier could be used to keep a record of their results.

Education Minister Brendan Nelson is expected to announce a shake-up of teacher training in universities in response to the report, prepared by a panel of experts including Ken Rowe, when it is released on December 1. His report finds the preparation of new teachers to teach reading is "uneven across universities" and that an evidence-based approach, including greater instruction on phonics and vocabulary knowledge and text comprehension, is required.

"The literacy competency of student teachers was raised as an issue in all focus group discussions," the report says. "In general terms, the reputation of effectiveness of teacher preparation among new graduates is not high. "Increasing time on reading instruction, improving the content of teacher preparation courses and school practice arrangements, together with improvements in new graduates' personal literacy, should be examined." School experience was also lacking, varying from between just 50 to 100 days in the classroom over the four-year degree.

Booming enrolments in teacher training, which have increased by 38per cent since 1996, have also created new pressures on teaching degrees. "There is anecdotal evidence that during this time there was a decline in the numbers of staff employed in universities to support these students," the report says.

Opposition education spokeswoman Jenny Macklin said yesterday the report had identified an "alarming" rise in student-to-staff ratios in universities. "This is a direct result of the Howard Government slashing higher education funding," she said. "This is clearly having an impact on the quality of teaching in our universities."

Source

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

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

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

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19 November, 2005

"VIRTUAL" SCHOOLS ON THE RISE BUT UNDER ATTACK -- PREDICTABLY

This year, an unprecedented number of Arizona K-12 students will take their classes online through virtual schools. It's part of a distance-learning tide that has rolled through higher education and corporate America and is spreading more rapidly into high schools and below. Statewide, one in 100 students, or 10,816, took at least one class through virtual schools last year, with more enrolling this year, state officials said. Hundreds attend all of their classes online.

Studies show that virtual schooling can work well, although experts say more research is needed. Arizona's schools generally report good results, especially for students who want flexible schedules..... Flexibility is what makes online classes a popular choice for students. They can choose when they study and, more importantly, when they don't. Every virtual school in Arizona has examples of students who chose the schools because of flexibility. There is the 9-year-old girl on the Navajo Reservation whose mother disliked the local school and discovered a virtual one, or the 9-year-old Phoenix boy who enrolls in virtual school so he can make trips to California for acting jobs....

For homebound students or rural kids with few school choices, online schools provide a much-needed service, said Mary Gifford, director of Arizona Virtual Academy, the largest virtual charter school in the state. But even school directors say they aren't for everyone. "Students have to be motivated. If they aren't motivated, they won't do well," said Doug Barnard, director of distance learning for Mesa's program, the state's largest run by a school district.....

The state has placed more restrictions on virtual schools in recent years. The number of schools allowed in the state is capped at 14. Afraid that virtual schools could steal many students from traditional ones, lawmakers this year prohibited a virtual school from growing more than 100 percent in enrollment each year. They also required the schools to report more information about academic performance, so parents can gauge whether students are making progress. The schools must now report to the state their students' scores on standardized tests such as AIMS compared with the state average.

Lawmakers also gave more regulatory power to the two state agencies that oversee virtual schools. The Arizona State Board of Education and the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools must review each school's effectiveness. Virtual schools must re-apply every five years to remain open.

Because virtual schools are new, little extensive research has been done on whether K-12 students do better or worse in them. A national analysis of 14 other studies found "no significant difference in performance" between online students and those in classrooms, said the 2004 report by Illinois-based Learning Point Associates. The study said online students show greater improvement than traditional students in critical thinking, problem-solving and creative thinking. But they were also more likely to feel isolated and show less improvement in speaking and listening skills.

More here



They Found Their Way in San Jose : A California charter school success story

Life really can imitate art. The art I have in mind is the kind of tear-jerker movie in which, say, a beleaguered small-town basketball team beats the odds and makes it to the state finals. Or in which someone--imagine Sally Field in a faded gingham dress--struggles to bring in the harvest and save a farm.

Joanne Jacobs's "Our School," a vivid account of the creation and first years of a charter high school in San Jose, Calif., has that kind of drama. It reads like a novel whose characters are both stereotypical and improbable. The founders of Downtown College Prep--as the school is called--are a Jewish guy from an affluent family educated at Princeton and Stanford and a woman who had been raised by a working-class single mother and had sleepwalked through her own high-school experience until a year in Spain as an exchange student persuaded her to become a teacher.

Many of the other characters are right out of central casting. The Rev. Mateo Sheedy is the patron saint of Downtown College Prep; while dying of cancer he helps to open doors to the philanthropic and business communities of San Jose and to a nearby university. Florina Gallegos, a local education activist and organizer, becomes the school's godmother, overseeing a thousand small details. There's also Florina's daughter, Alicia, who just happens to be earning a master's degree in education--at Harvard--and who reluctantly returns to San Jose to teach at the school "because Padre Mateo wanted me to be here." (Pass the tissues, please.)

But this isn't fiction. The challenges are real, the stakes high, the lessons important--and the achievements extraordinary. The entering ninth-grade class at Downtown College Prep was a challenge, to say the least. "Most students had earned D's and F's in middle school," writes Ms. Jacobs. "Some were repeating ninth grade. Some had been labeled learning disabled, hyperactive, or emotionally disordered." In addition, "most students read at the fourth- through sixth-grade level; some students had made it to high school with second- or third-grade reading skills."

One ninth-grader stumbled over the phrase "ride the carousel" on a language test, reading it as "ride the carrot salad." The school's informal motto thus became: "Downtown College Purgatory: Ride the Carrot Salad." A sense of humor was badly needed, for the first few years were grueling. Homework loads, required classes, teaching techniques--everything was a moving target, subject to adjustment or radical change. Eventually the basic verities of the school--discipline, hard work, an atmosphere of community, the involvement of parents--asserted themselves to good effect.

From scratch, teachers created innovative courses, such as College Readiness, in which kids were taught to take notes, organize their time and study for tests, as well as to formulate arguments and support them with facts. Classes were kept small, teachers and students worked long days, and more and more kids "crossed over," that is, metamorphosed from (barely) warm bodies to committed students. Grades on standardized tests and the number of students on the honor roll gradually crept up. Downtown College Prep has sent all the graduates from its first two classes to four-year colleges and now ranks among the top third of public high schools in California.

In "Our School," Ms. Jacobs brings to life the experience of particular kids and teachers but also, rightly, raises the big questions about charter schools: Do they work? Do they divert resources from conventional public schools?

Charter schools almost always take a few years to refine their efforts, and not all succeed at doing so. But Downtown College Prep and schools like it adapt more quickly than traditional schools--because they can. It's not merely a matter of their being free from various rules and regulations. The bigger difference is attitude. As Ms. Jacobs observes, principals and teachers at noncharter public schools have trouble learning from their mistakes because nobody is willing to admit to any--the inertia of the status quo is paralyzing. But at charter schools like Downtown College Prep admitting mistakes is part of the culture. What is more, the teachers who work there are young, open to new ideas and usually hostile to unions or anything else that gets in the way of a fresh approach to teaching. (That doesn't mean that they are all good teachers; charter schools are subject to the normal variations of human ability.)

Do charter schools take money from the traditional public school system? Of course they do, because they take students. And school districts with a lot of infrastructure and rising costs will get hurt if their enrollments are static or declining. As it happens, Downtown College Prep siphons off many difficult, underperforming students. They are the least likely to attend public schools regularly or to graduate--and require expensive extra services from traditional schools. So the financial burden on the district, in this case and some others, is minimal.

Will charter schools force traditional schools to change? Let's hope so, if only by embarrassing them with success. Certainly if noncharter public schools are forced to compete for students, they will have to improve simply to survive. But Ms. Jacobs makes no grand claims. Her task is mainly one of fidelity to the case at hand--a success story worthy of Hollywood.

Source

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

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

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

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18 November, 2005

HOW THE BRITISH LEFT HATE GIFTED CHILDREN!

They upset that treasured but mythical "equality"

"Gifted children are missing out on a scheme to help them because of ideological opposition to selection, according to a shadow education minister. Some local authorities are denying valuable opportunities to young people because they are not putting them forward for membership of a national academy that serves the top five per cent of the ability range, says Nick Gibb, the Conservative shadow schools minister.

Figures from the Department for Education this week show that membership of the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth differs widely between local authorities. Islington in north London has no members while Reading in Berkshire has enrolled more than 15 per cent of the school population. Children who are considered to be in the top five per cent can be put forward by their schools and local authorities for membership of the academy. The academy requires proof that the children have reached the standard expected of the top five per cent in national curriculum tests or exams. Alternatively, pupils can use scores on recognised diagnostic tests or submit their work. "The wide variation in the take-up of this scheme demonstrates the ambivalence some local authorities have in striving for excellence and rigour in our education system," said Mr Gibb. "Denying valuable opportunities either out of indolence or ideology is unacceptable."

The academy, based at Warwick University, provides on-line activities and hosts regular lectures and seminars. It also runs residential weekend and holiday schools. It has 70,982 members aged 11 to 19, representing 1.78 per cent of secondary pupils.... Peter Corker, the senior manager of the academy's student section, said there was still some ideological opposition in schools to picking out the able students but not as much as in past years.

A spokesman for Islington council said it participated in other schemes for gifted and talented children based in London. "We have plenty of facilities here for them," she said".

Source



EDUCATIONAL TYRANNY

Lean's "Collectanea," a 19th-century collection of Elizabethan proverbs, contains a maxim it ascribes to the Jesuits: "Give me a child for the first seven years, and you may do what you like with him afterwards." In like manner, Vladimir Lenin said: "Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted." All around the world, parents are stunned and dismayed by the actions of the educational bureaucracy. Germans are again fleeing from their government into France and Switzerland as officials announce they will take children away from parents who refuse to turn their children over to the state-mandated schools. California parents are reeling from the recent decision by the a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals which asserts that parents' have no right to control how the public schools educate their children. In Texas, parents are angrily protesting their children being medicated by school personnel against their wishes.

However, these despicable actions should come as a surprise only to the ignorant - who are clearly the great majority - since only an ignoramus or a fool would voluntarily pass his children through the pagan fires of the public schools.

The Association of California School Administrators is reported to have issued the following statement:

"Parent choice" proceeds from the belief that the purpose of education is to provide individual students with an education. In fact, educating the individual is but a means to the true end of education, which is to create a viable social order to which individuals contribute and by which they are sustained.

It is perhaps apocryphal - I could not find an original publication to cite here - but in it one hears a distinct echo of the man who established the first public kindergarten and was the U.S. Commissioner of Education from 1899 to 1906. In "The Philosophy of Education," William Torey Harris let the cat out of the bag by asserting that the entire point of public education is "the subsumption of the individual."

This is why Marx, Lenin and Hitler were all supporters of public schooling in their attempts to permanently secure the individual's services for the State. The standing in line, the bullying, the drudgery and boredom of the mind-numbing daily school routine is not incidental to the education of the schoolchild, it is the education. Contrary to what most parents believe, it is actually reading, writing and arithmetic that are entirely incidental to the true purpose of public school - subservience is the "socialization" of which educationists correctly complain that homeschooled children lack.

The homeschooling movement was inevitable, as it is only a symptom of the fundamental conflict between Christianity and the utilitarian collectivism that lies below the surface of the public-school system. The little girl who raises her hands to praise the Son of God who loved her enough to die for her will never buy into the lie that she is nothing more than an insignificant and eminently replaceable cog in the great machine of the collective. She is an immortal soul, a creature of eternity who cannot be subsumed.

The latest battle for the minds of the next generation's schoolchildren has barely begun, but the result is already certain. Nero failed. Lenin failed. Hitler failed, and so, too, will the American educationists and their evil school system. If the gates of Hell will not triumph against the Church, then what chance do the NEA minions infesting your local Molochian altar have?

Source



How awful: Illegality finally penalized: "The high school teacher was appalled that so many of her bright students were not planning for college. They told her it was no use trying because they were here illegally. The teacher ended up literally walking a few students through the admissions process, proving that colleges didn't question someone's legal status. But after all that encouragement, the teacher is finding maybe her students were right after all. For someone unauthorized to be here, college is of little use. The teacher, Sonya Kim, watched one of her former students, Rosa Olivares, attend Scottsdale Community College and then earn her education degree at Arizona State University. Olivares now has her teaching certificate. But it's of no use without another document: a valid Social Security number, something they didn't hand to Olivares when she dashed across the border near Nogales as a child. 'It's like having a key to the door and still not being able to use it,' Kim said, after letting kids out of her class for the day."

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

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

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

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



17 November, 2005

Thomas C. Reeves on Failing Schools

And it's the poor who get hit hardest by an irresponsible and corrupt public school system

"Paul E. Peterson of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University recently wrote an important syndicated column about the failures of high school education in this country. In the course of analyzing data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/ ), he has pinpointed two major weaknesses in our high schools that may be seen as well in the country's colleges and universities.

Peterson began by clarifying some data. The correct figure for the dropout rate among blacks is running somewhere between 50% and 60%, "a sad fact that remains one of the best-kept secrets in American education." For reasons of political correctness, figures on black graduation rates are manipulated, both by schools districts and the U.S. Department of Education, to report only a 17% dropout rate. That half of the blacks in this country are leaving public school is surely among the nation's most acute and embarrassing problems, requiring immediate attention.

Peterson also noted that among those in the top 10% of high school test-takers, reading scores have dropped four points since 1971. Their math scores have not budged since they were first measured in 1978. Only 9% of all public high school students take the Advanced Placement test. So the system appears to be failing at both ends of the spectrum. Is it any wonder that we are searching desperately for foreign expertise in many fields? Here too we surely have at least a partial explanation for our plummeting cultural standards.

At the heart of the high school problem, Peterson argues, are two contradictory assumptions. First, that adolescents should be responsible for guiding their own curriculum. Second, that adolescents should not be held responsible for their performances.

If given the choice, of course, young people will normally take the easiest courses offered. Why work hard when there seems to be little or no reason to be truly educated, when graduation is almost automatic for those who can muster the energy to attend, and when most colleges will accept all applicants with a diploma? Most young people quite naturally relax, have fun, and devote a lot of time off campus making money. They don't seem to care if they know next to nothing upon graduation, and no one else does either. Peterson argues, "To graduate from high school, students should be expected to pass, at as high a level as they can, a challenging, substantive examination in a variety of subjects that allow them to demonstrate-to colleges and employers-just how accomplished they are." At present, that seems quite utopian.

The same pair of misguided assumptions reign in college and university policy as well. Students may choose from hundreds of courses to fulfill the extremely minimal graduation requirements on most campuses, and graduation depends merely upon the accumulation of enough of these credits to reach the necessary number. We cannot be entirely confident that most college graduates can even write a coherent, error-free paragraph let alone be committed to a life of study and thought. Internet chat rooms, newspaper book reviews, and "best seller" lists have a way of persuading one that literacy and serious inquiry have almost disappeared in America. The demise of intelligent television programming points in the same direction.

Until we as a nation get serious about our education, we will continue to lag behind other nations in test scores, suffer severe shortages in several occupational areas, and increasingly debase the nation's the cultural level. We need a demanding and required curriculum, a strong commitment to teach and to learn, discipline, and solid examinations that will open or close the doors to a diploma.

The wealthy elite, with their prep schools, tutors, and prestigious private colleges and universities, already enjoy a large measure of educational respectability. It's time to turn our attention to the public institutions at all levels and make sure that everyone has available an education that is worthy of a great people in a challenging time. There is nothing in a democracy that prohibits the presentation of a demanding and useful education. There is nothing written in the stars that prevents minorities from learning and earning degrees. Our great failing is the will to turn things around".

Source



PERSECUTION OF ASIANS AT SCHOOL

There would be a huge outcry if whites were doing it. But it will probably end up making a lot of Asians into confirmed GOP voters

Eighteen-year-old Chen Tsu was waiting on a Brooklyn subway platform after school when four high school classmates approached him and demanded cash. He showed them his empty pockets, but they attacked him anyway, taking turns pummeling his face. He was scared and injured - bruised and swollen for several days - but hardly surprised. At his school, Lafayette High in Brooklyn, Chinese immigrant students like him are harassed and bullied so routinely that school officials in June agreed to a Department of Justice consent decree to curb alleged "severe and pervasive harassment directed at Asian-American students by their classmates." Since then, the Justice Department credits Lafayette officials with addressing the problem - but the case is far from isolated.

Nationwide, Asian students say they're often beaten, threatened and called ethnic slurs by other young people, and school safety data suggest that the problem may be worsening. Youth advocates say these Asian teens, stereotyped as high-achieving students who rarely fight back, have for years borne the brunt of ethnic tension as Asian communities expand and neighborhoods become more racially diverse.

"We suspect that in areas that have rapidly growing populations of Asian-Americans, there often times is a sort of culture clashing," said Aimee Baldillo of the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium. Youth harassment is "something we see everywhere in different pockets of the U.S. where there's a large influx of (Asian) people."

In the last five years, Census data show, Asians - mostly Chinese - have grown from 5 percent to nearly 10 percent of Brooklyn residents. In the Bensonhurst neighborhood, historically home to Italian and Jewish families, more than 20 percent of residents now are Asian. Those changes have escalated ethnic tension on campuses such as Lafayette High, according to Khin Mai Aung, staff attorney at the Asian-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which is advocating for Lafayette students. "The schools are the one place where everyone is forced to come together," Aung said.

Brooklyn's changes mirror Asian growth nationally. Between 1980 and 2000, the number of Asians and Pacific Islanders grew from 3.7 million to nearly 12 million. After Latinos, Asians are the nation's fastest-growing ethnic group.

Stories of Asian youth being bullied and worse are common. In recent years:

A Chinese middle schooler in San Francisco was mercilessly taunted until his teacher hid him in her classroom at lunchtime. Three Korean-American students were beaten so badly near their Queens high school that they skipped school for weeks and begged to be transferred. A 16-year-old from Vietnam was killed last year in a massive brawl in Boston.

Some lawmakers have responded. The New York City Council, after hearing hours of testimony from Asian youth, last year passed a bill to track bullying and train educators on prevention. Also last year, California Assemblywoman Judy Chu won passage of a new law to allow hate crimes victims more time - up to three years - to file civil suits; the bill was inspired by a 2003 San Francisco incident in which five Asian teens were attacked by a mob of youth.

In August, the Oakland-based Asian Pacific Islander Youth Violence Prevention Center organized a first-ever conference on the subject in Sacramento. Isami Arifuku, assistant director of the center, said she expected about 200 participants but nearly double that number attended....

Increasingly, some victims are fighting back. A 2003 California survey by the Services and Advocacy for Asian Youth Consortium found that 14 percent of Asian youth said they join gangs for protection. Department of Justice school crime data found the number of Asian youth carrying weapons nearly tripled from 1999 to 2001. "There are more Asian kids being brought to juvenile court for assault and battery," Arifuku said. "The thing we're finding in their history is that they had been picked on - called names and teased - and in some cases they lashed out and retaliated."

Advocates and students say that, typically, large fights erupt after weeks or months of verbal taunting. That's what happened at Edison High School in Fresno, Calif., according to Malcolm Yeung of the Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco. For months starting late last year, Hmong students had been repeatedly called names and had food thrown at them. "There had been patterns of this happening over and over again," said Yeung, whose group investigated the case on behalf of Asian students. "But the school had overlooked the issue."

On Feb. 25, the lunchtime taunting escalated into fights involving at least 30 students, according to Susan Bedi, spokesman for Fresno Unified School District. Seven students were treated for injuries, 12 were suspended and two faced expulsion, she said. Eight were convicted of misdemeanor assault, said Fresno police Sgt. Anthony Martinez. This year, officials at Edison High added more security and started an on-campus human relations council to address ethnic tension, Bedi said.

At Lafayette High, tension has long been high on campus and in surrounding areas, said Steve Chung, president of the United Chinese Association of Brooklyn, whose group was founded in late 2002 after an earlier student beating. That incident "was like the ignition - it started a fire" in the community. The student, a straight-A senior, was thrashed to unconsciousness while anti-Chinese slurs were yelled at him. Some news reported dubbed the school "Horror High," and Chinese students began going public about the problem. "The more we dug into Lafayette High School, the more we found," Chung said.

Aung's probing revealed that school administrators seemed reluctant to intervene, translation services for parents and students was spotty and teachers who reported the problems may have been punished. School officials say some reports were exaggerated. But "the problems there went back many, many years," said Michael Best, general counsel for New York City schools. Since signing the consent decree in June, he said, "the situation at the school in our view is very, very different." A Justice Department spokesman agreed that the school has been "very responsive."

Teachers this year are getting training to curb harassment, translation services throughout the district have been beefed up, and race relations experts are working with students and staff on campus, deputy New York schools chancellor Carmen Farina said. Last year, Lafayette's longtime principal retired, and many are optimistic about the new principal, Jolanta Rohloff. In addition, new vice principal Iris Chiu is fluent in Chinese and working closely with parents and students. "We actively sought someone that we knew could handle the delicacy of the school," Farina said.

Still, she said, an incident already has been reported since school started: An Asian student was attacked by several classmates on his way to the subway. He suffered minor injuries.

Source

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

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

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

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



16 November, 2005

SMALL CALIFORNIAN CHARTER SCHOOLS WORKING WELL BUT UNDER THREAT

Nicolas Thorwaldson loves his school, and he wants everyone to know it. "I feel like I wouldn't be the same person if I didn't go to New Tech," said Thorwaldson, the senior class president at the small charter high school in the Sacramento City Unified School District. He went to Kennedy High as a freshman but says he felt lost at the school of 2,600 students. Transferring to New Tech, with just 350 students, allowed him to thrive. "I want the district to be aware that small schools are very valuable," Thorwaldson said. "Not everybody can learn in a large environment."

It's a message that will ring through the halls of the Elks Lodge on Riverside Boulevard tonight, as supporters of small public high schools gather for what they're calling a "Small Schools Summit." Their purpose is twofold: They want to inform prospective students and parents about the programs offered at Sacramento's small high schools. And they want to rebuild support for creating more of the programs that once formed the centerpiece of Sacramento City's efforts to reinvent secondary education.

Three years into its high school reforms, the school district has changed significantly. Shifts in leadership, a drop in available construction money and a poor track record in securing permanent locations for two of the small schools are causing worry among some parents and students. "I'm afraid they're just going to abandon these small high schools," said Linda Stinghen, whose daughter is a junior at The Met, one of two schools lacking a permanent home. Though switching locations each year has been annoying, Stinghen said, her daughter loves the school of fewer than 120 students. "It's been good for her because there's no falling through the cracks," she said. "Everybody knows everyone else."

When the district crafted its reform plan in 2001, it pledged to create eight new high schools, each serving no more than 500 students. The small schools were supposed to create more options for families, reduce crowding at existing high schools and keep students from dropping out in large numbers. The effort was fueled in large part by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is funding new small high schools across the country. More money came from taxpayers, who voted for Measure I in 2002 to pay for $225 million in bonds to upgrade existing campuses and build new high schools. Sacramento City Unified opened four small high schools in 2003 and a fifth one this fall. Three have permanent homes. But two have jumped from one location to another every year.

And now - largely because of rising costs - the district does not have enough money to complete all the construction projects it has proposed. Officials figure it would cost $356 million to build the campuses called for in the high school reform plan, complete the projects voters approved in Measure I and do necessary safety upgrades at existing schools. But there is only $173 million left to do the work. Advocates for small schools are worried their programs could be cut.

More here



BRITS NEGLECT PRACTICAL EDUCATION

The Government is accused today of neglecting work-based training and failing to close down an "unacceptable" number of inadequate colleges in an official review of the future role of further education published today. Further education is the neglected middle child between universities and schools despite its importance to the economy, says the report by Sir Andrew Foster.

FE colleges have their history in technical schools but their role has become confused as they pick up the pieces of failure in the school system, he says.

"The education system needs to improve the ability output of secondary schools. This is a major task as currently 50 per cent of young people in England do not achieve level 2 (five A*-C grade GCSEs or equivalent) by age 16."

Sir Andrew, the deputy chairman of the Royal Bank of Canada and a former head of the Audit Commission, said the number of failing colleges had gone down from 10 to 14 per cent to four per cent, but remained too high. In the report, "Realising the Potential: a review of the future role of further education colleges", he suggests that private companies could take over failing further education colleges.

Source



"INTELLIGENT DESIGN" COMES TO AUSTRALIAN SCHOOLS

Up to 3000 schools have been targeted in a DVD blitz aimed at challenging Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in favour of an "intelligent designer". The right to teach intelligent design in science classes is being tested in US courts and a fiery debate has erupted in Australia that has pitted scientists against advocates for the "alternative theory" to evolution. Proponents of intelligent design say some forms of life are so complex they can be explained only by the action of an unspecified "intelligent designer", who some say is God. A commonly cited example of this complex life is the flagellum, a natural "outboard motor" that propels a bacterium along. The argument is that it could not have been produced by the incremental steps of evolution, because it would not function if it was missing any of its parts.

The Minister for Education, Carmel Tebbutt, said intelligent design "can't be taught as part of the NSW school science curriculum" because it was not scientific or based on evidence.

More than 100 schools are already teaching intelligent design as science, alongside the mandatory curriculum requirement to study evolution. These schools include Christian community, Seventh Day Adventist, and a small number of Anglican schools. Many more may follow once the $21.95 DVD Unlocking the Mystery of Life: Intelligent Design is sent free to every school by Campus Crusade for Christ. The DVD promises to reveal "the unmistakeable hallmarks of design - and the Creator's skill - within our very cells".

Campus Crusade for Christ's national director, Bill Hodgson, said the DVD would be sent to all 3000 public and private schools by the end of the year. "We're making available to schools a copy of the DVD as a resource," he said. "There is no prescription on what people do with it." Schools that refused to "re-examine the basis of evolution" were engaging in "reactionary censorship".

The president of the NSW Teachers Federation, Maree O'Halloran, said the unsolicited DVD was a religious marketing exercise and "should be rejected" by schools.

More here

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

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

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

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15 November, 2005

The Ethnic Studies Echo Chamber

Comment from Jim Paine

If one thing has become abundantly clear to me as I've delved deeper into Ward Churchill's writings and the general field of Ethnic Studies, it is that Ethnic Studies is little more than an academic echo chamber dominated by a few loud voices, Churchill's being among the loudest. Now, most fields of study are similarly repetitious, but what makes the Ethnic Studies echo chamber particularly troublesome is that many of the academics within the field are not academics at all, but rather, they are political activists with teaching jobs.

Why is this so? I won't go into the emergence of professorial activism, since that subject has been covered thoroughly here. Suffice it to say that since the '60s, the Humanities in general and Ethnic Studies in particular (requiring as it does so little real scholarship) have attracted vast numbers of otherwise unemployable activists. The short hours, the long breaks, the ample salaries, and the endless opportunities to inculcate gullible students with one's beliefs make this a near-perfect safe-house from which to conduct one's real business of political activism.

Ward Churchill's entire career has been both a mirror and a prototype of this merging of academia and activism. And now that career, as well as his body of work, has been called into question. Of course he will defend himself. But the real threat of the investigation of Churchill's work is not merely to Churchill's continued employment at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Most onlookers understand, at least on a visceral level, that this battle represents much more than that.

Most telling of the true scope of this battle is that Churchill's academic peers are so vociferous, so strident in defending him. The simple fact of the matter is that they must defend him. Their own sinecures are threatened when Churchill is threatened. Much of their work would be eviscerated should the vast array of Churchill citations suddenly be rendered worthless. The work of Vine Deloria, of Bruce Johansen, of Winona LaDuke, of Robert A. Williams, Jr.-activists all, Churchill supporters all-the work of all of these is hopelessly intertwined and interdependent, each providing rationale for the others' theses.

Churchill cites Deloria, who cites Johansen, who cites Williams, who cites Churchill. But what happens when just one of those sources is shown to be irrelevant, or worse, false? How much of what presently constitutes the field of Ethnic Studies will have to be reconstructed from the ground up? What happens when a single joker is removed from this house of cards?

Nothing of import, save perhaps the restoration of a subfield of study to its rightful parents, History and Anthropology departments. And, of course, a vast lamentation from activists suddenly deprived of audience, income, and succor.



Colleges Welcome Texas Homeschoolers

While Texas homeschools often field inquiries from public school officials, social service workers, law enforcement officials, and employers who question their legitimacy, graduates are finding most colleges and universities eagerly accept them, and some are actively recruiting them.

The colleges' newfound appreciation of homeschooled students is due in part to the efforts of a grassroots organization founded in 1986. The Texas Home School Coalition (THSC) was formed to advocate for homeschooled students' rights after the Texas Education Agency (TEA) began seeking criminal prosecution for truancy against 100 homeschooling families statewide in 1985.

Homeschool parents responded with a class-action lawsuit against every school district in Texas--all 1,060 of them. The case progressed all the way to the Texas Supreme Court, where justices ruled in 1994 that Texas homeschools legally could operate as private schools, which have no compulsory attendance requirements, as long as they were "conducted in a bona fide manner using a written curriculum consisting of reading, spelling, grammar, math and a course in good citizenship." But state-supported colleges and universities continued to discriminate against homeschooled applicants until 2003, when the Texas legislature passed a law forcing them to stop. Now, a new generation of homeschooled graduates is reaping the benefits.

THSC serves as a liaison between colleges and universities and the homeschooling community. Homeschooled students receive guidance in developing transcripts and meeting the admissions requirements for Texas colleges and universities, while admissions offices are informed of legal requirements regarding admission of homeschooled students.

Obtaining federal financial aid was overly cumbersome for homeschooled students until recently. In 1998, Congress clarified the law regarding federal financial aid, stating homeschool graduates were eligible for aid without having to take an additional test other applicants were not required to take.

Prior to 2003, the college admissions process was likewise difficult for homeschooled students. Many colleges required homeschooled students to achieve higher SAT or ACT scores than public high school graduates. Others required homeschooled students to write essays not required of other applicants, THSC President Tim Lambert said. "We worked for six years through three legislative sessions just to amend the code to stop colleges from discriminating against homeschool students in the admissions process," Lambert said.

Though Stephen Swanson was homeschooled from kindergarten through 12th grade, he recalled no great difficulties in being admitted to Oklahoma Christian University, where he is a sophomore. His college routine, he said, is similar to what he experienced in homeschooling. Over the past few years, he has studied on his own, using a self-guided approach that has served him well in college.

"The hardest thing for me was exercising the discipline I learned through homeschooling to meet the challenge of a heavier workload at college," Swanson said. "I seek to 'just say no' to outside activities when they conflict with my studies. My drive to excel away from home at college is due to my parents' emphasis on character development. My faith-based homeschool education gives me incentive to use wisely the abilities and opportunities God has given me."

Lubbock Christian University freshman Thomas Kennedy was homeschooled for nine years. He said his professors are all aware he is a homeschool graduate, and they have received him well so far. "One of my professors told me that he looks to homeschool students in his classroom to pave the way and set the pace for the classroom," he said, adding that being homeschooled has made him a lifelong learner. "I have chosen to continue my education after undergraduate school because I like school."

Isaac Garcia, homeschooled throughout his K-12 years in Texas, is a senior at Lubbock Christian University majoring in computer information systems. Garcia said the hardships other homeschoolers faced before him made the way easier for him. "Because of the efforts of those before me to ease the process for homeschoolers to be admitted to college, I had no extra requirements to be accepted other than to demonstrate competence on the ACT or SAT," he said. "I have an inner desire instilled in me by my homeschool teachers, in this case my parents, to work hard in college and to aim high, and with God's help I will accomplish anything I set my mind to."

Craig Barnes, a Tarrant County Community College sophomore, was homeschooled in Texas from 7th through 12th grade. He said he has been tested in keeping up with the much faster pace required by his college instructors, but he noted the admissions process was simple. He merely mailed his application along with copies of his transcripts and SAT scores, just as his peers from public schools must do.

Most colleges and universities have realized homeschooled students in general are an asset to the campus, THSC President Lambert said. Texas homeschool graduates as a group score significantly higher than the state average on SAT and ACT tests.

Source

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

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

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

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14 November 2005

SCHOOL CORRUPTION

During his combined 17 years as superintendent of schools for the towns of Branford and Hadley, Massachusetts, Armand A. Fusco, Ed.D. began to question what he felt was a “legacy of corruption” in the operation of public school systems. Five years ago, the Guilford resident, who also has 35 years experience in the education field, began compiling hard evidence to back up his suspicion that many forms of what he labels corruption exist within nearly all public school systems in the nation, cheating taxpayers out of money and children out of a better quality of education.

This September, Armand published his findings in School Corruption: Betrayal of Children and the Public Trust. (2005, iUniverse). Armand's book exposes corruption in public schools and related agencies like PTA/PTOs by compiling overwhelming evidence of cheating, deceit, waste, mismanagement, fraud, and stealing occurring in the public school realm. “Nobody will believe what's happening. This book is just the tip of the iceberg; what's hidden is what I couldn't find,” says Armand.

Armand delves into tough questions including, “why corruption and political correctness leads to poor student achievement, disgraceful school outcomes, and failing schools.” He also sheds light on inept school government, which he says is allowing corruption to “flourish.” Armand adds he did not write School Corruption to stir up controversy. By including his idea for a “remedy,” applicable within any school district, people can begin to change the system for the better, he says. “I want to see positive change, not stir up a lot of controversy. This has to get out now, so it's discussed as a hot topic, or like the Catholic Church [priest sex scandal], it will explode and cost us dearly—all because they wanted to hide the facts instead of protect the children.”

Armand was writing an education column for local newspapers between 1999 and 2003 when he began a six-part series touching on ways corruption surfaces in public school districts. His research continued after the series ended. It developed into the idea for School Corruption, when Armand realized such a book did not yet exist. As he uncovered story after story, Armand shared them with his wife, Constance. An experienced educator and education administrator, Constance M. Fusco, Ed.D. recently retired after 30 years in education. Constance served her last four years in the field as assistant superintendent of Madison Public Schools. “My wife, as I was writing this book, would say 'That can't be,' because she doesn't think that way,” says Armand, who dedicated his book to her.

From the Long Island school superintendent who somehow stole $11 million of public school money to an administrator who took candy money from a school fundraising drive, Armand can back up each example of greed and corruption with corresponding news stories painstakingly culled from national news archives. “It covers a 20-year span, but a lot of it is recent,” he points out.

His book offers page after page of examples, state by state, including a Connecticut test-tampering scandal at Stratfield Elementary School in Fairfield. The school, one of nine in the town, scored 40 percent higher than other schools and tested highest in the state. “In fact, it was the envy of other schools and even captivated educators from India and Japan, who visited the school seeking the secret for its success. The community and parents revered the principal,” writes Armand. The acclaim continued until an analysis of the school's standardized test scores showed five times the number of erasures than on tests by other schools; 89 percent of the answers were changed from wrong to right. As a result, a probe by the Connecticut Department of Education also found evidence of tampering in state tests taken at the school between 1993-95. An investigation, which cost taxpayers $200,000, followed. The state Department of Education resolved the principal couldn't be excluded from suspicion, as he had access to test materials. However, the principal denied the charge and even passed a lie detector test. Then, he made what Armand found to be a “secret” deal with the school board, and retired. When the students were re-tested under strict security, scores dropped below other schools.

In School Corruption, Armand calls such examples of cheating and deceit “CheDe” (cheaty). Armand also identifies waste and mismanagement as a form of corruption, calling it “WaMi” (whammy). WaMi typically follows CheDe's decay of value and ethics, opening the door to complacency, which allows school resources to become mismanaged. While it doesn't typically involve personal financial gain, personal gains come in the form of less work, less effort, empire building, and more.

As the Hadley superintendent of schools (1972-80), Armand encountered WaMi first-hand, when the district hired a speech therapist. “The first year, we had her as a part-time speech therapist. At the end of the year, she asked for full-time status, because of her caseload. She had the numbers [to show need] and she was made full-time. Beginning in the third year, she said she needed an assistant,” he recalls. Armand felt the numbers weren't making sense. “When you are working with students in speech therapy, you should have turn-over, not an increase; and I told her so,” he says. Armand called in an independent speech therapy consulting group from neighboring UMass, and asked for a review of the needs of students in his district's speech therapy program. Meanwhile, the speech therapist went to parents and the press, until “they were ready the hang me at tenure time,” he says. But Armand was able to prove the expense of adding an assistant to the speech therapy program was unnecessary. “The [UMass therapists'] report came back saying two-thirds of the kids didn't need therapy. She was building an empire,” says Armand of the therapist.

WaMi violates what Armand feels is an “...implied sacred covenant between the taxpayers and the schools,” to spend money effectively and efficiently. As Branford superintendent of schools (1985–92), Armand says one instance of coming up against WaMi occurred during an attempt to save money by consolidating teacher hiring. “While I was there, we consolidated five elementary schools to three schools. The principals of each school wanted an art teacher. I said, 'What do you want covered?' They told me, and I worked out a schedule where two teachers could cover the three schools. Each principal then went to the school board to say they weren't getting an art teacher; and the board gave them three art teachers.” Astounded, Armand recalls asking the principals, “What will you do with the extra time those teachers will have? They said, 'We'll think of something,' and the board agreed to that!”

The final fitting acronym for the third form of corruption covered in Armand's book is “FraSte” (frosty); fraud and stealing. “It should 'frost' all taxpayers because it's their dollars that are being stolen in some way,” he says. Just one FraSte example in School Corruption describes a middle school secretary who regularly stole money from student accounts set aside for activities such as field trips. By the time auditors uncovered the theft, she'd already left town, having embezzled an estimated $483,000. No matter what you call it, Armand says, “Where ever you find money, you're going to find corruption...they've even stolen grand pianos. It's not just little stuff; it's anything that moves.” Corruptions also comes in less tangible forms, such as stealing time or tweaking work loads to justify jobs and programs.

In addition to exposing the many types of corruption in public school systems, and its resulting diminished quality of education for students, Armand notes he wrote School Corruption to challenge school boards to re-tool and create a new beginning. He even provides what he calls “...a simple remedy,” to make the challenge a reality.....

More here



Political correctness trumps free speech

What do the Bible and "The Vagina Monologues" have in common? Not much. But surely we can all agree that both are covered by the First Amendment, guaranteeing freedom of religion and freedom of expression. Well, that's not so at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. At UWEC you can live in a dorm and watch a performance of "The Vagina Monologues," but you can't join a Bible studies group. Any resident assistant, or RA, as the live-in student counselors are called, can put on a performance of the play, and one has, but leading a Bible studies class in his or her own room and on his or her own time, is forbidden. Many students want such a class, but they're out of luck.

The director of university housing says the ban is necessary to enable the RAs to "share" the perspectives of the students, to make RAs "approachable." Vagina perspective trumps the perspectives of Moses and Matthew in behalf of "approachability." That certainly sounds postmodern enough.

Where have we found such empty-headed university administrators? This destructive silliness goes to the root of politically correct attitudes: feminist ideology, good; the Bible, bad. Reaching for moral equivalence, the housing director reassures critics that the Koran and the Torah are banned, too. The university is now considering an extension of the bans to forbid political and ideological discussions.

Such flouting of the traditions of free speech -- and good sense -- is typical of the disease of political correctness that in various forms infects many campuses, denying students a fundamental understanding of the meaning of free speech. "The First Amendment doesn't end with Bible study or with 'The Vagina Monologues' -- it guarantees a student's right to perform both," says David French, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a six-year-old watchdog organization and clearinghouse for the bad news of campus offenses against free speech.

This latest offense follows another objection at UWEC where the student senate barred funding to any campus organization that promotes a "particular ideological, religious or partisan viewpoint." That covers just about anything a curious student could talk to anyone about.

Not so long ago -- within the memory of Americans still alive -- universities set rules to inhibit sensual temptation, to protect young people at an age when they were particularly vulnerable to sexual promiscuity. Now sexual promiscuity is barely an elective, and Big Brother and Sister Nanny shield everyone from the temptation of intellectual debate of secular and religious philosophies. By banning free speech, the universities impose indoctrination in lieu of learning. The Founding Fathers are spinning, but they're only dead white men, after all.

FIRE's Web site (thefire.org) includes maps with ratings of colleges that routinely punish students and faculty for saying things that hurt feelings and threaten "self-esteem." Although some college administrators retreat in the face of challenges of these speech codes, a casual survey turns up a catalog of taboos on language and dumb jokes. Bowdoin College, for example, bans jokes and stories "experienced by others as harassing." Brown University prohibits "verbal behavior" that produces "feelings of impotence, anger or disenfranchisement," whether "intentional or unintentional." Colby College in Maine outlaws speech that causes "a vague sense of danger" or a loss of "self-esteem." The University of Connecticut prohibits "inappropriately directed laughter." Syracuse University nixes "offensive remarks . . . sexually suggestive staring . . . and sexual, sexist or heterosexist remarks or jokes."

West Virginia University tells freshmen to use language that is not "gender specific." So "girlfriend" and "boyfriend" are out; "lover" or "partner" is in. The University of North Dakota defines harassment as anything that intentionally produces "psychological discomfort, embarrassment or ridicule." If a "person" comes out of the ladies room trailing toilet paper from the bottom of her foot, a la Gilda Radner in a memorable "Saturday Night Live" skit, make sure you don't tell her about it.

These speech codes would be laughable if they weren't so serious. But there's a larger lesson here. "If students on our nation's campuses learn that jokes, remarks and visual displays that 'offend' someone may rightly be banned, they will not find it odd or dangerous when the government itself seeks to censor and to demand moral conformity in the expression of its citizens," warns FIRE. "A nation that does not educate in freedom will not survive in freedom, and will not even know when it has lost." We need those FIRE alarms.

Source

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

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

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

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13 November, 2005

SPECIAL ED ALSO CRUMBLING IN NYC

The Klein fiasco mill is never on hiatus. Today's focus will be on the satellite issue of "special education." During one of Klein's momentous and scripted tours of a local school set up for a spontaneous VIP visit, the chancellor attended a virtual classroom lesson. His head swivelled once around the room of bug-eyed kids. One quick pivot and he pursed his lips to a microphone, declaiming, " I was asked to pick out which kids were special education and which ones weren't and I couldn't do it." Based on this immersion, he ordered that special education children, desperately deserving personalized care, be shoe-horned into already bulging classes. This is the dirty little secret called "mainstreaming."

Klein releases periodic odes to himself, sort of a monogrammed "triumph of the will." He calls them his "School Reform Report Card." In them he luxuriates over the strides made in special education during his stewardship. No sooner did it resonate among his support staff ( including authors of such staff development mags as "Frogs and Toadies", "Guide for Lap-dogs", and "No Show Digest") and the NYC tabloids, that federal judge Charles Sifton certified a class action suit alleging that Klein's school system denied special education students a full year of learning opportunity.

There is more than mere suspicion that Klein withheld services owed to these most vulnerable kids. Perhaps the chancellor doesn't agree that by ejecting them from school they were being denied services. Perhaps his rigorous training as an attorney enables him to make that case. According to Advocates for Children, parents were kept blind to their rights of due process and their children's civil right to an education thereby compromised.

Prior to making it as New York City's schools chancellor, Joel Klein's crowning achievement was as a Justice Department legal beagle, when he expeditiously busted Microsoft. After his victory was reversed on appeal, Klein was drafted as the first schools chancellor with no expertise in education. He seemed to start on the right foot when he proved to be the first chancellor, competent in the profession or not, who knew how many buildings were administered by his own bureaucracy. Now there was a foundation on which to build!

The bereaved public, bemoaning a lost but once glorious educational institution, clamored for its revival and clung to any blowing straw of hope. The need to believe is deep-rooted. For a citizenry steeped in "business as usual" shell games, Klein's zealous vows, combined with his crisp and military-sounding press releases, delivered the formidable zing of an adult beverage.

Klein knew that the school system was a gravely sick though not doomed patient. But he got the diagnosis all wrong. And instead of allowing capable professionals to apply their skilled hands to the prone patient, he rushed the patient to a morgue to be stabilized by no-bid consultants in ice-packing. Klein's revolutionary fiats are all fizzling because not only are they not antidotes to the poisonous truths reposing in the system, but they are compounding the catastrophe with new and unforeseen venoms.

The Aztec and Mayan civilizations have passed on their legacy of human sacrifice to an unlikely beneficiary: Joel Klein and his Department of Education. The difference is that this time, children's hearts and minds are on an agenda, not a menu. He is hitting them hard and all who serve them hard. That is no way to be hard-hitting.

Education is a thoroughbred that cannot be ridden by an army of 400 pound jockeys. Its magic cannot be scripted, like the chancellor's press conferences, to the beat of a metronome and the drone of an hourglass. The relationship between each teacher and every student is inviolable as between doctor and patient. Klein hijacks style and sabotages substance. He has made a mere job of a noble calling. When learning works it is despite, not because of his policies. And he has littered the road to progress with martyrs. Klein's leadership is an embarrassment of myths and fallacies. As he subdues the waves of the educational seas , we know we are on the "Good Ship Lollipop" because he told us so. The truth is that his occupation of what was once the pride and rock of New York, its public school system, is a cruel and furious adventure in failure.

Source



AUSTRALIA TO INSIST ON PHONICS

Every child in Australia will be tested for literacy when they start school and then regularly over the next three years under a national action plan to help struggling students. A national inquiry has also suggested that children's reading results be available to teachers if the child moves interstate or to a different school. Parents would be given regular updates on their child's performance, with a report twice a year for the first three years of schooling.

The report, Teaching Reading, was commissioned by Education Minister Brendan Nelson amid fears that current teaching methods were failing Australia's children. It contains an explicit warning that Australia's schools should embrace "systematic, direct phonics instruction so that children master the essential alphabetic codebreaking skill required for foundational reading proficiency". The warning follows a controversial, worldwide debate on which of two approaches is better - the phonics instruction method, or the "whole language" method, a "holistic" approach in which children are immersed in language and words, instead of learning first to break down words.

While acknowledging that this year's OECD indicators report Education at a Glance shows Australian school students compare well against overseas students, the report finds "a significant minority of children in Australian schools continue to face difficulties in acquiring acceptable levels of literacy and numeracy". While both phonics and whole-language methods can help some children, the report recommends that phonics be the starting point. "Systematic phonics instruction is critical if children are to be taught to read well, whether or not they experience reading difficulties," it finds. "The inquiry found strong evidence that a whole-language approach to the teaching of reading on its own is not in the best interests of children, particularly those experiencing reading difficulties. "Moreover, where there is unsystematic or no phonics instruction, children's literacy progress is significantly impeded, inhibiting their initial and subsequent growth in reading accuracy, fluency, writing, spelling and comprehension."

The report recommends that the current assessment of students' literacy results against national benchmarks be extended so results of individual children are available for diagnostic and intervention purposes. "To assist the transfer of achievement information as students move from school to school and from state to state, mechanisms are also proposed to make this process a long overdue reality," it states. "The committee recommends ... nationally consistent assessments on entry to school be undertaken for every child, and these link to future assessments. A confidential mechanism such as a unique student identifier should be established to enable information on an individual child's performance to follow the child regardless of location, and to monitor a child's progress throughout schooling."

Earlier this week, Dr Nelson backed national testing on basic literacy skills for trainee teachers when they enter university and when they graduate.

Source



The education of our children should not be left to the state: "By placing your child in the care of a government-run indoctrination center, you are saying that you trust the government to raise your child, essentially giving up your due process and privacy rights. You are admitting that the government is able to give your child something you cannot provide. When you consider how poorly the government manages everything else, why would any reasonable person think things would be different when it comes to education?"

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

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

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

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



12 November, 2005

School Allowed to Give Sex Survey to Students, Despite Parents' Protest

Another reason for giving parents a choice of schools

The recent ruling from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Fields vs. Palmdale School District is cause for great alarm. A group of parents brought a lawsuit against the school district for involving their children in a sex-survey conducted in their school without the parents' permission. The parents' basic complaint was that the school violated the students' right to privacy and the parents' right to control the education of their children, particularly regarding sexual matters.

The Central District Court of California ruled against the parents. The parents appealed to the 9th Circuit Court which on November 2nd agreed with and upheld the lower court's ruling. Quoting from the opinion from the appeals court:

"We agree, and hold that there is no fundamental right of parents to be the exclusive provider of information regarding sexual matters to their children, either independent of their right to direct the upbringing and education of their children or encompassed by it. We also hold that parents have no due process or privacy right to override the determinations of public schools as to the information to which their children will be exposed while enrolled as students. Finally, we hold that the defendants' (officials and school district) actions were rationally related to a legitimate state purpose."

This case disturbingly illustrates the radical departure of federal judges (and I must say, the entire legal system) from the foundational principle of the Constitution: that it is an instrument of the people to restrict the powers of government.

The court's conclusion could only be reached by using the Bizzaro Superman comic-book logic, where everything is in reverse, good is evil and evil is good. Instead of the Constitution being an instrument of the people to allow certain specified powers to the government, these bizzaro judges believe that the Constitution is an instrument of the government that gives rights to the people. This kind of bizzaro thinking violates the very essence of the Constitution! Only by using bizzaro logic can they conclude that, because there is no provision in the US Constitution that gives parents the right to control the sex education of their children, then the parents don't have that right.

This is what results from the mind-set of the activist-court. These arrogant liberal judges are out-of-control. If America is to avoid further erosion of the Constitution and the anarchy that will follow, these judges must be stopped and replaced. Furthermore, America needs to repair the damage caused to its Constitution by the bizarros with the gavels and black robes

Source

Another comment on the same ruling (Excerpt):

All parties agreed that no court had previously found a specific right to "exclusive control over the introduction and flow of sexual information to their children." Judge Reinhardt writes that "no such specific right can be found in the deep roots of the nation's history or tradition..." He means that he can find no political-legal right of this sort appearing in the documents that found our nation. Therefore, he looks for this right as an accompaniment of other broader rights that either are stated or have been construed by past jurists as having been stated.

Quite clearly, the judge is working solely in a framework of constitutional and statutory law. He is not seeking justice in the sense of natural rights. He is not out to find what is naturally right. His job is to determine what is legal either because a constitution says it is legal, or legislative laws say it is legal, or what other judges have previously determined to be legal.

If Judge Reinhardt were dealing in natural, not political, law, he could never say that the right to determine the sex education of children was not to be found in American history or tradition. He would be laughed out of natural law court. It is common knowledge that from time immemorial parents have heavily determined their children's education in sex and other matters, and have a natural right to do so. It is also obvious that the appellants are a small sample of a significant set of Americans who have objected to sex education in the schools on various grounds, such as religious, personal, and political, for a long time. If these facts aren't part of American history and tradition, then what is? The only way the judge's comment makes any sense is that he is not taking into consideration the age-old natural parent-child relationship.

In natural law, this relationship is straightforward. Children begin life with some rights and acquire more as they grow older. They do not have full adult rights as children. The parents have the right to bring up and educate their children, which they acquired by producing the children. This is not to say that there will not be tensions arising as children mature and acquire more rights.

At this juncture, I naively muse about why the lawyers for the plaintiff and why the judges did not make any reference to the numerous documents in our country's history that reflect natural law and rights. The Declaration of Independence is a prime example. It plainly states that governments are instituted among men to secure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I may not personally believe this, but if I were a lawyer I would argue on this basis. Educating one's children according to one's preferences is surely conducive to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It surely is natural to the life of those in a family.

And if I were Judge Reinhardt or one of the other two judges, I could, if I had a mind to, conclude that our history and tradition does provide a good deal of evidence of broad natural rights that imply that a parent has a right to determine what a school teaches. Why didn't both sides use this legal logic? Maybe they have not thought of it, but that's quite implausible. Maybe it won't hold up in court, but that's implausible too. Otherwise, why did the judge mention the documents that found our nation? I am puzzled. I hope that some bright lawyer reads these words and can build a different case the next time.

Under both political and natural law, the appellants have a potential weakness in their case. In sending their children to the school, they may have suspended their rights over the children. However, I argue that this is not the case because coercion is present in several respects. Parents must educate their children by law. Parents (and non-parents) must pay school taxes. Furthermore, parents find it very costly to move for the sake of changing school district. It is also very costly to remove the children and educate them at home or in a private school. Therefore many parents make a highly constrained choice to send their children to public school. They are not voluntarily suspending their rights. It is more accurate to say that they have lost their rights over their children.

A court might say that parents can assert their control over the school through the school board. In reality, the school board is a political body and, as such, is an unwieldy, blunt, and costly instrument for exercising control.....

Kristi Seymour administered all the surveys. She was a Master's Student in psychology at the time who volunteered as a "mental health counselor" in the district. She developed the questionnaire in association with the Children's Bureau of Southern California and the School of Professional Psychology in which she was enrolled. The Children's Bureau is a 100-year old private/public institution. It is private in form but receives over half of its funding from the state. One of its focal points is child abuse and neglect. The goal of the research was "to establish a community baseline measure of children's exposure to early trauma (for example, violence.)"

Seymour mailed a letter to parents that explained the study and provided a consent form. This letter, after mentioning the trauma and violence objective, explains: "We will identify internal behaviors such as anxiety and depression and external behaviors such as aggression and verbal abuse." This comprises the material about the substance of the questions. Nowhere at all is even a hint, not a trace, given of questions about sex or sexuality. However, the actual questionnaire had 10 (out of 79) questions specifically about sex.

My own naive legal thinking is that this deception should be the basis for a tort based upon the breaking of a contract. However, the lawyers of the plaintiffs did not go in this direction.

The appellants argued that the survey was not a legitimate state activity because it was not part of the curriculum, again referring to past cases. They also argued that the survey was done to advance Seymour's career. Reinhardt dismissed the latter as "entirely speculative and conclusory in nature." He referred to the "detailed information setting forth the legitimate governmental purpose of the survey" and that the survey would be used for the benefit of the School District. Although this issue did not make or break the case, the judge seemed to me to lean over backwards to side with Seymour. He does not admonish her either for her failure to inform parents fully in advance, indeed to mislead them, about the survey, even if only by oversight; and he does not even admit that she did stand to gain personally by her work.

The former claim he axed, noting that the state's interest goes far beyond curriculum. From Brown vs. Board of Education, he extracted a veritable paean to public education whose glorious language I will spare you from.

The only even slight concession to the appellants occurs here: "Although the students who were questioned may or may not have `learned' anything from the survey itself and may or may not have been `taught' anything by the questions they were asked, the facilitation of their ability to absorb the education the school provides is without question a legitimate educational objective." Judge Reinhardt at this point seems anxious to close off any legal loophole that might be used in the future. He makes a far-fetched assertion. He asserts (with no basis) that the survey makes easier the education of the students being asked the questions. Try as I might, I can't see how this occurs.

More here

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

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

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

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11 November, 2005

SOME DIVERSITY COMES TO KANSAS

Keith Burgess Jackson (who is, like me a religious unbeliever) comments: "This fight is not about imposing religion on schoolchildren. It is about keeping scientists from imposing their secularism on schoolchildren"

The fiercely split Kansas Board of Education voted 6 to 4 on Tuesday to adopt new science standards that are the most far-reaching in the nation in challenging Darwin's theory of evolution in the classroom. The standards move beyond the broad mandate for critical analysis of evolution that four other states have established in recent years, by recommending that schools teach specific points that doubters of evolution use to undermine its primacy in science education. Among the most controversial changes was a redefinition of science itself, so that it would not be explicitly limited to natural explanations.

The vote was a watershed victory for the emerging movement of intelligent design, which posits that nature alone cannot explain life's complexity. John G. West of the Discovery Institute, a conservative research organization that promotes intelligent design, said Kansas now had "the best science standards in the nation."

A leading defender of evolution, Eugenie C. Scott of the National Center for Science Education, said she feared that the standards would become a "playbook for creationism."

The vote came six years after Kansas shocked the scientific and political world by stripping its curriculum standards of virtually any mention of evolution, a move reversed in 2001 after voters ousted several conservative members of the education board. A new conservative majority took hold in 2004 and promptly revived arguments over the teaching of evolution. The ugly and highly personal nature of the debate was on display at the Tuesday meeting, where board members accused one other of dishonesty and disingenuousness.

"This is a sad day, not just for Kansas kids, but for Kansas," Janet Waugh of Kansas City, Kan., one of four dissenting board members, said before the vote. "We're becoming a laughingstock not only of the nation but of the world." Ms. Waugh and her allies contended that the board's majority was improperly injecting religion into biology classrooms. But supporters of the new standards said they were simply trying to open the curriculum, and students' minds, to alternative viewpoints.

There is little debate among mainstream scientists over evolution's status as the bedrock of biology, but a small group of academics who support intelligent design have fervently pushed new critiques of Darwin's theory in recent years. Kenneth Willard, a board member from Hutchinson, said, "I'm very pleased to be maybe on the front edge of trying to bring some intellectual honesty and integrity to the science classroom rather than asking students to check their questions at the door because it is a challenge to the sanctity of evolution." Steve E. Abrams of Arkansas City, the board chairman and chief sponsor of the new standards, said that requiring consideration of evolution's critics "absolutely teaches more about science."....

More here



BACKLASH AGAINST BRITAIN'S DICTATORSHIP FOR BABIES

A national curriculum for babies and toddlers has been dismissed as "absolute madness" by parents who fear childhood could be taken from children.

Under the Childcare Bill, childminders would teach the curriculum to children "from birth" until they start school. All three-year-olds in childcare in England would learn rudimentary maths, language and literacy.

But the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations described the proposal as "bizarre". Spokeswoman Margaret Morrissey said: "We are now in danger of taking away children's childhood when they leave the maternity ward. "From the minute you are born and your parents go back to work, as the government has encouraged them to do, you are going to be ruled by the Department for Education. "It is absolute madness."

The proposals for the first threee years of children's development give statutory force to existing guidelines, Birth to Three Matters, published two years ago. But the Professional Association of Nursery Nurses (PANN) also expressed concern. Tricia Pritchard, from PANN, said: "We hope that this will be age-appropriate and flexible as young children develop at different rates. "Children of the same age have different abilities." Deborah Lawson, former chair of PANN and now vice-chair of the Professional Association of Teachers, said: "We do need to have some guidelines and parameters but nothing that is too prescriptive."

Children's Minister Beverley Hughes said the curriculum would indeed be flexible and "age specific". The Bill tells childcare providers to give a mixture of "integrated care and education from birth". Introducing it, Ms Hughes said: "We want to establish a coherent framework that defines progression for young children from nought to five. "We are not talking about sitting very young children in chairs and making them learn numbers and letters where that is inappropriate."

The government drew up the new curriculum for toddlers, arguing that research showed earlier education helped children develop faster socially and intellectually. It will build on an existing system which teaches three-year-olds "mathematical development and communication, language and literacy", the Education Department said. The early years foundation stage will have the same compulsory legal force as the national curriculum for schools, Ms Hughes said. She said young children's learning deserved "parity" with that at primary and secondary level, but denied that this would be at the expense of play.

Source

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

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

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

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10 November, 2005

THE JESUITICAL BRITISH STATE: BABIES NOW TO BE POURED INTO A COMPULSORY COMMON MOULD!

Babies are to be taught a "national curriculum" devised by Whitehall, the new Childcare Bill revealed yesterday. Childminders and nurseries will be under a legal duty to teach the Early Years Foundation Stage to children from birth until the age of 3. They will be taught mathematics, reading and writing, according to Beverley Hughes, the Children's Minister. She argued that research showed that earlier education helped children to develop faster both socially and intellectually.

But parents will not be guaranteed childcare under the Bill, despite government promises of a universal service. Instead, local authorities will have a legal duty to provide childcare facilities for working parents only where it is "reasonably practicable".

Ofsted will police the new curriculum with its inspectors checking that children are developing in four distinct headings. The children will be expected to have mastered skills such as comparing, categorising and recognising symbols and marks. Ms Hughes said yesterday that the Bill was a bold move, adding that it would provide a "coherent framework that defines progression for young children from nought to five". She said that young children's education deserved parity with that at primary and secondary level, but denied that this would be at the expense of play. "We are not talking about sitting very young children in chairs and making them learn numbers and letters where that is inappropriate," she said.

The department said that the curriculum would be based on the four stages of development contained in Birth to Three Matters, an advisory document published two years ago. The curriculum will divide a baby's development into four broad areas: heads up, lookers and communicators; sitters, standers and explorers; movers, shakers and players; and walkers, talkers and pretenders. There will be four aspects each containing a check list of components - a strong child, a skilful communicator, a competent learner and a healthy child.

The guidance on which the curriculum will be based says: "Creativity, imagination and representation allow children to share their thoughts, feelings, understanding and identities with others, using drawings, words, movement, music, dance and imaginative play." The Government also pledged yesterday that by 2010 all parents of children aged between 3 and 14 should have access to year-round childcare places from 8am to 6pm.

Ms Hughes said: "It is a truly radical Bill enshrining in law the duty of local authorities to reduce inequalities amongst the youngest children and improve outcomes for all. "It brings, for the first time, the provision of integrated early years education and care into the mainstream of the modern welfare state."

More here



PRE-SCHOOL CREATES BEHAVIOUR PROBLEMS

Little kids are happier at home with their families -- something the British government is obviously ignoring

As taxpayers, parents and educators debate the value of public preschool for every child, a new study by UC Berkeley and Stanford researchers finds for the first time that middle-class children -- not just kids from the poorest families -- receive a boost in language and math skills from preschool. But its darker findings bolster earlier, more controversial conclusions that preschool can hinder social development.

The study, "How much is too much? The Influence of Preschool Centers on Children's Development Nationwide," was released today and comes as Hollywood movie director Rob Reiner leads a group of universal preschool advocates pushing for a June 2006 ballot measure that would tax the wealthiest Californians to fund preschool for all who want it. The study, with its good and bad news, is likely to fuel arguments on both sides of the preschool debate. Universal preschool advocates can seize on the findings that preschool benefits most children in language and math. Those who think scarce preschool resources should continue to go to the poorest children can point to the negative effects on social development, especially for children from the wealthiest families. The study looked not only at aggressive behaviors but also at a child's ability to cooperate and negotiate tasks in a classroom.

"If preschool is expanded, more isn't necessarily better," said UC Berkeley child development research director Margaret Bridges, an author of the study who expressed concern about the negative effects on social development. "Cognitive benefits are great, but we have to pay heed to what's going on with kids emotionally and socially." ....

The researchers found evidence supporting past studies that preschool has the greatest cognitive impact on the poorest children -- those whose families make $16,000 or less. Those children exhibited language and math skills that on average were 8 and 9 percentage points higher, respectively, than their stay-at-home peers. This sort of finding isn't new and has fueled support for the federal Head Start program for poor children. Children from lower-income families -- an economic notch above poor families -- didn't see a statistically significant improvement in language but performed an average of 6 percentage points better in math than peers who didn't attend preschool.

What struck researchers was this: Middle-income children did 5 percentage points better in both language and math than those in that income bracket who stayed at home. And children from the highest income quartile -- those whose families made $66,000 or more -- also saw improvements, although small ones: They performed 3 percentage points above average in language. Their gains in math weren't statistically significant.

These findings -- while positive overall -- don't convince Fuller that universal preschool is the way to use scarce resources. If preschool gives everyone a leg up in either language or math, then a universal program wouldn't close the achievement gap between children from low-income and higher-income families, Fuller argues. "Middle-class families are benefiting, but if we move toward universal preschool, it's not clear that universal preschool would close gaps in early learning because the gain experienced by low-income kids may not ever be enough to catch up with the gain by middle-class kids," Fuller said. ...

The UC Berkeley-Stanford study found that all children who attended preschool at least 15 hours a week displayed more negative social behaviors such as trouble cooperating or acting up, when compared with their peers. The discrepancies were most pronounced among children from higher-income families. Children from lower-income families lagged behind their peers who didn't attend preschool an average of 7 percentage points on the measure of social behavioral growth. But children from higher-income families lagged 9 percentage points behind their peers. These wealthier children did even worse when they attended preschool for 30 hours or more: They trailed their peers by 15 percentage points.

It's not clear why children from higher-income families exhibit more negative behaviors than their stay-at-home peers. Fuller speculated their peers might be in enriching home environments that include things like trips to the library as well as dance and music lessons. Other studies have found childcare centers negatively affect children's social development, said Jay Belsky, director of the Institute for the Study of Children, Families and Social Issues at Birkbeck University of London, in an e-mail interview. "It is time to come to grips with what all too many have denied for all too long, namely, that all disconcerting news about adverse effects cannot be attributed to low-quality care, which has been more or less the mantra of the field of child development and the child-care advocacy community for decades," Belsky said.....

More here

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

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

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

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9 November, 2005

MORE ON THE SPIRIT OF ENQUIRY AT AMERICAN COLLEGES

Post lifted from Steven Levitt's blog

Here is proof that citing Freakonomics can be dangerous to your academic health as well. A reader sent in this e-mail the other day, which we now reprint in full-minus the young man's name and college, for obvious reasons.

Dr. Levitt:

I was asked to leave a college classroom because of you. I'm a college student and currently taking Criminology. Among the subjects we're currently studying are Victimization. The professor uses a powerpoint presentation as an aid. We requested the powerpoint because he talked so fast and often gave statistics hard to believe. Now he shows us well documented charts, statistical numbers, and papers from different authors.

I noted he quoted some ideals from "The Changing Relationship Between Income and Crime Victimization" (specifically how poor people are now more likely to be assaulted or robbed). He specifically named Levitt as the author. Having read "Freakonomics", I picked up on the name and readily agreed with the idea.

Later the professor asked the question: "Why did crime fall in the 1990's?" Answers were typical: good economy, more police, etc. I offered a different view with the Roe v Wade approach. The professor immediately accused me of being all sorts of nasty things. I assured him my opinion was not loosely based, but rather well documented. He stuck back that no one in their right mind could possible prove that case had any effect on crime in the 90's. I answered back that one of the authors previously discussed in that very day's discussion wrote the paper and a few follow-ups and also co-authored a book containing that assertion. The professor was so upset at losing ground in the argument that I was asked to leave the room.

Apparently college professors are the ultimate authority on classroom information but not necessarily on the subject's actual facts. Thanks for getting me kicked out the room! I enjoyed every minute of it!

TEACHERS' UNIONS HURT THE CHILDREN OF THE POOR

So how to ensure that students, regardless of socioeconomic background, achieve to the best of their ability? In Britain, the Blair Government's white paper Higher Standards, Better Schools for All, released late last month, shows one way. In allowing schools more autonomy in staffing and curriculum and giving parents the freedom to choose between government schools, the intention is to pressure schools to be more responsive to community needs, as opposed to what teacher unions and public servants may want to supply. In the words of Tony Blair, there is a need ``to escape the straitjacket of the traditional comprehensive school and embrace the idea of genuinely independent non-fee paying state schools. [The white paper's goal] is to break down the barriers to new providers, to schools associating with outside sponsors, to the ability to start and expand schools; and to give parental choice its proper place.''

The cross-partisan British think tank Reform argues that the Blair Government does not go far enough because it does not propose to introduce vouchers, so that the funding can follow the child, nor allow profit-making companies to manage schools, but the white paper abandons much of existing practice. Historically in Britain, local education authorities control schools, and schools that under-perform continue unchallenged. Under the new set of proposals, not only will the role of local authorities be reduced but also, where there is parental demand, it will be easier to establish new schools that better reflect community needs.

In comparison, the recent Victorian government [Australia] white paper Review of Education and Training Legislation represents a more traditional approach to managing education. Whereas the Blair initiatives push the boundaries, the Victorian white paper stays on safer ground. Victoria's white paper fails to deliver on using results to rank schools in terms of performance, giving parents greater freedom to choose between schools and allowing private providers to manage schools. Although the education rhetoric under the Bracks Government is couched in marketing cliches such as ``best practice'', ``performance and development culture'', ``transparent reporting'' and ``multiple pathways'', the reality is that the system is unresponsive and bureaucratic.

The result? In Victoria and across Australia, such is the level of parental dissatisfaction with government schools that non-government enrolments have grown from 22 per cent in 1980 to 31 per cent in 2004; at years 11 and 12 the figure rises to 39.5 per cent.

Similarly, the ACT Government's response to public schools losing market share also demonstrates a singular inability to think outside the square. ABS figures show government school enrolments dropped from 68 per cent to 59 per cent between 1984 and 2004. Commonsense suggests that if students are going elsewhere, it's logical for governments to examine why and to do something to turn the tide. Not so with those responsible for education in the ACT. Instead of addressing the reasons parents are voting with their feet, the official response is just to get government schools to have a marketing strategy, hold open days and circulate promotional material.

As to why Victoria, and education systems across the rest of Australia for that matter, have failed to adopt more school reform, the reasons are easy to find. As the publication of Going Public: Education Policy and Public Education in Australia suggests, teacher educator organisations such as the Australian Curriculum Studies Association are opposed to opening up the education system to market forces.

The Australian Education Union is also a staunch critic of parental choice in education. The union consistently argues against government funding to non-government schools on the mistaken basis that private schools only serve the elite and that state schools are more effective in promoting social cohesion. In a paper titled Defend Public Education Against an Arrogant Federal Government, the AEU's South Australian president Andrew Gohl argues that parents should not be allowed to ``choose where to send their children and where to spend their education dollar''. Not only is Gohl's argument presumptuous -- suggesting that teachers and public servants, and not parents, know what is right for children -- but, by stifling innovation, state schools are denied the ability to compete against better performing non-government schools. Notwithstanding the $33 billion committed to schools (2005-08), Gohl also argues that the Howard Government may want to ``eliminate funding to the entire education sector -- public and private'' and that innovations such as funding vouchers will ``create a growing divide between the well off and the poor''.

Ignored is the US experience where community managed charter schools established in low socio-economic areas with high black American populations have been successful in strengthening community ties and raising standards. Also ignored is the evidence from the US, summarised by Mark Harrison in his book Education Matters: Government, Markets and New Zealand Schools, that vouchers have been instrumental in improving parental satisfaction and student performance among disadvantaged groups.

The AEU appears unaware of the research carried out by the English academic James Tooley, from the University of Newcastle, demonstrating that private education, especially in developing nations, is a key factor in raising standards among the poor. Tooley has spent some years researching the effectiveness of government and privately run schools in the poorer areas of the world, and he concludes that the research ``both from India and from other developing countries, suggests that private education in general is more effective''.

Finally, the Australian situation, where wealthier parents can afford non-government school fees or the cost of buying a house next door to a high-performing government school, is one already characterised by inequality. If the teacher union and Labor state governments are serious about equity and social justice, then logic suggests that vouchers, where more parents are given the financial ability to choose, and charter schools, where the local community manages the school, should be introduced.

Those opposing change, such as the AEU and many teacher educators, generally characterise as right-wing those pressing for more competition between schools, making school results public and rewarding better performing teachers. Although the label does apply to some advocates of school choice, such as the American economist, Milton Friedman, the same cannot be said of Andrew Leigh, a Canberra-based economist who served as an adviser to the federal ALP from 1998 to 2000. At the recent Australia and New Zealand School of Government conference in Sydney, Leigh argued that ``progressives in Australia had adopted a conservative approach to reform'' and, given the fact that literacy and numeracy scores are falling, that Australia had to follow the reforms introduced in England and the US.

Contrary to the AEU and its argument that any reforms will harm those children already most at risk, Leigh also argues that ``if we block innovation in Australian education, those who suffer will be children in the most disadvantaged schools''.

Source

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

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

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

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8 November, 2005

SHEER INSANITY

A highly selective and highly successful British private school has decided to accept "the King's shilling" (government funding) and in return has dropped all selectivity in its admissions. So it will become just another of the usual British sink schools where anybody goes and hardly anybody learns anything. It is only the academically selective schools that have provided a small stream of genuinely educated young people to British society. The fact that the school will remain privately run rather than government run may make some difference but not much. It is the quality of the students and the straitjacket of government regulations and requirements which will matter most in dictating the educational outcomes

A private girls' school in Liverpool is on course to join the state sector as an academy [charter school] in the first phase of Tony Blair's plans to take independent education to the State. The Belvedere School, run by the Girls Day School Trust and Sutton Trust, will end selection, admit boys and almost double in size within two years, if talks are successful. Children on Merseyside will be the first to benefit from the private-style teaching, in a move that ministers hope will prompt other leading independent schools to join the controversial programme.

Ministers are likely to use the school to try to win over critics of academies. One government source said that essentially it was "nationalising a private school". Labour MPs are divided over the move, with some welcoming it but others saying that the choice of academy status would be divisive and that independent schools that join the state sector should be subject to local authority controls.

The Belvedere, a 125-year-old independent school, is set to undergo a radical change under the proposals, starting with an end to all fees and academic selection from 2007. The 600-pupil school will specialise in modern languages and be open to all girls in Liverpool aged 11-18, reserving 10 per cent of places for those with an aptitude for its specialism. The sixth form, which will be open to boys, will be vastly expanded - at a cost of "a few million pounds" - to include several hundred pupils. Class sizes will also increase slightly.

Sir Peter Lampl, chairman of the Sutton Trust charity, which supports under-privileged children, said he welcomed the chance to extend the school's high-quality education to the whole of Merseyside's children. "My main objection to city academies has been on the grounds of their high capital cost," he said. "I have for some months let the (Education) department know that I would be prepared to help in the setting up of a low-cost academy. This would create a low-cost academy from a school with a high academic reputation which has recently had its most successful GCSE results thanks to the Open Access Scheme."

Companies, charities and the wealthy generally invest œ2 million to sponsor an academy - where average building costs reach œ25 million - and are given control of the governing body in return. To some, the Belvedere is already halfway there. Since 2000 the school has operated a unique "needs-blind" admissions system, with only 30 per cent of parents paying the full œ6,930-a-year fees. The other places are fully or partly funded. The scheme costs both charities œ2 million a year to operate. This summer it paid off with record GCSE results, when the first cohort of girls selected on ability alone passed 63.2 per cent of all their examinations with A* or A grades.

With 19,100 pupils at 25 schools in England and Wales, the Girls Day School Trust (GDST) is the largest provider of private schools in Britain and in a good position to share best practice. "The Open Access scheme has been so successful that we wondered how we might extend it and this goes a long way to broadening its impact," Sue Bridgett, a GDST spokeswoman, said yesterday.

Although academic selection would end at Belvedere, negotiators hope an expanded sixth form would maintain standards.The Government intends opening at least 200 academies by 2010, in traditionally deprived areas, despite opposition from backbench Labour MPs and teaching unions.

In September Mr Blair said that his goal was to "escape the straitjacket of the traditional comprehensive school" and offer "genuinely independent non-feepaying state schools". Government advisers hope achievement levels at state schools will be raised. Last year more than 10 per cent of GDST A-level students gained places at Oxford or Cambridge. A government source said: "We believe having more high-quality non-selective free places in the state system is a good thing, particularly in areas where academic achievement has been too low. This, alongside ceasing academic selection and adopting fair admissions, is key to any private school joining the state system, as we set out in the White Paper."

Although a number of private schools have already joined the state sector, this is the first major independent school. Terms of the deal are not yet known, but as an academy the sponsors will be liable to pay 10 per cent of the capital costs, while all other costs will be paid for by the taxpayer.

Source



CORRUPT LESBIAN LOVERS AT THE TOP OF THE UC SYSTEM

Another affirmative action success?

University of California Provost M.R.C. Greenwood, the UC system's second-ranking leader, resigned suddenly Friday amid what UC officials described as an investigation into possibly improper hiring practices and conflict-of-interest concerns. UC President Robert C. Dynes said in a statement Friday afternoon that the university's attorneys and auditors were looking into the role Greenwood, 62, may have played in two recent hirings, including that of her son James for a $45,000-a-year internship at UC Merced. The second involves Lynda Goff, a longtime UC Santa Cruz biology professor recently named to head the UC's new effort to improve science and math education in California. UC officials recently learned that Greenwood and Goff have owned rental property together, according to the statement. "It appears that Provost Greenwood may have been involved in Dr. Goff's hiring to a greater extent than was appropriate, given that her business investment with Dr. Goff had not been properly and fully resolved in accordance with conflict of interest requirements," the statement said.

UC spokesman Michael Reese said he could not comment on whether Greenwood resigned voluntarily. But he emphasized that the investigation was not complete and that there was no presumption of wrongdoing on Greenwood's part. "The president made some decisions very quickly, and this is the result," Reese said.

Greenwood, a biologist and former chancellor of UC Santa Cruz, in February 2004 became the first woman appointed as UC provost and senior vice president of academic affairs. Known to friends and colleagues as Marci, she has been widely praised as an articulate, forceful advocate for the university at a time of growing enrollment, rising student fees and tightened resources.

Greenwood, whose resignation was effective immediately, could not be reached for comment. Reese said she had declined to speak with reporters or issue a statement. A tenured professor, Greenwood is expected to return to a teaching or other academic position with the university, Reese said.

More here

But the above looks like a big improvement on just last September, when V.D. Hanson wrote the following rather sarcastic words:

One of President Summers's chief critics, Denice Denton, the newly appointed chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz, heralded Mr. Summers's public humiliation as a "teachable moment." As one president to another, she objected: "Here was this economist lecturing pompously [to] this room full of the country's most accomplished scholars on women's issues in science and engineering, and he kept saying things we had refuted in the first half of the day."

But Chancellor Denton has her own shortcomings. They do not revolve around mere impromptu remarks, nor have they been trailed by public apologies and task forces. Yet in its own way her controversy goes to the heart of the same contemporary race-and-gender credo that governs the university, enjoying exemption from normal scrutiny and simple logic.

Before her arrival, Ms. Denton arranged the creation of a special billet--ad hoc, unannounced and closed to all applicants but one: Ms. Denton's live-in girlfriend of seven years, Gretchen Kalonji. Most recognize this as the sort of personal accommodation--old-boy networking, really--that Ms. Denton presumably wishes to replace with affirmative action, thus ending backroom deals and crass nepotism.

But if race and gender--what we now refer to as "diversity"--are to be taken seriously, one wonders whether there was not a qualified African-American or Latina woman who could at least have been interviewed for the lucrative UC position. After all, Chancellor Denton herself praised UC Santa Cruz for its "celebration of diversity." And earlier, she insisted that "it is really shocking to hear the president of Harvard make statements like that," i.e., statements that ever so gently questioned the diversity shibboleth. Consider the reaction had President Summers arrived at a public, tax-supported university and arranged for his live-in girlfriend to have lifelong employment in a specially created job, complete with a subsidized move into a rent-free home.

And a six-figure salary: Gretchen Kalonji's unusual position pays $192,000 a year. Now, it happens that Chancellor Denton--whose salary is $275,000--was granted $68,750 to subsidize the move into the rent-free University President's House. But Ms. Kalonji, too, received a grant for expenses incurred during her "transition" to the Santa Cruz campus--$50,000, in fact.

The decision to pay $120,000 in public money for moving expenses to a couple with a combined salary of $467,000 can be defended, perhaps, but one group was certainly outraged: the university's maintenance staff, secretaries, and blue-collar workers. UC Santa Cruz's workers had not received a raise in three years. Yet in response to questions about her controversial partner accommodation--and the message that it sent to less-fortunate others on the campus--Chancellor Denton did not sound like a woman of the Left. "It's a typical practice," she explained in an interview with the local Santa Cruz Sentinel, "in the corporate world or academia." As if turning for support to the suspect world of capitalism was not enough, Ms. Denton also sought the sanctuary of victimhood, of someone at the mercy of red-state yahoos: "We got caught in the middle of national forces, gay marriage, red-state/blue-state issues and a state ruling. It's a hot item right now, and it heightened the tension. I was kind of surprised at the San Francisco Chronicle coverage saying 'lesbian lover.' It seemed more like a tabloid headline."

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

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

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

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7 November, 2005

ISLAMIC PROPAGANDA IN AMERICAN SCHOOLS

The Saudis are at it again, and this time America's school children are the victims. It's no secret that the princes in Riyadh fund anti-American, anti-Israel, and anti-Semitic propaganda in mosques and madrassas across the globe. But now a yearlong investigation by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency exposes that the oil kingdom's virulent tentacles also stretch into America's public school system.

The JTA says textbooks used in public schools across the country "are highly critical of democratic institutions and forgiving of repressive ones." The books also "praise and sometimes promote Islam, but criticize Judaism and Christianity and are filled with false assertions."

One such book is the "Arab World Studies Notebook." The JTA reports that it suggests that Jews have "undue influence on U.S. foreign policy" and that its country section omits any information on Israel and only refers to "Palestine." The book writes that the Koran "synthe sizes and perfects earlier revelations," namely Jewish and Christian. According to the JTA the two organizations behind the book - the Arab World and Islamic Resources and the Middle East Policy Council - receive funding from Saudi Arabia: AWAIR from the state-owned Saudi Aramco oil company and MPEC directly from Riyadh. According to MPEC's Web site it has "conducted Workshops in 175 different cities in 43 states," which "more than 16,000 educators have attended."

The American Jewish Committee published a study in February criticizing the book and urged "school districts across the nation" to ban it. A spokesman for the AJCommittee, Kenneth Bandler, told The New York Sun that they haven't been able to track whether the book is used in New York City's schools but that "it's possible." The director of communications for the New York City department of education, Stephen Morello, queried by the Sun, said that the department launched an "aggressive effort to find out" whether the book was used in the city's schools. Mr. Morello told the Sun that the book was not found as far as he can tell in the city's schools and that it is "unlikely it is being used."

The department of education has a good record in removing unsuitable influences from its schools and teachers. In February the city's schools chancellor, Joel Klein, barred the head of Columbia University's Middle East Institute, Rashid Khalidi, from lecturing the city's teachers on how to teach the Middle East. Whether other education departments across the country follow New York's lead and investigate whether Saudi propaganda is being taught in their classrooms will be something for the Congress and parents to watch.

Source



SCHOOL EMPLOYMENT AT WILL

Arnold Schwarzenegger and his supporters have managed to get several items on the November 8 California ballot, including the proposal to extend the trial period for government primary and secondary education teachers to five years rather than the current two before they receive tenure. Well, actually, they do not receive “tenure” in the sense of full job security but after two years they can only be let go by meeting various “due process” requirements—e.g., showing they are incompetent or have broken some laws.

Ordinary employment situations rarely involve tenure, even in this restricted fashion. If you hire someone to mow your lawn, clean your home, handle your tax returns, or flip hamburgers at your fast food restaurant, you can simply discontinue the relationship if you want to. You need not demonstrate good reasons for this, although you may get some resistance if you don’t—complaints, a bad reputation as an employer, etc. Or you can negotiate an employment agreement that spells out the conditions under which you may be let go, even conditions under which you may leave. It all depends on what the contract says.

The policy of tenure, to which a great many government educational institutions—as well as quite a few private ones that need to follow suit so as to be able to compete—involves getting substantial job security after a probationary period. The tenure at universities and colleges usually amounts to job security provided the entire institution is experiencing an economic down turn. (In state universities and colleges, of course, this is usually met with raising taxes, thus meeting the economic pressure, although even that can come to an end eventually.) Only if one commits a crime or grossly misbehaves will tenure provide no protection of one’s teaching position. But it usually takes seven years to achieve tenure.

The traditional argument for tenure, especially at state higher education institutions, had been that it will protect professors with controversial ideas from arbitrary treatment from the administration. At elementary and high schools this traditional justification is virtually completely moot. Here the reasoning tends to be that given the low pay of teachers, they will at least receive job security and thus have a pretty good reason to carry on properly, even excel, at their profession.

Problem is that there’s an imbalance involved in teachers receiving tenure, even of the moderate sort that guarantees due process when and if they are to be dismissed. Think about it for a moment—why must the school provide due process when a teacher is let go but the teacher who wants to leave can do so at will? If, in other words, schools are forced by law to show cause for letting a teacher go, why isn’t a teacher required, by law, to show cause for wanting to leave?

When I recently posed this question to some who support the existing tenure system of California’s public elementary and high schools, the question wasn’t even understood. Yet it is plain—if one side in the employment relationship must show cause for discontinuing that relationship, surely it is only fair that the other side should do so as well. Otherwise we have a case of blatant unjust discrimination!

Of course, how the employment relationship should be structured should actually be left to the agreement that employees and employers reach among themselves. That is how adult men and women should comport themselves in a free society. If, then, teachers can negotiate a tenure-like contract, as well as being able to leave anytime they wish, so be it. If not, so be it again.

You may think, well the bargaining situation is quite uneven. School administrators have a lot more clout than teachers, so teachers cannot be expected to negotiate a favorable employment agreement. But this is completely wrong. The institutional clout of school administrators is matched virtually fully by the clout of school teachers—by means of their unions. These unions enjoy even more clout than in justice they should have, given that governments have rules that mandate from employers the very conditions that should be left up to the bargaining process to settle. For example, many unions are authorized, in law, to bargain for employees who are non-members. Non-members of many unions, especially public service unions, are required to pay dues. (This varies some from state to state!)

There is also the injustice that governments have largely eliminated the choice educational customers have, the choice that customers of department, grocery, or shoe stores take for granted. They are, instead, virtual monopolies. So their unions have even more clout than those in the private sector where if a firm is struck, customers can shop at another firm. (Indeed, the whole notion of public service unionization is an anomaly in a free society.)

Alas, in our day certain people have come to take their special, unjust privileges for granted, so much so that even to bring up the issue of this injustice strikes them as bizarre. But that is no excuse for intelligent citizens to let the matter pass.

Source

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

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

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

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6 November, 2005

EXAM CHEATS IN BRITAIN

Staff at the AQA exam board have said that they detected 'blatant copying of material from the internet' in some of this year's coursework for GCSE English, and that some schools gave students so much help it amounted to 'a kind of mass plagiarism'.

Another board, Edexcel, said teacher guidance stretched what was acceptable: 'More insidiously worrying [than blatant plagiarism] is the growth of what one moderator described as "teaching by numbers" and there were other references to "over reliance on teacher notes" and "similar responses within a centre"', said its report. Meanwhile, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) prepares to publish the results of a two-year inquiry into cheating in school exams.

Yes, this is all very worrying. But what else can we expect, in a culture of grade inflation that abhors failure and views educational success purely in terms of a rising pass rate? For some years, university lecturers have been warning that the cult of course work, projects and 'portfolios' in schools are churning out students who simply don't know how to write an essay, and are unaware that including verbatim sources from the internet amounts to plagiarism. Teachers are under such pressure to ensure that their students pass their assessments that it can hardly be a shock if some lose sight of where hand-holding and handout-giving ends and writing their students' assignments begins. And though they can barely fail to get the grades as a result, the biggest losers are the students, who have been cheated of a decent education in the name of improving educational attainment. Bring back the prospect of failure in education - and with it, the freedom for students to think for themselves.

Source



ANOTHER REASON TO SEEK ALTERNATIVES TO PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Parents' rights were not violated when a Southern California elementary school conducted a psychological survey of their children and asked them about sexual feelings and masturbation, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco pointedly refrained from commenting on what the judges termed "the wisdom of ... some of the particular questions'' that were asked of children in grades one, three and five in the Palmdale School District in Los Angeles County. But the court said parents, while entitled to make basic decisions about a child's upbringing, have no constitutional right to control what they are taught at school or what questions they are asked.

"Parents have a right to inform their children when and as they wish on the subject of sex,'' said Judge Stephen Reinhardt in the 3-0 ruling. "They have no constitutional right, however, to prevent a public school from providing its students with whatever information it wishes to provide, sexual or otherwise.''

One of the Palmdale parents, Tammany Fields, said she was surprised and dismayed. "It gives the schools more control and the parents less control,'' Fields said. "I believe it should truly be the parents' decision to educate a child on appropriate questions about sex.'' She said she, her husband and four other parents haven't decided whether to appeal further. Their suit sought damages for violations of their right to privacy and their civil rights. Fields said her son came home from his fifth-grade class one day in 2001, asked to speak to her privately, and told her about the questions he and his classmates had been asked. He told her he was offended, she said.

The survey, intended to measure children's exposure to early trauma, was designed by a district counselor who was studying for a master's degree in psychology. Parents had consented to the survey after being told of its overall nature but were not informed of specific questions. Students were asked 79 questions about how often they had certain thoughts, feelings and experiences, such as anger, bad dreams and suicidal impulses. Ten of the questions concerned sexual topics, including how often they thought about sex or whether they were "touching ... private parts too much.''

The survey was discontinued after parents complained. The district's lawyer, Dennis Walsh, said school officials ultimately "recognized the inappropriateness of some of the questions.'' But he said the court rightly found that school curriculum is controlled by school boards, subject to the limitations of state law -- for example, California law allows parents to remove their children from sex education classes.

Reinhardt, in Wednesday's ruling, said the U.S. Supreme Court recognized in the 1920s that parents' rights to raise their children included the right to decide whether a child goes to public or private school. But a parent's constitutional prerogatives do not extend beyond the schoolhouse door, he said.

Source



UNUSUAL STRAIGHT TALK FROM THE PRESIDENT OF A TEACHERS' UNION

"If the United States is to preserve our system of free public schools, teacher unions are going to have to stop accepting the status quo and making excuses for the poor performance of our students. Most of us know that contrary to all of the talk about how we are raising our standards, in most of our schools they continue to decline. The low scores on the so-called high stakes tests are testimony to the fact that large numbers of students leave school knowing next to nothing and ill equipped for any but the most menial of jobs. While many of our most talented young people spend their days in so-called accelerated courses with curricula once thought more appropriate to the college level, too many of them have whizzed right by basic skills and cannot string together three coherent sentences or know to any degree of certainty if they have received the correct change in a store. We must face the fact that some of the right-wing critique of public education, particularly their criticism of the ever inflating costs of public education, resonates with the American public because it is true, or at least truer than some of the blather put out by the people who run the schools and the unions who represent the people who work in them. If it is true that our freedom is ultimately tied to our being an enlightened and educated citizenry, we are in terrible trouble.

Excuse number one - We don't have enough money to meet the educational needs of our students. While too many of our school districts do need more financial resources, resources that many find impossible to raise through the regressive property tax, the fact of the matter is too many of them also waste a substantial portion of what they have, a good piece of the waste mandated by state and federal law. I've written elsewhere about the administrative bloat in school districts where level upon level of bureaucracy insures that teachers and educational support staff are over scrutinized and under supervised to the point where teaching innovation and imagination are increasingly giving way to the routines of educational programs, particularly in math and English, that are intended to make teaching thinking-free. We have program upon program upon program. Can anyone seriously say that our students know more and are more skilled than they used to be? With entrepreneurial aplomb some crafty educators have gone corporate, developing and skillfully marketing programs for everything from mathematics to values education. School districts employ large numbers of central office administrators who then turn around and hire consultants who often come selling their programmatic wares. Where are the NEA and AFT to challenge this pentagon-like waste in our schools?

Meanwhile, over forty school districts on Long Island defeated their school budgets last spring. Pressed by ever-escalating property taxes, citizens were in revolt. That revolt, I fear, will spread as the middle class in the United States is squeezed more and more by a taxation system designed by and for the rich and an economy that increasingly is either exporting or abolishing the good jobs that used to support a comfortable middle class life. If education unions do not become outspoken advocates for economy in our schools, they will find taxpayers increasingly revolting against them. Surely some of the budget defeats on Long Island were aided by the local newspaper's articles on teachers earning over one hundred thousand dollars a year".

Source

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

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

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

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5 November, 2005

HUGE NUMBERS OF UNQUALIFIED TEACHERS IN CALIFORNIA

So few people are willing to stand up in front of the undisciplinable mobs in many California classrooms, that California has been willing to employ almost anyone as a teacher

"A court order Wednesday invalidated credentials held by at least 1,700 California public school teachers, adding to the rolls of teachers who don't meet the criteria for being "highly qualified" under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The ruling by San Francisco Superior Court Judge James Warren marks a win for the Californians for Justice Education Fund, which sued the state Commission on Teacher Credentialing in August. The suit alleged that in creating the "individualized internship certificate" without following proper procedures, the state agency falsely inflated the qualifications of teachers with emergency credentials. The credentials allow them to teach even if they haven't completed all their training. "It's a victory because the commission has had to acknowledge that these people are not highly qualified," said John Affeldt, an attorney with Public Advocates, which represents Californians for Justice.

The court order invalidates the internship certificate and replaces it with another, allowing teachers to remain in their classrooms for a set period of time. It also calls on the Commission on Teacher Credentialing to correct all published reports that count these teachers as "highly qualified" under No Child Left Behind.

The landmark education law President Bush signed in 2002 requires all teachers of core academic subjects be "highly qualified" by the end of this school year. That means teachers must have a bachelor's degree, knowledge of the subject they teach and pedagogical training. Teachers with emergency credentials are not considered highly qualified.

The lawyer for the Commission on Teacher Credentialing downplayed the significance of Wednesday's ruling. Mary Armstrong said the judge simply clarified the procedure necessary to create a new type of teaching certificate. "It was really a process issue," she said.

The exact number of teachers holding the internship certificate deemed invalid remains unclear. In court documents from September, the Commission on Teacher Credentialing put the number at 3,804. On Wednesday, the agency's spokeswoman said the number has since dropped to 1,700. "It's gone down quite a bit because these people were in teacher ed programs and have moved on to full credentials," said Marilyn Errett. Locally, just 12 teachers in Sacramento County hold the individualized internship certificate, Errett said. Many of the teachers affected are in the Los Angeles area, she said.

Many states have had a tough time getting all of their teachers highly qualified. In California last year, 72 percent of classes were taught by a highly qualified teacher, said Penni Hansen, a consultant in the professional development division of the state Department of Education. The federal government last month announced some leeway for states trying to meet the law's goal of having all teachers highly qualified by June 2006. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said the government will examine states' efforts toward meeting the goal and extend the deadline a year for those making good faith efforts to comply. Hansen said it was too soon to tell if Wednesday's court order could affect California's ability to get an extension from the federal government"

Source



"OUTCOMES-BASED" NONSENSE

Another hare-brained experiment using both the teachers and the kids as guinea pigs

Imagine a classroom where the geography teacher wants to teach children the best way to drive from Melbourne to Sydney. Based on a syllabus approach to learning, where teachers have a clear, succinct and easy-to-follow description of what is to be taught, the exercise is straightforward. A syllabus would provide teachers with an outline of possible routes to Sydney, for example, via the Hume Highway or around the coast, and there would be details of what all students should learn and what constitutes a pass or a fail.

During the 1990s, Australia ditched syllabuses in favour of outcomes-based education. With OBE, the focus is no longer on what is to be taught or how teachers teach. Instead, the emphasis shifts to what students have learned by the end of the process. The ACT curriculum describes OBE as: "Curriculum documentation has until recently concentrated on subject matter and teaching methods. This emphasis has highlighted what teachers do in the learning process. The move to an outcomes approach attempts to recognise the importance of what students know and can do." Based on OBE, not only are teachers denied a syllabus detailing the best way to Sydney, but children negotiate their own way in their own time, and as long as they eventually arrive, whether via Perth or Brisbane, all are considered successful.

While much of the criticism of Australia's adoption of OBE focuses on the fact that stronger-performing education systems have a syllabus approach and that OBE has failed to raise standards, equally of concern is the detrimental impact OBE is having on classroom teachers. Given the West Australian Government's intention, beginning next year, to extend OBE upward into years 11 and 12, that state has become a battleground where teachers associated with the website www.platowa .com have mounted a sustained attack against Australia's current approach to curriculum. Indeed, such has been the hostility to OBE that a parliamentary inquiry has been established and state Education Minister Ljiljanna Ravlich has been forced into a series of embarrassing backdowns, including replacing the head of the Curriculum Council.

Since being established in June, PLATO has attracted some 450 members and the website's forum provides an illuminating and at times startling expose of how educational experiments such as OBE make teachers' work increasingly difficult, frustrating and onerous. One of the common complaints voiced is that by denying teachers a syllabus that outlines essential knowledge, understanding and skills related to particular year levels, teachers and individual schools are forced to spend valuable time reinventing the wheel by writing their own documents. Primary school teachers, as they have to deal with a number of subject areas, are particularly concerned about the additional workload; a workload made worse by the fact that OBE documents are full of hundreds of vague and fluffy learning statements that drown teachers in meaningless detail. One practising teacher states: "Many of us have tried very hard to change our teaching and demonstrate more and more that we were implementing the department's dictates. That it has led to a disaster, gross overwork and teachers leaving (and planning to leave - I know of five in my school alone) is hardly our fault."

As noted in the debate concerning OBE assessment and reporting, where the assumption is that all students, given enough time and resources, are capable of success and the "fail" word is banned, teachers are also concerned that there is little motivation to excel. At years 11 and 12, for example, instead of marking student work out of 100, the proposed OBE approach in Western Australia is to grade all students as being at one of eight achievement levels. The result? One teacher notes: "To my mind, fine-grained assessments serve as excellent feedback mechanisms and lead to greater competition and student motivation to achieve their best. This is what would be denied in the WA implementation of OBE."

Criticism of OBE is not restricted to Western Australia. The Tasmanian president of the Australian Education Union, Jean Walker, has been reported as saying that not all teachers are happy with the adoption of the OBE-inspired essential learnings. While Tasmanian Education Minister Paula Wriedt argues that teacher critics of essential learnings are old-fashioned and pass their use-by date, the head of the AEU suggests that teacher critics span all ages and that more would go public if teachers had not been gagged.

In NSW, the Vinson inquiry into public education, on surveying teachers, found that many opposed the current preoccupation with outcomes as teacher workloads increased, learning was reduced to what could be measured and teachers' professional judgment was belittled.

It's significant that teacher complaints against OBE are supported by teacher academics. A NSW report undertaken by Professor Ken Eltis of Sydney University concluded that current approaches to curriculum lead to an "overpressured school day" and that teachers should be freed "to enable them to find time to pursue creative and innovative approaches to teaching, assessment and reporting". After evaluating Australia's adoption of OBE, Professor Patrick Griffin of Melbourne University also concludes that OBE is flawed: "Perhaps OBE cannot be fully implemented system-wide. The changes needed are too radical and disruptive for whole systems of education to accommodate."

As important, if not somewhat ironic, is that the very education bureaucrats and curriculum designers responsible for imposing OBE on Australian classrooms have finally seen the light and admitted that teachers' misgivings are well founded. An ACT report recently acknowledged: "Teachers had struggled with the volume of content they felt they had to cover." In Western Australia, a report evaluating the impact of OBE on teachers concluded: "Many schools and teachers are experiencing significant difficulty in engaging with the requirements of an outcomes approach." Notwithstanding the millions spent developing curriculum over the past 10 years, those responsible for the Queensland curriculum also admit that teachers are correct in arguing that the excessive amount of material is "hindering in-depth learning" and there is "lack of clarity around what must be taught". Indeed, such is the degree of self-criticism that those responsible for developing curriculum in Queensland are happy to admit that past attempts have failed: "For the first time, in Queensland's P-10 years [preparatory year to year 10] there will be rigorous, comprehensive assessment against defined standards that will be comparable across schools." Finally, in Victoria, there is also a belated admission that not all is well: "It can be argued that the current ways in which many curriculum authorities have conceived the curriculum for schools have resulted in poor definitions of expected and essential learning and provides teachers with insufficient guidance about what to teach".

One might be forgiven for thinking, such are the acknowledged flaws in OBE, that those responsible would heed teachers' complaints and, as the teachers connected to PLATO argue, provide schools with clear, succinct and academically sound syllabuses. This is not the case. Such is the bizarre and unaccountable world of curriculum development that the majority of Australian states and territories are renewing their efforts to develop more extreme forms of outcomes-based education. In Tasmania, subjects such as history, mathematics and English have been replaced with vague and new-age essential learnings such as: "Thinking, communicating, personal futures, social responsibility and world futures". South Australia defines essential learnings as "futures, identity, interdependence, thinking and communication" on the basis that "these understandings, capabilities and dispositions are personal and intellectual qualities, not bodies of knowledge". As might be expected from the territory that hosts the nation's capital, the ACT, not to be outdone by Tasmania or South Australia, lists 36 essential learning achievements, ranging from the banal, "the student understands change", to the trite, "students use problem-solving skills".

As evidenced by the history of Australian education, the harsh reality is that, instead of being listened to, an increasingly frustrated and overworked teaching force is set for yet another tidal wave of jargon-ridden and time-consuming curriculum experimentation.

Source



Non-existent standards

"A few years ago I wrote an open editorial for a local newspaper in which I informed the superintendent of my daughter's public school district that his services were no longer required. As far as my family and I were concerned, it was the day we fired the local bureaucrats and took our child out of a failing education system. I said it then and I say it now, government today is filled with politicians that think it is their job to take care of us. Either we are too lazy to care for ourselves and our children; or, we are too stupid to know what is best for our precious offspring and ourselves. No matter the reason, the majority of politicians in this country today believe in their hearts that they must save us from ourselves. Even to the point of promoting failing children so as not to ruin their self-esteem."

A few weeks after I fired the school system’s leading bureaucrat, the State justified my decision to remove my child from a forever-failing government school system. My hometown paper reported that the state’s promotion standards, which are designed to test third, fifth and eighth grade students, were largely being ignored by principals all across the state, at least at the fifth grade level. I was absolutely appalled to learn that seventy-three percent of fifth grade students (the only students tested for that year) who failed their exams were promoted anyway. In my county alone 298 students failed their tests not once, not twice, but three times and still only 53 of these unfortunate, inadequately-educated children were held back. Why are our children being robbed of a proper education?

You see, there was a “provision.” Ah yes, the all-powerful provision, better known as the exception to the rule. In this case the provision allows for principals to have the final word on who gets promoted to the next grade and who does not. Now I ask you, what the hell good is a standards test if the decision of pass and fail is left up to the principal anyway? Why even bother requiring these unfortunate children to take a test that means absolutely nothing since the final decisions rests in the hands of one individual bureaucrat?....

More here

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

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

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

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



4 November, 2005

EDUCATION TAKING OFF IN CHINA

When He Qinming passed the stiff entrance exams for university 20 years ago, his father's friend didn't congratulate him. Instead, he discouraged him, citing his own son, a high-school dropout, who had gone into business. "There was a saying back then -- making missiles doesn't pay as well as selling eggs. But that was a temporary phenomenon," says Dr. He. Now 40, the balding computer-science professor is on the cutting edge of the latest Chinese formula for success: education. This fall, he helped to launch China's first dual-degree program. Students in Canada and China will take five years of computer science together, in Mandarin and English, dividing their time between Vancouver's Simon Fraser University and Dr. He's school, Zhejiang University (pronounced Je-jeng).

Bryan Shen, 20, a freshman at ZU, has applied for one of 25 Chinese slots. Unlike the Canadian students, he won't know until next month if he has been chosen. He's keen, and not just because of the computer science he'll learn. "At home, you can get great marks in English, but you can't speak it," he says, in passable English. (He's already going by his foreign name, picked in homage to Canadian rocker Bryan Adams.)

To an outsider, it seems that all China cares about is money, money, money. That's true. But the difference is many now believe they need a top-quality education to make even more money. In tandem with the 9 per cent annual growth of its gross domestic product, China is expanding its education sector faster than ever before in its history. "The role of education is closely linked with economic development," says Kang Changyun, a professor at Beijing Normal University. Next year, he plans to launch a joint degree program with the University of British Columbia, for a two-year master's in science education.

In the mid-1980s, about the time Dr. He was being urged to go into business, only 2 or 3 per cent of Chinese students went on to university. By 2002, that number had jumped to 15 per cent, or 16 million students. By 2010, the target is 30 million students. During the 1990s, the number of people attending university in India rose from 4.9 million to 9.4 million. "Now China is probably double that of India," says Nello Angerilli, who heads international education at Simon Fraser. "It's a mind-boggling expansion." In China, the booming economy means parents have money to invest -- in their one and only child. And traditional values are back. Education is once again esteemed both for its own sake, and as a way to get ahead. "In Mao Zedong's time, he wanted people who obeyed. He said: don't read so many books. Just obey," says Chen Yue, a vice-dean at ZU. "Now, if you want to be stronger and stronger internationally, you need to improve the quality of your people."

Chairman Mao also said, "Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend." Today, he could make that a couple of thousand. While Canada has about 30 universities, China had 1,396 in 2002, plus another 1,000 private colleges and universities. And China is building new universities every year. Just as the business sector is expanding through joint ventures and turnkey operations, so is education. From a standing start 15 years ago, China now has 90 MBA programs and 30 executive MBA programs, according to Paul Beamish, of the Asian Management Institute at the University of Western Ontario.

Meanwhile, he has seen the Chinese mainland students at UWO's Richard Ivey School of Business increase yearly. "After Canadians, people from China are the second largest group," he says. In the newest class, Chinese mainland students now account for 50 of the 173 students. "It develops a very nice future network," he adds.

More here



Australian Universities dominate World Rankings

(On a per head basis). Post lifted from Australian blogger Neo-Con

I know this report was released a few days ago, but I only came across this staggering statistic today:

The UK is home to 24 of the top 200 universities, second only to the US with 54 and ahead of Australia, in third place with 17.

While the article was congratulating Great Britain's performance, consider how well Australia polled, especially given our population in comparison to the other two.

* Australian Population: 20,090,437
* Australian Universities in top 200: 17
* Australian ratio of top 200 universities per one million inhabitants: .8426
* United Kingdom population:60,441,457
* United Kingdom Top 200 Universities: 24
* United Kingdom ratio of top 200 Universities per one million inhabitants: .3971
* United States Population: 295,734,134
* United States top 200 Universities: 54
* United States ratio of top 200 Universities per one million inhabitants: .1826

The stats are my own, and clearly show Australia's relative domination of the rankings. Australia also secured one University in the top 20 for the first time, with Melbourne University coming in at the 19th best University in the world.



Parents: How to make the most of online schools: "The development of the Internet and the increasing public desire for educational choices have brought about a wide variety of online programs for school-age students. There are public and private schools that offer full-time or part-time programs, programs for gifted students and programs for those seeking to catch up, and religious and non-religious programs. Different programs have varying resources, teacher availability, and professional support. How can parents best navigate this online world to supplement their children's education?"

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

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

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

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3 November, 2005

NOBODY CARES AT LAUSD

Mayor Sam's got it right - the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has been sucking taxpayers dry for decades and now wants another $4 billion to crank out more illiterate dropouts. I have two short stories about what many Angelenos now call LA's mummified school system:

Jan (not her real name) was a flower child of the 60s: a daisy-waving-psychedelic-peacenik-free-love-liberal-Democrat-bimbo who bore a love child after high school. Jan spoiled her baby with no discipline or boundaries. One day when her toddler misbehaved and I offered a suggestion, Jan told me to mind my own business. Unfortunately for her child, I did.

About ten years later when the girl turned 13, Jan called and sounded hysterical: "Clark, I don't know what to do. I have to go to work. She took my keys, my car and my wallet and left with her boyfriend. I think she's on drugs or something. What should I do?"

It was too late. A few years later when her child returned to prison, Jan got custody of all five of her daughter's children. That lasted a few months - until DPSS finally declared Jan an unfit mother and took them away.

Why is this relevant? Jan is not only my cousin (yup, a blood relative), but has taught LAUSD elementary school children for about twenty years. Although she is unfit to raise her own children and grandchildren, the United Teachers of Los Angeles protects her job at the expense of her classroom children. Jan doesn't want you to vote for Propositions 73 through 78.

My second story is shorter: I used to jog to-and-from work at LAPD's West Valley Station. One day as I jogged past Mulholland Junior High School, I noticed a male student leave the school grounds as classes began. I watched the 9th grader run across the field and hop the 12-foot fence. He landed near me. When I told him to get back in school - he told me to "F- myself." I grabbed his wrist and walked him to the school office.

When I delivered the boy to the Principal, she demanded to know what right I had to kidnap the child from the street. When I identified myself as an LAPD officer and explained the relationship between school truancy and daytime residential burglaries, she made a complaint against me with the LAPD! Based upon these and many other on-duty experiences with the LAUSD, I moved to Ventura County where my children would be far from LAUSD and their dysfunctional teachers and administrators.

That school principal doesn't want you to vote for Propositions 73 through 78 or school vouchers for inner city families, however she does want more of your money. The LAUSD is as competent as an unfit mother who spoils her children without teaching discipline. The only LAUSD program I would endorse is disbandment. The unions are too strong and too dangerous for our children. If LAUSD was dissolved tomorrow, competent educators would find better jobs at better schools, leaving dangerous and incompetent teachers to find careers far from where they can influence our children.

More here



Britain: Lessons on a DVD put Latin back into state classrooms

Harrumph! As a very amateur Latinist myself, I cannot see anybody learning much Latin this way

Latin will be taught in hundreds of state schools for the first time using a new programme designed to reinvigorate the subject. Hi-tech lessons, created by Cambridge University at a cost of o5 million, will give step-by-step tuition in the language, history and culture of the Romans. Launched earlier this month, the initial run of 300 interactive DVDs were snapped up by schools in just one week.

Will Griffiths, the director of Cambridge Schools Classics Project (CSCP), said the enthusiasm could signal a revival in the number of state schools offering the subject, currently just 100. "Latin has been under threat but this programme can secure its long-term future," he said. "It can refresh lessons in schools that already teach it and give schools who have never taught it the practical means to do so." Aimed at secondary school pupils, the on-line course, which has 1,000 activities, including video clips, audio sequences and grammar exercises and tests, takes children up to GCSE level.

Crucially, the programme can be taught by non-specialist teachers, with students communicating via e-mail with classicists at Cambridge, making it ideal for state schools where there is a shortage of classics teachers. Only 35 are trained each year and most go into the private sector. With the number of pupils taking Latin GCSE in the state sector plummeting from 8,493 in 1988 to just 3,468 in 2004, the project has a lot of ground to make up.

Schools involved in the pilot said pupils were keen on the work, while parents regarded its provision "as a privilege". At Saffron Walden county school, in Essex, Latin lessons have boosted modern foreign language learning. A teacher Rebecca Anderson said: "It has been a great success. A lot of the children have really taken to it. You can see they have a greater understanding of other languages."

Source



Australia: Students compare Keats to SMS text

In their final English exam yesterday Year 12 students were asked to compare an SMS message, "how r u pls 4giv me I luv u xoxoxo O:-)", with a famous Keats love letter, "You fear, sometimes, I do not love you so much as you wish". And the 46,000 Victorian students who sat the three-hour VCE exam were also asked to analyse a Dilbert cartoon on the modern dilemma of email and write a letter to the editor of Woolworths magazine Australian Good Taste.

The test of English skills also included analysing more traditional texts from Shakespeare and Henry Lawson to Graham Greene. But it also quizzed students on popular films such as sci-fi flick Gattaca, Australian drama Lantana and classic Breaker Morant. Students sat the paper, set by the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, six weeks after the same body was accused of trying to "dumb down" Year 12 English. It also came a week after NSW students were asked to analyse the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission website as part of their Higher School Certificate.

A chief critic of the Victorian curriculum, Kevin Donnelly, who recently prepared a Federal Government-commissioned report on primary curriculum benchmarking, described the paper as "unchallenging". "It's dumbing it down and the real concern there is that in trying to be accessible to such a wide variety of students, and in trying to not disadvantage those weaker students, I'd argue they're not really challenging the better-abled students," Dr Donnelly said, referring to the magazine article.

A spokesman for the VCAA said the organisation did not want to make a comment about the material. Monash English lecturer Baden Eunson described the paper as part of the "multi-literacy" approach. "These are actually very interesting issues about communication and technology but the reality is that the students don't have the ability to express themselves with maximum fluency." [I wonder why?]

Source

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

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

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

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2 November, 2005

CRUNCH-TIME IN CALIFORNIA

Within the next few months, a staggering number of California high school seniors may see their worlds come crashing down. They are the guinea pigs in a tough new state experiment: the California High School Exit Exam. So many now are at risk of not graduating, it would take 60 high school campuses to seat them all. A practice that's gone on for decades will come to an end. Principals no longer will hand diplomas to students who can barely read, write and calculate. This spring, for the first time, seniors who can't pass the exam will not be allowed to graduate. They could be kids like Linda Nguyen, who started in Sacramento City Unified schools as a kindergartner and has earned a C average ever since. Or Kevin Muhammad, who hopes to attend college on a basketball scholarship. Or Juan Calderon, who left Mexico at age 4 and dreams of becoming a lawyer.

The seniors are among 182 at Hiram Johnson High School - and nearly 5,000 locally and 90,000 statewide - who still have not passed the test. The exam is in two parts - math and English language arts - and students must pass both sections. "I just want to get my education and make my parents proud of me," Linda said. "I'm just nervous about that test."

Despite their aspirations, many face tough odds. Linda is studying hard for the math test - but very little for the English section. Kevin has a 2-week-old baby and has contemplated dropping some classes so he can pick up more hours at his dish-washing job. Juan, though he has failed that part of the exam three times, is not taking a math course this year. Anxiety, apathy and confidence swirl on the Johnson campus. It's already time for seniors to take portraits and order their caps and gowns - even though more than one-third of the class has not passed the test they need to graduate.

The actions of state and local educators haven't made things easy. The school, as required by state law, offered extra help to seniors who have yet to pass the exam, but the law doesn't require them to attend. [Boo hoo!]

Classes, too, are not always aligned with students' needs. Johnson seniors, for example, can opt out of math if they've completed the required credits - even if they haven't passed that part of the exit exam. And teachers say that state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell, an exam supporter, confused students further when he said in September that he would consider alternatives for those who haven't passed. They say students wonder if the exam will be postponed, as it was for the class of 2004, the group originally in line to first face the consequences.

Depending on each school's calendar, seniors get two or three more chances to pass before graduation day. Hiram Johnson seniors will try again Tuesday and Wednesday and then in March. "I want to walk the stage," Juan said. "You see it in the movies, you see it everywhere. I want to be just like them."

The state does not track individual student performance, so it can't accurately report how many seniors have passed the test. But a Bee survey of all high schools in Sacramento, Yolo, El Dorado and Placer counties shows that 4,643 seniors have yet to pass the exam. One-third of them are concentrated in just 10 schools - most of them campuses that serve large numbers of low-income and nonwhite students. That means graduation ceremonies could be much smaller than usual next year at the region's neediest schools.

More here



PRIVATE SCHOOL GRADUATES DOMINATE BRITAIN AGAIN

The rubbishy State schools that socialism has produced now no longer give the poor a chance at a good education

This country is being overtaken by toffs. David Cameron is not the exception: he's the new rule. Privately educated children predominate in every sphere. It hasn't been like this since the Edwardian era. It's not just politics, although much of the Cabinet and shadow cabinet went to private schools. It's the arts, the media, the music industry and the sciences.

They may not wear school uniforms any longer, but they share distinct traits - they are self-confident, competitive, well read all-rounders. Tony Blair and David Cameron, from the best-known Scottish and English public schools, exemplify them. They are just as at home in jeans, changing nappies and drinking tea from mugs in Islington and Notting Hill, as they are leaning against their Agas, cooking breakfast for their children in the country.

The Cabinet is full of them, though ministers don't brag about it. Most forget to mention their schools in Who's Who. Tessa Jowell, who brought home the Olympics, went to the private St Margaret's School in Aberdeen. Charles Clarke pretends to be a man of the people, but went to Highgate School. Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, admits under duress that she went to Westminster. Ed Balls, Gordon Brown's protégé, went to the fee-paying Nottingham High School.

Margaret Thatcher presided over a cabinet of grammar school [selective State schools] boys including Cecil Parkinson and Michael Howard. Now half the shadow cabinet - including Oliver Letwin and George Osborne - went to private schools.

Those in the media are equally reticent about discussing their CVs, but most national newspaper editors and political commentators were privately educated. Andrew Marr went to Loretto, Tom Bradby went to Sherborne. Mark Thompson, director-general of the BBC, went to Stonyhurst and Michael Grade went to Stowe. Business is full of them. They excel at corporate life; BP and Marks & Spencer have privately educated chief executives. They are also entrepreneurs. Richard Branson is an early example of a public school boy (Stowe) who left to become a salesman. Julian Metcalfe of Pret a Manger started making sandwiches when he left Harrow. Charles Dunstone of the Carphone Warehouse did the same for phones after Uppingham. Johnnie Boden (Eton) fills his catalogues with dreamy photographs of private school holiday spots. The two best-known dotcom millionaires - Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox - went to Eton and Westminster respectively.

The music industry is addicted to them, even if they don't talk about it. James Blunt (real name Blount) is an old Harrovian, yet it didn't stop him becoming this year's biggest success with his song You're Beautiful. He is a modern traditionalist like Mr Cameron. He understands about verses, lyrics and choruses, but he also knows how to repackage them for 2005. He is also used to hard work. Dido (Westminster) has the same knack. Radiohead went to Abingdon School. Sherborne has produced Chris Martin of Coldplay, and Keane named themselves such after a tealady at Tonbridge.

Public school boys seem to attract the most famous women in the world. Guy Ritchie, who went to a series of public schools, is by no stretch of the imagination overawed by Madonna. Claudia Schiffer's husband went to Stowe. The artist Sam Taylor Wood and Phoebe Philo, chief designer for Chloe, have married Old Etonians - Jay Jopling and Max Wigram, both of whom are successful art dealers. Hugh Grant didn't bother hiding his accent, or Brylcreming his hair back like Mr Cameron. He still looks and acts like the best-looking boy at Latymer Upper School, the one all the Paulinas (St Paul's Girls School down the road) wanted to go out with. Emily Mortimer and Rachel Weisz were Paulinas. The old Harrovian Richard Curtis - Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Love Actually - defines his generation on film. They even dominate the sciences and the arts. Susan Greenfield, director of the Royal Institution, went to Godolphin & Latymer. Historians from Andrew Roberts to Tristram Hunt learnt their kings and queens at private schools.

This is outrageous. Private school pupils make up only seven per cent of the population (up under Labour), but their influence is out of control. This is not the fault of parents who slave away to pay the school fees, nor can it be blamed on private school alumni. At 13, Mr Cameron can't have been expected to rip off his tail coat and refuse to go to Eton. It's the Government's fault. The state system isn't good enough. It fails children on every level, not just the five million who never learn to read so don't even stand a chance of a decent career, but the pupils who never learn the self-confidence that comes from the good teaching and high standards expected at most private schools.

But it's not all Mr Blair's fault. The problems started when he was at Fettes. Grammar school boys could hold their own, they knew they had earned their places on merit alone. In the 1950s, the grammar school system meant that there were more state school pupils at Oxford and Cambridge than there are now when the numbers are being manipulated. But when Labour scrapped the grammar school, it turned the country back into a class-ridden society, where the children of the rich had a huge advantage. The comprehensives, if they had been properly streamed, might have worked, but instead they went for the lowest common denominator. No one was allowed to be challenged; no one could fail. Exam results were fudged and school discipline fell apart. Margaret Thatcher didn't do enough to stop it.

Mr Blair's crime was that he realised this. He sent his children to the selective Oratory School because he knew the comprehensives in north London were bog standard. Yet in eight years he has done little about it. His education White Paper today promises yet another new start with an emphasis on excellence, but he is more interested in busing children round the country in pursuit of that elusive goal of equality. If Labour really wants to boot out the toffs and give private schools a run for their money, it should bring back selection, not just for sport and drama, but also for academic excellence. My hunch is that it is going to take an Old Etonian to do it

Source



Arizona: Tax credit urged for teachers: "State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne wants to give all schoolteachers a $2,500 tax credit as a way to attract and keep qualified educators in Arizona. Horne is seeking support from the Arizona Legislature in its upcoming session to give both public- and private-school teachers the credit because he says salaries are lagging while the cost of housing is rising. The tax credit would also apply to school counselors, psychologists, librarians and nurses. The state currently does not give any tax credits based solely on occupation. If it became law, the credit would affect about 70,000 employees and cost the state an estimated $152 million."

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

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

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

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1 November, 2005

NO INTELLECTUAL DIVERSITY AT VASSAR

How they must fear conservative thought! They have just banned the only Conservative Student Organization there

"For those of you who may be following the events at Vassar College, a shocking and reprehensible twist: The only Conservative organization at Vassar College, the Moderate, Independent, Conservative Alliance (MICA) was officially de-authorized last night in a vote that succeeded by an overwhelming margin.

The ostensible reason for the de-authorization by the Vassar Student Association (VSA) was that MICA had missed the proposed deadline for holding its forum on free speech. The deadline was set to occur before Vassar’s October Break. According to The Miscellany News, not exactly a reliable source, though on this they are correct. Under the resolution passed by VSA on Sept. 18, MICA was to hold a forum before October break.

At the VSA meeting on Sunday, Oct. 9, Ambrose went to the VSA to ask for an extension for the dialogue… Rodems said that the resolution states that Council will revisit the issue after October break if the forum does not occur before break, and told Ambrose not to do a rushed job. No one made a motion for any amendments to the resolution. The forum was not held before October break, and MICA posters in the dorms advertise that it will be held on Wednesday, Oct. 26.

MICA requested a deadline extension on the forum, moving it back two weeks so that they would have more time to prepare. Their request was dismissed, and the forum did not take place before the assigned date (instead it is set to occur Wednesday, October 26th, the date requested by MICA).

While the VSA certainly has a right and a responsibility to penalize MICA for not meeting the agreed upon date, the inflexibility, strictness, and severity of their response, absolutely out of character given their dealings with other organizations on campus, was completely out of line given the mild nature of MICA’s infraction. The VSA’s decision to completely de-authorize MICA demonstrates that the VSA was not acting purely on the basis of MICA’s failure to hold the forum, instead it surrendered to the poisonous atmosphere of hostility directed towards MICA and let unreasonable and inappropriate factors, factors which exist outside of the purview of both MICA and the VSA, influence the severity of its response.

I had hoped that at a prestigious place like Vassar College that reason would prevail. Unfortunately the actions of those who identify themselves as “concerned students” and those of the VSA have dashed this hope. The real twist to this story, that it seemed like students at Vassar College were standing up on principle for free speech, has indeed flopped. And, though done in the name of censure, the aim was to censor. It it has succeeded.

Note that the name of this org is MICA Moderate, Independent, Conservative, Alliance. Apparently they are the only group on campus to the right of Howard Dean and now they are "de-authorized.""

Source



RELIGIOUS SCHOOL POPULAR: HOW SURPRISING!

Anything would be better than the average British "Comprehensive"

Parents trying to secure a place for their children at England's first state-funded Sikh school stapled cheques for the school fund to their applications, an inquiry by the Local Government Ombudsman has revealed. The watchdog has ordered Guru Nanak Sikh Secondary School, in Hayes, Middlesex, to review its admissions procedure after concerns that parents received the impression that giving money to the school would help to win a place. It had 223 applicants for 60 places this year. The main criticism of the popular secondary, one of only two state-funded Sikh schools in the country, was that it accepted "evidence of either financial or other donations" to a gurdwara (a Sikh place of worship) as proof of a family's commitment to the faith.

Tony Redmond, the Ombudsman, said that the way the school used this information to determine whether families met the admissions criteria was flawed because of a "lack of objectivity and transparency". The school also accepted "evidence of having supported the school or the Nansaker Trust", a Sikh charity established by the school's founder. Some parents had misinterpreted this to mean a financial contribution and they included cheques for the school with their application forms, although these were returned.

Mr Redmond said: "Although I have seen no direct evidence for this, I believe it could easily give rise to the suspicion that financial support for the school or the trust is a factor in the offer of places."

Greg Hall, the deputy head teacher at Guru Nanak, a former private school, said: "The idea that you can buy a place does persist among a few parents and it is categorically not true. We spend a lot of time making this clear, both on the application form and at parents' evenings. In fact offering money would be damaging to the application because we would regard it as a bribe." Mr Hall said donations to the gurdwara were part of the Sikh custom of sewa, voluntary service to help the needy. This was as likely to involve cooking for the temple or offering bags of rice as donating money, he said. However, the school does plan to simplify its admissions procedure and accept more evidence of devotion from priests rather than parents.

More here



Kentucky: School districts turn to random drug tests : "There's not much cramming students can do for this kind of pop quiz. As school districts grapple with keeping illegal drugs from students, some are turning to random drug testing. At least two have added random tests this fall, and more could be on the way. 'It's not such a radical movement right now,' said John Akers, executive director of the Kentucky Center for School Safety. 'But it's a slow moving, steady moving trend right now toward drug testing.' There is no exact count, but education officials think at least 36 of Kentucky's 176 school districts require drug tests at some level. ... Mark Cleveland, superintendent of Owen County Schools, said his district conducted its first random drug test at its middle school Tuesday. 'Seven or eight' students took the tests, along with three district administrators and the principal, Cleveland said .... 'You don't want to violate someone's civil rights, but at the same time you want to make sure that the schools are safe,' Cleveland said."

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

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

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

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