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30 November, 2006
AUSTRALIA'S EDUCATION WARS CONTINUE
Australian education has been substantially destroyed by Leftist State governments and the Feds are trying to undo at least some of the damage. Five current articles below:
Moral compass returning in postmodern schools
Kevin Donnelly believes the Left is losing the argument about school values
Education has traditionally been an electoral plus for the ALP, but not any more. As a recent Newspoll survey reveals, the Coalition Government has orchestrated an eight percentage point turnaround and is running neck and neck with Labor in terms of positive voter perception. Jenny Macklin, the federal Opposition education spokeswoman, argues the Howard Government's improvement is the result of cheap populism. She is wrong. As outlined in my book Why Our Schools are Failing, Australian parents are worried about significant issues such as falling standards, schools not being held accountable, the curriculum being awash with political correctness and, with government schools in particular, education failing to inculcate proper values.
That the Left has been wrong-footed in the education debate is clear to see. Remember the electoral impact of Mark Latham's hit list of non-government schools? More recently, take the Prime Minister's decision to finance religious counsellors in schools. When announced, the decision met with the usual mock outrage associated with the cultural Left. Andrew Gohl, president of the South Australian branch of the Australian Education Union, says: "It is totally inappropriate for the federal Government to try to impose ideology in public schools."
The Independent Education Union of Australia, an organisation not normally associated with the Left, reveals it has also been captured by the PC brigade when it suggests the federal Government is being divisive. "Australia is a multicultural, plural society; the strength of its values lies in the richness of its diversity," it says. "But John Howard and his Government consistently undermine this diversity with policies and commentary that divide the community and engender distrust." Even Bob Carr, a former politician usually guaranteed to be balanced and perceptive in his public comments, cannot resist hyperbole when he argues: "What if a poorly attended parent meeting chose a jihadist imam from a small Muslim prayer hall?"
Reality check: far from pushing a so-called conservative agenda, the Government is providing a resource that individual schools, government and non-government, can choose to take up or not. Quite rightly, while counsellors will not be restricted to any one religion or denomination, there will also be restrictions on who can be employed. That the AEU argues against the Government's initiative by describing it as ideological is also a bit rich. Consider how the union's curriculum policies have forced a politically correct, cultural-left agenda on schools, redefining the three Rs as the republic, refugees and reconciliation.
An uncritical promotion of multiculturalism and diversity, advocated by the IEU, also ignores that the overwhelming majority of Australians describe themselves as Christian and that our history, political and legal institutions have arisen out of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Instead of condemning the initiative to give students a clear and unambiguous moral compass to decide right from wrong and to identify a proper balance between rights and responsibilities, opponents of the scheme should be applauding it. For far too long, education has failed in its duty to address such issues. Beginning with the progressive education movement of the 1960s and '70s, the belief is that children should be left to their own devices and that adults should not impose a strong moral framework.
The self-esteem movement of the '80s and '90s, when education was reduced to therapy on the basis that nobody failed, compounded the problem as lessons focused on what was immediately entertaining and relevant to the world of the student. Classic myths, fables and legends such as The Arabian Nights, Aesop's Fables, The Iliad and The Odyssey gave way to popular magazines and social-realism stories about youth suicide and dysfunctional families. History as a subject disappeared, replaced by the study of the local community or figures such as Diana, princess of Wales.
Evident by debates about the nihilistic impact of theory, represented by postmodernism, the most recent example of our failure to give students a viable moral code is the belief that there is no right or wrong, as all values are relative and truth is simply a socio-cultural construct. As noted by John Paul II in his encyclical letter Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason): "A legitimate plurality of positions has yielded to an undifferentiated pluralism, based on the assumption that all positions are equally valid, which is one of today's most widespread symptoms of the lack of confidence in truth."
Historically, the education debate has focused on issues such as more money, smaller classes and more teachers, as shown by debates in these pages during the past 12 months. Equally important is the cultural significance of education, something the Prime Minister clearly understands.
Source
War over school history
The Queensland Government is preparing for a stand-up brawl with Canberra over attempts to impose history as a compulsory subject for high school students. Queensland Education Minister Rod Welford will defy federal Education Minister Julie Bishop and refuse to mandate history as a compulsory, stand-alone subject for Years 9 and 10. "I am happy to mandate some essential knowledge of key components of Australian history into a subject," Mr Welford said. "But it simply does not make sense to mandate history as a stand-alone subject."
History is taught in Queensland public schools as part of Studies of Societies and Environment and is optional from Year 9. Canberra is also facing a showdown with South Australia, where history is available until Year 11 as part of SOSE. Western Australia, where history is called "Time, Continuity and Change" and mingled in a Society and Environment course, is believed to be considering Ms Bishop's proposal. NSW and Victoria offer history as a stand-alone subject. Other territories and states have not made their position clear.
Ms Bishop has refused to rule out withholding money from the next $40 billion education funding round from those states that resist her push for a stand-alone compulsory history subject. "In the last funding round the Government provided $33 billion to the states and territories to run their schools and I believe that the Australian taxpayers would expect us to make the states and territories accountable for that investment," she said last month. Yesterday Ms Bishop's office said: "The Minister hopes the state will agree with the proposal voluntarily."
The warning follows news that a report commissioned by federal and state education ministers found that more than three-quarters of Australian teenagers did not know the significance of Australia Day. Ms Bishop's push for compulsory history in schools has the strong backing of Prime Minister John Howard. On Australia Day, Mr Howard foreshadowed his desire to see history established as a compulsory subject on Australia Day. He has specifically attacked Mr Welford's proposal for blending history with other curriculums. "Too often, it is taught without any sense of structured narrative, replaced by a fragmented stew of themes and issues," Mr Howard said.
Mr Welford last night vowed to strongly support Queensland public schools which want to establish a separate history curriculum. But he believes the practicalities of many smaller Queensland high schools require history be incorporated into other areas such as social studies or environmental education. He warned Ms Bishop that Queensland would not be swayed by Canberra's "rigid inflexibility" on the issue
Source
Teachers get a blast
Underperforming Australian teachers received a broadside yesterday from Prime Minister John Howard and Education Minister Julie Bishop. As the Federal Government presses on with plans to create a more centralised national curriculum, public school teachers are becoming fair game to a Government convinced they're on the nose in the electorate. In Parliament, Mr Howard used a Dorothy Dixer on claims that some Victorian teachers plan to join tomorrow's ACTU National Day of Action to launch a blistering attack on the profession.
"It is no secret to any member in this House that many Australian parents are voting with their feet against the government education system around the country," he said. "And they are not doing it because of funding. "It's this kind of behaviour by teachers that gives government schools a bad name." Instead of attending a "Jimmy Barnes concert" at the Melbourne Cricket Ground teachers should be in their classrooms, Mr Howard said. "As somebody who is rather proudly the product of a government education system, let me say that I worry about this kind of behaviour undermining the quality of government education in Victoria and around Australia," he said.
Ms Bishop told a gathering of National History Challenge finalists in Canberra that the teaching of Australian history had been denigrated in many of our schools. "And I believe that is a shame," she said. She found some comfort in the fact that finalists in the competition had produced sophisticated and intelligent work. But she reiterated her determination to make history a compulsory stand-alone subject for Years 9 to 10.
Source
Teach the facts first: Without the basics, school history is just propaganda
An editorial from "The Australian" below
WHEN NSW Education Minister Carmel Tebbutt said on Monday Australia Day commemorated the founding of our federation, instead of the arrival of the First Fleet, she did more than look like a dill. She demonstrated how she was betrayed by the people who designed the curriculum she was taught at school. As a woman in her early 40s, Ms Tebbutt went to school in an era when history, the study of the past on its own terms, not as a version of the present in fancy dress, was being trashed. Instead of the foundations of history - the facts and dates of events, who did what and why, and what were the consequences - history began to be a collection of stories based on the belief that whatever past winners said was invariably unfair to everybody else. The result is that the woman charged with running the largest school system in the country cannot distinguish between the founding of settler society in Australia and the creation of our commonwealth. But it is a fair bet that while she may not have any idea of the detail of how or why Australia came to be one of the most successful and enduring democracies, Ms Tebbutt was told at school how the settlers, or the founding fathers, probably both, dispossessed the indigenous Australians.
And just as Ms Tebbutt was betrayed then, so are children today. For a generation, our state education systems have emphasised ideology over information in history and literature, assuming the task of the teacher is to create a questioning culture among students, but one where fashion and feelings stand in the way of fact. We have now reached a point where it appears important for students to understand what people felt, rather than to know the facts that shaped their circumstances. As The Australian reports this morning, a simulation exercise used in a Sydney school presented conflict in the Middle East from a militant Palestinian perspective. As a way of inciting ill-informed anger among young people against one side in an immensely complex conflict, this is a winner. But as an exercise in education, it is hard to imagine anything worse. Before students can argue about the Middle East they need to learn the 20th-century history of the region. They need to be aware the British ran much of the region between the wars. They need to know the basic facts and dates of the way the Israelis fought for independence, the way the surrounding states sought to destroy Israel and the way ordinary Palestinians are now caught between Islamic terrorists and the Israeli forces. And they need to grasp that the Palestinian cause is now divided between people who want to make the best deal they can with Israel and fanatics who believe they are divinely directed to kill Jews.
In this, as in every other area of study, it is the job of schools to teach the facts and interpretive skills students need to make up their own minds. It is not their job to indoctrinate young people in some sort of party line that suits the political style of the teacher union leaders, who still see the world through the prism of the counter-culture of the 1960s, which blamed the West for all that was wrong in the world. We are now at a stage where children are being taught an interpretation of the past as if it were fact - the very thing the education apparatchiks always argue they oppose. To portray the European settlers of Australia, or the Israelis for that matter, as invaders, as if the evidence was irrefutable, ensures school students will argue before they have all the evidence.
Source
Hard-Left education chief self-destructs
West Australian Education Minister Ljiljanna Ravlich, close to tears yesterday as she battled an implication of lying from her former top bureaucrat, will today try to save her job before a state parliamentary inquiry. This follows damning evidence given to an upper house committee by former education director-general Paul Albert, who contradicted claims she made in parliament denying any knowledge of a Corruption and Crime Commission investigation into teacher sexual abuse of students.
Ms Ravlich, who has admitted seeking the help of disgraced former Labor premier Brian Burke to counter considerable media, community and teacher opposition to the controversial Outcomes Based Education (OBE), yesterday launched a scathing attack on her former top bureaucrat, claiming that Mr Albert had deliberately withheld information from her. Ms Ravlich has been clinging to her job after a series of blunders and scandals that have rocked the Carpenter Government, including the spectacular demise of police minister John D'Orazio and small business minister Norm Marlborough, who were both ensnared in CCC investigations.
Mr D'Orazio was kicked out of the Labor Party over an inappropriate and secretly taped meeting with a panel beater to discuss the minister's traffic infringements. Mr Marlborough may face criminal charges over evidence he gave to the CCC about his contact with Mr Burke, who was jailed twice in the 1990s and has since become a lobbyist.
Yesterday, Ms Ravlich flatly denied Mr Albert's evidence on Monday that he told her about the CCC investigation on three separate occasions. At times looking close to tears, Ms Ravlich said she had no recollection of the discussions outlined by Mr Albert, apart from a "passing" reference on one occasion. She described his actions as incomprehensible.
The discrepancy renewed the pressure on Premier Alan Carpenter, who yesterday came under fire in parliament as the Opposition demanded to know whom he believed: Ms Ravlich, or Mr Albert, whom the Premier appointed as director-general in 2001 when he was education minister. Giving very careful responses, Mr Carpenter suggested it was not unreasonable for people to have different recollections about passing comments, but he refused to answer questions on Ms Ravlich's immediate future.
The CCC spent almost a year investigating the Education Department's handling of allegations of sexual misconduct by teachers against children before releasing a damning report last month that accused the department of being more concerned with protecting staff than students. Mr Albert said that while he did not go into any detail with Ms Ravlich, he had raised the issue in general terms at meetings in May, July and August. He said that on one occasion in July he recalled telling the minister a draft report had been received from the CCC and it looked bad. Mr Albert was forced to resign over the issue last month.
Ms Ravlich said she was never told the CCC was looking into alleged sexual misconduct by teachers and that Mr Albert's failure to inform her was "totally unacceptable". "I met with the director-general every fortnight, on occasion on a weekly basis, and we would go through a whole range of issues. I would have called Mr Albert virtually on a daily basis," she said. "To be dropping breadcrumbs over the place for a minister to pick up and to, by way of passing, put forward any information in that manner, it's totally unacceptable."
Liberal leader Paul Omodei said the Premier had no option but to immediately remove Ms Ravlich from the education portfolio.
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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.
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29 November, 2006
Alabama: School funding by the numbers
It is difficult to read a newspaper, listen to the radio, or watch TV news without hearing somebody tell us that our schools are badly under-funded. For the moment, the State will be satisfied with a $160 million tax increase, but indications are that they will soon pursue a $1.4 billion tax increase in order to "make schools adequate." School systems around the state are also seeking local tax increases to bolster their budgets.
We are told that schools need the money because buildings are in disrepair, students don't have textbooks, teachers are underpaid, and some schools have to request donations so that students will have toilet paper to use. Their focus is on educating kids, they claim, and that's where most of the money is spent, but they need more to do a decent job.
Critics claim that much of the money is being mishandled. Reducing waste and streamlining the bureaucracy, they insist, will allow schools to spend more money on actually educating students, and hopefully enable them to do a better job of actually teaching children how to read and write. Maybe public schools can even pull the average ACT scores of graduating seniors above 19.1, they hope.
Let's begin by crunching the numbers for the public schools, as provided by the State Board of Education. The Montgomery County school system spends an average of $5,398 per student each year, while the State education system spends an average of $5,657 per student. If we add the proposed $1.4 billion (or 30%) funding increase, that would increase county and state spending to $7,040 and $7,378 per pupil, respectively.
In order to compare public schools with private schools, I selected three private schools from the yellow pages and started asking questions. Specifically, I was curious as to how much it costs parents to put their kids in private schools, and how well those schools educate their students.
School Per Pupil
State Public Schools $5,657 ($7,378 after $1.4 billion increase)
Mgm County Schools $5,398 ($7,040 after $1.4 billion increase)
St. Bede $3,850
Mgm Academy $6,597
Trinity Presbyterian $5,299
As you can see from this chart, two of the three private schools spent less per pupil than did the public schools, and all spent less then what the per pupil spending would be after the proposed $1.4 billion tax increase. All of the private schools obtained better SAT scores than did the public schools, but tuition ranged from $1,500 less than that enjoyed by the taxpayer-funded schools to $1,200 more. Once the proposed $1.4 billion increase is added in, the private schools will cost between $3,190 and $443 less per pupil than will taxpayer funded public schools. By examining this data, a few things become crystal clear.
1) If most private schools can get better results than public schools for less money per student, then the amount of funding for public education isn't the problem.
2) A significant portion of the funding for public schools must be wasted or spent on items that do not help the schools achieve their overall goal: teaching children.
3) A dramatic increase in school funding will not help the students to learn more or to achieve higher scores. Only a fundamental change in how public schools are run and how public school teachers teach will accomplish that.
Over the past five years, per-pupil spending in Montgomery County schools has increased by 22%, while student performance has either dropped or remained the same. Parents of private school students have the option of removing their children to another school, and thus removing that money from the disappointing or overpriced school. Taxpaying citizens should have the same rights, to remove both student and funding from an education system that has failed them.
As education officials and politicians, led by Governor Seigelman, demand more tax dollars for public schools, taxpayers should be able to demand that the money is spent responsibly, on the actual process of educating students. By examining the performance of private schools, it is evident that children can be educated with less money than the public school system is currently spending, and we should demand that student performance rise with the funding level.
Don't force us to pay more taxes for an education system that doesn't educate our children. Until public schools start doing what their lesser-funded private brethren have shown themselves fully capable of doing, taxpayers should refuse even the barest suggestion of a tax increase.
Source
Australia: Students dumbed down and left out
No wonder our school students are culturally illiterate. If NSW Education Minister Carmel Tebbutt can't tell the difference between Australia Day - which marks the arrival of the First Fleet on January 26, 1788 - and Federation, which marks the federation of Australia as a nation on January 1, 1901, then it is hardly surprising three-quarters of Australian teenagers don't understand the significance of Australia Day, the responsibilities of the governor-general or the symbolism of the Union Jack in our flag.
Ms Tebbutt's embarrassing gaffe aside, the results of the civics and citizenship test, reported in The Australian yesterday, reveal extensive gaps in the knowledge of national history in our schoolchildren. Worse, the news is simply the most recent in a long line of incidents and stories demonstrating the parlous state of our education system. While state and territory education ministers describe their schools as "world's best" and argue that standards are on the rise, the opposite is the case.
Why has this been allowed to happen? The first thing to realise is that those responsible for our education system argue that there is no crisis. At two forums organised this year by the Australian Curriculum Studies Association, concerns about falling standards and the politically correct nature of the curriculum were dismissed as a conservative backlash and a media beat-up.
Alan Reid, an Adelaide-based academic in favour of the much-condemned outcomes-based education model, argues: "We have a conservative backlash in the media which is really pushing us back to fixed syllabuses and a more didactic curriculum which conservative government forces are helping to promote."
At the second ACSA invitational conference, held in August and made up of the usual suspects, one of the educrats reportedly said: "It is all about politics and the influence of parents, lobby groups and media hype that sells papers."
Not only do state and territory curriculum bureaucrats argue there is no problem, the overwhelming majority also believe that process is more important than content and that teaching subjects such as history andliterature is secondary to developing generic competencies and skills, such as being futures oriented and valuing diversity.
While evidence of content-free education could be found at this year's history summit, where the argument was put that "you learn from doing history, not by being taught it" and the intention was to design a curriculum in terms of open-ended questions, it's important to understand that the curriculum has been under attack for years.
In 1975, the Whitlam government's Commonwealth Schools Commission sought to radically change the way teachers taught by arguing: "There is no reason to assume that the traditional subject fields, or high culture, are the only avenues through which thought might be developed or basic skills learned."
In opposition to the belief, as argued by US academic Jerome Bruner, that students must be taught the "structure of the discipline", the schools commission argued: "The skills of assembling evidence in logical argument may be developed through any content about which people care enough, or might be brought to care enough, to exert themselves to use them."
Never mind that skills and competencies do not arise intuitively or by accident and that they are best taught within the context of established disciplines such as English and mathematics. It is also true that not all content has the same value or complexity: Henry Lawson's The Drover's Wife is different from a mobile phone text message.
Since the early 1970s, the new age approach to teaching also has become embedded in teacher training. Georgina Tsolidis, an academic at Monash University, describes the role of teachers: "We were to go into classrooms to teach students, not subjects. We were to instil in our students feelings of self-worth premised on the value of what these students already knew and the value of what they wanted to learn, rather than the intrinsic worth of what we wanted to teach."
The most recent manifestation of education lite - in which, as argued in Shelley Gare's recent book The Triumph of the Airheads and the Retreat from Commonsense, "two generations of experimented-upon young Australians have emerged unable to read, write and think" - is Australia's adoption of outcomes-based education and the vague, generalised way the curriculum is written.
Instead of being given a clear, concise road map of what is to be taught, teachers are told that students, in the words of the West Australian curriculum, must be able to "describe and explain lasting and changing aspects of Australian society and environments", "construct a sequence of some major periods and events" and "categorise different types of historical change".
Memorising important facts, dates, events and the names of significant figures is also attacked as "drill and kill" and the argument is put that the curriculum must be open-ended, as teachers must be free to teach what their students are most interested in.
The flaws in such an approach are manifest. Not only are students disempowered as a result of leaving school culturally illiterate, thus disenfranchised in terms of the public debate, but the common ground on which democracy depends is left untilled.
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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.
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28 November, 2006
Business to save British schools?
Business executives should be drafted into schools to help to raise standards, the new chief inspector of England's schools said yesterday as figures revealed that more than half of secondary schools were under-performing. Christine Gilbert, the head of the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), blamed poor leadership and management in schools for persistent poor standards. "We should certainly look at drawing in heads from business and industry," she said. "If you have teaching experience, it may get you to first base quicker, but I do think that schools could benefit from the leadership expertise of people from outside, particularly those who have taken early retirement in their 50s. They could come in as consultants or heads."
Ms Gilbert's comments came after the publication of Ofsted's annual report, which showed that 51 per cent of England's secondary schools were failing to provide a good education for their pupils. With one in eight secondaries and one in 12 schools overall judged inadequate, she said that the proportion of failing schools in England was too high. "The report card for English education has been increasingly encouraging over the past ten years, but it is still not good enough," she said. Of the 6,129 schools inspected last year, twice the proportion of secondaries (13 per cent) were judged inadequate, compared with primaries (7 per cent).
The key to raising standards was good school leadership and early intervention with primary school children, Ms Gilbert, a former history teacher, said. She acknowledged that academies were one possible response to raising standards, but said that only three of the nine inspected were judged effective. There were 46 academies operating and the Government hoped to have 200 by 2010.
Progress had been made, but inexperienced staff and problems recruiting and retaining teachers remained a significant problem. Secondaries without sixth forms suffered the greatest difficulties in raising the achievement among pupils, with more than half (52 per cent) failing to make good progress. At the same time, poor behaviour was disrupting one third of classes in secondaries, the inspectors said.
Those schools that had focused on the underlying causes of poor discipline, such as poor reading and writing skills and emotional problems, found that behaviour often improved.
More than half (58 per cent) of primaries were judged good or outstanding, but inspectors expressed serious concerns about primary teachers' "weak subject knowledge" in science, history, geography, music, art and design and technology.
Ms Gilbert's idea of appointing head teachers from outside the sector drew a mixed reaction. Liz Sidwell, chief executive of the Haberdashers' Aske's federation of schools in South London, said: "As long as the chief executive of a school has people on the management team who understand the curriculum and standards, it could work. The business skills you need to run a school are not the skills that teachers necessarily have."
John Dunford, of the Association of School and College Leaders, agreed that outsiders may make good heads, but added: "You could not recruit straight from business. School leadership is very different from business leadership and business leaders would be the first to spot that." Dr Dunford was very critial of the inspectors' report overall and accused them of setting schools up for failure. "Reports such as these will cause a crisis of confidence among the leaders of the profession unless we start to accentuate the positive aspects of schools' performance," he said. "Of the schools cited as `inadequate', many have good value-added scores for very weak intakes."
Source
Australian students ignorant of Australian history
More than three-quarters of Australian teenagers do not know that Australia Day commemorates the arrival of the First Fleet and the beginning of British settlement. A report commissioned by Federal, state and territory education ministers shows an overwhelming majority of schoolchildren are also ignorant of the reason for Anzac Day, or for the inclusion of the Union Jack on the Australian flag. About 77 per cent of Year 10 students and 93 per cent of Year 6 students across the nation cannot nominate the official responsibilities of the governor-general, and the great majority do not know the Queen is Australia's head of state.
The report, which is yet to be released but has been obtained by The Australian, reveals surprisingly high levels of ignorance about basic historical facts and Australia's system of government, and questions the effectiveness of the teaching of civics and citizenship. "The widespread ignorance of key information about national events and nationally representative symbols, which, it had generally been assumed, had been taught to death in Australian schools, was a surprise," the report says. "More targeted teaching is required if students are to learn about these things. Formal, consistent instruction has not been the experience of Australian students in civics and citizenship." The report says only high-performing students "demonstrated any precision in describing the symbolism of the Union Jack in the Australian flag".
Regarding the students' lack of understanding of the role of the governor-general, the report says: "One can only infer that students are not being taught about the role of the governor-general. "Many of the Year 10 students clearly did not have the knowledge outlined... as being designated for Year 6," the report says. "This was especially the case in relation to information about the constitutional structure of Australian democracy in Year 10."
The report was prepared for the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs by the Australian Council for Educational Research. It tested about 10,000 Year 10 students and 10,000 Year 6 students in every state and territory.
Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop said the ignorance of Australian students about their own country revealed in the report underlined the need for the Federal Government's push for Australian history to be taught as a compulsory, stand-alone subject in years 9 and 10. "It is disappointing that so few Australian students know the basic facts about our national events and icons such as Anzac Day and the Australian Flag," she said. "I am concerned that only a small minority of Year 10 students know the reason for the national public holiday on Australia Day. "Young Australians have the right to vote at 18 years of age and should have knowledge about our nation's history and traditions."
The Howard Government introduced a Discovering Democracy program in 1997, producing and placing curriculum materials on civics and citizenship in all primary and secondary schools in 1998. The program aimed to promote students' participation in democratic processes "by equipping them with the knowledge, skills, values and dispositions of active and informed citizenship". According to the Federal Education Department, "it entails knowledge and understanding of Australia's democratic heritage and traditions, its political and legal institutions and the shared values of freedom, tolerance, respect, responsibility and inclusion". In August, education ministers approved national Statements of Learning for Civics and Citizenship, setting out common knowledge all students should possess in years 3, 5, 7 and 9, ahead of national assessment tests from 2008.
The report says half of Year 6 students achieved a proficient standard in the test, while 39 per cent of Year 10 students reached the proficient standard. It says the level of ignorance will restrict students' involvement in democratic processes. "Ignorance of such fundamental information indicates a lack of knowledge of the history of our democratic tradition, and this ignorance will permeate and restrict the capacity of students to make sense of many other aspects of Australian democratic forms and processes," it says. "Without the basic understandings, they will be unable to engage in a meaningful way in many other levels of action or discourse."
The report identifies two main concepts with which students struggle the most: "iconic knowledge" of Australia's heritage and the idea of the common good. Students had difficulty grasping the idea of a common good or strategies that refer to how individuals can influence systems for the benefit of society. "It is unclear whether students do not have such a concept at all, don't believe in the common good or do not see how individuals can act for the common good," the report says.
Source
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My Home Pages are here or here or here.
***************************
27 November, 2006
Black students at Indiana University/Purdue University at Indianapolis want more spent on them than on all other groups combined
Black students who have accused IUPUI of discrimination rejected the university's efforts to address their concerns, including a pledge to form a new black student affairs office. The student leaders have scheduled a forum Sunday to discuss the issue and whether they will sue the university, which they had vowed to do if administrators did no meet their demands.
The university hoped to meet with students about the requests and possible solutions, school spokesman Rich Schneider said. "We're just waiting for more information from the students about what they would like to see done differently," he said.
The IUPUI Black Student Union marched last week in protest of what they say is the school's false sense of commitment to diversity. They allege, among other things, that school officials declined to set aside money for a black student group's trip while approving money for other student clubs. The group had said it would file a lawsuit Monday unless officials agreed to provide a new black cultural center, more black faculty and $78,000 for black student groups - about $10,000 more than IUPUI student government's budget for all campus clubs. The group also requested sensitivity training for administrators and an undergraduate degree program in African-American studies.
IUPUI officials have made racial diversity a top goal, aiming to boost the school's minority student enrollment from 15 percent to about 18 percent. Officials also want to boost minority graduation rates at the 30,000-student campus.
Source
"DUMBED DOWN" BRITISH HIGH SCHOOLS
Odd that such exams were not too hard for British kids in the past!
An exam modelled on the old O-level is too difficult to be offered in state schools, a report has revealed. Watchdogs concluded that International GCSEs in key subjects are "more demanding" than the standard exam, effectively ruling out their introduction in state secondaries. Hundreds of private schools have already adopted IGCSEs in some subjects, mainly maths and science, because they consider them to be better preparation for A-levels.
Now a report from the Government's exams watchdog has confirmed that popular IGCSE syllabuses contain tougher questions and challenge pupils on topics that GCSE pupils only encounter at AS-level. But it means that, without substantial changes, they cannot be added to the list of qualifications approved for use in state schools since they are not directly comparable to GCSEs. The exams may need to be dumbed down if they are to fit strict official criteria laid down for teenagers' studies.
Opposition politicians warned of a widening gulf between the state and independent sectors as fee-paying schools increasingly turn to tougher qualifications. Ministers admitted yesterday there were "significant obstacles" to the introduction of IGCSEs in secondary schools. But they agreed to launch a public consultation on whether they should "explore further" with exam boards "how to overcome these obstacles".
IGCSEs were developed primarily for schools overseas but are attracting increasing interest from British private schools dissatisfied with the standard GCSE. They are similar to the old O-level - scrapped in 1987 - as pupils are tested in a series of final exams at the end of a two-year course. There is a coursework option but most schools do not use it. Teachers also consider questions to be more "traditional" and open-ended.
The report from the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority exposes the apparently low demands placed on GCSE candidates in crucial subjects compared with counterparts abroad who are following IGCSE syllabuses. It reveals that English GCSEs have too many "formulaic questions" while pupils taking double science GCSE are even awarded marks for giving the wrong answers. They can be given credit if an answer is written in "appropriately scientic" language - even if "the science is incorrect".
But there were sharp variations across the two exam boards offering IGCSEs. IGCSEs set by Cambridge International Examinations (CIE) is taken in 200 independent schools, in at least one subject, while Edexcel's are used in 170. But only CIE's papers were found to be more demanding than standard GCSEs. And out of four subjects studied, CIE papers in just two - maths and science - were judged to be tougher. The report said: "The content of the CIE IGCSE coordinated syllabus is broad and deep compared with the other syllabuses reviewed. A number of the areas included are currently part of AS syllabuses. "CIE IGCSE was judged to be more demanding for the higher tier candidates and very demanding for foundation tier candidates." In contrast, standard GCSEs were "less demanding than they should be" for brighter candidates
Meanwhile a CIE maths paper was "by a long way" more difficult than others reviewed by a panel of assessors. Candidates were only allowed scientific calculators and no formula sheets. There were also "extensive structured questions" which "require organisation and a systematic approach from candidates". The report concluded there were "major differences" between GCSEs and IGCSEs across all four subjects studied - maths, science, English and French. "In almost every case, these differences meant that the IGCSE examinations did not meet the GCSE subject criteria in significant ways" it said.
Nick Gibb, Tory schools spokesman, said: "If the Government and the QCA refuse to allow state schools the same options as independent schools, an even greater divide between the two sectors will emerge as schools in the private sector increasingly adopt what the QCA has termed the 'demanding' IGCSE exam."
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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.
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26 November, 2006
RESISTANCE TO LEGALLY MANDATED EQUAL TREATMENT AT U MICHIGAN
A University of Michigan student has kindly forwarded the following message from university president Mary Sue Coleman and university provost Teresa Sullivan. It shows that the Left only advocate equality when it suits them
Diversity Blueprints: Your ideas wanted
We know we have a great deal of work to do at the University of Michigan to live up to our ideals of a broadly diverse learning community. This would be true regardless of whether Proposal 2 were approved by Michigan voters. But the passage of the amendment makes this work more urgent, particularly with respect to race, ethnicity, gender and national origin.
Our University thrives on finding solutions to vexing societal issues. This is an historic moment, and an opportunity to apply our collective creative, energetic thinking to discover the most effective ways to support diversity. We will succeed only if we have thoughtful input from everyone in our community.
Today we are announcing the creation of a university-wide task force that will encourage innovative thinking among all segments of the University community and identify the best ideas developed through this process. The task force, called "Diversity Blueprints," will be co-chaired by Teresa Sullivan, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, and Lester P. Monts, senior vice provost and special counsel to the president, and will include students, staff, faculty, alumni and administrators.
The group will begin its work immediately. Its first task will be to engage the U-M community in developing fresh, innovative approaches to sustain and enhance diversity. Through e-mail, a website, brainstorming sessions and other means we will encourage alumni, faculty, staff, students, and others to consider the question, "How can we maintain and enhance diversity at U-M in the years ahead?" Areas for specific input include recruiting, precollege/K-12 outreach, admissions, financial aid, mentoring/student success, climate, curriculum/classroom discussions, diversity research and assessment, and external funding opportunities.
The ideas submitted may range from general insights to detailed plans. In the true spirit of brainstorming, all ideas will be considered regardless of how ambitious or unconventional they may seem. We will commit significant resources to some of the best and most promising recommendations that the Diversity Blueprints task force brings forward. You may share your ideas by writing to Diversity.Blueprints@umich.edu. More details will be coming soon about members of the task force and other ways you can get involved in this work, such as by attending a campus forum.
Many individuals in our community also have questions about how Proposal 2 affects specific aspects of our work. We have created a central e-mail address, Diversity.Questions@umich.edu, that will assist you in getting answers to your questions. Questions submitted to this address will go to the Office of Institutional Equity and will be routed to the appropriate areas for response.
We are asking the Diversity Blueprints task force, and our entire community, to leave no stone unturned as we explore ways to encourage diversity within the boundaries of the law. We look forward to your ideas and your energy. Together, we must continue to make this world-class university one that reflects the richness of the world.
Source
Prestigious British private schools exported
In what is believed to be the first venture of its kind, Brighton College, a leading independent school, is planning to export British public school education to Russia. Boarding schools in England have attracted interest from growing numbers of wealthy Russians in the past decade who are keen to give their children a high-quality education in a secure, friendly environment. Brighton College is seeking to build on these links by building its own public school, 50 miles south of Moscow.
Several elite schools, such as Dulwich College, Harrow and Shrewsbury, have set up in the Far East to feed a growing appetite for British public school education, but none has so far attempted such an undertaking on Russian soil. Four hundred boys and girls will be offered Mandarin, polo and cricket, and taught a European-style curriculum, in English, in the grounds of a school near Borovsk, south of Moscow. Estimated to cost 18 million pounds, it could open as early as 2009. The school is the brainchild of Mikhail Orloff, a Russian businessman and the grandson of King Farouk, and it hopes to blend the best of English education with Russia's culture and history. It would operate mostly as a weekly boarding school.
Richard Cairns, the headmaster of Brighton College, said that Russian parents were attracted to the school because they would no longer have to send their children abroad for a top-class education. "Parents have been sending their children to Europe, but they don't like it because when they come over, they stay," he said. "They believe that Russia is losing her children. But this way, they hope to keep the same value system and the children."
The cleverest pupils would be able to spend their last couple of years studying A levels at Brighton College, which also has partnerships with schools in China and Australia. Mr Orloff approached the college after it became the first private school in England to make Mandarin compulsory for all new pupils. Brighton College is developing a three-year plan with Lord Skidelsky, an economist of Russian origin and chairman of its board of governors, to raise the money. Richard Niblett, the director of music, is overseeing the project. He has been living in Moscow since September to undertake feasibility studies and raise to funds for the school. "The concept is to draw on the best of both education systems - the logic of science and maths, which the Russians excel at, and the house-style system and arts of British public schools," he said. "Teaching in Russia is quite dogmatic, whereas we tend to help them think outside the box more."
There would certainly seem to be a market for it. According to the Independent Schools Council, which includes 1,288 of the Britain's 2,500 private schools, 343 Russian students were attending its schools in 2005-6. These parents were paying more than 5.5 million pounds for one year's school fees. Brighton College charges about 16,000 a year for weekly boarders, but their Russian affiliate would charge just 10,350 a year.
While Russia already has a handful of good Western-style private day schools, such as the Anglo-American School, the English International School and the British International School, they are not linked to any leading independent schools in Britain. The advantage of its model, Brighton College argues, is not only that it will follow a tried and tested method of schooling, which has worked well for centuries in Britain, but will also take children out of the pollution of Moscow during the week
Source
AUSTRALIA: CURE FOR CHEATING
When two students walked into their lecturer's study to mount a challenge about the mark one of them had received in a multiple choice exam, the academic smiled. The first student had scored 90 per cent; the second 10 per cent. All three people knew the real reason for the gripe was that the second student had copied the first. So why the discrepancies in the marks? Unruffled, the academic compared the disgruntled student's answers to the master copy, demonstrating that the fail mark was justified.
They had just been foiled by a well-worn sting within the biochemistry department at the University of Sydney. Frustrated by suspicions that students were cheating, the department creates four variations to each multiple choice exam it prepares. If students copy the letters circled by their neighbours, they will arrive at different results. The more they copy, the worse they will do.
"What our solution enables us to do is say natural justice has occurred," said Associate Professor Gareth Denyer, a senior lecturer. "This student has ended up with an incredibly low mark as a result of their cheating . There's a wonderfully sweet feeling . It's evil of me, I know. But they're trying to get one over you and you end up getting one over them."
The department has been improving the system over seven years, but despite its success being published within the university and externally, other academics have resisted adopting it. Some regard it as a form of entrapment. Others have their own systems. But Professor Denyer believes that many do not want to know if their students are cheating. "There's a very strong head-in-the-sand culture," 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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.
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25 November, 2006
STILL SOME "FREE SCHOOLS"
I once taught in such a school. Half the kids learnt zilch
One recent day at the Brooklyn Free School, the "schedule" included the following: chess, debate, filming horror movies, and making caves for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Not that the students had to go to any of these sessions. At this school, students don't get grades, don't have homework, don't take tests, don't even have to go to class. Unless they want to. "You can do basically anything at any time, and it's just a lot more fun because sometimes when you need a break at regular schools you can't get it," said Sophia Bennett Holmes, 12, an aspiring singer-actress-fashion designer. "But here if you just need to sit down and read and have time to play, then you can do that."
"Free schools," which had their heyday decades ago, operate on the belief that children are naturally curious and learn best when they want to, not when forced to. Today, the approach is getting another look from some parents and students tired of standardized testing, excessive homework, and overly rigid curriculums in regular schools. "Every kid here is definitely motivated to learn something, there's no doubt in my mind," said Alan Berger, a former public school assistant principal who founded the Brooklyn school, which launched in fall 2004. "Our belief is that if we let them pursue their passions and desires, they'll be able to get into it deeper. They'll be able to learn more how to learn."
Hundreds of free schools opened in the U.S. and elsewhere in the 1960s and 1970s. Most shut down, but some, such as the Albany Free School and Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts, have persisted. Overall, it's unknown how many free schools operate today. The ones still in operation often use a "democratic" model, giving students a say in running the institution. At the Brooklyn Free School, much of that decision-making occurs in a mandatory (yes, as in required) weekly gathering called the Democratic Meeting. Here, students air grievances, pose challenges, propose rules and set policy. Even the youngest kids have a vote equal to staffers. One agreed-upon rule? No sword-fighting allowed inside.
The school - granted a provisional charter in 2004 by the state to run as a private educational institution - occupies two floors of a Free Methodist church. Students are required to show up for a minimum of 5 1/2 hours a day, partly so that the school can meet legal definitions, but what they do with their time is up to them. The student population - 42 students, ages 5 to 17 - is diverse racially, economically and in terms of ability, and the students are not separated by age.
On any given day, a student may be playing chess, reading a book, practicing yoga or helping mummify a chicken. The day after the Nov. 7 U.S. congressional elections, one group listened to President George W. Bush's press conference on a radio, while the sound of the younger students' feet rattled the ceiling.
Source
FAILING BRITISH SCHOOLS
One in eight secondary schools was judged "inadequate" in the past year, while more than a third were no better than satisfactory, Government inspectors said today. Chief Inspector of Schools Christine Gilbert condemned the high failure rate and said it was "unacceptable" that the gap between the best and worst state schools was so wide. She demanded urgent action to raise standards, warning: ""The report card for English education has been increasingly encouraging over the past 10 years, but it is still not good enough."
In her first annual report since becoming Chief Inspector, Ms Gilbert said a good education can "liberate and empower" children. "The story is not always positive, however," she added. "That is why I am so concerned at the gap between the best provision and that which makes an inadequate contribution to improving the life chances of children and young people. "Too many schools are inadequate - about one in 12 of those inspected, and in secondary schools this proportion rises to just over one in eight."
Ms Gilbert said many secondary schools, which are often far larger than primaries, faced a "substantial" range of issues which held them back. "However, more needs to be done, and swiftly, to reduce the number of secondary schools found to be inadequate," she said. Ofsted's annual report was based on evidence from inspections of 6,000 state schools during the 2005-06 academic year. The watchdog found:
11 per cent of all state schools were outstanding, about half were good, 34 per cent satisfactory and 8 per cent inadequate; 13 per cent of secondary schools were inadequate, and 7% of primaries; School attendance was not good enough in one in 10 schools, with particular problems in London and the North of England. In nearly one in three secondary schools, behaviour is "no better than satisfactory overall, and in these schools there are also instances of disruptive or distracting behaviour from some pupils".
The findings follow the first year of a new inspection system, in which Ofsted conducted "shorter and sharper" inspections, giving schools only a few days' notice before visiting. The new criteria for schools were also tougher than before, which explained in part why so many schools were judged to be poor. Ms Gilbert said: "The new inspection arrangements have raised the bar, but without putting it out of reach. "The performance of schools, and the public's expectations of them, have both risen, and it is right that inspection should reflect that."
Schools Minister Jim Knight said it would not be fair to make comparisons with previous years. "Direct comparisons between school judgments in this year's report and previous ones would be misleading," he said. "This report reflects the first year of the toughest inspection regime we have yet introduced. "Schools that may have been judged as good in previous years might only be judged as satisfactory now. "However, we make no apology for raising the bar - expectations are higher than ever and judgments need to be tougher than ever. "No school should be inadequate and there should be no hiding places for under-performance or coasting. "That is why the Education and Inspections Act is introducing tough new powers to turn around schools, closing or replacing them if they do not make adequate progress within 12 months."
Shadow education secretary David Willetts said: "It is still not good enough that four out of 10 schools are regarded by Ofsted as merely satisfactory or downright inadequate. "There is one success story - special schools. "But the Government is putting more effort into closing good special schools than closing inadequate secondary schools. "We need a moratorium on special school closures. "The wide gap between the best and worst-performing schools is also very worrying. "The best way to bridge this gap is by concentrating on discipline, improving behaviour and more streaming and setting in all schools."
Source
Australian conservatives winning the education debate
Rednecks rescuing public education? Never. In fact, it's happening in pockets of North America. Accountability is back in fashion and it is a boon for public education. And it may just happen here in Australia. As education becomes a pivotal issue for the Howard Government, the Coalition may end up thanking the self-styled progressive teachers unions for that electoral gift. Each time their union leaders bang on about political issues, it's a reminder that they are less interested in what ought to be their core concern: educating Australian children. Far from working to destroy public education, as the teachers unions allege, the conservatives may just end up saving it. But more on that later.
First, to the shifting electoral sands. Education has long been regarded as Labor's stronghold, an issue that differentiated the ALP from the Coalition. In October 2003 a Newspoll survey revealed that Labor was ahead by 13 points when voters were asked who was best able to handle education. Similarly, Kim Beazley has been regarded, by and large, as more capable on education than John Howard. That appears to be changing. A Newspoll survey last week revealed that Howard is seen as just as capable as Beazley when it comes to education.
It's too early to talk of firm trends in favour of Howard on education, but the gap is closing. As a point of contrast, on the Coalition's traditional strength - handling the economy - it continues to significantly outscore Labor. The October survey had the Coalition ahead by 32 points on the economy front. As Newspoll chairman Sol Lebovic told The Australian: "You don't see that (differentiation) in Labor's strength on education." So education is well and truly up for grabs. Given that 75 per cent of Australian voters rate education as very important in determining who gets their vote, it's clear that Howard will use education as an electoral issue next year.
If it turns out to be a winner for Howard, the teachers unions will be the dunces who handed it to him. Last week The Daily Telegraph reported that the NSW Teachers Federation announced that teachers should not be compelled to include comments about students' performance in school reports. That's from the same union that is blocking any movement towards A to E grading of students of subjects apart from literacy and numeracy. As that newspaper's editorial asked, where does that leave the school report card? Looking rather blank?
The unions also opposed suggestions by federal Education Minister Julie Bishop that teachers be remunerated according to merit, not merely seniority. They scoffed at the idea that principals are best placed to determine the good teachers who deserve greater rewards. It happens in every workplace across Australia, but in schools? Forget about it.
Bloviating against reform on the dubious basis that teachers unions know best, they also opposed moves to inject a greater focus on phonetic instruction into literacy. The knee-jerk rejection by the most powerful teachers union of education reforms suggested by the Howard Government highlights the politicised nature of the unions' agenda. That and the fact union leaders regularly spill the political beans in the most colourful way. It's worth repeating the political outbursts for the simple reason that they may explain why more voters are looking to Howard for leadership on education. Recall NSW English Teachers Association president Wayne Sawyer blaming the re-election of the Howard Government in 2004 on the failure of teachers to create a "critical generation". Then came Australian Education Union president Pat Byrne declaring that teachers needed to be on the progressive side of politics. In her prepared speech to the Queensland Teachers Union conference last year, Byrne complained that "it was not a good time to be progressive in Australia" but assured her union constituency that"the conservatives have a lot of work to do to undo the progressive curriculum".
It's a neat reminder to parents of who to blame for curriculum woes. The Coalition is inching forward in the polls on education for one simple reason: the so-called progressive agenda thrust on schools has not worked. Every time a unionist calls for more of the same, it may just translate into another point in the polls for the Coalition on education. Alas, some of our education union leaders are not smart enough to work that out. Who can forget Byrne attacking the Coalition for casting the education debate in terms of conservative values. "It has framed the debate in terms of choice, excellence, quality, values, discipline," she said. Crikey. You can almost hear parents saying: "If progressives are opposed to choice, excellence, quality, values and discipline, it's time to give the conservatives a go." Next week, teachers will desert the classroom to march in the National Day of Union and Community Action, railing against the Government's Work Choices legislation. Expect a wry smile from the Howard Government, as parents and students are once again relegated behind union politics.
Union rhetoric that says conservatives want to trash public education does not match what's happening in the real world. In Alberta, Canada, long derided as home to dumb rednecks riding high on the proceeds of oil and natural gas, there has been a dramatic turnaround in the inexorable decline in public education. In Edmonton, the province's capital, recently retired schools chief Angus McBeath says: "The litmus test is that the rich send their kids to public schools, not the private schools." Just read that again. Rich folk are sending their children to public schools. Compare the exodus of Australian students from public to private schools, with parents often working two jobs to pay for private school fees. What's behind Alberta's counter-intuitive trend, in which 80per cent of parents express satisfaction with public education? Put it down to the dreaded conservatives, who have reigned since 1971, and their values. It's simple stuff like reforming the curriculum to focus on core subjects such as maths, English and science, improving teacher training, setting real performance goals for students and tracking student performance in province-wide tests.
As The Economist recently pointed out, Alberta has spent the past three decades building one of the best education systems in the country. And it's turning out clever students who rank higher than their Canadian peers. In Australia, there appears to be a similar yearning for genuine accountability in education. Increasingly, parents are turning away from Labor as being best able to deliver on that front. It's not an unreasonable response, given that reform is unlikely to come while the political bruvvers in the union movement rule in our schools.
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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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.
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24 November, 2006
The education debate we're not having
My adopted state of New Hampshire may be at a crossroads. The state supreme court has commanded the legislature to find a new way of funding public schools by next summer, or else the justices will impose a solution of their own. Many people here fear that a directive from the court will require so large a funding increase that a statewide sales tax or income tax would become inevitable - a radical departure from New Hampshire's historic low-tax mentality. Democrats, naturally, are for the most part ecstatic. They would love to see New Hampshire become like neighboring states that tax their citizens through every means possible.
In response, conservative Republicans have proposed that a state constitutional amendment be passed denying the court any say in education matters. All this handwringing over the best way to pay for public schools distracts us from a far more important point: that we are dealing, first and last, with a broken system - and one that is inherently defective. Rather than patch it up with more money, we ought to try a different approach.
Few dare speak of it, particularly in political circles, but an alternative to public schools does exist. While the state, to some extent, has always had its fingers in education, its role was initially minimal. Prior to the wholesale takeover of education by government, parents typically paid about half their kids' tuitions directly, while the other half was made up in local taxes. Education was mostly a private enterprise. The tireless research of historian E.G. West shows that the earliest movements at the state level to increase education funding were meant to address only the perceived need of those living far from city and village life in small pockets of rural poverty.
It was understood even by these early interferers that the overwhelming majority of families were already providing an adequate education for their children, and at their own expense. Parents would routinely forgo creature comforts for the sake of their children's needs. One anecdote West supplies is that of a poor family living on nothing but potatoes so they could afford to send their children to school. Official education commissions in the United States and England in the early 19th century consistently found that children were being competently schooled and, of equal importance, that the number of kids in private schools was steadily growing. Growing demand fueled a boom in the education industry. Rising general income and fierce competition made school more affordable for more people. More schools opened, but that tells only half the tale. There were many different kinds of schools, with different goals, curricula, and teaching styles. Literacy levels were higher a century and a half ago than they are today.
Public-school proponents would have us believe that government took over education for the sake of the poor. The truth is, early activists - urged on by education bureaucrats - idealized the militaristic atmosphere of Prussian schools and wanted to mold the nation's children into "good citizens". Later on, great industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie wanted government schools to mold citizens for work in the factories. Today teachers and their powerful unions love the job security. Meanwhile, quality education falls by the wayside.
Such is to be expected when we relieve families of the responsibility for their children's needs and place their fate in the hands of so-called experts. At a national education summit last year, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, a huge supporter of public schooling, nevertheless told the audience that schools were "ruining" the lives of "millions" of children every year. Given the 12 years of mind-numbing, stultifying boredom and mediocrity that makes up the average student's public-school experience, it's hard to disagree with him. Sad to say, the "solution" proposed by Gates and other public-school supporters, including the New Hampshire Supreme Court, is more or "better" funding, and widespread acceptance of this cure-all leads to our present predicament.
It is at times of crisis when free people most need to return to first principles, and the founding principles of our republican government include a belief in individual initiative, importance of family, private enterprise, and personal responsibility. We've largely abandoned belief in these things, and our tragically flawed system of public schools reflects that fact. The Republicans have it half right in this debate: a constitutional amendment is in order - but one that separates school and state
Source
Godless Dawkins challenges British schools
RICHARD DAWKINS, the Oxford University professor and campaigning atheist, is planning to take his fight against God into the classroom by flooding schools with anti-religious literature. He is setting up a charity that will subsidise books, pamphlets and DVDs attacking the "educational scandal" of theories such as creationism while promoting rational and scientific thought. The foundation will also attempt to divert donations from the hands of "missionaries" and church-based charities.
His plans are sparking criticism from academics, religious leaders and fellow scientists. The Church of England described them as "disturbing", while others complained that Dawkins's foundation bore the "whiff of a campaigning organisation" rather than a charity.
John Hall, dean of Westminster and the Church of England's chief education officer, said: "I would be very disturbed if this project was going to be widely supported because it's not based on reasoned argument."
Dawkins, Oxford's professor of the public understanding of science, is the author of various bestsellers extolling evolution, such as The Selfish Gene. His latest book, The God Delusion, is a sustained polemic against religious faith. He established his foundation in both Britain and America earlier this year and is now applying for charitable status. It was founded in response to what he calls the "organised ignorance" that is promoting creationism, the belief that the Old Testament account of the origins of man is true. Another challenge comes in the form of "intelligent design", the suggestion that life is the result of a guiding force rather than pure evolutionary natural selection.
"The enlightenment is under threat," Dawkins said. "So is reason. So is truth. We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and resources to defending it from deliberate attack from organised ignorance. We even have to go out on the attack ourselves, for the sake of reason and sanity."
Creationism is less widespread in Britain than in the US, but there is a growing movement lobbying to have it introduced as part of the national curriculum. The Emmanuel Schools Foundation, sponsored by Sir Peter Vardy, the Christian car dealer, has been criticised for featuring creationist theories in lessons in the three comprehensives it runs. A spokesman for the foundation denied the claims. However, Steve Layfield, head of science at Emmanuel College in Gateshead, is a director of Truth in Science, a Christian group campaigning to have "intelligent design" in science lessons. Truth in Science has sent DVDs and educational materials to thousands of secondary schools to encourage them to debate intelligent design. Andy McIntosh, director at the organisation and professor of thermodynamics at Leeds University, said: "We are not flat-earthers. We're just trying to encourage good scientific discussion."
Dawkins, however, describes the theory as a "bronze-age myth" and plans to send his own material to schools to counter the "subversion of science". He also plans to campaign against children being labelled with the religion of their parents. "It is immoral to brand children with religion," he said. "This is a Catholic child. That is a Muslim child. I want everyone to flinch when they hear such a phrase, just as they would if they heard that is a Marxist child."
But Hall said: "The European convention on human rights is clear that parents have the right to bring up children within the faith they hold."
Dawkins is also critical of donating money to religion-based charities, warning that pledges for disaster victims should not end up in the hands of "missionaries". His foundation will maintain a database of charities free of "church contamination".
Christian Aid, however, believes Dawkins is "tarring a lot of excellent charities with the same brush". Dominic Nutt, a spokesman, said: "Many charities give aid only on the basis of need."
Dawkins's approach has also offended fellow scientists. Steven Rose, emeritus professor of biology at the Open University, said: "I worry that Richard's view about belief is too simplistic, and so hostile that as a committed secularist myself I am uneasy about it. We need to recognise that our own science also depends on certain assumptions about the way the world is - assumptions that he and I of course share."
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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.
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23 November, 2006
NCLB LAW FAILS TO RAISE BLACK ACHIEVEMENT
No-one who knows what a century of IQ testing shows will find that "perplexing"
When President Bush signed his sweeping education law a year into his presidency, it set 2014 as the deadline by which schools were to close the test-score gaps between minority and white students that have persisted since standardized testing began. Now, as Congress prepares to consider reauthorizing the law next year, researchers and a half-dozen recent studies, including three issued last week, are reporting little progress toward that goal. Slight gains have been seen for some grade levels.
Despite concerted efforts by educators, the test-score gaps are so large that, on average, African-American and Hispanic students in high school can read and do arithmetic at only the average level of whites in junior high school. "The gaps between African-Americans and whites are showing very few signs of closing," Michael T. Nettles, a senior vice president at the Educational Testing Service, said in a paper he presented recently at Columbia University. One ethnic minority, Asians, generally fares as well as or better than whites. The reports and their authors, in interviews, portrayed an educational landscape in which test-score gaps between black or Hispanic students and whites appear in kindergarten and worsen through 12 years of public education. Some researchers based their conclusions on federal test results, while others have cited state exams, the SATs and other widely administered standardized assessments. Still, the studies have all concurred: The achievement gaps remain, perplexing and persistent.
The findings pose a challenge not only for Mr. Bush but also for the Democratic lawmakers who joined him in negotiating the original law, known as No Child Left Behind, and who will control education policy in Congress next year. Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Representative George Miller of California, who are expected to be the chairmen of the Senate and House education committees, will promote giving more resources to schools [i.e, throw money at it. How unable to learn from experience can you be? It's the lawmakeres who need educating] and researching strategies to improve minority performance, according to aides. "Closing the achievement gap is at the heart of No Child Left Behind and must continue to be our focus in renewing the act next year," Mr. Kennedy said in a statement. Experts have suggested many possible changes, including improving the law's mechanisms for ensuring that teachers in poor schools are experienced and knowledgeable, and extending early-childhood education to more students.
Henry L. Johnson, an assistant secretary of education, said: "I don't dispute that looking at some comparisons we see that these gaps are not closing - or not as fast as they ought to. But it's also accurate to say that when taken as a whole, student performance is improving. The presumption that we won't get to 100 percent proficiency from here presumes that everything is static. To reach the 100 percent by 2014, we'll all have to work faster and smarter."
The law requires states, districts and schools to report annual test results for all racial and ethnic groups, and to show annual improvements for each. It imposes sanctions on schools that do not meet the rising targets. Many experts and officials, including the president's brother, Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, have supported the goal of raising all students to academic proficiency, but they have also called it unrealistic to accomplish in a decade. But President Bush, who put education at the center of his 2000 campaign, has been insisting that it is not only feasible but that the gaps are already closing. "There are good results of No Child Left Behind across the nation," Mr. Bush said last month at a school in North Carolina. "We have an achievement gap in America that is - that I don't like and you shouldn't like." "The gap is closing," he said.
The researchers behind the reports issued last week in Washington, D.C., New York and California were far more pessimistic, though. "The achievement gap is alive and well," said G. Gage Kingsbury, an author of the report issued in Washington by the Northwest Evaluation Association, a nonprofit group based in Oregon that administers tests. Examining results from reading and math tests administered to 500,000 students in 24 states in the fall of 2004 and the spring of 2005, the study found: "For each score level at each grade in each subject, minority students grew less than European-Americans, and students from poor schools grew less than those from wealthier ones." Minority and poor students also lost more academic ground each summer, the study said.
More here
STUFFY OLD CONSERVATIVE SINGLE-SEX EDUCATION REDISCOVERED
The problem posed in Mrs. Pfeiffer's seventh-grade prealgebra class at Campbell Hall is seasonal: How much turkey is needed to serve 30 people if each person gets 2/5 of a pound? Hands shoot up, with an "ooh, ooh!" here and a quizzical look there. It appears to be a typical math class on the tree-lined campus of the private North Hollywood coed school, except for one thing: There are only boys in the room. The all-girls math class will meet a few hours later. For more than eight years, Campbell Hall has separated the 250 boys and girls in seventh- and eighth-grade math; this fall, for the first time, the school is doing the same with science class. Students benefit because they are less distracted by the opposite sex, said math teacher Michelle Pfeiffer, and instruction can be tailored to the different learning styles of boys and girls. "We can express ourselves better," said Brett Landsberger, 12, a Campbell Hall seventh-grader. "It's like boys are a different species. You walk by the girls classes and they're sitting there all perfect, and you go into the boys class and they're all over the floor."
Single-sex classes and schools - both public and private - are gaining favor across the nation as educators search for ways to boost test scores and students' self-esteem. In 1995, only three public schools in the nation offered a single-sex option, compared with more than 253 today, according to the National Assn. for Single Sex Public Education. Five percent of private schools are single-sex. In Los Angeles, a new girls-only public charter school opened this fall. Another newly opened charter school in Lincoln Heights has launched one of the first formal experiments in single-sex education, creating separate boys and girls classes with plans to study their test scores, classroom behavior and other achievement yardsticks.
Research has long suggested that girls in coed settings defer to boys and receive less attention from teachers. Other educators cite more recent evidence that boys, especially low-income minority youths, might benefit as well. The gap between girls' and boys' test scores has decreased, and girls are applying in higher numbers to college and now obtain more bachelor's degrees than boys.
A recent ruling by the U.S. Department of Education giving public schools more leeway to offer single-sex curricula will probably accelerate the move toward single-sex classrooms, experts said. Previous rules generally banned single-sex classes, with some exceptions. The new guidelines, scheduled to take effect Friday, permit single-sex education in public schools but must be geared toward improving achievement, providing diverse experiences or meeting the particular needs of students. Programs must treat male and female students evenhandedly and offer substantially equal coeducational classes in the same subject. Enrollment must be voluntary. "We're already seeing schools respond to the amended regulations," said Elena Silva, a senior policy analyst with the Education Sector, a nonprofit Washington, D.C.-based think tank. "There's a lot of public support for at least the notion of single-sex schooling." That support reflects a wave of enthusiasm for greater school choice overall as policymakers, parents and educators struggle to reform an education system that has left American students frequently lagging behind their international peers. The federal No Child Left Behind Act endorsed same-sex programs as an "innovative" practice.
But gender separation is controversial. Critics contend the practice is a slide backward, one that could reinforce stereotypes and lead to different and unequal classroom experiences. The American Assn. of University Women argues that there is little evidence that girls and boys do better apart. Better-funded schools with more focused academic instruction, smaller class sizes and qualified teachers are far more likely to influence learning, said research director Catherine Hill.
The American Civil Liberties Union sued a Louisiana junior high school last summer over its plan to separate girls and boys, arguing that it violated Title IX regulations that require gender equity in educational programs that receive federal funding. The complaint against the Livingston Parish School Board cited statements that girls would be taught "good character" while boys would be taught about "heroic" behavior. The school board dropped the plan.
But such arguments have failed to sway those educators who believe there is much to gain and little to lose in experimenting with same-gender education. They point to a growing body of findings - albeit disputed - that boys' and girls' brains function and develop in different ways. Boys, the theory goes, do better in competitive, action-based, team-oriented tasks, while girls thrive in a more relaxed environment, working in pairs or alone.
Since Campbell Hall began the single-gender classes, girls are taking more advanced math courses in high school and are participating more in class, said junior high Principal Eileen Wasserman. In Regina Choi's eighth-grade math class one recent morning, about 16 girls worked quietly in pairs solving algebra problems. Choi said girls feel more comfortable asking questions in class, while boys prefer to wait to avoid looking less smart in front of classmates. Though the course's content is the same for both sexes, Choi said it is sometimes more effective posing problems for girls using shopping examples and for boys using sports. Another math teacher, Arlene Myles, said she focuses on trying to get the girls to be more competitive and the boys more cooperative. Because teachers and administrators believed the single-sex approach to math was successful, they decided to apply it to science this year. Courses at Campbell Hall's high school are coed.
Students had mixed views. "I like math now a lot more than I used to," said Ally Piddock, 12. "Boys are a distraction because they goof around a lot and it's easier for me to concentrate when they're not there." "It's easier to pay attention in math when girls are not there," agreed Reese Wexler, 13. "But science would be better coed. It's a different environment. In lab, the people you might work better with could be girls or boys."
In the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second-largest, Jordan High School and King/Drew Medical Magnet are experimenting with single-sex curricula, establishing small academies for at-risk boys. George McKenna, assistant superintendent of the Pasadena Unified School District, said he has tried and failed to interest his staff in trying single-sex classes but is encouraged that the new federal guidelines may ease resistance. Many public schools, including charters, have skirted federal law and used same-gender curricula for years on the "down-low," said Caprice Young, executive director of the California Charter Schools Assn., who predicted that more charter schools will open single-sex programs.
New Village Charter High School opened in September on the grounds of St. Anne's, a residential treatment center for teen mothers. The ninth- through 12th-grade college prep all-girls school will focus on the particular needs of low-income girls. The school opened after receiving a waiver from the state and had fretted at the possible federal response. "I've been a coed advocate all of my educational career, but when you look at the specific needs of these girls it seems absolutely essential that it be single-sex," said Paul Cummins of the New Visions Foundation, which helped develop the school. "This is one very small single-sex school in an ocean of coed schools."
But data from a major California project suggest that single-sex programs are problematic and at the least must be carefully planned. In 1997, as an experiment in public school choice, the state opened 12 single-gender academies - one middle or high school for boys and another identical one for girls - in six school districts. A 2001 study by researchers at the University of Toronto, UC San Diego and UC Berkeley found that the program was poorly implemented and underfunded. Separating girls from boys reduced classroom distractions, said the authors - although students still experienced harassment and teasing. But traditional gender stereotypes often were reinforced, and students received mixed messages from their teachers. Only one of the schools, the San Francisco 49ers Academy in East Palo Alto, is still open.
At the Excel Charter Academy, a middle school northeast of downtown Los Angeles, Principal Patricia Mora and other administrators launched a project to evaluate girls-only and boys-only programs and a coed group for comparison, with students randomly assigned to each group. In its first year, the school is offering only sixth grade, with 25 students in each group. Early observations find the coed group having a few more behavioral problems, said Mora. But the all-boys group seems to be doing especially well academically. One recent morning, the boys' humanities class was reading "Boy of the Painted Cave," about a boy in ancient times who wants to be a cave painter. Both boys and girls were assigned to read the book, and stories with female protagonists will be introduced later. As teacher Cecily Feltham described the hero grabbing a wolf by the neck and fighting a bull, the boys were attentive, offering vivid descriptions of the action. In another room, the girls science class was learning about thermal energy, having built a solar oven. The coed group, meanwhile, took physical education during recess.
The first test scores are due in January, and Mora is hoping to attract a top research group to evaluate the program. "If at the end of the year we find that one group is working out better than the other, then I don't think we'd continue to subject one cohort to being coed," she said. "But I honestly don't know what we'll find."
Source
DISCREDITED BRITISH HIGH SCHOOL QUALIFICATIONS
Eton College is leading a rebellion that could result in it dropping A levels in favour of an alternative examination system with no coursework and tougher questions. Tony Little, Eton Head Master, said that "Pre-U" examinations being developed at Cambridge University would offer pupils more stimulation and a system of testing that rewarded creativity and lateral thinking. He said that A levels forced children to "think inside a very small box" and discriminated against highly imaginative pupils, whose exam answers were often marked down because they were considered too sophisticated. "We are very interested in adopting it and in looking at anything that thinks afresh and in a creative way, which has a stimulating syllabus. We want the best courses that challenge our students and, if that means doing the Pre-U instead of A Level, then we will do it."
Eton is among at least 100 leading independent schools to have shown strong interest in the Pre-U. Others include Harrow, Dulwich College, Winchester and Charterhouse. But there are fears of the creation of a two-tier examination system for rich and poor pupils, with independent schools opting for the Pre-U and state schools remaining with the discredited A-level system. Graham Able, Master of Dulwich College, who is on a steering group advising on the Pre-U, said the diploma would better prepare pupils for university. "It will take us back to the original idea of A levels from the 1950s as a qualification for university entrance," he said.
Barnaby Lenon, Head Master of Harrow, said that A levels were flawed because too many pupils got top grades, examiners made too many mistakes when marking and coursework was vulnerable to cheats. "The Pre-U combines the flexibility of A level with regard to subject choice together with the promise of harder questions and reliable examining," he said. Richard Cairns, headmaster of Brighton College, said that he believed that most independent schools would be in favour of the Pre-U when it is introduced in 2008. "A levels do not discriminate enough at the top end of the ability range. If government reforms to A levels are not satisfactory, we will go with the Pre-U and so will most others," he said.
Kevin Stannard, of Cambridge International Examinations, said that about 20 state schools and colleges had also expressed an interest in the Pre-U. "They represent the tip of the iceberg," he said, adding that he expected more state schools to sign up once it had been officially recognised. Growing support for the Pre-U will put pressure on the Government to speed up reforms of the A-level system. It has promised to make A levels harder. An extended essay will be introduced, together with more open-ended questions in place of those that lead students through a series of highly structured answers. Coursework is also being cut back to reduce plagiarism. A new A+ grade is being considered. Many heads fear that these reforms may be too late, as they will not be ready before September 2008, the date the Pre-U is due to begin.
Dr Stannard predicted that 2008 would mark a turning point. "Schools will have to choose between the reformed A level, the Pre-U and any other alternative," he said. One alternative, the International Baccalaureate (IB), has been adopted by about 90 independent schools, but most have retained A levels as well. After an initial surge of interest, support has levelled off. Many schools find it too prescriptive and too heavily weighted towards very academic pupils. Andrew Boggis, Warden of Forest School, in East London, and chairman of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference of independent schools, says that neither Pre-U nor IB is the answer. He has called for the reform of A levels, with coursework being dropped from final grades. A government spokesman said that A levels were here to stay. "However, as standards in schools rise, we need to make sure that we are stretching and challenging all students, particularly our brightest," 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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.
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22 November, 2006
Preferences Forever?
The University of Michigan's president does her best George Wallace impersonation.
Michigan voters struck a blow for equality this month, when 58% of them approved an amendment to the state constitution banning racial discrimination in public universities and contracting. Almost identical measures have previously passed by similar majorities in California and Washington state. That means the original meaning of the 1964 Civil Rights Act--that racial discrimination of any kind is illegal--has won reaffirmation in three liberal states, none of which have voted for a Republican for president since 1988. Supporters now plan to carry the fight to other states.From the outraged cries of affirmative action diehards, you would think the dark night of fascism was descending with the passage of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative. Mary Sue Coleman is president of the University of Michigan, which has already spent millions of taxpayers' dollars defending its racial preferences in courts. She addressed what Tom Bray of the Detroit News called "a howling mob of hundreds of student and faculty protestors" last week. "Diversity matters at Michigan," she declared. "It matters today, and it will matter tomorrow." Echoes of George Wallace, who in 1963 declared from the steps of Alabama's Capitol: "I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."
Ms. Coleman isn't the only Michigan official to employ Wallace-style rhetoric against MCRI. Detroit's Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick told a fundraiser last April that the measure would usher in an era of racial prejudice. "Bring it on!" he bellowed. "We will affirm to the world that affirmative action will be here today, it will be here tomorrow, and there will be affirmative action in the state forever."
Another leader in Michigan's massive resistance is Karen Moss, the executive director of the state ACLU. "I do think it's necessary for the courts to slow this thing down and . . . interpret some of the language," she told the Washington Post. That "thing" is an amendment that simply states: "The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting." As the blog Discriminations.us notes, "What part of that language does the ACLU find vague or unclear and in need of "interpretation'?"
Let's be clear what is really at stake here. Racial preferences were intended to help disadvantaged minorities, but they have turned into a spoils system for the privileged. "Most go to children of powerful politicians, civil-rights activists, and other relatively well-off blacks and Hispanics," notes Stuart Taylor of National Journal. "This does nothing for the people most in need of help, who lack the minimal qualifications to get into the game."
School choice and other dramatic efforts to improve the quality of K-12 education would do far more to improve the chances of minorities entering and finishing college than any racial set-asides. Indeed, school choice would represent genuine "affirmative action" in favor of millions of disadvantaged kids trapped in failing schools.
Despite all the demagoguery and misrepresentations hurled at the MCRI, a CNN exit poll of 1,955 Michigan voters showed that the measure had widespread appeal across many demographic groups. A majority of both sexes voted for MCRI, as did 40% of self-described liberals and Democrats. Among nonwhite voters, 30% of men and 18% of women voted "yes."
The public sentiment against racial preferences is in accord with the overwhelming belief of the lawmakers who passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They thought they were ending segregation, not sanctioning new race-conscious violations of the Constitution. But it didn't take long for activist courts and bureaucrats to claim the act actually authorized the creation of preference programs.
In recent years, the courts have been slowly inching back towards a belief that the legitimate quest for diversity does not justify any and all race-conscious means to achieve it. In 2003 Jennifer Gratz, a young white woman denied admission as an undergraduate to the University of Michigan, won her case before the Supreme Court. By a vote of 6-3, the high court held that the school's undergraduate college had unconstitutionally awarded applicants a set number of points solely for not being white.
On the same day, however, the court ruled 5-4 against Barbara Grutter's suit against the University of Michigan's law school. The court decided that the law school used race as only one factor among many and upheld the view of the late Justice Lewis Powell, who held in the 1978 Bakke case that race could be used to achieve "diversity" in higher education.
Justice Sandra O'Connor, who sided with Ms. Gratz but wrote the opinion in Grutter, issued some cautionary language that supporters of affirmative action should heed: "The court expects that 25 years from now the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today." After noting that institutions of higher education in California and Washington were pursuing alternatives to racial preferences, she urged that "universities in other states should draw on the most promising aspects of these race-neutral alternatives as they develop." Just last week, the now-retired Justice O'Connor was asked her opinion of MCRI's approval. She replied that it was "entirely within the right and privilege of voters" to enact a ban on racial preferences.
The blind anger that supporters of racial preferences have shown towards efforts at their reform betrays a lack of imagination. Ms. Gratz, who won her Supreme Court case against the University of Michigan and spearheaded this year's effort to ban quotas in that state, says she would be happy to explore alternatives if the opponents would sit down with her. She believes universities could look to socioeconomic factors rather than racial ones when considering applicants. Economic elements "should be taken into account, regardless of your skin color," she says.
Ms. Gratz is showing great forbearance in holding out an olive branch to her opponents. Just last June Ms. Gratz filed a report with Detroit police accusing Luke Massie, national chairman of the activist group By Any Means Necessary, of displaying a knife during a heated confrontation outside a state civil rights meeting. "It was one of several attempts to either intimidate me or attack my character," she said yesterday in an interview after a speech she gave at the National Association of Scholars meeting in Boston. She said Mr. Massie had a knife in his right pants pocket and toyed with it, pulling it halfway out of his pants but not drawing its blade. Mr. Massie denies the allegation.
What isn't in dispute is that supporters of racial preferences sometimes engage in behavior that resembles the "massive resistance" campaign that tried to preserve segregation in the South, and even led some counties to close their public schools rather than allow integration. Some supporters of preference programs in Michigan are talking about lowering state university admission standards dramatically in hopes that the university will then accept what, in their view, is the proper number of minority students.
Earlier this year, some 250 high school students staged a near riot at a hearing of the state's Board of Canvassers, which was charged with determining whether the initiative qualified for the ballot. The board's four commissioners were preparing to vote when members of Mr. Massie's group began yelling, "They say Jim Crow. We say hell no." Some 50 students began marching on the board, knocking over a table before Lansing police could stop them. Other protesters began stomping their feet, with one yelling at Paul Mitchell, an African-American commissioner, "Be a black man about this, please!"
The board adjourned for two hours only to be faced with more catcalls when they reconvened. In the end, two Republican appointees voted to place the measure on the ballot, but Mr. Mitchell voted "no," and Doyle O'Connor, the other Democratic appointee, refused to vote. Three votes were needed for the measure to secure ballot access. Eventually an appellate court had to finally order the board to do its sworn duty.
We've come a long way since 1964, when the late civil rights hero Hubert Humphrey stood on the Senate floor and told his colleagues that if the civil rights bill contained "any language which provides that an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related to color, race, religion, or national origin, I will start eating the pages one after another, because it is not in there."
Four decades later, supporters of racial preferences imposed by government agencies are blocking legal efforts to establish the color-blind society that Martin Luther King envisioned. Dr. King's dream is alive in Michigan, and in other states, but a large number of people seem interested in stirring up a nightmare of massive resistance. Such efforts are likely not only to only fail, but to harden the public's opposition to divisive racial quotas.
Source
BRITAIN: ELITE UNIVERSITIES MUST BE DESTROYED
That's the underlying agenda of Britain's Leftist government. First, stop awarding research funding on merit ....
Britain's elite research universities were warned last night that they could forfeit millions of pounds in a shake-up of higher education. David Eastwood, head of England's university funding council, told The Times that, in future, universities that admit a large number of students from poor backgrounds were likely to receive as much public funding as those that concentrate on research. The shift will make it harder for middle-class students to get places at university.
At present almost a third (32 per cent) of all research funding goes to just five institutions: Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester, Imperial and University College London. These admit among the lowest number of students from poor backgrounds. They said last night that they feared they would have to fight harder for fewer funds and would struggle to compete with competitors, particularly in America.
The Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) spends 6.7 billion pounds on teaching and research in universities. Of this, 1.6 billion goes on research, 332 million on raising the number of working-class students attending university and 118 million on developing regional business links. Professor Eastwood, its chief executive, said that as students pay higher fees and employers invest more in the sector, universities must play a greater role in society. While insisting that research funding will not be cut, the former Vice-Chancellor of the University of East Anglia said that ensuring more young people attended university was as important as the take-up of subjects such as maths, engineering and physics.
However, Malcolm Grant, Provost of University College London and chairman of the Russell Group of leading universities, said that while all would like to see the funding gap in teaching costs close, that gap was worst for research universities that compete globally for staff. "While we applaud widening participation, it would seem sensible for Hefce to look at ways to allow our world-class universities to compete at an international level and not to tax research funding to cross-subsidise widening participation across the sector," Professor Grant said. While universities have concentrated traditionally on teaching and research, Professor Eastwood said it was now time for institutions to work out what they were good at and act upon it. It was not possible for all universities to excel in all areas, he said, and instead of competing with the large research-led universities for diminishing returns, they should capitalise on excellent teaching and regional economic growth.
Five universities are already involved in pilot projects, including Sheffield Hallam, which has been given 1.2 million to undertake research on food waste, packaging and better ingredients with companies in the region. Forty-two per cent of 18 to 30-year-olds attend university and the Government has set itself a target of 50 per cent reaching that level by 2010. Since the introduction of 3,000 pounds-a-year tuition fees, the numbers applying to university have dropped, especially among poorer school-leavers.
The University of Reading's decision last night to close its world-class physics department, despite the prospect of a government rescue package, was met with dismay by the scientific community.
Source
Australia: More contempt for the people from a Leftist elitist
That kids get turned off school by being bored rigid -- by politically correct preaching masquerading as education -- is not considered
Most Australians are anti-intellectual and hostile towards education, a senior Labor frontbencher said today. In a provocative speech to the Sydney Institute tonight (AEDT), Lindsay Tanner will argue parents are partly to blame for a culture of anti-intellectualism in Australia. "There's a lot of evidence that we're still disdaining of learning, we're still regarding learning activity as something that `real Aussies' don't get into too much," Mr Tanner said on ABC Radio today. "It's not an accident that our levels of education and our level of commitment to education and learning is significantly lower than comparable countries."
Mr Tanner said Prime Minister John Howard had fuelled anti-intellectualism by suggesting it was fine for young people to leave school early, and by allowing Education Minister Julie Bishop to brand schoolteachers "Maoists". "Australians have come a long way in the past 20 or 30 years but there's still a lingering culture of antagonism to learning, and I think the Howard government really has been exploiting that," he said. "We should have a government that's actually upholding learning, that's advocating learning, improving learning. "Instead, we've got a government that's exploiting that anti-learning strand of feeling that's very deep in Australia." It was "staggering" that 46 per cent of school leavers did not go on to either higher education or TAFE, he said.
Mr Tanner defended his strong views. "I don't think it's disdainful, I think it's an acknowledgement of reality," he said. "I've grown up in the Labor movement, for example, where the word `academic' has historically been a term of derision. That's just a reflection of the wider society." A British university's presentation of an honorary degree to Australian cricketer Shane Warne, who once famously boasted that he had never read a book, illustrated that many Australians regarded learning as "a bit of a laugh", he said. "I thought that was embarrassing," Mr Tanner said. "He isn't the first person to receive one of these things ... but I suspect in terms of learning and approach to education, he's probably the least justified."
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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.
***************************
21 November, 2006
Australian PM Criticizes anti-business curricula in State schools
Australian schools should teach innovation and the virtues of a free-enterprise culture, Prime Minister John Howard said yesterday in comments likely to cause further friction with the states. Mr Howard was the keynote speaker at the Business Summit of the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation meeting in Hanoi in Vietnam. He told 500 business leaders that free enterprise and the values of openness and innovation were not emphasised enough in Australian high schools. "I think our whole education system, starting at primary school, going into secondary school, should have a much greater focus on what we used to call, years and years ago, business principles," he told the summit.
The comments are likely to inflame an already-strained relationship with state Labor governments, increasingly nervous about the Federal Government moving into their areas of responsibility. While universities are mostly a federal responsibility, school education is firmly within the states' control. State governments are already on high alert following last week's majority 5-2 High Court ruling that the Commonwealth had the power to regulate employment contracts of corporation employees. Constitutional experts have since warned the High Court decision may open the way for other federal encroachments into state areas. Mr Howard and Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop have previously expressed concerns at aspects of state-run education, including teaching of history.
The above report appeared in the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" on Nov. 19, 2006
Sinking ... poor white boys are the new failing class
British working-class white boys have taken over from their black counterparts as school under-achievers. Michael Collins explains why
If confirmation were needed that the urban white working class has moved away from the archaic image of a cockney cap-wearing armchair revolutionary, it came via a report published last week from the Social Justice Policy Group: a think tank created by David Cameron and chaired by the former Tory party leader Iain Duncan Smith. While liberals stand accused of demonising and disenfranchising the white working class, and new Labour legislates on the food that should go in their mouths and the words that should come out, the Conservatives have weighed in with news regarding this urban tribe’s rising generation. The prognosis isn’t favourable: things ain’t what they used to be. The report, entitled State of the Nation - Education Failure, casts the young of the tribe in an image that takes up the baton from Vicky Pollard of Little Britain and the chav industry that erupted a couple of years ago. It brings news of an illiterate underclass, spiralling towards drug dependency, crime and homelessness.
Apparently the rot begins with truancy and poor exam results. For the first time boys from white working-class backgrounds are performing less well in their studies than their contemporaries in any other ethnic group. Just 17% of white working-class boys achieve five good-grade GCSEs, 2% fewer than black boys and far below those from Indian and Chinese backgrounds.
If it's true that urban white boys have long since come to emulate the style, attitude and language of their black contemporaries, this latest development takes the transformation to the nth degree. Respect?
Throwing cash at the problem is not going to improve matters as, to paraphrase the report, the parents are to blame. A lack of parental interest in a child's education is listed along with parental drug and alcohol abuse for the underperformance of working class white lads.
Some of this was evident at some level in many urban neighbourhoods from the 1980s, a point the report fails to reflect on. What's happened in the past 20 years is that the problem has expanded and deepened. As GK Chesterton once said of writers trying to predict the future: "They took something or other that was going on in their time, and then said that it would go on more and more until something extraordinary happened."
According to the report, we are now in the throes of something extraordinary happening. But it strikes me that this is not exclusively a 21st-century issue. Just over 100 years ago, authors, anthropologists and reformers descended on working-class neighbourhoods. The class they were observing then was one that was said to exist without a voice, in the form of a political vote, and emerged as an identifiable crowd only when celebrating a patriotic victory, sporting or otherwise (at which point they were said to emerge like "rats from the sewers", sing drunken songs and attack each other with pigs' bladders).
Reformers put the emphasis on the need for education and thrift in order to lead the voiceless underclass from gambling, alcohol, licentiousness, vice and crime. Some were concerned that greater wealth might lead to further debasement. This is echoed today in those who believe the masses are destroying the planet with their fast food and holidays in Benidorm.
With the emergence of universal suffrage, healthcare and education, the white working-class profile altered. They became seen as salt-of-the-earth toilers, living out their lives in the same streets they'd been born in before a backdrop of factory, pub, market and betting shop and lots of communal singing, a dab of fisticuffs, and perhaps a bit of politics and patriotism thrown in.
In the early 20th century, working-class culture was localised and family based and, even if the emphasis wasn't on education, it largely valued working hard and doing well.
How things have changed. As well as highlighting the underachievement of white working-class boys, last week's report found that the young males who are doing best at school come from the Chinese and Indian communities, which have perhaps the most insular and inward-looking ethnic backgrounds. Iain Duncan Smith says in the report that boys from Chinese and Indian homes do well because "family structures are strong and learning is highly valued". He adds that marrying-in and keeping the faith are fostered.
The irony is that back in the 20th century, similar elements kept the white working class together in a tightly knit, localised culture. Once, it too had its own rituals and community cohesion. But that all changed and a social class that was, economically, already bottom of the pile was forced to experience more upheaval than any other social group. After the second world war and the bombing that had destroyed many of the old terraces and tenements in urban areas, so many people were rehoused in new concrete estates which broke down many of the old community ties. From the 1950s onwards there were incessant waves of immigration, with the white working class forced to share what were already cramped quarters with a huge influx of immigrants.
When they complained, they were dismissed by the chattering classes as Little Englanders and racists. The incessant attempts to accommodate an increasingly dense population scattered the white working class out of their original habitat. Many moved out to the suburbs, geographically fracturing the strong family networks and communities.
Before that the working class were born and bred in the place they would live for the rest of their lives. Existing cheek by jowl with family, friends and neighbours meant that everybody knew everybody else and their business. A lack of respect or a stepping out of line could haunt you for life; there was an incentive to keep your nose clean and do as you would be done by. That enforced morality and standard of behaviour began to unravel in the anonymity of the new estates.
Changing social mores also hit hard as teenage pregnancy and single mothers bred boys without father figures and dependent on benefits. Added to those problems are the increased awareness among the working classes of the lives of the rich: rather than living among their own kind, television provided a window to another way of living.
For many young lads, education seemed a long route to riches, particularly when huge sums were on offer to footballers or musicians, or lately to anyone who appears on reality television. Today's working-class lads are as clued up as anyone on what wealth is about and its signifiers. Burberry, anyone?
The culture of political correctness and the widespread (and often accurate) view among many working-class people that every other social and ethnic group's needs came above theirs when it came to government resources bred resentment. From the 1980s the multiculturalists formed part of a breed within civic bodies, keen to erase evidence of the local heritage of the white working class and emphasise the historical presence of every other creed and colour. Had all this been done to any other ethnic or social group, its problems would not have remained so hidden. "If the experience of poor urban whites were happening to other groups, there would be an outcry, followed by inquiries, commissions, reports, and positive action plans," wrote one columnist last week. "But nothing of the sort will occur. The entire thrust of the state machine is to address the needs of ethnic minorities."
I would argue that divorcing today's young working-class lads from a sense of their own history and belonging has played a large part in their underperformance. When the poor academic performance of black boys became an issue, experts were quick to point to the causes: a lack of positive male role models, racism and history. The poor performance of black boys at school first became an issue in the 1970s. Nobody then mentioned what was happening to the likes of us. I left a comprehensive school with one CSE. Only a handful of my white working-class contemporaries went on to further education. Now, 30 years on, it is depressing to say the least that things have got even worse.
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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.
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20 November, 2006
"ADVICE" FOR BULLIES?
Loony Britain at work again
ANTI-BULLYING advisers should be employed by local councils to help to combat bullying in schools, according to recommendations from the Office of the Children's Commissioner. The advisers would mediate in cases where parents complained that bullies were not being disciplined. They would also dissuade bullies from abusing other pupils and provide advice for victims.
The new report, Bullying in Schools, commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) and to be published this week, states that parents often find that head teachers dismiss allegations that a child is being bullied. The new anti-bullying advisers would be selected and employed by local authorities. The report recommends that the parents of a bullied child should have the right to a hearing before a committee of school governors. It also wants new powers for the local government ombudsmen to intervene in schools where discipline is a problem.
Professor Carolyn Hamilton, senior legal adviser to the Office of the Children's Commissioner, writes in the report: "Some heads still respond to parents by rejecting the suggestion that there is any bullying in the school. "It may be alleged that the parent is overprotective or even a troublemaker. There may be hurtful suggestions that the bullied child is oversensitive or antisocial."
A DfES spokesman said the proposals would be examined by Alan Johnson, the education secretary. The spokesman said: "While in the vast majority of cases of bullying, schools do an excellent job, we want to ensure that every case is investigated thoroughly and that parents have an effective route of complaint if they feel inadequate action has been taken."
Sir Al Aynsley-Green, the children's commissioner, said of the report: "There is evidence that the present system is not satisfactory. Our proposals would lead to a more formal appeals process involving the governors and above all an independent aspect which has been missing until now." Aynsley-Green was himself bullied as a 10-year-old when his family moved to London from Northumberland and he was victimised because of his accent. He said that bullying is an "enormous problem" and he is keen for it to be "on the front burner". He added that new technology meant bullies had new ways to make their victims' lives miserable: "Until recently, if children are being bullied at school, they could go home and be in a safe environment. Now they can't escape because they are bullied on their mobiles or by e-mail."
Up to 70% of children have experienced bullying, according to a survey of 8,574 children released earlier this month by the charity Bullying Online. Half of bullied pupils said they had been physically hurt. When bullying was reported to a teacher, children said that in 55% of cases it did not stop. A report from the Office of the Children's Commissioner, Bullying Today, said Muslim children had experienced greater victimisation after the September 11 attacks in America and the July 2005 London bombings. [Odd that!]
Source
BRITISH FAITH SCHOOLS DO WELL
FAITH schools have this year increased their dominance at the top of The Sunday Times's state primary league table - taking 60% of places in the list of the 500 best schools. The dominance of faith schools is likely to reopen the debate over whether such schools should change their strict admission policies. Since 2002, there has been a 10% increase in the number of church and Jewish primary schools in the top 500.
Alan Johnson, the education secretary, was last month forced into a climbdown over his plans to introduce reforms to ensure up to 25% of pupils at new faith schools came from other backgrounds. Kenneth Baker, a former Conservative education secretary, described the climbdown as "the fastest U-turn in British political history".
In the league tables published today, the most successful schools are Catholic and Jewish. Out of 1,700 Catholic primary schools, 141 are in the top 500; and out of 28 Jewish primary schools, six are in the top 500. A significantly smaller proportion of Church of England schools enjoy such success. Of 4,400 Church of England schools, only 142 are in the top 500.
In the two highest performing schools - North Cheshire Jewish school in Cheadle and St Mary and St Thomas Aquinas RC primary in Blaydon-on-Tyne in Gateshead - all pupils have achieved the maximum score in English, maths and science tests for the past three years. Experts have suggested the success of faith schools may be a result of their popularity with middle-class parents. Tony and Cherie Blair have sent their four children to Catholic primary schools.
According to Chris Woodhead, a former chief inspector of schools, faith schools are often the only realistic option for some parents in inner city areas. "If you cannot afford independent school fees, the local faith school may be the only one offering a decent education," he said.
Head teachers of faith schools, however, argue that a school's values rather than a middle-class intake is the key to success. Wendy Duffy, acting head of St Mary and St Thomas Aquinas, said her pupils were drawn from both affluent and less well-off backgrounds. "I think the strength of the school lies in its ethos," she said. "Gospel values are very important. They are essential to our mission."
Norma Massel, head teacher for the past seven years at North Cheshire Jewish school, said the moral and discipline code imposed by religious schools was a key to their performance. Her school in Cheadle, north Cheshire, draws pupils from as far as Northwich, which is 25 miles away from the school.
It can take dedication by parents to get places at church schools with some parents starting to go to church solely to get a place for their child. However, even this is no guarantee in some inner-city areas with schools reporting as many as three applications for every place. Others apply strict criteria: at the Our Lady of Victories primary, a small Catholic school in Putney, south London, children are only admitted if their parents have attended church diligently for at least three years. The head teacher, Margaret Ryall, said: "It is almost a register that is taken by the priest at the end of mass on Sunday. We impose a strict system so it is fair to all. I doubt whether non-Catholic parents could keep up that level of attendance."
Despite the prevalence of faith schools in the top 500, some community schools have enjoyed success. South Farnham community junior school in Surrey is one of three non-faith schools in the top 10. The school has more than 100 pupils sitting the tests and this year they all achieved the maximum score. Andrew Carter, head teacher for 18 years, said his results were the result of systematic teaching. "Smaller schools can rely on one excellent teacher, but this school has four classes sitting the test. "There is excellent teaching plus analysis of what extra effort is required to get all of them through the tests. There are a lot of small church schools that do well, but we take everybody."
There are no Muslim or Sikh primary schools in the top 500, but such faith schools are rare in the state sector. There are only five Muslim and two Sikh primary schools in the country.
Johnson last month announced plans to pass new laws to force faith schools to take more pupils from other faiths and non-religious backgrounds. He scrapped the proposals after lobbying from the Catholic church and complaints from backbench MPs.
The league tables of primary and secondary schools and the independent school tables are contained on the Parent Power CD-Rom and online.
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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.
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19 November, 2006
Why Intellectuals Still Support Socialism
Intellectuals, particularly academic intellectuals, tend to favor socialism and interventionism. How was the American university transformed from a center of higher learning to an outpost for socialist-inspired culture and politics? As recently as the early 1950s, the typical American university professor held social and political views quite similar to those of the general population. Today - well, you've all heard the jokes that circulated after the collapse of central planning in Eastern Europe and the former USSR, how the only place in the world where Marxists were still thriving was the Harvard political science department.
More generally, US higher education often looks like a clear case of the inmates running the asylum. That is, the students who were radicalized in the 1960s have now risen to positions of influence within colleges and universities. One needs only to observe the aggressive pursuit of "diversity" in admissions and hiring, the abandonment of the traditional curriculum in favor of highly politicized "studies" based on group identity, the mandatory workshops on sensitivity training, and so on.
A 1989 study for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching used the categories "liberal" and "conservative." It found that 70 percent of the professors in the major liberal arts colleges and research universities considered themselves liberal or moderately liberal, with less than 20 percent identifying themselves as conservative or moderately conservative.[1] (Of course, the term "liberal" here means left-liberal or socialist, not classical liberal.)
Christopher Cardiff and Daniel Klein have recently examined academics' political affiliations using voter-registration records for tenure-track faculty at 11 California universities. They find an average Democrat:Republican ratio of 5:1, ranging from 9:1 at Berkeley to 1:1 at Pepperdine. The humanities average 10:1, while business schools are at only 1.3:1. (Needless to say, even at the heartless, dog-eat-dog, sycophant-of-the-bourgeoisie business schools the ratio doesn't dip below 1:1.) While today's Republicans are hardly anti-socialist - particularly on foreign policy - these figures are consistent with a widespread perception that university faculties are increasingly unrepresentative of the communities they supposedly serve.
Now here's a surprise: Even in my own discipline, economics, 63 percent of the faculty in the Carnegie study identified themselves as liberal, compared with 72 percent in anthropology, political science, and sociology, 76 percent in ethnic studies, history, and philosophy, and 88 percent in public affairs. The Cardiff and Klein study finds an average D:R ratio in economics departments of 2.8:1 - lower than the sociologists' 44:1, to be sure, but higher than that of biological and chemical engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, management, marketing, accounting, and finance.
A survey of American Economic Association members, examined by Daniel Klein and Charlotta Stern, finds that most economists support safety regulations, gun control, redistribution, public schooling, and anti-discrimination laws. Another survey, reported in the Southern Economic Journal, reveals that "71 percent of American economists believe the distribution of income in the US should be more equal, and 81 percent feel that the redistribution of income is a legitimate role for government. Support for these positions is even stronger among economists with academic affiliations, and stronger still among economists with elite academic affiliations."[2]
Why do so many university professors - and intellectuals more generally - favor socialism and interventionism? F. A. Hayek offered a partial explanation in his 1949 essay "The Intellectuals and Socialism." Hayek asked why "the more active, intelligent and original men among [American] intellectuals . most frequently incline toward socialism." His answer is based on the opportunities available to people of varying talents. Academics tend to be highly intelligent people. Given their leftward leanings, one might be tempted to infer from this that more intelligent people tend to favor socialism. However, this conclusion suffers from what empirical researchers call "sample selection bias." Intelligent people hold a variety of views. Some are lovers of liberty, defenders of property, and supporters of the "natural order" - i.e., defenders of the market. Others are reformers, wanting to remake the world according to their own visions of the ideal society.
Hayek argues that exceptionally intelligent people who favor the market tend to find opportunities for professional and financial success outside the Academy (i.e., in the business or professional world). Those who are highly intelligent but ill-disposed toward the market are more likely to choose an academic career. For this reason, the universities come to be filled with those intellectuals who were favorably disposed toward socialism from the beginning.
This also leads to the phenomenon that academics don't know much about how markets work, since they have so little experience with them, living as they do in their subsidized ivory towers and protected by academic tenure. As Joseph Schumpeter explained in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, it is "the absence of direct responsibility for practical affairs" that distinguishes the academic intellectual from others "who wield the power of the spoken and the written word." This absence of direct responsibility leads to a corresponding absence of first-hand knowledge of practical affairs. The critical attitude of the intellectual arises, says Schumpeter, "no less from the intellectual's situation as an onlooker - in most cases also as an outsider - than from the fact that his main chance of asserting himself lies in his actual or potential nuisance value."[3]
Hayek's account is incomplete, however, because it doesn't explain why academics have become more and more interventionist throughout the twentieth century. As mentioned above, during the first half of the twentieth century university faculty members tended to hold political views similar to those held by the general population. What caused the change? To answer, we must realize first that academics receive many direct benefits from the welfare state, and that these benefits have increased over time.
Excluding student financial aid, public universities receive about 50 percent of their funding from federal and state governments, dwarfing the 18 percent they receive from tuition and fees. Even "private" universities like Stanford or Harvard receive around 20 percent of their budgets from federal grants and contracts.[4] If you include student financial aid, that figure rises to almost 50 percent. According to the US Department of Education, about a third of all students at public, 4-year colleges and universities, and half the students at private colleges and universities, receive financial aid from the federal government.
In this sense, the most dramatic example of "corporate welfare" in the US is the GI Bill, which subsidized the academic sector, bloating it far beyond the level the market would have provided. The GI Bill, signed by President Roosevelt in 1944 to send returning soldiers to colleges and universities, cost taxpayers $14.5 billion between 1944 and 1956.[5] Federal spending on the latest version, the Montgomery GI Bill, is projected at $3.2 billion in 2006 alone.
To see why this government aid is so important to the higher education establishment, we need only stop to consider for a moment what academics would do in a purely free society. The fact is that most academics simply aren't that important. In a free society, there would be far fewer of them than there are today. Their public visibility would no doubt be quite low. Most would be poorly paid. Though some would be engaged in scholarly research, the vast majority would be teachers. Their job would be to pass the collective wisdom of the ages along to the next generation. In all likelihood, there would also be far fewer students. Some students would attend traditional colleges and universities, but many more students would attend technical and vocational schools, where their instructors would be men and women with practical knowledge.
Today, many professors at major research universities do little teaching. Their primary activity is research, though much of that is questionable as real scholarship. One needs only to browse through the latest specialty journals to see what passes for scholarly research in most disciplines. In the humanities and social sciences, it is likely to be postmodern gobbledygook; in the professional schools, vocationally oriented technical reports. Much of this research is funded in the United States by government agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the USDA, and others. The large universities have tens of thousands of students, themselves supported by government-subsidized loans and grants.
Beyond university life, academics also compete for prestigious posts within government agencies. Consider my own field, economics. The US federal government employs at least 3,000 economists - about 15% of all members of the American Economic Association. The Federal Reserve System itself employs several hundred. There are also advisory posts, affiliations with important government agencies, memberships of federally appointed commissions, and other career-enhancing activities. These benefits are not simply financial. They are also psychological. As Dwight Lee puts it:
Like every other group, academics like to exert influence and feel important. Few scholars in the social sciences and humanities are content just to observe, describe, and explain society; most want to improve society and are naive enough to believe that they could do so if only they had sufficient influence. The existence of a huge government offers academics the real possibility of living out their reformist fantasies.[6]
It's clear, then, that there are many benefits, for academics, to living in a highly interventionist society. It should be no wonder, then, that academics tend to support those interventions. Economists, in particular, play active roles as government advisers, creating and sustaining the welfare state that now surrounds us. Naturally, when government funds their research, economists in applied fields such as agricultural economics and monetary economics are unlikely to call for serious regulatory reform in their specialty areas.
Murray Rothbard devotes an interesting chapter of Man, Economy, and State, to the traditional role of the economist in public life. Rothbard notes that the functions of the economist on the free market differ strongly from those of the economist on the hampered market. "What can the economist do on the purely free market?" Rothbard asks. "He can explain the workings of the market economy (a vital task, especially since the untutored person tends to regard the market economy as sheer chaos), but he can do little else."
Furthermore, economists are not traditionally popular as policy advisors. Economics teaches that resources are limited, that choices made imply opportunities forgone, that our actions can have unintended consequences. This is typically not what government officials want to hear. When they propose an import tariff to help domestic manufacturers, we economists explain that this protection will come only at the expense of domestic consumers. When they suggest a minimum-wage law to raise the incomes of low-wage workers, we show that such a law hurts the very people it purports to help by forcing them out of work. On and on it goes. As each new generation of utopian reformers promises to create a better society, through government intervention, the economist stands athwart history, yelling "Remember the opportunity cost!"
Over the last several decades, however, the role of the economist has expanded dramatically. Partly for the reasons we discussed earlier, the welfare state has partly co-opted the profession of economics. Just as a higher murder rate increases the demand for criminologists, so the growth of the welfare/regulatory state increases the demand for policy analysts, antitrust consultants, tax and regulatory experts, and various forecasters.
To some degree, the increasing professionalization of the economics business must share the blame for this change. The economists' premier professional society, the American Economic Association, was itself created as an explicitly "progressive" organization. Its founder, the religious and social reformer Richard T. Ely, planned an association, he reported to a colleague, of "economists who repudiate laissez-faire as a scientific doctrine."[7] The other founding members, all of whom had been trained in Germany under Gustav Schmoller and other members of the younger German Historical School - the so-called Socialists of the Chair - were similarly possessed with reformist zeal. The constitution of the AEA still contains references to the "positive role of the church, the state and science in the solution of social problems by the 'development of legislative policy.'"[8] Fortunately, the AEA subsequently distanced itself from the aims of its founders, although its annual distinguished lecture is still called the "Richard T. Ely lecture."[9]
If asked to select a single event that most encouraged the transformation of the average economist from a critic of intervention to a defender of the welfare state, I would name the Second World War. To be sure, it was the Progressive Era that saw the permanent introduction of the income tax and the establishment of the Federal Reserve System. And it was during the Great Depression that Washington, D.C. first began to employ a substantial number of economists, to join such central-planning organizations as the National Resources Planning Board. Still, even in those years, the average economist favored free trade, low taxes, and sound money. World War II, however, was a watershed event for the profession. For the first time, professional economists joined the ranks of government planning bureaus en masse:
To control prices, as with the Office of Price Administration, led by Leon Henderson and later John Kenneth Galbraith. This group included prominent "free-market" economists such as Herbert Stein and George Stigler.
To study military procurement (what later became known as "operations research") with Columbia University's Statistical Research Group (including Stigler, Milton Friedman, Harold Hotelling, Abraham Wald, Leonard Savage), or with the Army's Statistical Control Group, which was led by Tex Thornton, later president of Litton Industries, and his "Whiz Kids." The most famous Whiz Kid was Robert McNamara, Thornton's leading prot‚g‚, who later applied the same techniques to the management of the Vietnam War.
Before World War II the primary language of economics, in the English-speaking world, was English. Since then, however, economic theory has come to be expressed in obscure mathematical jargon, while economic history has become a branch of applied statistics. It is common to attribute this change to the 1947 publication of Paul Samuelson's mathematical treatise, Foundations of Economic Analysis, and to the development of computers. These are no doubt important. However, it is likely the taste of central planning that economists - even nominally free-market economists - got during World War II that forever changed the direction of the discipline.
What about other public figures, what Hayek called "second-hand dealers in ideas" - the journalists, book editors, high-school teachers, and other members of the "opinion-molding" class? First, intelligent and articulate liberals (in the classical sense) tend to go into business and the professions (Hayek's selection-bias argument). Second, many journalists trade integrity for access; few are brave enough to challenge the state, because they crave information, interviews, and time with state officials.
What does the future hold? It is impossible to say for sure, but there are encouraging signs. The main reason is technology. The web has challenged the state-university and state-media cartels as never before. You don't need a PhD to write for Wikipedia. What does the rise of the new media, new means of sharing information, new ways of establishing authority and credibility, imply for universities as credential factories? Moreover, as universities become more vocationally oriented, they will find it hard to compete with specialized, technology-intensive institutions such as DeVry University and the University of Phoenix, the fastest-growing US universities.
Home schooling, the costs of which are greatly lowered by technology, is also on the rise. And traditional media (newspapers and network news) are of course rapidly declining, and alternative news sources are flourishing. The current crises in higher education and the media are probably good things, in the long run, if they force a rethinking of educational and intellectual goals and objectives, and take power away from the establishment institutions. Then, and only then, we may see a rebirth of genuine scholarship, communication, and education.
Source. Some more observations on the same subject here
NZ: UNDERWEAR RUN PENALIZED BY HUMOURLESS OFFICIALS
You would probably see more flesh in a bikini
United Future leader Peter Dunne today called upon Christchurch schools to relax and maintain a sense of humour over the hijinks of their departing students. He was responding to reports that St Margaret seventh form girls were stopped by Christ's College staff on Monday when they pulled up outside to dash through the school in their underwear. "The tradition of undie runs at Christchurch high schools has been going on for many years in good spirits. Such heavy-handedness is political correctness gone mad," said Mr Dunne. It is understood the 12 St Margaret's students have been banned from attending their end-of-year leavers' dinner.
"Let's put this into perspective. It's simply end of year hijinks. There is no malice involved and in comparison with other activities that teenagers get themselves into, this really is at the low end of the spectrum. "It is traditional for Christchurch schools to get up to such antics at this time of year. While the public expects a certain standard of behaviour I would doubt if many people would be offended by such an event as occurred on Monday. "Kids will be kids; if we are unnecessarily pedantic they will inevitably be compelled to rebel in more destructive ways. "I agree that schools need to be vigilant especially as the end of year approaches, however I think they may have gone a little over the top in punishing students for what is traditionally a harmless bit of fun," concluded Mr Dunne.
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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.
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18 November, 2006
NO RESPECT FOR DEMOCRACY AT UM
A thoroughly Fascist lesson to teach their students
The elitist cocoon within which academia is embedded was on full display in last week's post-election performance by Mary Sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan. Voters in Michigan, like voters in California and the state of Washington before them, had just given 58-42 percent approval to a ballot proposal banning the use of race-based preferences in state hiring, contracting and university admissions. Rather than accept such an affront to the gods of diversity, Coleman took to the streets to denounce Michigan's benighted voters and threaten a lawsuit to overturn the result.
"Diversity matters at Michigan," she blustered to a howling mob of hundreds of student and faculty protestors in Ann Arbor. "It matters today, and it will matter tomorrow." She went on to announce that she has "directed our general counsel to consider every legal option available to us." In other words, to paraphrase a politician from another, unlamented era, "preferences today, preferences tomorrow, preferences forever." Moreover, the university may now go to the breathtakingly arrogant extreme of using taxpayer funds to try to undo what the taxpayers and voters approved by a landslide margin.
Never mind that a similar lawsuit was rejected by the liberal 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals after California's similar Prop 209 was approved a decade ago, or that opponents of Michigan's Proposal 2 had already tried -- and failed -- to get courts to throw the measure off the ballot before the election on various trumped-up charges.
Coleman's rant reflected the degree to which academia remains firmly in thrall to political correctness. A national survey of more than 1,200 professors at four-year colleges and universities in the spring of 2005 by the Institute of Jewish & Community Research, a nonpartisan group in San Francisco, found that professors were three times as likely to call themselves "liberal" as "conservative." And that probably understates the case, since most of the rest are middle of the road only by comparison to their brethren.
Thus if Coleman had not toed the line, she could expect to share the fate of Harvard University's ex-president, Lawrence Summers, who was run off campus by faculty radicals (and a gutless Board of Overseers) after being caught musing about the mere possibility that gender might play some role in career decisions. The egalitarian fringe would prefer to suppress dissent than to permit open discussion of such matters.
Coleman can't complain that Michigan voters didn't know what was at stake on Nov. 7. Virtually the entire political, business, union and academic establishment of Michigan had combined to mount a noisy, mendacious campaign against Proposal 2 that outspent the pro-Prop 2 forces by nearly four to one. And this followed years of lively national debate over the use of racial preferences by the University of Michigan in its admissions process. The U.S. Supreme Court tried to split the difference in the Michigan cases, ruling that a more "holistic" use of race and ethnicity was allowable. But even that was too much for Michigan's voters -- perhaps because they were aware that minorities continue to gain a huge advantage over white applicants with equal qualifications.
Public colleges and universities across the country constantly moan about lack of taxpayer support. Maybe they should take a long, hard look in the mirror. Voters -- and tuition-paying parents -- might be forgiven for wondering what their kids are being taught when prominent schools like the University of Michigan show such contempt for the voters and the democratic process.
Source
Professors fear political correctness
Amusing how the writer below tries to twist the finding into showing Leftist professors as being the intimidated ones -- the usual Leftist inversion of reality
A new survey reports 63 percent of college professors feel their colleagues aren't expressing their opinions when their opinions aren't the dominant view on campus. The findings were published in "Political Beliefs and Behavior" by the Institute for Jewish & Community Research released Oct. 18. The online survey polled 1,269 professors in four-year colleges and departments, co-author Aryeh K. Weinberg said. "Our goal was to set a document about the general self-identification of conservative and liberals on campus," Weinberg said.
The survey asked professors' opinions about domestic and foreign issues by asking whether they agreed with statements such as, "Many of the problems that now exist in Middle Eastern countries can be traced to misguided American policies," along with asking professors their party affiliation and voting history. The objective of the survey was to find the general political views and leanings of college professors, Weinberg said. The survey also found college professors are overwhelmingly liberal, are opposed to American unilateralism, trust international organizations and distrust big business.
University of Nevada, Reno sociology professor Markus Kemmelmeier wasn't surprised by the results. Kemmelmeier said college professors might not want to share their opinion because students who disagree might stop listening to them. "Expressing my views and opinions can come at a great cost," Kemmelmeier said. "You always run the risk of losing the students that don't believe in your views."
Political science professor Eric Herzik said more self-censorship might be because of a rise in conservative students. Herzik said conservative professors used to be more closely scrutinized because of the large numbers of liberal students. "These days more conservative students are more active in defending their beliefs," Herzik said.
Kemmelmeier and Herzik said that even though instructors are self-censoring more, it might not be a bad thing. Because professors are more conscious of what they are saying it could lead to more balanced teaching. But Kemmelmeier and Herzik both agreed that tenure could affect whether professors express themselves or not. Herzik said untenured professors have more to lose than tenured professors, because professors who have tenure are harder to fire than untenured professors.
"The simple reason is it's a risk factor," Kemmelmeier said. If tenured professors received complaints from students it would most likely affect their pay and not their job, Herzik said. But if an untenured professor received complaints it would weaken their chances of becoming tenured and staying at that institution, Herzik said.
Contrary to the findings, managerial science professor Yvonne Stedham said she hasn't seen much self-censorship in the College of Business. A common perception is that the College of Business is predominately conservative, Stedham said. Though the survey reports business faculty are the most conservative professors on campus, Stedham said there is no predominating political leaning one way or another. Stedham said professors discussed their opinions openly in informal conversations or in meetings.
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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.
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17 November, 2006
CA CHARTER SCHOOLS UNITE TO DOUBLE NUMBER OF PARENTS WITH ACCESS TO CHARTERS
Press release from California Charter Schools Association:
California's charter public schools today launched the "My School!" public awareness campaign to mobilize parents statewide to find, support and expand access to charter schools. The campaign aims to double the number of parents statewide who can choose charter schools for their children. The California Charter Schools Association kicked off the campaign with the launch of www.myschool.org, an interactive Web site that includes a map of California to help parents find a charter school near them.
The "My School!" campaign, designed to reach more than 300,000 new parents, will help inform parents about their right to choose the best public school for their child. The campaign will also assist parents, teachers and local community groups in starting new high-quality charter schools and will provide additional support to strengthen existing charter schools.
In a survey of California voters commissioned last year by the Association, 78 percent of the voting public said that giving parents the ability to choose the best public school for their child would help improve the overall public school system.
"Charter schools open doors of opportunity for hundreds of thousands of families across the state because they empower parents, teachers and local communities to have ownership over their public schools," said Caprice Young, CEO and president of the California Charter Schools Association and parent of a charter and a district public school child. "The `My School!' campaign will allow more than 300,000 new parents to learn that they have the right to choose the best public school for their child and will help parents find a charter school near them."
More than 50 charter schools across the state have already started to participate in this campaign, including incorporating the "My School!" theme in school curriculum projects, community activities, and creating dialogue among educators and parents about what their school means to them. These schools have provided more than 2,500 photos of their teachers, parents, students and supporters holding a "My School!" sign proclaiming what their charter school means to them.
Visitors to the www.myschool.org Web site can quickly find a charter school by viewing an interactive map of their neighborhood and clicking an icon that represents the local charter to get more information. The Web site includes links to each charter school's profile through "Greatschools" (www.greatschools.net) a nationally-recognized online resource to help parents access even more information on public schools.
The campaign is part of a larger effort by the Association to expand access to charter schools. In addition to increasing its web-based technical support and offering charter teacher recruitment fairs across the state, through the campaign, the Association is announcing a series of programs and services including:
* The "High Quality Charter Grant" program, which will provide $8 million to community groups to open charters in Los Angeles Unified, San Diego Unified, Oakland Unified, Sacramento City Unified and Fresno Unified school districts.
* Offering a series of "How to Start a Charter School" workshops, and through its "Charter Launch" program, will provide over 90 hours of direct support to communities in need, enabling them to start some 65 new charter schools.
* The "California Charter Quality Institute", which will provide ongoing expertise and leadership mentoring to over 40 newer charter schools.
* The launch of the "California Charter Building Fund" in early December, which will provide below market-rate loans to help more than 25 charter schools purchase facilities.
A GREENIE EDUCATION POLICY
Below are excerpts from the very socialist education policy of the Green party in the Australian State of NSW. No mention of parent choice and an utter loathing of private schools. They are far to the Left of the NSW government -- which is a mainstream Leftist one
1.1 Education is a key determinant of the ability of an individual to participate in the economic, cultural and social life of our society. The provision of quality public education to all children is thus a key social justice objective, as well as being central to creating a cohesive and successful society.
1.2 Only a well-funded and resourced public education system can deliver high quality outcomes for all Australian children, regardless of their socio-economic background, abilities and level of family support. Only public education can build a collective sense of belonging and a respect for diversity.
1.3 The Greens NSW believe that it is the primary responsibility of the state government to fund and administer public education. This responsibility is enshrined in 4(d) of the NSW Education Act 1990 which states that "the principal responsibility of the State in the education of children is the provision of public education." We also believe that the Federal government must also make the funding of public education its primary responsibility.
1.4 The massive increases in total Commonwealth and state government funding of private schools has exacerbated the financial disadvantage of public education and has drawn resources away from our government schools and TAFEs. Continued government funding of the wealthiest elite private schools is inequitable and inefficient.
1.5 Both commonwealth and state governments have abandoned their responsibility to the public education system, including TAFEs and Universities. Consequently salaries are inadequate to match the complexity and importance of the tasks demanded of teachers. Class rooms are insufficiently cleaned and maintained. There is an urgent need for more specialist teachers for students with learning difficulties, school and TAFE counsellors, resources for children with special needs, public pre-schools and funding for teacher training and development. Libraries and textbooks urgently require more funding. Class sizes remain too large, especially in the early years of education.
1.6 The attempted closure of eight public schools in Sydney is a symptom of the failure of the current and previous governments to provide adequate funding and appropriate policy settings to protect and enhance the social and economic values that public education delivers.
1.7 Despite the state government's failure to adequately provide for public education, the Greens NSW celebrate the achievements of our government schools and TAFE colleges and congratulate the teachers, parents and students on the excellence of outcomes, derived from a shared sense of responsibility for the future of our society.
1.8 The Greens NSW welcome the initiative of the NSW Federation of Parents and Citizens Organisations and the NSW Teachers Federation in establishing an independent inquiry into the Provision of Public Education in NSW, conducted by Professor Tony Vinson. The process of extensive consultation with teachers and parents has lead to a number of high quality recommendations, including additional resources for teacher professional development and reduced class sizes in the early years of schooling.
1.9 The State government has embarked on a program of privatising the construction, ownership and operation of new public school grounds and buildings, despite overwhelming international experience that the Privately Funded Infrastructure model is more expensive in the longer term and can damage the ability of the school to deliver independent, quality education and community service.
1.10 The day to day operation of schools is funded globally (i.e. by a single allocation of funds to cover all activities) and expected to run on business principles. The size of the global budget is inadequate to meet the needs of most public schools so that some educational standards are compromised.
1.11 Public schools are also expected to supplement their resources by the fundraising work of parents and citizens groups. Further, many schools are forced to obtain sponsorship from local businesses and industry, raising the potential for schools' autonomy and independence to be compromised.
1.12 The effects of the increasing gap between rich and poor have produced an ever growing sector of the community that experiences poverty, periodic or long-term unemployment and unstable access to housing. The effects of these social problems have a profound influence on the educational achievement of affected children. Consequently problems associated with literacy, numeracy and general learning have become more acute.
1.13 NSW is the only state that has a disadvantaged schools program, now known as the Priority Schools Funding Program. While this is commendable, the program is far from adequate, largely due to lack of support at a Federal level. The programs funded under this scheme, while educationally sound and useful, are not able to make significant in-roads into the basic problems experienced by schools servicing disadvantaged communities.
1.14 Teacher in-service training in public education has been drastically curtailed over the past ten years, making it difficult for teachers to cope with the demands of introducing new syllabi into the curriculum in the time expected.
1.15 The introduction of the new HSC curriculum and changes to curriculum requirements for other years has not been accompanied by adequate resources, thus placing an unacceptable burden on teachers in public education.
1.16 The Greens NSW face the challenge of seeking to improve the public education system by addressing:
1.16.1 low morale;
1.16.2 increased workload for teachers;
1.16.3 pressure to adopt business principles in school and TAFE management;
1.16.4 the haphazard development of secondary education, which has largely resulted in the development of a range of specialist high schools to the detriment of local comprehensive high schools. This has resulted in competition between some schools, at the expense of cooperation. The restructuring has occurred in a secretive way without publicly accountable or contestable evaluation and is fragmenting the NSW education system. This approach to the organisation of secondary schools undermines the equity objective of public education.....
1.24 Many of the non-government schools receiving large allocations of government funds serve children from wealthy families and are already well endowed with resources such as heated indoor swimming pools, rifle ranges, and high-tech computer labs and libraries that can only be dreamt of by public schools.....
1.27 The 80 or so wealthiest private schools in NSW including The Kings School, Parramatta, Sydney Grammar, Presbyterian Ladies College, Barker College and Kincoppal Convent and Newcastle Grammar receive more than $40 million dollars in NSW State per-student funding (plus other subsidies on loan interest payments and textbooks) and much more from the Federal Government.
1.28 This amount is approximately double the NSW contribution to the Priority Schools Funding Program (previously known as the Disadvantaged Schools Program), which serves to reduce class sizes in public schools which serve communities which suffer from socio-economic disadvantage. This program makes a valuable contribution to improving educational outcomes and social equity.
1.29 Private schools are exempt from the provisions of the Anti-Discrimination Act, allowing them to discriminate against children on the basis of religious background, ethnicity are physical disability. Many private schools, for example, exclude children who are confined to wheelchairs. Further, some private schools discriminate on the grounds of family income in that they charge fees which exclude children from poorer backgrounds. Some private schools also practice discrimination against staff on the basis of sexual practice....
2.3.6 comprehensive public education contributes to the reduction of inequality, supports social cohesion and economic well being, creates a safer society and reduces rates of imprisonment in the general population;
2.3.7 only comprehensive public education is capable of providing everyone with a sound foundation for lifelong learning by granting both sexes equal access to early childhood services, schools, TAFE and university education, irrespective of the economic, social and cultural background of their parents, and thus contributes to equal opportunity for all;
2.3.8 education of students in comprehensive public schools and colleges contributes to the diversity of the learning environment, promotes respect for and understanding of others, and contributes to the reduction of social, racial and cultural prejudices among young people;
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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.
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16 November, 2006
NEW ZEALAND FOLLOWS SCOTLAND IN DOWNGRADING ORDINARY ENGLISH
New Zealand high school students will be allowed to use text-speak - the second language teenagers have developed for cellphone messages - in exams, according to news reports on Thursday.
The move has divided students and educators amid concerns that it could damage the English language, The Press in Christchurch reported. It said that the New Zealand Qualifications Authority was still encouraging students to use proper English in exam papers but would give credit if an answer written in text-speak "clearly shows the required understanding". Deputy chief executive Bali Haque told the paper that in English examinations, where candidates were specifically required to demonstrate proper use of language, text abbreviations would be penalised.
Teachers' spokesperson Debbie Te Whaiti said that the move reflected the situation in the classroom, where teachers were grappling every day with the use of text-speak. One Christchurch school principal, Denis Pyatt, said that he would not encourage students to use text abbreviations in exams, but added: "I think text messaging is one of the most exciting things that has happened in a long time. "It is another development in that wonderful thing we call the English language." But another teacher, Stephen Rout, said: "Students need to be able to write and understand full English."
Source
CANADA ADOPTS NON-ACADEMIC CRITERIA FOR PROFESSORSHIPS
The Canadian Association of University Teachers is welcoming today's settlement of a human rights complaint launched by eight female professors against a federal government research program. "Today's settlement is an important step toward redressing some very serious inequities in the academic research community," said CAUT President Greg Allain. In their complaint to the Canadian Human Rights Commission initiated in 2003, the professors argued that the design of the federal government's Canada Research Chairs Program discriminated against equity-seeking groups.
Allain says the settlement breaks important new ground by requiring the Program to undergo a complete gender-based and diversity-based analysis. In addition, Allain notes, universities will have to establish targets for the representation of women, visible minorities, persons with disabilities, Aboriginal people and ensure that the recruitment process for Chairs is "open, transparent, and equitable."
According to Allain, a survey of chair holders conducted by CAUT in 2005 found that only 20 per cent of the Chairs at that time had been awarded to women. Just over 9 per cent of Chairs were visible minorities, less than 2 per cent identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered, and only 1 per cent indicated they had a disability. Only 0.2 per cent were Aboriginal Canadians. "Thanks to the courageous efforts of the eight women involved, there are some very important advances made in the settlement that will benefit the entire academic community," said Allain. "It's unfortunate, however, that it took a formal human rights complaint to get the government to agree to things that should have been done in the first place."
Established in the 2000 federal budget, the Canada Research Chairs Program was provided with $900 million over five years to create 2,000 new university research chairs. CAUT is the national voice of more than 55,000 academic and general staff at universities and colleges across Canada.
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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.
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15 November, 2006
THE RETURN OF THE FOUNTAIN PEN
THE fountain pen, complete with leaky nibs, bursting cartridges and indelibly stained shirts, is making a compulsory comeback in a last-ditch attempt to save the nation's handwriting. The spread of vowel-free text messages among the young and the rise of grammarless e-mails across all age ranges is leaving children, university students and even teachers unable to write legibly by hand.
But now a leading independent school has ordered pupils aged nine and over to write only with fountain pens. Bryan Lewis, the headmaster of The Mary Erskine & Stewart's Melville Junior School in Edinburgh, believes that his pupils' educational attainment and sense of self-worth will all benefit. "All teachers who join our junior school are taught a handwriting style by my colleagues and they, in turn, teach all our children the same style," Mr Lewis said. "They are helped by our insistence that children from primary 5 onwards write in fountain pen. "Learning to write in fountain pen not only results in beautiful presentation but also has the not-insignificant bonus of developing children's selfesteem."
Mr Lewis's policy is likely to be well-received by those in authority. Tony Blair is a fountain-pen user and has been known to give heavyweight Churchill pens as gifts. The Prime Minister, who was educated in the Scottish private school system, writes all his speeches in longhand with a favourite fountain pen before passing them to his secretaries to be typed.
At Mr Blair's end of the market, fountain pen sales are reportedly booming. Purveyors of expensive jewellery such as Bulgari and Chopard are starting to produce luxury pens.
It is widely accepted that the use of the fountain pen, necessarily slower and more deliberate than the ballpoint or rollerpen, produces more elegant handwriting. Those who write for a living tend to profess affection for the fountain pen. In Eighteenth, the poet, Kate Bingham, praised the "low-tech simplicity" of the instrument and recalled the excitement of watching "the tip of a new pen touch its first white sheet, the hand behind solemn and quivering, unsure whether to doodle or draw or let the nib try for itself, licking the page in thirsty blue-black stripes". John Banville, the Booker prize-winning Irish author, also prefers to use a fountain pen. He has been reported as saying that "a fountain pen is about the right speed. A machine goes too fast. It goes faster than I can think."
But the fall of the fountain pen from common usage was once widely welcomed because of its association with ruined school uniforms, messy pages and classroom squabbles. In the days when fountain pens were widespread, was there ever a pupil whose school blazer did not have a giant inky map all over the lining or a blue puddle in the top pocket? The fountain pen was also a favourite weapon of the naughty schoolboy. The nib could be used to jab other pupils and some models, especially those which filled from bottles by pistons or levers, were ideal for squirting ink. The more primitive dip-in types also made crude darts. But the favourite of every schoolboy was the ink pellet - the blotting-paper-and-ink device detested by every teacher.
Mr Lewis is adamant that the return of pen and ink will have positive results for his pupils. The demise of the fountain pen and handwriting went hand-in-hand, he argues, with the rise of "progressive" teaching methods. He added: "Modern teaching methods overwhelmed the curriculum in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They proved to be no more than an excuse for the lowering of standards of basic literacy and numeracy under the guise of freedom of expression. From that time generations of children were no longer taught to write properly. They couldn't recognise the importance of spelling, to read with expression and understanding, and to master numbers. "In many cases the pupils of that era are now today's teachers. They can hardly be expected to teach basic literacy and numeracy skills when they went through childhood either unaware of, or indifferent to, rules of grammar and spelling."
The Scottish Qualifications Authority has lamented that the standard of handwriting on some exam papers was so poor that its markers could not read them. A spokesman for the Campaign for Real Education said: "Good spelling, handwriting, grammar and punctuation make for confident use of language and smooth communication."
Source
NY SUBURBAN PUBLIC SCHOOLS NO GOOD EITHER
A public school is still a public school, with all the perverse incentives and policies that implies
Mimi and Gol Ophir left behind their Riverside Drive apartment with views of the Hudson a decade ago to move to the Westchester suburbs, reluctantly trading comfort and convenience for what they believed would be better public schools for their growing family. Only the suburban bargain the Ophirs thought they were getting turned out to be no bargain at all. They chose the Yorktown school system, a relatively well-off district whose students consistently outscore their peers on state tests. But the Ophirs came to view the schools as uninspiring and unresponsive, and now they pay $51,000 a year for their children, 11-year-old Dylan and 9-year-old Sabrina, to attend the private Hackley School here - on top of $23,000 annually in property taxes. "That's the whole point of moving to Westchester: you pay the high taxes, but you get the good schools," Mrs. Ophir, 43, a full-time mother who formerly worked as a lawyer, said with anger and frustration. "That's the tradeoff, I thought."
Like the Ophirs, many New Yorkers with the means to do so flee the city when they have children, seeing the suburbs as a way to stay committed to public education without compromising their standards for safety and academics. Yet a small but growing number of such parents are abandoning even some of the top-performing public schools in the region. In school districts like Scarsdale, N.Y., and Montclair, N.J., where high test scores and college admission rates have built national reputations and propelled real estate prices upward, these demanding families say they were disappointed by classes that were too crowded, bare-bones arts and sports programs, and an emphasis on standardized testing rather than creative teaching.
Some are private school graduates themselves who, try as they might, feel guilty giving their offspring anything less. Others were spoiled by their children's experiences in private school in preschool or the early grades before leaving the city. Still others simply found that public school programs in suburbia did not live up to their promise. So they forsake city living to wind up shouldering the double burden of high taxes and tuition bills. Or they end up moving back to Manhattan or commuting with children in tow to the city's private schools. "It was not part of our plan at all, and I'm not sure how sustainable it is," said Tracy Fauver, of Bedford, N.Y., whose three children attend the Rippowam Cisqua School in the town; tuition there runs from $17,500 to more than $26,000 per student. She said her husband's Ford Focus had become something of a joke parked alongside his co-workers' Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs, as the family has forgone fancy cars and vacations to afford the tuition.
Headmasters and admissions officers at more than a dozen prestigious private schools in the region - including Rye Country Day in Westchester, the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey and the Westminster School in Simsbury, Conn. - say they have seen steady increases in applications in recent years. Private-school placement consultants in New York City and Westchester track similar trends: one such company, Manhattan Private School Advisors, now counts 325 suburban families among its clients, more than three times as many as three years ago, while another, Abacus Guide Educational Consulting, gets five calls a week from Westchester families, compared to one a week two years ago. "In the past, it used to be calls from some less desirable school districts in Westchester," said Emily Glickman, the founder of Abacus Guide. "Now it is places with creme de la creme school districts like Bronxville, Larchmont, Mamaroneck, Pelham."
According to a survey by the National Association of Independent Schools, applications at a random sample of 14 private schools in the New York suburbs were up to an average of 334 per school in 2005, from 250 a decade earlier, an increase of 34 percent; nationally, there was no such change among the more than 900 schools surveyed. At the 55 area schools submitting data in both years, enrollment jumped 16.4 percent.
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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.
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14 November, 2006
Some good in new NY governor Eliot Spitzer?
Although he might be bad for business, he could be surprisingly good for kids. As Kathleen Lucadamo reported in Monday's Daily News, Spitzer, "speaking to Orthodox Jews at a Brooklyn yeshiva, said it is unjust that private schools educate 15 percent of the state's students but get only 1 percent of the education budget."
Spitzer couldn't be more right. He supports encouraging public education through private means, and is increasingly unabashed in saying so. Earlier in the year, Spitzer flipped from hazy opposition to support of what was then Governor Pataki's proposal for an education tax credit. "I support the idea of education tax credits," he claimed, though he had previously declared that "vouchers would destroy the public school system." The education tax credit at issue turned into a blanket child tax credit, but Spitzer still expresses support for the concept of education-specific tax credits. His spokeswoman Christine Anderson said this week that "if elected, Eliot will explore the feasibility of expanding such programs."
Spitzer's still no fan of vouchers, but education tax credits are emerging as both the "third way" for Democrats and the policy of choice for social conservatives seeking to send their children to religious schools and libertarians who just want more choices. Spitzer appropriated the tax credit issue from his current opponent, attorney John Faso, who sponsored the ETC bill as minority leader of the state assembly in 2001.
Education tax credits have been on the rise across the nation. In the past year, Arizona, Rhode Island, and Iowa have all passed new programs, and Pennsylvania expanded its existing business tax credit for donations to private scholarship funds. The Arizona and Iowa bills both got past Democratic governors, and the Rhode Island business tax credit came about in a legislature controlled by Democrats in both houses.
At $330 per child, the current New York tax credit is paltry, but its political implications are enormous: an ambitious Democrat has embraced education tax credits in a true-blue state. Like Bill Clinton signing on to "end welfare as we know it," the acceptance of the principle and the approach matters greatly. President Clinton didn't want to go all the way with the Republican welfare plan. But his acceptance of the conservative conception of the problem and the range of solutions moved the political center of gravity to a point that allowed their victory.
The politics of school choice is changing, too, and school-choice supporters need to take advantage of it. Supporters of school choice should take advantage of Spitzer's overtures to raise their expectations and push for educational freedom on a much more meaningful scale.
As we have seen in Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and elsewhere, tiny pilot and hyper-targeted programs have served their purpose in demonstrating the effectiveness of school choice and helping a small number of students. But coverage for low-income children will expand most rapidly if a broad and politically powerful set of constituencies gets behind it, and that means the middle class. It's easier to help the disadvantaged through a program that helps everybody.
Whether their concern is for low-income children alone or for educational freedom across the board, school choice supporters need to build on the new momentum and push forward with big, broad-coverage education tax credits. With political opposition to these credits softening, New York has never had a better opportunity to bring educational choices to children.
It doesn't matter if Spitzer's support for school choice is limited: His statements have changed the game. As he heads to the governor's mansion, school-choice supporters should think big, and push him to pass broad bills that would allow all parents to choose where their children are educated.
Source
HUGE SCIENCE EDUCATION FAILURES
What causes the phases of the moon? Why do seasons change? Kids come up with the darndest answers, says Bill Weiler. He compiles lists of children's misconceptions about science for the American Institute of Physics. North Carolina State University physics professor John Hubisz found similar problems in a two-year study of middle-school science textbooks. All told, he compiled 500 pages of errors in 12 textbooks, including mix-ups between fission and fusion, incorrect definitions of absolute zero, and a map showing the equator running through the southern states.
Reporting on the ways science textbooks are developed and sold to schools, Forbes writer David McClintick says many companies "churn out rubbish" with countless errors. One widely adopted text, for instance, claims the earth rotates around the sun, when it actually revolves around the sun and rotates on its axis.
But textbook companies are reluctant to change blatant errors, even when renowned scientists submit long lists of corrections. Astrophysicist and schoolteacher Leonard Tramiel, testifying before California's Curriculum Commission, an 18-member panel that approves textbooks, reported finding 30 errors in the first 100 pages of one science book. The company corrected only three mistakes, leaving a book rife with errors that, if approved, could be used for six years or more in California classrooms and in other states.
As school started this year, I took Hubisz advice to "borrow a middle-school science text and randomly open it up." I immediately saw his point that texts often present important concepts in a clutter of cartoon-like graphics. Some errors were glaring, and the short blocks of print, written at a low reading level, glossed over explanations.
Can science teachers change students' misconceptions? The answer is yes, but only if teachers are competent, patient, and willing to do more than cover the curriculum and coach students on test questions. University of Dallas physicist Richard Olenick urges teachers to blend good science and artful instruction to help students "make connections between what they learn in science classrooms and what they already know." He says it's possible to change students' preconceptions by cultivating curiosity about important concepts, such as gravity and density; building new understanding piece by piece; and helping students see the errors in their thinking.
Joseph Stepans, science education specialist at the University of Wyoming, says students need many opportunities -- not just one -- to "replace their naive ideas about natural phenomena with scientifically accepted concepts." In Targeting Students' Science Misconceptions, he urges teachers to check students' prior knowledge through interviews, group discussions, journal writing, and illustrations. At the National Center for Improving Student Learning and Achievement in Mathematics and Science, based at the University of Wisconsin, director Thomas Carpenter and his co-researchers recently completed an eight-year study on teaching practices that help students "learn with understanding." Carpenter says students' scientific (and mathematic) understanding emerges when teachers engage students in four ways of thinking:
* Constructing relationships: Students relate new ideas to ones they already understand.
* Extending and applying knowledge: Students apply new concepts to solve unfamiliar problems.
* Justifying and explaining generalizations and procedures: Students think like scientists and mathematicians to test the validity of key ideas.
* Making knowledge personal: Students strive to understand emerging concepts as they work and study in groups and teams, much like real scientists
Carpenter says the best way to improve science teaching and learning involves training teachers to understand scientific concepts, practicing scientific inquiry the way real scientists investigate problems, confronting their own scientific reasoning and misconceptions, and generating and demonstrating scientific understanding.
About a year ago I discovered Carpenter's recommendations at work in a California elementary school. Until recently, science lessons at San Diego County's Jefferson Elementary School were mostly lackluster worksheets. But a school partnership with the San Diego Natural History Museum has transformed science by using a local watershed -- where water drains from mountains to the Pacific Ocean -- as a "broad learning canvas." To begin, the museum provided teachers with 32 hours of training in applied field biology and ecology, curriculum standards pertaining to water-related studies, and technology skills such as digital photography and data graphics. Then toxicologists, botanists, and hydrologists had the teachers don boots and backpacks and venture into a nearby canyon to learn about water quality, water conservation, and erosion, topics they'd soon be teaching to fourth- to sixth-graders.
But the teachers still had to prove their scientific understanding. In the third stage of training, they completed the same performance assessments they'd designed for their students -- presentations of scientific principles using examples from their own photographs, charts, and other data. The impact of teacher training shows up in the ways students now learn science. Instead of completing a steady stream of worksheets, kids use scientific fieldwork techniques to identify and eradicate invasive plants in the watershed and study microorganisms in water samples. In the classroom, they chart water levels on spreadsheets, and at the end of the year they present their research in the school auditorium.
The transformation in science shows up in the school's achievement scores. When the school-museum partnership began in 2001, overall Academic Performance Index scores were 574; now they're over 750. Scores for Hispanic and ESL students, the fastest growing segment of Jefferson's population, have risen from 492 to 689. Once cited as an underperforming school, Jefferson is now a California Distinguished School.
Georgia's Pinson says she's learned that her students need adequate time and repeated opportunities to observe and try out science principles and theories. And they need to spend more time on experiments and hands-on activities and less time on textbooks and worksheets. Teachers, she says, need to unpack kids' prior knowledge and develop lessons that specifically target their misconceptions. It's impossible to predict if Pinson's 9-year-olds will revert to their childlike misconceptions when they're 19 or 49, but for now her students are listening to one another, volunteering information and ideas, cooperating on projects and experiments, and, with help from a patient and caring teacher, working hard to learn good science. It's a good start.
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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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.
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13 November, 2006
First we take your money, then we take your schools
In a speech last week at a Washington, D.C., charter school, Bush brought education back to the front burner, promoting federal initiatives to train 70,000 new Advanced Placement teachers, help pay the costs of AP exams for low-income students, and furnish vouchers for 28,000 poor children nationwide. The President also devoted his weekly radio address entirely to education, talking up the No Child Left Behind Act, the signature accomplishment of Bush's first year in office, which is scheduled for reauthorization next year.
Bush's education agenda, however, doesn't stop at K through 12. Last month, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced that the administration would also pursue new policies in higher education, including plans to track information on every college student in the country, and to increase federal financial aid. And that's just the beginning. The Secretary will be holding a "summit" next spring to explore even more ivory tower reforms.
The danger of pushing so many education initiatives, of course, is that many voters who have traditionally supported Republicans despise big government, especially federal intrusions into their schools. That's a group, as the upcoming midterms are likely to show, that Republicans can't afford to lose. Which puts the Bush administration in a tight spot: Just as it is attempting to plunge federal tentacles ever deeper into the schools, it must also convince the public that federal control is the furthest thing from its mind. "Local schools remain under local control," Bush declared in his radio address, though NCLB dictates everything from how reading is taught to teacher qualifications. Similarly, in response to a question about the expansion of federal power during her tenure, Secretary Spellings recently insisted that "I'm a good Federalist and a good Republican." But the billion-dollar question remains: How can the administration hew to the ideal of local control while simultaneously advocating federal intrusion into the classroom?
They can't. Either they stick to the Constitution and keep the federal government out of education, or they chuck it and run the schools from Washington. Rhetorically, though, the Bush administration is trying to square the circle, dodging the Constitution and asserting that because the federal government spends money on education - an amount that's grown roughly 36 percent under Bush - it has an obligation to force "accountability" on the schools. "With one-third of higher education investment coming from the federal government," Spellings said recently, "it's right for me as the Secretary of Education...to know what the heck we're getting for it."
Similarly, President Bush asserted in last week's radio address that all "the federal government is asking for" with NCLB "[is] demonstrated results in exchange for the money we send from Washington." Rhetoric notwithstanding, if the Bush administration were really devoted to federalism - or even just plain fairness to taxpayers - it wouldn't expand its powers over the nation's schools. As far as taxpayers are concerned, it's bad enough that Washington takes our hard-earned cash. Should they also lose control of their schools? And federalism? If you're a "good Federalist," you know that the Constitution doesn't give Washington any authority to appropriate money for education or to run schools, much less to spend money on education and then use it to buy control of the schools.
Regrettably, the reality is that George Bush has not been a good Federalist. When it comes to education, he has repeatedly flouted the Constitution and expanded the scope of federal power. If he continues to do so for the next two years, his legacy will not be what he had hoped.
Source
JIHAD UNIVERSITIES IN BRITAIN
Islamic extremists have infiltrated at least four British universities to radicalise Muslim students, says a "troubleshooting" imam who sends teams to campuses to tackle indoctrination. Sheikh Musa Admani believes fundamentalists are bypassing campus bans on groups with radical links by presenting themselves as "ordinary Muslims" to fellow students or forming societies with alternative names. Some students, says Admani, have been so deeply indoctrinated that they are close to travelling to Afghanistan and Iraq to engage in jihad, or holy war.
Admani, a Muslim chaplain at London Metropolitan University, runs a charity that helps to rehabilitate young men who have fallen prey to extremism. He is also an adviser on Muslim affairs to Bill Rammell, the higher education minister. "We are dealing with people filled with hatred," said Admani. "It's hatred for the white man and the West in particular, because they have read the works of Qutb and Maududi (Islamist ideologues followed by Al-Qaeda) who set Muslims apart from everyone else."
Admani's claims come in the wake of a warning by Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5, about the extent of the threat faced from home-grown Islamic extremists. She said the domestic security service has identified 200 terrorist networks involving at least 1,600 people, and 30 "Priority 1" plots to kill are being investigated. "Radicalising elements within communities are trying to exploit grievances for terrorist purposes; it is the youth who are being actively targeted, groomed, radicalised and set on a path that frighteningly quickly could end in their involvement in mass murder of their fellow UK citizens, or their early death in a suicide attack or on a foreign battlefield," said Manningham-Buller.
Yesterday Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan police commissioner, called for new measures to combat the growing terrorist threat. One of the "truly shocking" things about the recent alleged transatlantic airliner bomb plot, he said, was "the apparent speed with which young, reasonably affluent, some reasonably well educated British-born people" were radicalised to the point where they were prepared to murder thousands in alleged suicide attacks.
Admani's charity, the Luqman Institute of Education and Development, has been tackling the effects of this indoctrination by sending volunteers to campuses to challenge "the warped view of Islam" spread by extremists. The charity has received reports from students about fundamentalists operating in at least four UK institutions: Brunel University, west London, Bedfordshire University, Luton, Sheffield Hallam University and Manchester Metropolitan University. Up to 10 students at Brunel are being "deradicalised" by a caseworker from the institute. Jawad Syed, who nearly succumbed to extremism himself when he was a Brunel student, said: "Some of the students are watching jihadi videos and might be listening to different sheikhs encouraging jihad."
Earlier this year the Islamic society at Sheffield Hallam University hosted a lecture by Sheikh Khalid Yasin, an American preacher who favours the death penalty for homosexuals. Shakeel Begg, another radical cleric, recently urged students at Kingston University, southwest London, to wage jihad in Palestine. In a tape-recorded speech obtained by The Sunday Times, Begg, who is a Muslim chaplain at Goldsmiths College, part of London University, said: "You want to make jihad? Very good . . . Take some money and go to Palestine and fight, fight the terrorists, fight the Zionists." British-born Asif Hanif, who killed three people in a suicide attack on a bar in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 2003, had attended Kingston.
Admani said some extremists win their peers' trust in university prayer rooms before inviting them to off-campus lectures. In other cases, groups banned by the National Union of Students, such as Hizb-ut Tahrir, are thought to be operating under alternative names. Last month students at Staffordshire University were invited to attend a discussion entitled "The true word of God: the Koran or the Bible". The event was addressed by a former member of Al-Muhajiroun, a proscribed organisation.
A further twist on extremism and campus life emerged in court last week when it was revealed that Dhiren Barot, the most senior Al-Qaeda plotter to be captured in Britain, had used a forged pass to carry out research at Brunel. Barot, 34, a Hindu convert to Islam, was sentenced to at least 40 years in jail after he admitted planning terrorist attacks that could have caused "carnage, bloodshed and butchery" in Britain and America. Brunel University said: "The safety of our students and staff is paramount, as is the security of our campus. We will look into the [Luqman] institute's claims and respond accordingly."
Referring to Begg's lecture at Kingston, Professor Peter Scott, the university's vice-chancellor, said: "Should the university be made aware of any concerns about the views expressed at such events, it has the protocols in place to investigate." Staffordshire University said it was investigating last month's lecture. "No extremists of any kind will be welcome at our campus," said a spokesman. Manchester Metropolitan University said: "If any evidence of extremism comes to light, we will immediately act upon it." Bedfordshire University and Sheffield Hallam University denied that extremists were operating on their campuses. [Good British ostriches]
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Wacky Leftist attack on Australian conservatives in an alleged textbook
By Christopher Pearson
The postmodern Left has just launched a new, unusually vicious polemic. It's called The War on Democracy: Conservative Opinion in the Australian Press. Its authors are Niall Lucy, a Derrida scholar, and Steve Mickler and it was published by the University of Western Australia Press. Luke Slattery, Miranda Devine, Gerard Henderson, Janet Albrechtsen, Andrew Bolt, Michael Duffy and I all rate a denunciatory chapter.
Readers familiar with our work will have noticed that while Slattery has some old-fashioned ideas about the Western canon and the secondary school curriculum, his inclusion is an outright category mistake because he's not remotely conservative in any ordinary sense of the word. Henderson is more of a sceptical observer than an ideologue these days and often found himself broadly in sympathy with the Hawke and Keating governments when they were in office. Duffy, who wrote an appreciative biographical account of Mark Latham and cut his teeth in anarchist punk bands, is too unpredictable to count as a dyed-in-the-wool anything. Albrechtsen, a fan of the republic, Malcolm Turnbull and market solutions to almost every problem, is of the political Right but, again, scarcely a true conservative.
Even if, for the sake of argument, it's granted that the term is roughly applicable to the rest of us, it's clear that the authors' intention is demonising rather than descriptive or diagnostic. The niceties of distinguishing between neo-con, palaeo-con and Tory seem to be beneath them, or perhaps beyond the ken of their anticipated undergraduate audience. For this is a textbook, designed for the impressionable young in media and cultural studies courses and the semiotics end of political science. It's also intended as an object lesson, a terrible warning of what to expect from the academic Left if you stray too far from its orthodoxies.
Its opening gambit is to assert that the villains of the piece are in some sense waging war on democracy. This, I'm sure, will come as a surprise to my colleagues, all of whom were strong supporters of a universal adult suffrage for Australian parliaments when last I checked, even if some share my enthusiasm for the British House of Lords in the pre-Blair era. (Strange as it may seem, there's a persuasive argument that the Lords, where membership was a hereditary lucky dip topped up with politically appointed bishops and life peers, was a more representative body than an entirely appointed or party-list elected house. But I digress.)
The authors have a concept of democracy that is radically different from the workaday world of parliamentary representative chambers and other elective bodies on which we rely. For them, "the democratic project remains, and must always remain, unfinished, since there could never come a time when we could be satisfied that we had enough democracy, enough freedom, equality and friendship for all the different social differences there are today and others that come in the future".
We are at war with democracy, they say, not as "a system of representative government but as a project without origin and which remains, and must remain, forever unfinished", "an ongoing democratisation of ever more diverse and hitherto obscured areas of society". This borders on the millennial as well as the metaphysical and strikes me as an ill-considered mix of the ultra-Puritan Levellers' ideals and the rhetoric of Mao Zedong's "continual revolution".
When I talk about democracy I have in mind a project with its origins embedded in Periclean Athens; with its noblest expression in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address on government of, by and for the people; with its triumph over Hitler's fascism and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. Lucy and Mickler draw their inspiration from the soft left agenda - a critique of consumer capitalism and endorsement of "socially progressive ideas and movements, anti-authoritarian attitudes and a liberal approach to difference".
It comes as no surprise that they are hell-bent on rewriting what little they know of Australian history. "Conservatism has played no part in helping to produce Australia as a modern democratic society," they say, in the context of a discussion of women's and indigenous voting rights and extending other rights to minorities. They seem not to have heard of the pro-women's suffrage South Australian liberal premier Charles Cameron Kingston or to realise that the Commonwealth Electoral Act of 1962 and the Aboriginal Referendum of 1967 passed under Liberal-led governments. The first gay law reform in the country (more on that later) was also initiated by Murray Hill, a Liberal in the SA parliament.
I turned to the chapter devoted to yours truly, expecting ad hominem abuse but not quite a full-dress Robespierrean prosecution. "It isn't just that we think Pearson is a hypocrite; in fact we don't think 'hypocrisy' covers it. But if it was good enough to get Al Capone for tax evasion, we'll settle for showing that Pearson is different because he's hypocritical." The first evidence they adduce is that I've written in support of covenant marriage, a legally enforceable model that aims to wind back Lionel Murphy's "no-fault" divorce arrangements. They query "why a gay man would think he had any authority to comment on a woman's role in marriage", by lending support to what the Bible says on the subject. But surely everyone, whatever their sexual preference, has a legitimate concern with the survival of marriage as an institution and surely, in a pluralistic society, even people who take the Bible seriously are allowed to say so once in a while? Lucy and Mickler don't seem to have noticed the strictures of covenant marriage apply to men as well as women and that the essence of them is they're entirely voluntary.
I can't see any substance in this charge of hypocrisy, although they think it's self-evident. They then quote from an interview published by the Festival of Light, in which they detect an "obvious misattribution" on sexual politics in the '70s, but in which I'm also credited with 17 years of celibacy before my conversion to Catholicism. It was news to me and, had I seen the leaflet, I'd have corrected it at the time with rueful references to Augustine of Hippo's prayer ("Oh God, make me chaste, but not yet") and my published autobiographical essay on the subject. When I contacted the FOL on Wednesday, it became clear that, in a rushed phone conversation, admissions of 17 years of partnerless prudence in the era of AIDS had been charitably misconstrued as heroic virtue. Perhaps it explains the portentous allusion to Capone.
The next charge of hypocrisy is my "continuing lack of condemnation of some of the sickening sins of the church", especially the cover-up of child abuse by pedophile clergy. Now it's clear that most child abusers are not priests but men in de facto relationships, uncles and even fathers, although you'd never guess it if you relied on tabloid journalism and its bigoted, anti-Christian agenda. Molestation is a terrible betrayal of trust, whoever perpetrates it. The question is: how often would one have to say so before this local chapter of the Committee of Public Safety were satisfied?
The gravest charge against me is "not explaining to readers how he can be openly gay and at the same time opposed to social movements, opposed to the very idea of democratic social progress that makes it possible for him to be a public figure who is known to be other than heterosexual". Law reform didn't arrive, they tell us, "as a result of conservative activism or by divine decree. The right to be an Australian citizen who is other than heterosexual today was won by others in a struggle against conservatism and the church."
As it happens, I was involved in the struggle for homosexual law reform in SA from the beginning, in the wake of George Duncan's drowning, in an incident where members of the vice squad refused to answer questions at the inquest "on the grounds that they might tend to incriminate". I was an active member of the Social Concern Committee, which engineered the consensus that enabled Peter Duncan's reform bill to pass in the state, with a fair measure of bipartisan support. I acted as a go-between in negotiations with the Anglican and Catholic churches, which lent pivotal endorsement. The Maoists and Trotskyites who'd so effectively colonised gay lib and, like the Left to this day, regard gays as a wholly owned, natural constituency, contributed little. In the judgment of many at the time, they jeopardised reform with their revolutionary talk and ultra-leftist antics.
It's true that some conservatives and clergy vehemently opposed Duncan's bill. So did some sections of the Labor Party. I interviewed most of them and found them generally polite and, despite our differences, often affable. Lucy and Mickler perhaps might have learned something from them about civil disagreement over matters of high principle. But they betray little evidence of the curiosity or imagination needed to engage with world views other than their own. Their only really strong suit is bile.
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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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.
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12 November, 2006
Public schools: Spending money in all the wrong places
In school reform, the chasm between establishment advice and what the data show keeps on growing. In exchange for a "Performance Promise," voters approved a $20 million bond issue for Jefferson County Public Schools to be used on projects that, according to the District's web site, "have been proven to increase student achievement - smaller classes, classroom coaches, staff development, extended learning and individualized attention."
But contrary to Jeffco's claims, reducing teacher workloads does not improve student achievement. Between 1950 and 1994, the pupil-teacher ratio in American schools fell by 35%. Student achievement deteriorated. The achievement decline is not explained by changes in family structure, poverty, special education, or increasing numbers of immigrants. Some studies suggest that class size reductions may result in small achievement gains in special situations. In general, however, the more thorough the study, the more likely it is to find that class size reductions produce no gains in student achievement.
Project STAR, which followed Tennessee kindergartners assigned to classes of different sizes through high school, is often cited as proof that small classes raise achievement. A re-analysis of the data by Princeton professor Alan Krueger suggests that any class size effect was limited to kindergarten and first grade. Unfortunately, the quality of the underlying data is suspect. More than 50% of the children in the initial kindergarten classes had dropped out of the experiment by the end of the first 4 years. Project Star also did not control for variations in teacher quality. With the exception of Professor Krueger, no outsider has been allowed to examine the project data.
Teacher quality, not class size, is what school districts should improve. Especially teacher quality defined in terms of increases in student performance, rather than by years of teacher education or experience. In one large city school district, good teachers have raised student performance by 1.5 grade equivalents in a single academic year. (Bad teachers got only .5 of a grade equivalent.) At this performance level, 5 excellent teachers in a row would erase the standard performance level difference between children from high and low-income families: excellence in teaching can overcome less fortunate family circumstances.
Jefferson County Public School officials would say that the Performance Promise addressed teacher quality by funding staff development. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that the kind of training endorsed by Schools of Education, public school districts, and teachers' unions, does anything to improve student achievement. According to the Jefferson County Public Schools web site, staff development courses include such gems as "Making Sense of Algebra, Grades K-2? and "Gender Equity in the Mathematics Classroom 4-8." Given that second graders ought to be mastering their multiplication tables, and that gender studies have never helped anyone master fractions or decimal equivalents, Jeffco money would be better spent on bonuses to teachers with high verbal abilities and deep knowledge of the academic subject they teach. These attributes, not certification, master's degrees, or continuing education in education, best predict individual teacher productivity. The best predictors of teacher productivity are good communication skills and strong subject matter knowledge.
Another thing that improves student achievement is school choice. Independent, private and charter schools are less likely to hire certified teachers than the public school system and more likely to hire teachers from high quality colleges and universities who are first of all knowledgeable in the subjects they teach. They may work them harder, reward the good teachers, and get rid of the bad. They pay salaries that reflect market conditions. Because public schools appear to respond to surprisingly small competitive threats by raising student achievement, public schools in districts pressured by traditional forms of school choice-open enrollment policies, private and charter schools-have higher student achievement. According to Harvard professor Caroline M. Hoxby, "if all schools in the United States experienced high levels of the traditional forms of choice, school productivity [as measured by student achievement] might be as much as 28 percent higher than it is today."
Jefferson County Public School officials say that they are facing budget cuts of $17 to $20 million. In true dot com style, they anticipated revenues from the Performance Promise in their operating budget. The student achievement failure requires immediate cuts of $3.5 million. Taking advantage of the budget cuts as an excuse to limit competition, school officials say they are considering limiting or suspending new charter school applications. That this may lower student achievement is just too bad. "Tough budgets, call for tough measures," they say. The teachers, and their union, will do just fine. A 2002 story in The Rocky Mountain News reports that in the next school year the Jefferson County Public Schools expect $11.3 million in new revenues from the state, Amendment 23, and an enrollment decline. Projected new costs, which far outstrip the revenues, include $3.4 million for utility costs and $1 million for a new school. The rest, $26.5 million, is for cost of living increases, staff "experience" increases, and employee benefits.
Source
THE FEMINIZATION OF BRITISH SCHOOLTEACHING
Teaching is fast becoming an all-female profession with women outnumbering men in the classroom as much as 13 to one, dramatic new figures revealed today. The number of male teachers has plummeted to an all-time low, threatening a classroom discipline crisis as a generation of boys misses out on authority role models. In parts of the country worst-hit by the male recruitment slump, fewer than 10 per cent of primary teachers are men. In Reading, just 38 primary teachers are male compared with 478 women.
But the decline has been particularly marked in secondary schools, fuelling fears of rising misbehaviour among disaffected teenage boys whose lives lack male authority figures. Analysts believe male teachers are "fast becoming an endangered species" as salaries rise more quickly for other graduate jobs, especially high-flying City roles which traditionally attract men. There are also fears men are being scared away by the fear of false child abuse allegations while others are thought to be put off by the absence of male companionship in primary schools.
It means that in the space of a generation, the proportion of secondary school male teachers has dropped from 55 per cent to 41 per cent. Across all state schools, just a quarter of teachers are men. The shortage is most severe in the commuter belt surrounding London where soaring house prices and high cost of living renders teaching merely the 'second income' for many couples, according to an analysis conducted for the relaunch issue of the Times Educational Supplement. Local authority areas with the fewest male teachers include Reading, Sutton, Windsor and Maidenhead, Surrey, Wokingham, Richmond-upon-Thames, Harrow, Camden and Bracknell Forest.
Teachers are said to be 'mostly women whose husbands or partners have good jobs'. The highest concentrations of male teachers are found in lower-cost areas such as Cornwall, Devon, Norfolk, North East Lincolnshire and Hull.
The findings sparked calls last night for urgent measures to make teaching more attractive, especially in the South East. The imposition this September of 3,000 pounds-a-year top-up fees on university courses is thought to have particularly deterred male applicants. Multi-million pound Government advertising campaigns aimed at tempting more men into teaching are thought to have mainly benefited fee-paying schools, where salaries tend to be higher, it emerged.
Experts are concerned the lack of male role models in the classroom could have serious implications for boys' performance in exams. It is thought to be one of the key reasons why boys now lag behind girls in every major school examination. Analysts from the research firm Education Data Surveys said the trend warranted national debate. Professor John Howson, EDS director and visiting professor at Oxford Brookes University, said: "We've all known it's been like this in primaries. When you add in all the classroom assistants, the dinner ladies and the office staff, probably only about one per cent of the primary workforce in somewhere like Reading is male. "We've rather accepted it. But do we want secondary schools to go the same way?" Since men are more likely to become heads and deputies, who are registered as teachers but often do not have active teaching duties, the number of male teachers actually in the classroom is even smaller.
Professor Howson continued: "In the classroom, the division is even more stark. It is perfectly possible for a child to go through their whole education and be taught entirely by women. That may not necessarily be a bad thing, but it is an issue that society has to have a debate about. "Clearly some schools where all the teachers are women are functioning very well but there may be groups, particularly the older age group of pupils, for whom having some more male role models around would be helpful in making them better operating schools."
The Training and Development Agency, the teacher training body, said male teachers were "important". A spokeswoman said: "Different people bring different qualities to the classroom. It is important that children are exposed to a teaching force which is representative of society." But the agency is concerned men still have "misconceptions" about teaching such as the likely salaries they can earn. Professor Howson said a senior teacher leading a large secondary school department could command more than 50,000 pounds-a-year in London, and 46,000 outside.
Source
Education failure: Kids don't know even the basics
Jokes about softening of education standards would be funnier if they weren't so true, writes Shelley Gare from Australia
A Tasmanian reader writes to a newspaper column, describing what happened when her husband tried to hire a car at Sydney airport. Given his credit card and driver's licence, the clerk punched several computer keys fruitlessly before asking helplessly: "Is Tasmania in New Zealand?" A university lecturer discovers that of the 33 students in her class, not one has heard of Chairman Mao. What's more, they get irritated when she expresses astonishment. "How would we know that unless we'd studied Chinese history?" they demand of her.
The lack of general knowledge among so many of us is now so mind-bogglingly obvious that it has become part of the culture to swap funny stories. But this is an ignorance that has been learned. And too many of us stood by and let it happen. The crisis is not confined to Australia. When British playwright Alan Bennett was rehearsing his young actors for his recent play The History Boys, about a government grammar school in the 1980s, he told journalist James Button he discovered they had no idea who the poets A.E. Housman and W.H. Auden were. Later, he realised one of the actors didn't know what a plural was.
The trouble, as always with airheads, is that we don't take their nonsense seriously at first and then it's too late. Who would have believed 20 years ago, that one day we might seriously debate whether correct spelling really mattered? Our thinking processes have been addled by postmodernism, with its insistence that nothing is better than anything else.
What the Right and its belief in the free market have done to our value systems in the past 30 years, insisting money is the be-all and end-all, the Left merrily - or, playfully, as the postmodern crowd may prefer to say - has done with knowledge, learning and education at the same time. Our value and belief systems have been turned upside down.
The circuitous theories of French philosophers Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes arrived on our shores in the '70s and '80s to be widely misunderstood and misinterpreted. Soon they were being applied in even more half-baked form to teacher education and then to teaching in schools. The effect on young brains has been roughly the same as what would happen to an assembly line of Rolls-Royces if you poured glue into all the door locks. Two generations of experimented-upon young Australians have emerged unable to read, write and think with the skill and clarity they should have been able to assume would be theirs.
Too often, under the postmodern influence, schooling has turned into a hatchery for baby airheads unable to think for themselves or communicate clearly. But as journalist and editor Luke Slattery has questioned in an essay on the all-encompassing belief in postmodernism and its theory: "How did a minor tradition within continental philosophy come to dominate, to the point where it would brook no dissent, in both teaching and research in the English-speaking humanities?"
Whatever the original worth and intention of the movement, postmodernism, with its insistence that there are no such things as objective truths, knowledge or values, gave licence to far too many to take the easy way out. A host of behaviours that generations had taken for granted as being normal and/or necessary - from swotting up French verbs, to slogging at understanding a poem, to receiving grades, to being ticked off for being lazy or careless - were suddenly on a verboten list because they interfered with our creativity, originality, freedom, happiness and rights. And particularly our self-esteem.
Funnily enough, the behaviours newly banned are the ones that also require rigour, resources and a sense of reality, all of which, in our new airheaded world, have become more and more difficult to find and muster. How convenient is that?
American academic Susan Ostrov Weisser, a professor of English, points out in an essay on college classroom culture, published in US journal Academe, that the study of literature increasingly comes down not to expertise and knowledge but to feeling. Instead of a student and teacher discussing, perhaps, the biographical, historical and social contexts in which Charlotte Bronte wrote, and researching the evidence, they talk about how the student reacts to the novel, what it personally does or does not mean to them. "No one can then agree or disagree with you because it's all about you," Weisser says.
Glyn Davis, vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne, remarked recently that the term postmodernism is on its way to meaninglessness. Maybe, but postmodernism flushed through the system in the '80s and nothing will be quite the same again. People say political correctness is finished. That's not true either. Postmodernism and political correctness don't have to be in our faces any more: they are embedded in our culture.
An English professor recalls wistfully when his field was regarded as a discipline. Now, he says, just the word discipline is frowned on because it sounds too, well, disciplinarian. Disciplines have disappeared into a kind of "cultural stir-fry" so that department letterheads can list a range of studies. An English department probably won't be called English any more either, but some amalgam that makes you ponder just which bit of it would signal that if you drilled down in that spot, you might be lucky enough to find a palely loitering Keats.
There have been several attack dogs on the traditional notions of learning. Deconstructionism seeks to reveal the concepts and influences (patriarchal, racial, elitist) that may have led to the creation of a work so that less attention is paid to the piece - its effect, its beauty, its sweep, its passion, its ability to take us out of our own world - than to who created it and why. I've done my best with deconstructionism and, every time, I keep thinking that call-girl Mandy Rice-Davies said it better in 1963. Told that Lord Astor denied her allegations about sex at his racy house parties at his country estate, Cliveden, she defended herself cogently: "He would, wouldn't he."
Meanwhile, constructivism argues that learning is a journey and that education has to be done in the context of the student's experience, with the teacher a "co-explorer". Everything must relate back to the student. Everything must be relevant, a word that here has all the charm of a vice. The real message: don't aspire, think small. Let the child's existing knowledge be the yardstick of everything he or she is to be taught in future; and then, to top it off, like a monstrous shiny artificial cherry on a cake of fake cream and off-the-shelf sponge, let children be the judge of their own progress and let them be measured by their own ability.
Such theory is behind the much vaunted outcomes-based education that now flourishes in Australia and other "new" countries such as Canada, New Zealand, the US and South Africa. Not that it flourishes in France. There has been no deconstructionist or constructivist pawing over of the French school system. You can be sure that Jean-Louis in Lyons is getting his daily dose of maths, grammar and all the other basics. Trust the French to realise that postmodernism and all the other theories were never supposed to be taken so seriously that you'd apply them to your precious children.
Kevin Donnelly, a former secondary school teacher of English and history in Melbourne, who started his own company, Education Strategies, writes frequently on the iniquities of the modern education system. He escaped his working-class Broadmeadows background through education and says he'd still be there if he'd been subjected to going on a personally relevant journey at school. He was actively involved in the Victorian Secondary Teachers Association for 10 years but was appalled by the moves that brought in continuous assessment where, before, a child's marks had mostly been determined by a final exam. For him, the change was always going to favour kids in comfortable backgrounds who had parents who "could pay for a tutor or even do the kids' work themselves". Kids from poorer homes with less well-educated parents suffered.
In the mid-'80s, Donnelly saw what he believed was "the Left taking the 'long march' through the institutions", referring to a conscious effort on the part of people who were politically active on the Left to change society by changing the institutions of society, especially in education. Left, for Donnelly, in thiscontext, means not the Left of social concern, compassion and humanism but the radical, social-engineering Left. Reading, that skill that allows a human being to operate as a member of a civilised, democratic society, withequal ability to question and, even better, to imagine, became the first casualty.
Cognitive scientist Max Coltheart left Australia in 1969. By the time he returned, two decades later, the public education system had been turned on its head, the traditional methods of schooling that had worked for centuries had been virtually outlawed except in a band of select and selective schools, and university entrants were so ill-prepared it was not unusual for them to have to take courses in how to spell and write before they could start to study and prepare essays. He discovered that trainee teachers knew little about how to teach reading, writing and spelling. At first, he thought it was an aberration; then he realised that it had hardly been on their curriculum.
Worse, the educationists in charge, Coltheart says, were preaching something called the whole-word method, and that learning to read was the same as learning to speak. It came instinctively to children, they argued, and all teachers had to do was aid and abet the process, providing what they called a "reading rich" environment. There was no need to teach the alphabet or explore letter-sound relationships. It was a kind of natural magic, like little children unconsciously picking up foreign languages. Coltheart asks now in exasperation: "If everyone can learn to read naturally, why is most of the world illiterate? Learning to read is artificial. We have to be taught."
By April 2004, he had had enough. He and 20 other distinguished academics, researchers, psychologists, linguists and educators wrote to then federal minister for education Brendan Nelson stressing their concerns about the way reading was typically being taught in Australian schools: "The ability to read is a complex learned skill, which requires specific teaching." The education establishment retaliated, digging into a grab-bag of statistics that claimed to prove Australia has among the most literate children in the world, quoting results from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development program for international student assessment. But as The Australian Financial Review columnist Peter Ruehl pointed out acerbically, "PISA tends to be one of those New Age life skills tests, where students are not corrected for faulty grammar, spelling and punctuation. What are you going to do? On your job application at Merrill Lynch, write: 'Look how good I done on the PISA test'?"
Spelling, of course, is not supposed to matter any more, which is stiff cheese for those of us who can spell and who see in it the same sense of security that comes with, say, knowing that cars drive on roads, not pavements. Now, correct spelling is seen as something put on only for special occasions, like people wearing hats and gloves in the '50s. A NSW secondary school teacher, Ryszard Linkiewicz, wrote a piece in August 2005 for The Daily Telegraph: "The brutal fact is that the standards have been lowered to such an extent that children who, in former times, would have been regarded as sub-normal are now regarded as well within normal range. No longer are students penalised for errors in spelling and grammar. Any response, no matter how incoherent or insouciant, must get a mark." (Linkiewicz's piece proves that there are many teachers, usually older ones educated in more formal times, who are worried about what's happening, but there are penalties for speaking out and so most don't.)
Education was once felt to be a kind of "moral transaction" between parents and children. Educating by the late medieval period was supposed to be one of the duties of human beings. But what we're seeing now feels like a full-frontal attack on the notion of education. In 1979, American critic Christopher Lasch wrote in his book The Culture of Narcissism, "In the name of egalitarianism, they preserve the most insidious form of elitism, which in one guise or another holds the masses incapable of intellectual exertion."
At least the letter from Coltheart and his colleagues to Nelson helped towards the national inquiry into teaching literacy. The education minister announced its findings on December 8, 2005, and recommended the use of a phonics-based teaching method for reading. As Coltheart pointed out on an ABC Life Matters program in late August 2005, the phonics method where children are taught to associate sounds with letters has been working very well since 1570.
The people who now steer education often use the phrase rote learning disparagingly in articles and commentary when they're talking about the past. There is much hoo-ha, for instance, about why students should be looking at Shakespeare not through his language but via the messages he sends about race, gender and so on. In an opinion piece for a Sydney newspaper, Melina Marchetta, a teacher and the author of Looking for Alibrandi, wrote that when students have "meaningful debate on issues of inequity based on race, class and gender", they are acquiring valuable skills "of comprehension, evaluation and synthesis in order to participate meaningfully in an increasingly complex world".
The Sisters of Mercy who took me through Othello and The Merchant of Venice back in the '60s could never have expressed it quite like that. But while we studied and appreciated Shakespeare in the traditional way, for his language and vision and plotting, we too considered the place of Othello the Moor in a white society, Portia, a woman, playing lawyer and the depiction of Shylock, the Jewish money-lender. If the nuns at a not particularly prominent convent school in Perth were broadminded enough to discuss such issues in 1968, I think we can be assured that the present crop of teachers did not invent this particular wheel.
The truth is that too much of today's debates is airheaded tosh that covers up the fact kids are not getting the teaching and acquiring the knowledge they deserve. Worse, Donnelly believes that what we have seen so far is only the beginning, especially now that the teachers going through training grew up in this theory-driven system. He says, "At least now I think it's beginning to change because it's out there in the public arena." In the meantime, if you'd like your child to get a good education, there's always France.
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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.
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11 November, 2006
Public school class size doesn't matter
Public-school authorities often complain that classes are too large. They claim that teachers can't be expected to give their students the individual attention they need if there are too many students in the class. On the surface, this excuse seems to have some merit. Common sense tells us that in smaller classes, teachers can give more time and attention to each student.
However, many studies show that smaller class size does not guarantee that children get a better education. The pupil-to-teacher ratio in public schools in the mid-1960s was about 24 to 1. This ratio dropped to about 17 to 1 by the early 1990s, which means the average class size fell by 28 percent. Yet, during the same time period, SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) test scores fell from 954 to 896, a decline of 58 points or 6 percent. In other words, student academic achievement (as measured by SAT scores) dropped at the same time that class sizes got smaller.
Eric Hanushek, a University of Rochester economist, examined 277 published studies on the effects of teacher-pupil ratios and class-size averages on student achievement. He found that only 15 percent of these studies showed a positive improvement in achievement with smaller class size, 72 percent found no statistically significant effect, and 13 percent found a negative effect on achievement.
It seems to go against common sense that student academic achievement could drop with smaller class sizes. One reason this happens in public schools is that when class sizes drop, schools have to create more classes to cover all the students in the school. Schools then have to hire more teachers for the increased number of classes. However, public schools across the country are already having trouble finding qualified teachers to fill their classrooms. As a result, when reduced class sizes increase the need for more teachers, schools then often have to hire less-qualified teachers.
As we might expect, teacher quality is far more important than class size in determining how children do in school. William Sanders at the University of Tennessee studied this issue. He found that teacher quality is almost twenty times more important than class size in determining students' academic achievement in class. As a result, reducing class sizes can lead to the contrary effect of hurting students' education, rather than helping.
Similarly, a study on class size by policy analyst Jennifer Buckingham of the Sydney-based Center for Independent Studies found no reliable evidence that students in smaller classes do better academically or that teachers spend significantly more time with them in these classes. Buckingham concluded that a 20 percent class-size reduction cost the Australian government an extra $1,150 per student, yet added only an additional two minutes of instruction per day for each child.
Reducing class sizes can't solve the core problems with public schools. No matter how small classes become, nothing will help if the teachers are ill-trained or their teaching methods are useless, destructive, or idiotic. For example, if English teachers use the whole-language or "balanced" reading instruction method, they can cripple students' ability to read no matter how small the classes are. If math teachers use "fuzzy" or "integrated" math, they can turn kids into math cripples. Even if classrooms had one teacher for every student, that child's ability to read or do math could still be wrecked if the teacher used these destructive reading or math-instruction methods.
In fact, under these conditions, smaller class sizes could give a teacher more time to damage (not intentionally) each student's reading or math abilities. So if a public school has teachers who are poorly trained or who are forced to use idiotic teaching methods by their supervisors, the ironic situation can occur where the smaller the class, the more damage the teacher can do to her students.
Here's an analogy on this issue of class size vs. teaching methods. Suppose a horseback-riding instructor was teaching one little girl to ride. This instructor's teaching method was to tell the bewildered girl to sit backwards on the horse, facing the horse's rump, hold onto the horse's tail, and say "giddy-yap." Does it matter that the student-teacher ratio in this horseback-riding class is one-to-one if the instructor is an idiot or uses idiotic teaching methods?
When public-school apologists claim that reducing class-size will "fix" the public schools, they are only dragging out the same 40-year old excuse that if, "you just give us more money, we can finally give your kids a decent education." That's because, as I noted above, whenever you reduce class sizes, a school district needs more money to hire more teachers.
The class-size smokescreen issue hides the fatal flaws of a coercive government-controlled education system that, by its nature, will give kids a third-rate education no matter how small the classes are. That is because a government-monopoly public-school system strangles a fiercely-competitive free-market in education, and forces parents to send their kids to schools that have no fundamental accountability to parents.
Smaller class sizes also has a unique benefit that public-school employees and their unions love. When class sizes are reduced, the schools have to hire more teachers. More teachers means more union dues and more power for the unions. Could this be the hidden reason why public-school authorities keep asking for smaller class sizes?
The only way to give our kids a decent education is to scrap the public-school system, permanently. When parents can choose which school, teachers, or teaching methods they think best from a supermarket of education choices in an education free market, then class size won't matter much anymore. Only competence and results will matter.
Source
BRITISH UNIVERSITY STUDENTS DEMAND TO BE TAUGHT
Final year history undergraduates at the University of Bristol have complained after learning that they will have only two hours of lecture time a week. The students who paid 1,200 pounds each in tuition fees claim that they are not getting value for money as each class they attend will cost the equivalent of 20 pounds an hour.
With students who started courses this year now paying fees of 3,000 pounds, universities are bracing themselves for similar complaints from students and parents, who want to see the extra fee income spent on increased contact time with lecturers and smaller class sizes.
Huge variations in the number of teaching hours of academics in different disciplines were revealed in a report last week by the Higher Education Policy Institute. Students in medicine and dentistry have the highest number of contact hours at 21.4 hours a week, but teaching time is as low as eight hours a week in subjects such as history and philosophical studies.
The University of Bristol claims its new history timetable has been designed to allow time for "independent learning" and says students should be doing independent research rather than sitting in class. But Steven Hayes, 20, from Birmingham, said: "When I saw the two hours on my timetable I was shocked. It really does make one wonder whether to commute for those two hours a week." Another student told the university's newspaper Epigram: "I thought I was paying to be educated by leading academics, not for a library membership and a reading list."
When the 100 students applied for the history degree course they were told there would be a minimum of six hours a week tuition in the final year. They found out that had been reduced by two-thirds when they were handed their timetables last month. In the first two years they received between seven and nine hours of class time but the third year was designated as being "research led".
Teachers at the department claim the changes were made after "considerable consideration with students, staff and leading historians from other universities". Dr Brendan Smith, head of history, said: "The new syllabus has been introduced at a time when pressures on resources are incredible and we have to make decisions about which forms of teaching will be most stimulating and effective."
Students say they chose the University of Bristol because it offered more structured teaching than Oxford or Cambridge.
Source
U.K.: Exams watchdogs bid to remove World Wars from curriculum sparks outrage
Exams watchdogs have been accused of drawing up plans to allow schools to drop the two world wars from history lessons. They want teachers to cut back on world history in a drive to improve pupils' performance in the three Rs. But Government exams chiefs stood accused yesterday of indicating to schools they will be allowed to ditch the first and second world wars altogether.
The proposal from the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, which emerged just three days before Remembrance Sunday, provoked furious and widespread condemnation from war veterans, historians and politicians from all parties. Education Secretary Alan Johnson said the plan must be "stamped on" immediately. He said he had heard reports that the QCA intended to allow teachers to drop the wars from the syllabus. He went on: "If it is an idea anywhere - and I have heard the same rumours - it needs to be squashed pretty quickly and I will make sure I do that."
However the Government itself faced criticism for ordering the secondary school curriculum to be slimmed down in the first place. Ministers had asked the QCA to trim the content of crucial subjects to give teachers more time to run catch-up classes for pupils still lacking basic skills. Planned changes for history involve specifically highlighting the British Empire to try to reverse years of neglect of the subject. But guidance on other British, European and world events would be slashed.
According to drafts produced earlier this year, studies on six compulsory periods of time would be replaced with an emphasis on themes running throughout time. Pupils currently study mandatory units including one headed "The World after 1900", which covers World War I, World War II, the Holocaust, the Cold War and the Vietnam War. But the planned guidance shown to some schools failed to specifically mention the world wars. One teacher said: "It is very British-centric. It does not mention world and European history at all."
In designing the shake-up of lessons for 11 to 14-year-olds, the QCA is acting on ministers' concerns that teachers are not left enough time to ensure pupils are mastering English and maths. The QCA has previously said that schools are concentrating too much on teaching about "Hitler and Henry" and should broaden their pupils' knowledge in history.
But now Mr Johnson has moved to slap down the QCA for apparently going too far. Asked about the reports at a Westminster lunch, he said: "I've heard the same thing and if this is an idea that the QCA are developing or anyone else we should make sure that it is stamped on very quickly. "We need to have the two 20th century world wars as part of our curriculum. "We need it not just because we are wearing poppies and coming up to Remembrance Sunday and they need to know what they are remembering, which I think is crucial and very important. "But I think also because it is a crucial part of where we are now...if you think of how the European Union developed out of the conflict of two world wars of the 20th century and it is so relevant to everything that we do in this country now. "If it is an idea anywhere - and I have heard the same rumours - it needs to be squashed pretty quickly and I will make sure I do that."
However veterans' groups expressed dismay and outrage that dropping the two world wars from compulsory studies was even being considered. Bill Bond, founder of the Battle of Britain Historical Society, said: "This is really very, very sad and also very dangerous. You can't learn from mistakes if you don't know about them. "If young people are not taught about mistakes that were made these mistakes will get made again. For example, the rise of fascism. Young people may not even know what the word means. "History is an easy target when it comes to cutting down but this is nonsense. We should be teaching the basics as a matter of course but history with it."
The QCA last night denied planning to drop the world wars from the curriculum. In a statement, it said: "The QCA has not given advice to the Secretary of State on this matter. "The two world wars are a significant part of the curriculum in history and they will always be an important part of classroom teaching. There are no plans to change this. It appears some people have been misinformed." A spokesman added: "The world wars will be in there but it is premature to say exactly where in programmes of study." New draft syllabuses are due out early next 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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.
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10 November, 2006
AZ: Private tests get kids into gifted classes
Hundreds of parents in Arizona are doing an end-around their neighborhood schools to get their kids in gifted programs. They're turning to a little-known state rule that mandates if a psychologist or other "qualified professional" tests a child and determines he or she is gifted, the school must put the student into a full- or part-time gifted classroom. It applies even if the child failed the school's test for being gifted. Some parents call it "buying in." Private one-on-one testing costs from $250 to $700. In districts where parents are aware of the option and have the cash, they often successfully use private tests to get their kids in gifted classes. Officials at several wealthy Valley districts said about 5 to 10 percent of their gifted students were admitted based on private testing. The alternate strategy reflects several trends:
* Many parents distrust their schools' gifted testing. Some districts test all second- or third-graders, while others test only students referred by parents or teachers. Some parents view the tests, which are approved by the state, as one-size-fits-all and say teachers and tests are not sensitive enough to pick up their child's talents.
* Parents don't have confidence in the quality of regular, non-gifted classrooms. They retest their children privately because they think Arizona schools are underfunded and crowded and because many students score poorly on national tests. They want a more challenging curriculum. Many parents also like the cachet of the gifted label.
* Many teachers don't know about the testing options and don't tell parents. If they knew, potentially thousands of additional kids could be labeled gifted. Schools have a financial incentive to limit the enrollment: The state funds gifted programs for up to 4 percent of a district's students; the district must pay for any more.
Competitive world
About 100 kids in the Scottsdale Unified District used private testing to get into the gifted program. In the Madison Elementary District, about 45 to 75 students tested privately into the program.
Dina Brulles of Paradise Valley Unified's gifted program cautioned that the state has minimal criteria for outside testers and some are not well-qualified. Others are eager to sell parents a battery of tests that can run up a tab of over $1,000. "I've heard parents say, 'I'm going to spend hundreds of dollars and I can't guarantee a score? That's a gamble,' " Brulles said. "That may put undue pressure on testers."
Private Phoenix psychologist Jamie Matanovich tests about 50 children a year for parents who want them in the gifted programs at Madison, Washington, and Tempe elementary districts. Most of them make the cut. "I know there are parents who push for inappropriate placement," Matanovich said. "I think it's the competition in the world we live in." Matanovich said she requires that parents bring her the child's grades, district scores and teacher comments before she does the testing. "That scares away people who just want a score to run down to the district."
Put to the test
Many parents want their kids in a challenging, accelerated classroom, whether their children are gifted or just ambitious. They don't feel that their children will be overwhelmed. Gretchen Hansen's third-grade twins are in the Washington Elementary District's gifted program. If not for a suggestion by her children's doctor, Hansen said it would never have occurred to her to ask the district to test them. But now she is considering having her first-grader tested as well.
Hansen's not confident about the curriculum in her daughter's regular class. Hansen said she comes home with all 100 percents. "Is she gifted or is it a feel-good curriculum?" Hansen asked. "Is the curriculum tough enough? Does no one lose?"
The district test was enough to get Jennifer Wheeler's son into the self-contained gifted program at Phoenix's Madison Elementary District. "I would equate it to a private-school education," Wheeler said. She was so impressed with the curriculum that when her second-grader failed to make the cut after district testing, she took her to a private psychologist. The private report got her second child into the program. Wheeler said she isn't convinced district tests are able to measure all children's talents.
Susan Goltz, a former principal who runs Madison's gifted program, said the district used to be less tough about who got in, and kids came and went. Now, only students who reach the 97th percentile on the school test get in. Privately tested children must have a report showing a minimum IQ of 139. Goltz said most privately tested students do well in the gifted program.
Who is gifted?
Schools across the country do not agree on a definition of "gifted." Only 32 states require schools to identify gifted students. The inconsistencies result in varying statistics. While about 8 percent of students in Arizona schools are labeled gifted, nationally it's 3 to 5 percent. Madison has 17 percent of its students in gifted programs; Scottsdale has 13 percent.
Advocates and educators agree that most gifted tests used in schools favor children who grow up in the United States in wealthier, well-educated families and learned English from birth. "Everyone thinks their child is gifted. The term is thrown around so loosely," Hansen said. She said just about every child on her street has been labeled "gifted" and wonders how one-third of the Moon Valley neighborhood could possible be gifted. "Kudos to us, I guess," Hansen said. "Are we all gifted?"
Not in the west Phoenix neighborhood of the Cartwright Elementary District, where most kids are still learning English and come from lower-income or Spanish-speaking families. At Cartwright, the cutoff score on the same gifted tests is the 85th percentile to make up for students' lack of language skills. About 2 percent of the district's population is in its gifted programs. Curriculum director Cindy Segotta-Jones said no parent has ever sought a second opinion from a private tester.
Source
Bright Britons deserting universities
Universities will be dominated by foreign academics soon unless more British graduates are persuaded to stay in higher education, the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge has told The Times. Alison Richard - who has a quarter of her staff and more than half of her postgraduates from overseas - raises the prospect of universities depending increasingly on foreign academics for regeneration.
The situation across the country is most acute in science, technology and mathematics, as fewer British students are recruited to undergraduate courses, which restricts the pool going on with postgraduate study. Professor Richard's comments are echoed by Universities UK, the umbrella group of vice-chancellors, which cautions that the danger of relying wholly on non-British researchers in some subjects is not only that they go home, but also that the lack of home-grown talent spirals downwards into less interest in schools.
While Professor Richard, an anthropologist who has returned to England after 30 years at Yale, delighted in the cosmopolitan make-up of her staff, she said that she was concerned that the brightest students did not want to follow in her shoes. "What does it say about the perception of universities in this country if an ever-falling proportion of really bright British undergraduates is not considering continuing with this as a career?" she said. "We will always be able to staff Cambridge with brilliant people from all over the world, but if you can't get your own students then British universities will carry on, of course - but without their own."
For the past two decades the number of overseas students undertaking postgraduate research at Cambridge has risen each year. Last year 53 per cent of its postgraduates were foreign students. At undergraduate level overseas students made up only 15 per cent of the total, and overall more than one in four (27 per cent) of all its students came from abroad. "Twenty-five per cent of Cambridge's academics are from outside the UK and it's a wonderful cosmopolitan international mix and I think it's quite splendid that we are as international as we are," she said. "Now the question is - if it were 75 per cent from outside the UK would that be a `bad thing'? I don't know how to answer that question. "So should we be troubled if none of our brightest British undergraduates goes on to further studies and PhDs? Actually, if the truth be told, that does trouble me."
Professor Richard says that lecturers' historic poor salaries are partly to blame, as is the old public opprobrium of universities as irrelevant ivory towers. While that has changed, she says universities are still underfunded and competing with a more exciting world. Although it is not a problem for all disciplines, Professor Richard is clearly concerned about the lack of children studying science, technology and maths (STEM) at a higher level at school. Currently roughly 39 per cent of STEM postgraduates at British universities are from overseas.
Drummond Bone, president of Universities UK, agreed that an overreliance on foreign academics in those subjects was a concern. "The long-term issues for UK business, industry and universities are very serious, because some proportion of overseas academics will stay in Britain, but a good number will go home," he said. "In some subjects we can already see this - especially in maths - where we're seeing huge numbers of people from Eastern Europe in the staff. They are very good, but there is a shortage of home-grown talent."
Professor Bone, who is also Vice-Chancellor of Liverpool, said that the danger was that Britain would not generate its own core of academics. He said this problem had already been encountered in Australia, where some universities were dependent on Asian academics. Last week a study found that nearly two thirds of British academics had considered leaving the country to work overseas and that more than half had considered abandoning university life completely for a better-paid job in the private sector. The biggest gripe among lecturers was bureaucracy, with one in three spending at least 16 hours a week on paperwork.
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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.
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9 November, 2006
British fruitcake in charge of education
Children as young as 12 should help to appoint teachers and take a much bigger role in running their schools, the Schools Minister has declared. In a ringing endorsement of pupil power, Lord Adonis said that headteachers should consider following the example of Finland, where children were full members of governing bodies. The former Downing Street adviser said that he wanted to see a cultural change to allow children to interview candidates for teaching posts.
Pupils have been allowed to be associate members of governing bodies in England's schools since 2003. But to date only a handful of schools have taken up the opportunity.
Lord Adonis told the Commons Education Select Committee that he was impressed by how schools were run in Finland. "One of the things I was very struck by is the degree of pupil participation in the schools," he said. "School governing bodies now routinely in Finland have pupils as full members. That is something we don't have here." In England, governors have to be 18 in order to be full members but pupils can take part as associate members, he said. "These sorts of ideas are ones we should be prepared to look at to see whether there's anything we can learn," he said.
Lord Adonis was giving evidence to the committee's inquiry into citizenship education in schools. He said that he had visited a school in England where children were consulted on appointments. He said that some head teachers believed that it was vital that the school council of pupils should express views on appointments, while others were against the plan. He added: "Every school could help children get to grips with the techniques of interviewing and selecting job applicants. Every school has senior staff who are trained in interview techniques," he said. "The issue isn't whether the skills are available within the school, it is whether the school leadership regards this as a sufficiently high priority for them to do it. "My own view is that they should make the effort. That is the kind of cultural change we need to spread over an increasing number of schools."
Citizenship became a compulsory part of the national curriculum four years ago. The subject is designed to give pupils a knowledge and understanding of current affairs, encourage them to question their social and moral responsibility, and render them politically literate. But inspectors claim that it is taught inadequately in a quarter of schools.
Lord Adonis said that schools should develop school councils, promote volunteering and help pupils to promote their debating skills in order to make more of a contribution to their community.
Source
Determined education ignoramuses in Australia
The bureaucrats and their Leftist masters are pushing the hoary old superstition that promotion of gifted children harms them socially. It has been known to be false since the work of Terman in the 1920s
A legal battle between Education Queensland and a gifted schoolgirl will soon resume - this time in Queensland's Court of Appeal. Lawyers representing the state of Queensland have filed notice they intend to appeal against a Supreme Court ruling last month that quashed an earlier favourable finding in the Anti-Discrimination Tribunal. The case centres on a decision by education authorities in 2003 not to allow Gracia MalaxEtxebarria, then 9 and who had already skipped two grades at school, to advance to high school the following year.
Education Queensland refused the request because they had concerns for her social development, but offered to tailor a program for her. That decision was later separately backed by then education minister Anna Bligh, one of her advisers and a senior departmental figure. The Anti-Discrimination Tribunal - which considered the case in mid-2005 - ruled in April that there was no discrimination by the department.
But in a judgment handed down on October 4, Supreme Court justice John Helman granted Gracia's appeal against the Anti-Discrimination Tribunal's 2005 decision and ordered the tribunal re-hear part of the case. Justice Helman found that while the tribunal could be justified in finding the initial departmental decision had not been discriminatory against Gracia, the question of whether the department had gone on to discriminate against her in their later review of the case had not been adequately considered.
In their notice of appeal, lawyers for the state have asked that Justice Helman's orders be set aside and the original Anti-Discrimination Tribunal finding be affirmed. The pending Court of Appeal matter has meant a scheduled directions hearing of the case this week in the Anti-Discrimination Tribunal has had to be postponed.
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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.
***************************
8 November, 2006
Muslim Propaganda at the University of Chicago
The Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago is Indiana Jones' museum. At least, it is the museum that Indiana Jones would have shipped the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant home to, if only he had been a real person. Not that even the Holy Grail would top the actual collections of the museum by much. Chicago had lots of archaeologists shipping stuff home. Visitors can see the sixteen foot tall human-headed, winged, guardian bull from the palace of Sargon II, the astonishing giant head of a bull made of polished black that guarded the entrance to the Hundred-Column Hall at Persepolis, and an almost equally remarkable bit of Islamic propaganda - written by the museum staff and posted in the section on ancient Megiddo - in which history is rewritten and Mohammed actually travels to Jerusalem. The Muslim propaganda wall plaque is headed:
Land of the Bible. 600 B.C. to the Present. Three Major Religions Grew in the Southern Levant
Right in the headline, the curator mis-states history to satisfy a political agenda. Judaism and Christianity "grew" in the southern Levant (defined by the museum as roughly the territory of modern Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian territories.) Islam did not. It "grew" in the Hijaz (Mecca and Medina,) nor did the scholars who defined the religion after the death of the Prophet live in the Levant. The plaque continues:
Long after the Canaanites and the Israelites, the Southern Levant has continued to play an important role in the religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The golden days of Israel and Judah ended at the hands of the Babylonians with the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 586 B.C. and subsequent mass exile of the Israelites. Although many returned to the Southern Levant under the rule of the Persians (529-332BC), they would not soon regain their autonomy. But Israelite religion continued to develop. At the turn of the first millennium AD, several religious sects broke away in response to Roman rule and the local political climate. One of these lines led, ultimately, to the tradition of modern Jewish religion.
Did the curator slip that bit of anti-Jewish sovereignty propaganda under your radar? The Israelites fail to "regain their autonomy" but continue to "develop" as a "religion." This is a standard line of argumentation according to which the Jews cease to be a political community and transition to being a religious community with, consequently, no entitlement to sovereignty.
Written out of history by the Oriental Institute is not only all evidence that the proto-Jewish community in Judea under the Persians at times enjoyed a limited degree of political autonomy, but the entire history and existence of the Hasmonean and Herodian kingdoms. Since one of the strongest arguments that can be made by a national liberation movement is that the group claiming a right to sovereignty has a history of sovereignty, eliminating ancient Jewish kingdoms from the historical narrative reduces the historically based claim to legitimacy of the modern Jewish state, with real political implications.
Having skipped right over two centuries of Jewish political sovereignty in favor of an anti-Zionist story line that has the Jews abandoning political life after the Babylonian exile in favor of developing exclusively as a religion, we come to the advent of Christianity:
Jesus was born into this context, and was hailed by his followers as the Messiah, Son of God.
Fair enough. Scholarly and objective. But when we come to Mohammed, scholarly objectivity disappears.
Six centuries later, the Prophet Mohammed would visit Jerusalem where he would experience his Night Flight and Ascension to heaven.
Only the pious believe that the visit and night flight are actual, historical events. Mohammed's visit and Night Flight is a religious myth or dream, not an actual event. The Prophet never actually visited Jerusalem. The Quran speaks not of a visit to Jerusalem, but of a visit to the "farthest mosque." Scholarly dispute over the event centers around the question of how early the Quranic reference to "the "farthest mosque" came to be interpreted as a reference to Jerusalem. But note the wording of the plaque. Even a museum visitor who does not believe in night flights and ascensions to heaven, will read -- and quite likely accept as fact -- the notion that Mohammed's visit to Jerusalem was an actual, historical event. After all, this is the faculty of the University of Chicago saying that he did.
The assertion that Muhammad actually visited Jerusalem is a political statement which has the effect of making the groundless assertion in the headline -- that Islam grew in the Levant -- appear to be true. If Mohammed did travel to Jerusalem, if he actually set foot on the Temple Mount, Jerusalem becomes one of the places where the religion of Islam "grew." Because one of the arguments made by national liberation movements is that formative events in the history of the group claiming sovereignty took place on the land they are claiming, if we accept that the Prophet visited Jerusalem, the Muslim claim to Jerusalem is strengthened, with real political implications.
The problem with substituting political propaganda for history is that it alters our perceptions of the world, and our perceptions affect the actions we take. Schoolchildren throughout the Muslim world are taught history exactly as it appears on the wall of the Megiddo room in the Oriental Institute. Jesus was a man, not the messiah as his followers believe. The Jews are a religious group, not an historic Levantine nation, (and therefore have no claim to sovereignty.) Mohammed visited Jerusalem, (which makes it Muslim land).
Maybe we need to send Harrison Ford to the University of Chicago in his Indiana Jones hat, to teach the faculty of the Oriental Institute the difference between evidence-based scholarship and political propaganda.
Source
The Reality of School Corruption
The usual carelessness with taxpayer funds
"Don't confuse the issues with the facts," seems to be a principle that governs too many school boards.It is a major reason why school corruption is so pervasive and why it continues its insidious and unrelenting impact on school budgets. The facts are indisputable that there are not sufficient safeguards or effective monitoring of school operations, procedures and practices nor are there adequate school board policies to prevent and detect corruption.It is much easier to be in denial about the problem in order to protect the system rather than protecting the resources provided by the taxpayers for the education and development of the children.
Statements are often heard from school officials and board members that "there is enough oversight" and that "we have checks and balances."These statements are seemingly credible responses and there is no doubt that many board members and even school administrators believe it.However, it does not withstand the process of verification.For example, school audits do not provide sufficient school oversight.The fact is that the typical school audit is not designed to uncover fraud and stealing and it certainly is not designed to uncover waste and mismanagement.Auditors will tell you that fraud audits take far more time and are more expensive and must be contracted separately.
The Roslyn, LI school district where the superintendent and five others embezzled $11.2 million had its books audited yearly (how it was done so easily is revealed in a separate state audit report). It is a lesson for all school boards to learn from, but denial of the problem and belief that it "can't happen in our school district" seems preferable to facing the reality.
Obviously, the yearly audit did not uncover such a massive theft nor did audits uncover other embezzlement schemes not only on Long Island but in districts all over the country and this is documented in my book: School Corruption:Betrayal of Children and the Public Trust. The fact is that even when some boards were given warnings by auditors that there were financial management irregularities, they were ignored.The Roslyn School Board not only ignored such a warning, but also voted not to inform their insurance carrier that a potential problem existed.This action cost the taxpayers dearly because they lost the insurance coverage that would have protected them from the loss. Furthermore, an audit by the State Comptroller found that the auditing firm did not even follow standard auditing practices (they are now out of business).
What are the other checks and balances?Public scrutiny has worked at times but usually against great odds; however, aren't boards elected for this responsibility?Where are the school policies that address prevention and detection?The public has a right to credible and verifiable answers from every school board.
School officials and school board members have a responsibility to see that all the resources provided for the benefit of the children's education should be used wisely, efficiently, effectively, and be protected from any corrupt acts (cheating and deceit, waste and mismanagement, and fraud and stealing).Unfortunately, corruption is allowed to "fester" in school districts because the opportunities that exist to reduce the children's resources are not identified and addressed by prevention procedures and practices, effective oversight, and comprehensive school board policies.In fact, all of these issues have been identified, documented, and supported in a 348-page grand jury report that has just been released:
"Suffolk County (LI) public school districts have recently been plagued by a series of financial scandals unprecedented in their number and diversity. Although these crimes and misdeeds have ranged in nature from credit card abuse by administrators to the disappearance of grant monies received from the federal and state governments to outright theft, they have also had much in common. Each episode involved malfeasance by lone individuals or small groups.
"The Grand Jury finds that many of the school district administrators entrusted with safeguarding these millions of dollars have been lax in taking adequate steps to prevent theft, fraud and other malfeasance." "And most significantly, each episode arose out of an environment where strong internal controls in school business offices had come to be viewed as optional luxuries and the only consistent, independent watchdogs of school monies were determined private citizens.
Evidently, school audits, checks and balances, and safeguards, purported to be in place in school districts have either been absent or ineffective; instead, it finally took a grand jury to do a thorough job.It is also an example that to find such problems, boards must accept the fact that corruption occurs because the system makes it so easy.It is made easy because boards and administrators do not identify where the opportunities exist for corruption to manifest itself.The reason for this is that they are not only ill-informed about the problem, but even when given the opportunity to be informed, they would rather remain in denial.Only if they know how it happens, where in the district it occurs, who does it, etc. can preventiveaction be taken. When the grand jury looked for the problems, it found overwhelming evidence of corruption that could have just as easily been uncovered by local boards and administrators had they been proactive in combating corruption.
To make matters even worse is that too often the information about financial crimes is hidden from public view by the educational establishment; again, this was confirmed by the grand jury report"
"New York State Department B also employs staff auditors but in fifteen years it has never referred a single case of misconduct to the Special Commission."
Any board that believes that they and the school administration have done all they reasonably can to examine their practices and procedures and identified any opportunities that exist for corrupt acts to take place should be willing to prove it publicly.No excuse should be accepted that what happened on Long Island is not a lesson to be learned by all school boards and administrators because similar problems have occurred all over the country from the smallest to the largest school districts, state departments of education, school unions, U.S. Office of Education, and even associations representing school boards.
Stopping School Corruption:A Manual for Taxpayers (free download at yankeeinstitute.org) lists ten questions that any board should be willing to answer publicly in order to prove that they are fulfilling their responsibilities as fiduciary agents of public funds.Any board that can provide credible and verifiable answers to the questions should be most willing and proud to reveal the results publicly. Why fear to do so when it costs nothing?The fear, of course, is that the results of such a review may reveal facts that may be embarrassing and unpleasant as evidenced by the findings of the grand jury.
For example, is there an asset management program that protects against the loss of school assets?A new study conducted in all 48 contiguous states involving hundreds of school districts revealed that $250,000 in assets is lost each year to theft ($1.5 million in larger districts).In other words, school districts admitted that asset management is a problem; and, obviously, school assets are not being protected very effectively. Finding school assets missing without adequate explanation means that they were stolen and that is an act of corruption.Any school board should be willing to put their asset management program (if they even have one) to a rigorous test (outlined in the Taxpayer Manual). A comparison of the current asset inventory with what was actually purchased (school purchase orders) going back at least five years is a very objective way to prove whether or not corruption has taken place or if the opportunity exists for greedy hands to prevail.Asset management is only the first question to deal with in the Taxpayer Manual.
What training and education have board members received in how to protect school resources and how to maximize school resources?What training and education has been provided to board members for how to review and analyze a school budget?Doesn't the public deserve an answer?In fact, shouldn't board members be asking why they have not received such training and education?
When I suggested in my book that there should be independent auditing committees in every school district, I never thought I would see the day that it would be a reality: "As of January 1, 2006, all school districts (New York State) have an audit committee whose members assist the school board to fulfill its financial oversight responsibilities." This was part of a Five Point Accountability Plan that enacted by legislation and one that should be emulated by every state.
In addition, the grand jury recommended the establishment of an Inspector General Office for Education.The Five Point Plan, the auditing committee requirements, and the IG office are major and monumental steps in preventing and protecting schools resources from corrupt acts.They got it right, but will other states learn from their experience and action?Prevention is certainly preferable to reaction: "School district administrators and boards of education should carefully review the New York State Comptroller's annual reports and apply the lessons therein to their own systems. One of the most frequently cited abuses in these reports involves the reimbursement of employee expenses." School reimbursement expenses are another common source of corrupt acts and this opportunity for corrupt acts to take place prevails in all school districts.
If school corruption were not a pervasive and serious problem, why would New York resort to such drastic and comprehensive legislation?Why should school districts believe that they are somehow immune from similar corruption problems?What would be the results in every state if a grand jury investigated school districts in the same way as it did on Long Island? ........
A serious problem is that the public does not have easy access to information they need and although the information is all-public, and even though there are Freedom of Information requirements, many boards make it very difficult to obtain information:
"The Grand Jury found that taxpayers have no meaningful access to information about the largest school district expenditures - the salaries and enhanced benefits being paid to school district administrators.Remember that this grand jury had subpoena power and a team of auditors combing through thousands of documents, interviewing school officials, all the while clarifying volumes of sophisticated financial data. there has to be a better way to make the average citizen aware of the salaries and perks paid to administrators financed with their tax dollars," said DA Spota."
In conclusion, the following statements from the grand jury report put it all into perspective.
"Many of school districts' recent troubles stem from an overall lack of accountability. Administrators need not vouch for the data they provide to government and private auditors, nor are they held to answer when the numbers do not add up.
"The Grand Jury finds that the presumption that school districts have been in the care of educated professionals selected for their experience and financial knowledge has not stood the test of time.
"Management must show leadership in carefully safeguarding the public resources entrusted to them.To achieve these goals, management must first establish clear policies and procedures that will govern operations, communicate them broadly and then ensure that all employees comply with these policies and procedures."
What is so difficult to understand and what is so difficult to do?It costs nothing to do, not a single penny.What is required is to face the fact that corruption is a systemic and on-going problem so that appropriate actions can be taken. Why don't boards want to know about these problems and issues and how to deal with them?Isn't protecting the children and the resources that are provided for them their most important responsibility rather than protecting the system?Isn't this what they are elected to do? Learning from the mistakes and misdeeds of others, regardless of where they occur, should be a priority of all school board members and school administrators.
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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.
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7 November, 2006
SCHOOL SPEECH TYRANNY RATCHETING UP?
An interesting email below from a reader:
There is a disturbing trend in public schools concerning free speech that you have addressed many times, but I noticed something in two of your posts that is very concerning. It is no secret that public schools are trying more and more to control what students say in school, whether it is blogged speeches or on a T shirt, but that control is now growing beyond in-school speech. I think you blogged about the high schoolers who were banned, and some even suspended, for wearing T shirts with slogans that protested their displeasure with gay rights events at their schools. One of the principals was quoted, "Living in a free society, people can't feel threatened to live any way they want to be. School districts need to be one of the safest, if not the safest, place for students to expand their thinking".
Controlling what students say in school during school hours isn't enough now. A while back you blogged about a school that suspended a student who posted a banner reading "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" across the street from his school during the Olympic Torch relay because they claimed it was a school-sponsored event and therefore the students are subject to school policy. Students have been punished for speech on their My Space pages that were created off campus outside of school hours.
I noticed in the Tongue Tied posts that both the Florida principal who had an *offensive* article physically cut out of the school paper and the Michigan principal who banned Huckleberry Finn ordered the students not to talk about the controversy even out of school. According to the St Petersburg Times, the Florida principal, William Orr, ordered the students not to talk about the article, and the Detroit News reported "parent Cyndee Push said school officials in her daughter's 11th-grade class told students not to discuss the decision." Both of these revelations were small throwaway sentences in the articles and not noted as indicative of the larger problem of censorship. (You linked to the St Pete's article, but I had to search for the Detroit article that I quoted) .
It is one thing to restrict speech in school or even at off-campus events, but to tell students not to discuss anything, much less a controversy about free speech, is ridiculous. When you blog about censorship in public schools, I think you should start looking for reportings of school officials telling students and families what to say and what not to say. I know that I'm going to look for that kind of censorship when I read articles about! censorship in public schools from now on, because I find that censorship even more worrisome than the original. It is one thing for a principal to suspend a student for wearing a T shirt that the principal believes is discriminating or a banner that the principal believes promotes a pro-drug agenda at a school-sponsored event, but to tell students not to discuss the event is a direct violation of their 1st Amendment rights. I really hope that this is the extent of this "trend," and it turns out to just be a coincidence. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that I'll be reading about more of these occurrences in the future.
BACK TO TRADITION FOR BRITISH GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS?
The cadet corps and the "house" system may be considered vestiges of Tom Brown's schooldays, but prefects, sporting societies and communal discipline could soon be making a far more prominent return. State schools are encouraged today to adopt the traditions of the public schools to prevent the gap between rich and poor growing ever wider. An influential left-wing think-tank has taken the rare step of advocating a return to some of the structures associated with public schools - including the house system and forcing young people to take part in structured and uniformed activities - to help the working class to gain personal skills for the 21st century.
The recommendations may be aired commonly in society's more conservative wings, but they have now emerged in a far more surprising quarter. The Institute for Public Policy Research believes that the young can no longer rely on good exam results to get on and that gaining personal and social skills will become more important to self advancement. It says that failing to teach these vital skills will lead to a widening social-class gap between rich and poor and make it more difficult for the working class to move up the social ladder. "We have looked hard at the evidence and children do better in these conditions," Richard Darlington, of the institute, said. He added: "We have to challenge some of the hippy tendencies of the Left on youth activities. Actually what works is structure, discipline, uniform and hierarchy."
All state schools should be encouraged to adopt the "house system" found in public schools and aped in grammar schools. "House systems are a good way to harness peer effects in a positive way. There are three main benefits to this approach: it ensures the pupils interact with older and younger peers, that their identity within school is not solely determined by their year or class and that they are members of structured hierarchies," the report, Freedom's Orphans, says. It adds that the house system would also encourage them to work collectively towards goals while breaking up traditional peer groups. All children aged 11 to 16 should be made to take part in two hours of structured activity in an extended school day under the institute's proposals. Activities could include martial arts, a cadet force or the Scouts - and most would involve wearing a uniform. Parents who failed to ensure their children attended the activities should face fines just as they are punished if their child is a persistent truant.
The report says that activities such as the Scouts and Guides can help to improve educational attainment, behaviour and personal and social skills. Mr Darlington added: "The evidence shows that wearing a uniform, be it in the Scouts or for martial arts, football or sports clubs, helps." The benefits of joining the Scouts or the Sea Scouts or cadet corps are, according to the institute, proven. Those who had participated in structured activities by the time they were 30 were less likely to be depressed. less likely to be single, separated or divorced and less likely to be in social housing. The report found that skills such as communication, self-esteem, planning and self-control had become 33 times more important in determining earnings between the generation born in 1958 and those in 1970.
Nick Pearce, director of the institute, said that there had always been class divides in education, but there was now a personal skills divide that was contributing to a decline in social mobility.
Source
Teachers warned off criticism
Teachers are being warned to watch what they write and say about students because of the risk of being sued for defamation. New South Wales schools have also been urged to closely vet student scripts for theatrical performances and postings on school websites, blogs or electronic bulletins. At least one former Year 12 student complained he had been defamed in the school magazine and threatened to sue everyone involved. Parents as well as students have threatened legal action over comments made by teachers or pupils at school.
Education Department lawyer Wayne Freakley [What an appropriate name!] has issued a warning to 50,000 public school teachers across NSW to be "on the lookout" for potentially defamatory material. Mr Freakley urged teachers to "always be circumspect in relation to comments - written or oral - you make about staff, students and parents".
The advice comes as anger has exploded in schools over new student reports which grade students on a scale of A to E for academic performance. Already some parents have expressed disappointment to their school over their child receiving E grades - a scenario many teachers believe labels the student as a failure.
While student reports carry a qualified privilege giving teachers some protection for the comments they make, serious complaints can be made by angry parents. Sources have told The Daily Telegraph teachers need to think carefully before using words such as "lazy", "grumpy" or "moody" when describing a child's behaviour.
Parents and Citizens' Association president Di Giblin believes words such as lazy or phrases such as "can try harder" should not be used. "It is very important when referring to young people that their self-esteem is not damaged," Ms Giblin said. "Try harder doesn't tell a parent anything . . . it is better to say 'needs motivating' or 'is finding it difficult to be engaged in work'. "Without wrapping kids in cotton wool we need to ensure that young people are given a positive outlook and are encouraged to move forward."
Teachers' Federation vice-president Angelo Gavrielatos said threats to sue meant Australia was "importing the worst of American culture". "It reflects, regrettably, that we do live in an increasingly litigious society and that is sad," he said. "All too often we hear threats of litigation . . . and what we are seeing imported into Australia and into our schools is that litigious environment or mindset that is so prevalent in the United States."
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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.
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6 November, 2006
SPOILT-BRAT UNIVERSITY STUDENTS IN BRITAIN
No apparent appreciation that they are in receipt of huge subsidies from the taxpayers, most of whom have NOT had the privilege of a university education
Student demonstrators gathered in central London last Sunday to protest against the new university top-up fees - up to 3000 pounds per year. You may have missed it; it was upstaged by an anti-war demo a few streets away, and the only live media coverage - on ITV news - noted that `motorists were disrupted today' as a number of students held up traffic. Talking to students over the weekend about why they didn't join the rally, many felt that the protest was `a bit late now' or, according to Daryn McCombe, union president at King's College London, `a bit early,' as the top-up fees policy which the National Union of Students (NUS) hoped to bring down is not up for review for another three to four years.
Daryn and I met up in King's College student union bar, which is called `The Waterfront' because it boasts a beautiful, sun-dappled view of the river Thames. The Waterfront's entry sign is subtitled `student life support', but inside it looks less like a counselling centre and more like a suburban cocktail bar. From the outside, the union is a dirty-looking concrete building with lots of windows, but on the third floor, plush is the word that describes it best. There are canvas photographs of London street scenes bolted to the brown walls, brown leather booths, plasma TV screens, games units, a fluorescent blue juke box, subtle orange lights highlighting the ceiling, and stylish white lamps drooping down from it like large plastic tear drops. The caf‚ sells `delicious gourmet coffee and Covent Garden soup'.
With all this lushness, it's slightly puzzling that students are still demanding more, more, more. But such is life in the brave new dawn of commercialised education. Since top-up fees came to King's, Daryn explains, students are increasingly asking `where's this, where's that? Why aren't there more water fountains?' They're not treating education `as a chance to look beyond themselves' but as a `career step'. As students now pay for their education, they feel entitled to buy themselves the right results. `Students are becoming more and more litigious,' Daryn explains. `They're appealing over and over again against marks. Three years ago the academic board received about 50 appeals for independent adjudication a year. This year, there were 250 appeals.'
One of Daryn's victories as union president has been to defeat an invasive measure to make students who wish to record lectures because of hearing problems prove their disability. This is not because `lecturers were reluctant to be recorded for reasons of copyright or intellectual property', but `because if lectures are recorded and students repeat a point made there in an exam and then has their answer marked "wrong" they can sue'. Although Daryn holds no truck with these sorts of complaints, he does uphold students' rights in terms of living conditions at the King's College student halls, which, he explains, `is a military hospital converted in the 1950s and it hasn't seen much refurbishment since then. There are tiled floors, bad beds, and mismatched furniture. When you're paying for education, that isn't really good enough'.
The turn out from King's at Sunday's demo was around 100. In the presidential office Daryn shows me digital photographs of the day. Before the demo, King's students held a `workshop' to widen participation and make their own personalised banners. Daryn describes the day itself as having `gone really well.' Smiling students flash up, holding banners. He was pleased that the NUS managed to restrain themselves from `wasting money' on placards `that just piss people off', like those saying `Fuck Fees'. He explains that `there are children in central London and it just doesn't help. It just perpetuates what is becoming legend already: that students are just the unwashed masses.'
Daryn was quietly annoyed by the small number of students who staged a sit-in on Parliament Square on Sunday as `they were never going to get any press coverage and all they did was annoy the police'. But why didn't more students from King's man the barricades? `The problem we have at King's is that it's a fairly good uni and it cares about its students. There's not a massive lot for students to protest about, so we're not going to inspire activism.' But if this is the case, why did Daryn go himself? Because, he tells me, he fundamentally believes in free education for all. It's like the war in Iraq, he says. The government has spent `billions and billions' on the war, but the attitude to the army is, `whatever they need, they can have - so why can't that attitude be applied to the public services?'
Although Daryn and many students believe that education should be free, they've thoroughly absorbed the idea that education should be a unit in the consumer economy. For instance, Daryn believes the many problems with science education today are down to fees: `Physics, for example, is good for the economy - but it's an expensive degree and that's putting people off,' he explains. You will find it difficult to find a student who argues that physics should be studied for free and purely for the sake of physics. You just can't sell that sort of line to society anymore. He disagrees with Tony Blair's `arbitrary 50 per cent target' for university enrolment. Instead, you need to `just look at what the economy needs and fill those needs. A lot of degrees, for example David Beckham studies at Birmingham or Norwich or wherever it was, are a pointless waste of time. We need to think about what's best in terms of outcomes.'
Education long ago ceased to be about education. An NUS leaflet, presenting the case against top-up fees, treats the economic facts of the university `market' in much the same way as the Daily Mail discusses house prices. Top-up fees are now a middle class whinge-fest. Did you know, for instance, that `according to the Department for Education and Skills (DfES), the extra money you will earn as a graduate compared to a non-graduate has gone down by over œ350,000 in the last three years alone! We deserve value for money in our teaching, high quality facilities, and world class resources to help us become better citizens.' But then don't students deserve Goa gap year tans, mummy to buy us a flat, cocktails in the union bar on a Thursday, matching halls furniture, crayfish and avocado wraps each lunchtime and an idiot-proof instruction leaflet on how to get top results too?
The ideal of free education - accessible to all regardless of income or heritage - is a good one. But if higher education is just about equipping people for jobs or making them `fit for society', then why shouldn't they pay for the benefits they accrue? If we understand education as merely `good for the market' then it's only a natural extension for it to be governed by market principles. But talk of education in terms of developing knowledge and critical faculties and then, and only then, do we have a rational argument against fee-dom and a real reason to go out and march.
Source
Science teaching: A breath of realism from Britain
TEACHERS of physics and chemistry should be paid more than those in other subjects so as to attract bright graduates and tackle a severe shortage which threatens Britain's competitiveness, a Lords committee warns today. A report from the science and technology committee says the government needs to act urgently to reverse a collapse in the number of state school pupils taking science subjects. The committee is concerned that the shortage of teachers is being compounded by schools worried about league table positions. The schools push pupils to study "soft" A-level subjects such as psychology, media studies and photography rather than academically demanding "hard" sciences. It calls for "significantly higher" salaries for physics and chemistry teachers.
If adopted, the move would be likely to spark opposition from teachers' unions, but Lord Broers, the former vice-chancellor of Cambridge University who chaired the inquiry, said that increased salaries were vital. "The government has to recognise market forces require them to pay science graduates more than others," said Broers. "The future of British science and engineering is at risk because pupils are not being inspired to study science."
Last Friday Tony Blair called for more young people to take up science to counter "irrational public debate" on subjects such as genetically modified foods and stem cell research. He added that science was "not a life all spent in a laboratory but has the best business and job prospects the modern world can offer".
The Lords committee adds urgency to Blair's call, documenting the steep decline, particularly in physics, in the past 15 years. The number studying the subject at A-level in comprehensives has gone down from 18,000 to 11,000. Across all schools, only 24,600 pupils took physics A-level in 2005. Half the A-grades are achieved by candidates from independent schools, which educate only 8% of the population. About a quarter of state schools for 11-16-year-olds do not even have a qualified physics teacher and 12% have no qualified chemistry teacher.
"Poor quality teaching means pupils do not choose the subject to study," said Broers. The report also accuses ministers of reneging on an election promise to spend 200 million pounds improving laboratories. Some 66% of science facilities in state schools have been assessed as "basic or unsatisfactory". Many schools, the report says, have almost given up practical science lessons. Teachers say science classes are too big or too badly behaved for practicals to be safe. The Lords also believes the government should broaden the number of subjects that pupils study after the age of 16.
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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.
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5 November, 2006
Florida School newspaper censored
Everybody knows it but any mention that blacks do poorly at school is forbidden!
There are few issues in American education as widely discussed as the achievement gap, the racial divide that separates the academic performance of white and minority students. But not at Hillsborough High School, where the principal pulled an article detailing the school's achievement gap from the student newspaper. Principal William Orr called the content inappropriate, even though it focused on data the federal government publicizes under the No Child Left Behind Act. Instead of a story and chart, students found a gaping hole Monday in the Red & Black, the school newspaper. "If it's something that has a potential to hurt students' self-esteem, then I have an obligation not to let that happen," he said. "I don't think it's the job of the school newspaper to embarrass the students."
Editor-in-chief Emily Matras wrote the article, which included a chart breaking down Hillsborough High student test scores as reported on the state Education Department's Web site. She wanted to let classmates know what the school administration was doing to address the divide, including a schoolwide reading push. Instead, she learned this lesson: "High school is not the real world," said Matras, a junior. She understood the decision, but doesn't fully agree with it. "I think that we could have made a case that the story could have run, but we thought not to because we respect Dr. Orr."
Students stayed at school until 8 p.m. Friday cutting the article out of Page 3 in the October edition. It was replaced by a stapled note explaining that the administration offered to reprint the edition, but the newspaper's staff didn't want to delay publication. Students were told not to talk about the article. The St. Petersburg Times contacted several after learning what happened. "It did not condone anything immoral. It didn't talk of drug use or pregnancy or teen violence," said Simone Kallett, the newspaper's features editor and a sophomore. "It was a very fact-based article, and we don't understand why it was pulled."
Orr allowed a Times reporter to read the article briefly in his office, but not to quote it. The Red & Black's faculty adviser, Joe Humphrey, declined to answer questions about the article when they came up around campus. "We were told not to publish, and by word of mouth or otherwise we have not published it," he said. "Our primary goal when this happened was to still get the newspaper out." Humphrey, formerly a reporter at the Tampa Tribune and a onetime intern at the Times, said the newspaper staff talked a little about legal ramifications.
In explaining his decision to remove the article, Orr cited a U.S. Supreme Court case giving school administrators broad power to censor student newspapers. But it's not absolute. Mike Hiestand, a lawyer and consultant to the Student Press Law Center, thought the students at Hillsborough High could win a court case. He said they should be able to cover pertinent issues in public education. "If it's a problem, it needs to be solved by addressing it accurately and openly, and it sounds like that's what the students tried to do," he said. "You don't fix a problem simply by putting your head in the sand."
The Red & Black is known as one of the more aggressive student newspapers in Hillsborough County. The latest edition features a front-page article about a junior arrested for bringing an unloaded gun to school.
Orr noted that it was only the second time in more than 20 years as a school administrator that he removed an article from a student newspaper. He had two other school administrators review it. "If it had appeared in the Tampa Tribune or St. Petersburg Times, we wouldn't have thought anything of it," said Bertha Baker, assistant principal for administration. "But a student newspaper has to be a little more sensitive to the feelings of the students."
Source
Government school follies
France, England, Germany, and who knows which other countries are in deep doo-doo because of the impossibility of supporting both multiculturalism and state school policies. The former is in fact a corollary of individual liberty-in a free country one may practice whatever cultural practice one wants, provided others' rights aren't violated. Thus, wearing a black veil-niqab-should not be banned, while, of course, female circumcision should, the former being a peaceful if unusual while the latter a violent practice. The latter are the policies enforced in government schools which simply could not exist in a free country. But since they exist in early all countries, including in the free West, the conflict is unavoidable.
Educational administrators have their idea of what, for example, is proper dress in schools, for a variety of reasons, some of which may be a bit loony, some quite sound. Parents, however, ought to be free to send their children to schools with administration policies of which they approve. Not all children require identical school practices and shopping among them is what freedom is about. A free market in education would make this possible.
What makes educational diversity, along with diversity of school rules, nearly impossible is the policy of government-or "public"-education that is anything but free in the important sense of that term. (Of course, it isn't free even in the sense of being cost-less to those who have to send their kids there; they pay in property taxes and in the loss of other opportunities for educating their kids.) Such education is coercive and imposes extensive uniformity in an area where just the opposite is most fruitful, namely, where alternative approaches to education should be competing and experimenting.
But when government runs something that it should not run, such as education (as well as such obviously diverse elements of culture as museums, concert halls, theaters, athletic competitions), the problem will inevitably surface that some citizens will be put upon while others will want their ways to be imposed on all. Everyone will want to control the "public" turf so his or her way will be the one size that will be imposed on everyone else. This is akin to how in some countries different religions fight for the public square.
In a fully free country there would be innumerable types and kinds of educational institutions. Many would be similar, but quite a few would be unique, different from most. Some would admit children whose parents want them to get mainly religious instructions, others those whose parents would not want this but focus mostly on science; some would go to schools with extensive athletic programs, others to one's where the arts are emphasized. Some would be Roman Catholic, some Muslim, some Hindu, some completely secular-you get the idea.
The same would be the case with various other cultural institutions that have been conquered by government-actually, that are relics of the supposedly obsolete monarchical system or modern tyrannies where the royal head's or dictator's entourage could call the shots about nearly everything. Museums, for example, have to struggle with the artistic sensibilities of those who manage them versus the will of the public being taxed to fund them. And when one side wins, the others becomes alienated and this characterizes much of the cultural and political atmosphere.
Instead education, the arts, and the rest should be dealt with the way religion is, at least largely, in America. Everyone gets to go to his or her own church or temple or synagogue, with no one having to pay for it and encounter unwanted rituals, practices, customs, and sermons. This is, of course, only possible in a society that respects the fundamental right to private property, a right that implies both the exit option and the authority to keep those who are unwelcome outside. But because there are thousands of alternatives to choose from, conflicts can be avoided far more effectively than when government, making policies for all about matters that are highly diverse and involved deep seated human differences, tries to administer matters at everyone's expense.
No doubt, this idea will immediately meet with the lament, "But what will happen to the poor?" No one seems to worry that there are poor people who must confront the issue when it comes to religion-some religions are poorly and some are richly supported and funded in free countries. And despite how important millions of people believe religions is in people's lives, few, at least in American, cry for government funding and administration of their churches.
It is high time to extend the revolution toward a fully free society into the area of education and apply the principle there that is well accepted in religion-the separation of it from government. Aside from according with the principle of individual rights, it would also promote just peace and reasonable tolerance.
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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.
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4 November, 2006
Why military history is being retired
A decade ago, best-selling author Stephen Ambrose donated $250,000 to the University of Wisconsin, his alma mater, to endow a professorship in American military history. A few months later, he gave another $250,000. Until his death in 2002, he badgered friends and others to contribute additional funds. Today, more than $1 million sits in a special university account for the Ambrose-Heseltine Chair in American History, named after its main benefactor and the long-dead professor who trained him.
The chair remains vacant, however, and Wisconsin is not currently trying to fill it. "We won't search for a candidate this school year," says John Cooper, a history professor. "But we're committed to doing it eventually." The ostensible reason for the delay is that the university wants to raise even more money, so that it can attract a top-notch senior scholar. There may be another factor as well: Wisconsin doesn't actually want a military historian on its faculty. It hasn't had one since 1992, when Edward M. Coffman retired. "His survey course on U.S. military history used to overflow with students," says Richard Zeitlin, one of Coffman's former graduate teaching assistants. "It was one of the most popular courses on campus." Since Coffman left, however, it has been taught only a couple of times, and never by a member of the permanent faculty.
One of these years, perhaps Wisconsin really will get around to hiring a professor for the Ambrose-Heseltine chair - but right now, for all intents and purposes, military history in Madison is dead. It's dead at many other top colleges and universities as well. Where it isn't dead and buried, it's either dying or under siege. Although military history remains incredibly popular among students who fill lecture halls to learn about Saratoga and Iwo Jima and among readers who buy piles of books on Gettysburg and D-Day, on campus it's making a last stand against the shock troops of political correctness. "Pretty soon, it may become virtually impossible to find military-history professors who study war with the aim of understanding why one side won and the other side lost," says Frederick Kagan, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who taught at West Point for ten years. That's bad news not only for those with direct ties to this academic sub-discipline, but also for Americans generally, who may find that their collective understanding of past military operations falls short of what the war-torn present demands.
The very first histories ever written were military histories. Herodotus described the Greek wars with Persia, and Thucydides chronicled the Peloponnesian War. "It will be enough for me," wrote Thucydides nearly 25 centuries ago, "if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future." The Marine Corps certainly thinks Thucydides is useful: He appears on a recommended-reading list for officers. One of the most important lessons he teaches is that war is an aspect of human existence that can't be wished away, no matter how hard the lotus-eaters try.
A DYING BREED
Although the keenest students of military history have often been soldiers, the subject isn't only for them. "I don't believe it is possible to treat military history as something entirely apart from the general national history," said Theodore Roosevelt to the American Historical Association in 1912. For most students, that's how military history was taught - as a key part of a larger narrative. After the Second World War, however, the field boomed as veterans streamed into higher education as both students and professors. A general increase in the size of faculties allowed for new approaches, and the onset of the Cold War kept everybody's mind focused on the problem of armed conflict.
Then came the Vietnam War and the rise of the tenured radicals. The historians among them saw their field as the academic wing of a "social justice" movement, and they focused their attention on race, sex, and class. "They think you're supposed to study the kind of social history you want to support, and so women's history becomes advocacy for `women's rights,'" says Mary Habeck, a military historian at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C. "This makes them believe military historians are always advocates of militarism." Other types of historians also came under attack - especially scholars of diplomatic, intellectual, and maritime history - but perhaps none have suffered so many casualties as the "drums and trumpets" crowd. "Military historians have been hunted into extinction by politically active faculty members who think military history is a subject for right-wing, imperialistic warmongers," says Robert Bruce, a professor at Sam Houston State University in Texas.
At first glance, military history appears to have maintained beachheads on a lot of campuses. Out of 153 universities that award doctorates in history, 99 of them - almost 65 percent - have at least one professor who claims a research interest in war, according to S. Mike Pavelec, a military historian at Hawaii Pacific University. But this figure masks another problem: Social history has started to infiltrate military history, Trojan Horse-style. Rather than examining battles, leaders, and weapons, it looks at the impact of war upon culture. And so classes that are supposedly about the Second World War blow by the Blitzkrieg, the Bismarck, and the Bulge in order to celebrate the proto-feminism of Rosie the Riveter, condemn the national disgrace of Japanese-American internment, and ask that favorite faculty-lounge head-scratcher: Should the United States have dropped the bomb? "It's becoming harder and harder to find experts in operational military history," says Dennis Showalter of Colorado College. "All this social history is like Hamlet without the prince of Denmark."
Consider the case of Steve Zdatny, a history professor at West Virginia University. On his webpage, he lists World War I as one of his "teaching fields." But he's no expert in trench warfare or aerial dogfights. Here's how he describes his latest scholarship: "Having recently finished a history of the French hairdressing profession . . . I am now in the opening stages of research on a history of public and personal hygiene, which will examine evolving practices and sensibilities of cleanliness in twentieth-century France." His body of work includes journal articles with titles such as "The Boyish Look and the Liberated Woman: The Politics and Aesthetics of Women's Hairstyles."
Not that there's anything wrong with that. But when fashion history begins to crowd out military history, or even masquerade as it, the priorities of colleges and universities are clearly out of whack. "The prevailing view is that war is bad and we shouldn't study bad things," says Williamson Murray, a former professor who is now at the Institute for Defense Analyses. "Thank goodness cancer specialists don't have that attitude." The problem is most severe at first-tier schools. Two years ago, Coffman, the retired Wisconsin professor, pored over the faculties of the 25 best history departments, as determined by U.S. News & World Report. Among more than a thousand full-time professors, only 21 listed war as a specialty. "We're dying out," he says.
To make matters worse, faculties are refusing privately financed lifelines. Years ago, William P. Harris, the heir to a lumber fortune, tried to establish a chair in military history at Dartmouth, his alma mater. He offered $1.5 million to endow it, but the school turned him down. "Liberals on the faculty objected to the word `military,'" says Harris, who recently pledged his money to Hillsdale College, which was happy to accept it.
Another reason for the shortage of scholars is that military historians have been shut out of The American Historical Review, the most prestigious academic journal for history professors. Last year, John A. Lynn of the University of Illinois surveyed the last 150 issues of the AHR, which comes out five times annually. During this 30-year period, he couldn't find a single article that discussed the conduct of World War II. Other ignored wars included the American Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. There was a single article on the English Civil War, dealing with atrocities committed therein. Lynn located precisely two articles on the U.S. Civil War. One of these also dealt with atrocities. "I guess military atrocities are attractive to the editors," he says. The only article on World War I focused on female soldiers in the Russian army. "I suspect the editors liked it because it was about women, not because it was about war." The lead article in the most recent issue of the AHR is about wigs in 18th-century France.
Although military history is sometimes viewed as a haven for conservative academics, Lynn calls himself a liberal Democrat. Yet his politics haven't swayed any of his left-wing colleagues to accept his field. "When I retire in a few years, I'm sure they won't replace me with another military historian," he says. "That will end a long tradition of teaching military history at Illinois." Other schools already have abandoned military history. James McPherson, the most celebrated living historian of the Civil War, recently retired from Princeton; his prospective replacement, Stephanie McCurry, is an expert in gender relations. The University of Michigan retreated from the field when Gerald Linderman and John Shy retired in the 1990s. Purdue failed to replace the late Gunther Rothenberg. "We had a really strong graduate program, with maybe 18 students," says Frederick Schneid, a former student of Rothenberg and now a military historian at North Carolina's High Point University. "But the department didn't bring in a new military historian and now it's gone."
TAKING COVER
Military history still clings to a few fortified positions. The service academies continue to teach it; cadets at West Point, for example, must take two semesters of military history during their senior year. ROTC students are also required to pass a course in military history, though the quality of these classes can vary dramatically. "We prefer a member of the regular faculty to teach them, and for these courses to include battle analysis," says Army Lt. Col. Gregory Daddis, the ROTC battalion commander at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "But not every campus has a faculty that can handle this." When a school can't satisfy this requirement - or doesn't want to - the instruction is left to ROTC officers. Elsewhere, students may take "military history" courses that are more likely to concentrate on the quilting patterns of Confederate war widows than Stonewall Jackson's flanking maneuver at Chancellorsville.
Several public universities - Kansas State, Ohio State, and Texas A&M - are highly regarded bastions of military history. A handful of strategic-studies programs, such as those at SAIS and Yale, also approach the subject with seriousness. But even these strongholds are besieged. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Security Studies Program recently introduced a new logo that features a compass. "It seemed there were complaints from others at MIT that the existing logo with its 18th-century cannons was too aggressive," complained Harvey Sapolsky, the center's retiring director, in a recent annual report. "And if the cannons offend, will not the work we do as well?"
Some military historians have found refuge in the military itself. The Army alone employs more than 200 civilian historians. They write official histories, teach at various war colleges and leadership schools, and research questions for active-duty personnel. "Just before the first Gulf War, we got a call from the Pentagon asking us to describe the historical experience of the Army in the desert," says Cody Phillips of the Army's Center of Military History. "So we prepared a report that focused on the North African campaign during the Second World War."
Military historians who try for a more conventional career, however, often confront the academic equivalent of urban warfare, with snipers behind every window and ambushes around every corner. "You shouldn't go into this field unless you really love the work," warns Showalter. "And you have to be ready, like Booker T. Washington, to cast down your bucket where you are." Many talented scholars wind up taking positions at second-rate institutions because they don't have other options.
Even though they're embattled, military historians have a not-so-secret weapon: the public's love for their area of expertise. When history departments actually offer military-history courses, students flock to them. "My classes max out right away," says Sam Houston's Bruce. "I like to think it's because I'm a good teacher, but this material simply sells itself." A surefire way for a history department to boost its enrollment figures - and perhaps win funding that is tied to the number of bodies it packs into classrooms - is to offer a survey course on a big American war.
The hunger for military history is even more obvious off campus. The History Channel used to broadcast so many programs on World War II that it was nicknamed "The Hitler Channel." It still airs a lot of shows on war, and now there's a separate Military History Channel. Booksellers and publishers also recognize the popularity of military history. Most large bookstores have shelves and shelves of titles on generals, GIs, and the wars they fought. "I'm always looking for good books on military history because there's such a large audience for them," says Joyce Seltzer, an editor at Harvard University Press. The audience is highly informed, too. "If you get the tiniest detail wrong, you're going to hear about it," says Arthur Herman, the author of a book on the Royal Navy. "This feedback from readers improves the overall quality of the scholarship."
The refusal of many history departments to meet the enormous demand for military history is striking - the perverse result of an ossified tenure system, scholarly navel-gazing, and ideological hostility to all things military. Unfortunately, this failure is more consequential than merely neglecting to supply students with the electives they want. "Knowledge of military history is an essential prerequisite for an informed national debate about security and statecraft," says Michael Desch, a political scientist at the Bush School of Government and Public Service in Texas. Many voters, for instance, don't know how to contextualize the nearly 23,000 U.S. military casualties in Iraq since 2003. That's a pretty big number. But it's also roughly the level of casualties suffered at Antietam in just one day, and a small fraction of the more than 200,000 casualties endured in Vietnam.
Critics of the war also have plenty to gain from a public that has a better understanding of older conflicts. "People might have realized that we have a poor track record of using the military to do nation-building in Third World countries," says Desch. "The model isn't Germany or Japan, but Nicaragua and the Philippines." Finally, the population of Americans who have served in the military is shrinking, and with it their knowledge of what armies and navies do.
Anybody who has studied the history of war knows that it's possible to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat - it happened at Shiloh, when a Confederate attack nearly routed the Union army, only to have General Grant drive them off the field of battle the next day. Perhaps military historians can stage a similar comeback. In their efforts to do so, they will be wise to remember something that Grant didn't know back in 1862: An awful lot of brutal fighting lies ahead.
Source
The Sovietization of British school inspections
School inspections used to be about improving education. This is no longer the case, says Susan Elkin
I am teaching in an English department in a "bog standard" Kent high school and we are being inspected. Although we have only 500 pupils, we are joined by 13 men and women from London for a complete school week. One cerebral, interesting man is attached exclusively to the English department. Only five of us work in the department, so "our" inspector is with one or other of us almost continuously from Monday to Friday. He makes helpful comments and joins in. At the end of the week, he meets the whole department and shares some thoughts, ideas and observations with us. It is all very constructive.
When I pop along as usual to the music department at lunchtime on Tuesday to sing in the choir with the senior pupils, I find the music inspector helping our (only) music teacher by playing accompaniments so that she can get on with conducting. I also notice the science inspector apparently helping pupils with experiments when I pass the chemistry lab.
Did we know they were coming? Yes, we had a few weeks' notice and naturally we scurried around in advance to present our school in the best light. But there was no requirement to produce forests of pointless paper "policies" that no one ever looks at before or after the inspection. So, of course, this isn't Ofsted, with its dogma of discounting what isn't documented. I am winding the clock back more than 20 years to the early Eighties, when I was in a school that underwent a full inspection by Her Majesty's Inspectorate (HMI). Founded in the 19th century, HMI was the forerunner of Ofsted and has now been incorporated into it.
I was lucky to have this experience. HMI inspected schools like ours at random, but there was no brief to be exhaustive. It used to be said that, statistically, you could teach for 100 years and never see an inspector - clearly not ideal if you want teachers and schools to be accountable. Their method, however, was exemplary. No inspector in our school that week suggested there was one "correct" way of tackling a subject, organising a lesson, assessing work or relating to pupils. They had the wisdom to know that there are almost as many good learning methods as there are teachers, and that encouraging those who are clearly good at the job to build on their strengths and "to go with what works" is far more likely to get good results - and I don't mean just examination grades. There was no evidence of fixed criteria and there were certainly no tick boxes.
Compare that with the blinkered reductiveness of Ofsted, whose purpose is to enforce the Government's dumbed-down education policies and to suppress breadth and initiative. If a teacher isn't doing precisely what the Department for Education and Ofsted dictate, his or her lesson is publicly damned as "unsatisfactory". Anastasia de Waal, author of Inspection, Inspection, Inspection!, recently published by the think tank Civitas, argues that Ofsted is a Government lapdog, not the education watchdog it pretends to be. A spokesman for one of the schools Miss de Waal cites said: "If there is a box for it, it must be ticked and if something doesn't have box, it's ignored." Another commented: "When I challenged a judgment in discussion, the inspectors shrugged their shoulders, saying they simply had 'to follow the rules and tick the boxes'."
One of the Government's obsessions is with rigidly structured lessons. Mine always began with a greeting, a joke and then, mostly, "Let's start from where we got to yesterday". In 36 years of reasonably successful teaching, I rarely managed a self-contained lesson - because life and learning are simply not divisible into neat units for the convenience of petty bureaucrats. Moreover, good, confident teachers who know what they're doing and who care about learning can never quite predict where a lesson is going. A pupil might ask an interesting question and the discussion might veer off in a relevant, but unexpected, direction - anathema to control freaks and Ofsted inspectors.
Driven out partly by the absurdity of the Ofsted inspections, Sue Gibson no longer teaches garden history in a further education college. "I was criticised for not altering my method of delivery every 10 to 15 minutes," she says. "In a two-hour lesson, that would have meant changing my teaching method at least eight times. These were college students being prepared for the workplace. Producing students with a concentration span of only 15 minutes would, to any sane person's thinking, only add to the numbers of unemployed." Miss Gibson is relieved to be out of it, but says she regrets the waste of her years of experience and knowledge.
Ofsted has achieved what Miss de Waal calls the "homogenisation" of teaching. That means schools are getting worse, not better. They change to accommodate what Ofsted wants. Most are too frightened of the punishments that Ofsted can dole out - "special measures" and the like - to do anything else.
Although we weren't exactly thrilled to see HMI, there was mutual respect between teachers and inspectors in the 1980s. The inspectors were regarded as the creme de la creme in the teaching profession, and you had to be outstanding to make it as one. Today, the relationship of most teachers with Ofsted is based on well-founded mistrust and suspicion. Inspectors, typically, are part-time hirelings borrowed from schools that are clones of the ones they're inspecting. Independent they are not.
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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.
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3 November, 2006
TEXT LANGUAGE ACCEPTED IN SCOTTISH EXAMS
English literature students who reduce Hamlet's agonies to "2b or not 2b" will not be penalised so long as they display an understanding of the subject, an examinations authority has ruled. While the use of text message jargon would not achieve top marks, it would be accepted if the answer was right, a report by the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) said.
The SQA report on Standard Grade English - the equivalent of English and Welsh GCSEs - reveals that examiners are becoming increasingly concerned about literacy standards among pupils. Many students have a grasp of English so poor that they resort to the stunted shorthand of the text message. The assessor's report says that candidates are failing to achieve good grades because the quality of their English does not match the quality of their answers. The SQA said yesterday that while text shorthand was "not acceptable" in exams, the positive-marking philosophy of the Scottish system meant that marks would still be given for correct answers, even if they were written in text message.
"In English the candidates need to show knowledge [of the subject] and express it appropriately. Text message language is not considered appropriate," a spokesman for the SQA said. "However, an answer written in text would be accepted if it was correct, but the candidate would not get top marks. To get the best marks they would have to write in standard English."
The liberal approach is not echoed in England and Wales where GCSE candidates lose marks for failing to write in standard English. Edexcel, one of England's largest exam boards, said: "We acknowledged that text language has its own lexicon, but students need to know why it is inappropriate within a report, an exam or a business setting. "If in geography students used short forms of words and were rushing towards the end of an essay, and had used the words correctly earlier, they would be forgiven. "But in English text language would be frowned upon and they wouldn't be given marks for it."
Dave Smith, of the Plain English Campaign, said that it was no wonder more and more employers were complaining about the poor literacy skills of school leavers. The SQA report concluded that teachers should emphasise to pupils the importance of avoiding "informalities of talk and text language in written submissions except during direct speech".
Source
Tough jobs and education policy from an Australian LEFTIST
Young people who drop out of school and stay at home "twiddling their thumbs on PlayStation or Xbox" would be kicked off the dole after six months if they did not return to study or training under a reform plan from Labor backbencher Craig Emerson. The radical policy to be released today aims to prevent the formation of a permanent underclass in Australia that cannot find a job even in a boom. Dr Emerson, who last month called for school to be compulsory until Year 12, will use new research to identify the problem group in the community at risk of becoming unemployable.
More than half those of working age who failed to finish Year 10 are out of work - despite the economy achieving a generation-low unemployment rate of 4.8 per cent - according to official data commissioned by Dr Emerson. "This is not about punishment, it's about getting young people the education and skills needed for them to have a prosperous future," Dr Emerson said. "This is a learn-or-earn program where there is no third option of sitting around doing nothing."
His paper will be presented to the economic and social outlook conference in Melbourne this morning. Co-hosted by The Melbourne Institute and The Australian, the Making the Boom Pay conference will run for two days, with tonight's keynote dinner address being delivered by Treasury Secretary Ken Henry. Opposition Leader Kim Beazley will outline more of Labor's reform agenda in tomorrow's main luncheon address.
The Emerson plan is likely to upset many of his own Labor colleagues because it echoes the Fightback proposal of former Liberal leader John Hewson to remove the dole for all recipients after nine months. Labor's workforce participation spokeswoman Penny Wong said she supported the central idea behind "learning or earning", but would not go as far as Dr Emerson. "People should work if they can, and young people should be either learning or earning. Labor does not support time-limited social security," Senator Wong said.
Dr Emerson argues that if a variety of schools were funded - including "second chance" schools that help students not academically inclined - there would be "no excuse and no justification for leaving school early to sit at home on the dole". "Australia cannot afford to have up to 54,000 long-term unemployed young people neither working nor studying to improve their skills," he will say today.
Dr Emerson says that, in addition to working, studying or training, long-term unemployed young people should be given the option of doing military or community service. "As an alternative to military service, a peace corp could be established to help build community infrastructure in our Pacific island neighbouring countries. "When the range of alternatives that I am advocating is put in place, the dole should not be available to unemployed young people beyond six months. They would receive income support payments for studying or training, but not for sitting at home, twiddling their thumbs on PlayStation or Xbox."
Australian Council of Social Service director Andrew Johnson attacked Dr Emerson's idea, saying such plans had failed in the US. "Time-limited payments are both unfair and ineffective in helping disadvantaged people get into education or work. In the US, one of the few nations who cut off all payments after a time period, child poverty rates are high and levels of youth employment participation are lower than here in Australia," Mr Johnson said.
Dr Emerson says his research, which relies on unpublished figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, rebuts John Howard's claim that leaving school early is the best option for students not academically inclined. The ABS figures show that of those who finished Year 10, more than one-third are unemployed. More than 60 per cent of 15 to 24-year-olds who left school before finishing Year 10 are not employed. In the mining boom states of Western Australia and Queensland only about half of boys from disadvantaged backgrounds are finishing high school, while three-quarters of boys from more privileged backgrounds are doing so. In the Northern Territory, 13 per cent of boys and 18 per cent of girls from disadvantaged backgrounds are finishing high school.
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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.
***************************
2 November, 2006
DUTCH "NERDS" SOCIALLY POPULAR
Being a swot was once the quickest way to lose friends. Now researchers have found that teenagers who are top of their class are just as popular as athletic "jocks". Girls or boys who combine academic success with a friendly approach and good fashion sense are the most liked by their peers. The jocks were seen as bullying, cocky and more likely to take advantage of others.
Daniel Muijs, a professor of education at Manchester University, said: "There has for some time been an image of clever children in schools being these swotty, geeky, nerdy type of kids, but this is clearly not the case any longer." Researchers at the University of Amsterdam, asked almost 300 14-year-olds at two Dutch high schools to identify the characteristics of their most widely liked peers. Three-quarters of the children said the athletic types were arrogant and half found them threatening, while just 7% considered them intelligent. But their rebellious behaviour, such as talking back to teachers and even being expelled, meant they were still seen as "cool".
But swots were admired, too. More than half were prepared to help others with homework, and 59% were considered friendly. Many pupils also admire their cleverer peers for their ability to master new technology and gadgets quickly. Eddy de Bruyn, a professor of education at the University of Amsterdam, who led the study published in the Journal of Adolescent Research, said: "These children have social intelligence. They are not nerds, they know how to get on with people and they understand the politics of a social group. "The jocks, on the other hand, can be very controlling and bitchy. It's all about them being the top dog, about them being the centre of attention. They are popular because they are powerful, but their friendships often don't mean very much."
Alain de Botton, the philosopher and author, recalled that intelligence was rarely an asset when he was at Harrow school in the 1980s. He said: "Sport was definitely the only route to popularity and academic success was likely to get you beaten up fast. "I survived by making the brutes laugh, and doing their homework." He added: "The influence of academic success as a way of increasing popularity suggests another triumph for the bourgeoisie, who have always put intelligence way above other things, so it isn't surprising this ethos has gradually filtered back to the school system."
Alex Bagenal, 12, from Oxford, agreed with de Bruyn's findings. He said: "At my school you get the rockers, the sporty ones and the nerds. But you also get people that can move between groups, who are popular because they have the knowledge and can fit in. That's how I see myself."
The study also showed differences between "alpha" boys and girls. In jock groups, girls were more likely to find it "cool" to be expelled than boys, and were less likely to help others with their homework. Boys were seen as verbally and physically aggressive, and threatening.
De Bruyn said: "If you take a class of 30 kids and ask them to choose the most popular . . . usually pretty girls will come out on top. The boys who are most interested in fashion are more popular but also more anti-social."
Source
NEWER BRITISH UNIVERSITIES HAVE LOWER STANDARDS
Undergraduates who study for as little as 20 hours a week are more likely to be awarded a first-class degree at a newer university than those at older institutions, a survey says. Scientists at Cambridge have to work 45 hours a week to obtain a top-class degree; those studying physics and chemistry at the University of Central Lancashire have to study 19 hours a week for a 2:1 or a first.
The Higher Education Policy Institute survey of 15,000 first-year and second-year undergraduates questions the true value of a degree, showing that some students work far harder than others, depending on the subject. Although tuition fees are now paid upfront in a loan by the Government, graduates must pay them off once they earn 15,000 pounds. Banks estimate that by 2009 a student's debt will be approaching 30,000 pounds, which most will be paying off until their mid-thirties.
The survey, published today, shows that while, on average, students claim to be working 25.7 hours a week in lectures, seminars or private study, medics and dentists are apparently working ten hours a week more. Overall the study shows that undergraduates on courses in mass communications put in five hours fewer than the average each week. The differences were more pronounced between subjects than between different universities, although those at older universities studied more.
Bahram Bekhradnia, of the institute, said: "If students are putting 32 hours a week into engineering and 21 hours a week into business studies, is a degree telling you the same thing about the universities and the experience the students have had? You can get a 2:1 with different amounts of effort." The authors say: "This report does not prove that the degree classification system is flawed, but it certainly raises questions that need to be addressed." They note that 60.9 per cent of students of physical sciences at Plymouth University receive a 2:1 or first-class degree for working 20 hours a week. At Cambridge, where students may have twice the A-level points, they work 45 hours a week for the same class of degree.
About half of students were disappointed by some aspect of university - mostly with the quality of teaching. Nearly 30 per cent of overseas students - who pay much higher fees than British and other EU students - said that their university experience did not represent value for money.
Drummond Bone, of the vice-chancellors' group Universities UK, said: "There is no national curriculum in higher education, and so we should not be surprised that different courses at different institutions involve different use of facilities, contact hours and so on."
Oxford University plans to open a research centre in India next year, to exploit funding and talent in the fast-growing economy. The Said Business School is in talks on opening at least one centre, probably in Bombay or Bangalore, and hopes to open several. They will not offer degrees, but will link Indian policymakers, corporate leaders and researchers with experts at Oxford.
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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.
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1 November, 2006
LEFTIST BIAS: "YES"; CHRISTIAN BIAS: "NO"
The University of California and an association of fundamentalist Christian schools are heading for a showdown over their competing views of academic freedom. The conflict erupted over a decision by UC admissions officers a couple of years ago to reject future proposals for high school curricula based on certain Christian textbooks published by Bob Jones University Press of South Carolina and A Beka Books of Florida. Approval was not withdrawn from courses that already received an OK.
The Christian schools sued UC, asserting a right to teach the viewpoints they choose. A federal judge in Los Angeles has refused to throw out the suit, ruling in August that the schools should have a chance to prove that religious discrimination was behind UC's decision. A two- or three-week trial is expected in 2007.
Among the books are a physics text that treats the Bible as infallible truth and a biology text that calls evolution "a retreat from science." American history, government and literature texts also are at issue.
The 4,000-member Association of Christian Schools International has been joined in the suit by current and former high school students in Riverside County and their alma mater, Calvary Chapel Christian School of Murrieta, which says its mission is to teach students "to understand, analyze and interpret every subject from a biblical perspective." "At the same time," the mission statement continues, "we will be familiarizing our students with the so-called 'facts' of the subjects."
In its response to the suit, UC has said it's not stopping the Christian schools from teaching or studying anything, but that the schools "have no right to freedom from academic evaluation." UC lawyer Christopher Patti said in an interview that the challenged texts fail to meet the university's academic standards. They're too narrow in outlook, he said, with "huge gaps ... about the experience of ... any nonwhite movements in the United States," or they rely too much on faith and supernatural explanations instead of objective evidence and reasoning.
Despite long-established legal precedents recognizing a university's right to control its admission standards as an aspect of academic freedom, U.S. District Judge S. James Otero said in his opinion in August that "if in fact" UC has been discriminating against religious viewpoints, "such action would run afoul of the limits of (its) freedom to determine its admissions policies."
Among many issues to be sorted out at the trial is whether UC's admissions criteria, which permit students to qualify via routes other than approved course work, such as standardized testing, leave Christian school students at a disadvantage. "We're clearly not trying to keep these kids out," Patti said. He said graduates of the school in Murrieta have had a particularly high admission rate in recent years. He also said UC's approval rate for courses taught at Christian schools is identical to the rate for schools overall.
But Robert Tyler, who represents the Christian schools, said the UC has been turning down Christian school courses at the same time it has accepted secular school courses based on viewpoints such as feminism or Buddhism or "the influence of nearly every imaginable group on history" except Christians. The Christian schools assert they want to use the disapproved texts only as supplementary materials, to deepen the education their students get from standard texts. For example, Tyler said, to explain the concept of separation of church and state, a standard U.S. government text might discuss the Supreme Court's 1952 pro-church decision in Zorach v. Clauson.
A Christian text might go back to the origin of the phrase in Thomas Jefferson's 1802 letter to the Danbury (Conn.) Baptist Association, which was concerned that a larger denomination might establish a national church. The class then might consider how a national church would work, "to give students a better understanding and, frankly, a more diverse understanding," Tyler said.
Patti countered that far from being merely supplementary, the Christian texts contradict the standard curriculum with a single point of view that fails to promote critical thinking. While "the university has no opposition to questioning current scientific points of view," he said, certain ways of questioning aren't legitimately academic because they aren't subject to scientific testing. The Bob Jones physics text, for example, teaches that "the only sure truths are found in God's Word, which is settled forever in heaven. ... The Bible, written by an omniscient God, can never be proved wrong."
The higher education establishment seems to be firmly in UC's corner. Barmak Nassirian, spokesman for the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, said universities must defer to academics to define the essence of their disciplines, not only in biology, chemistry and physics but also in the humanities and social sciences. "You simply can't bring a bundle of your particular views" to the university and demand that it "manufacture a degree," he said. "We wouldn't do this in engineering" if someone refused to concede, for example, the theory of gravity.
Christian high schools in the Sacramento area and elsewhere refused to comment on the issues. But one prominent school official who's familiar with the case said UC shouldn't be examining Christian high school curricula at all. The university should admit students solely on the basis of their ability to succeed, said Assemblywoman Sharon Runner, R-Lancaster, a co-founder and board member of Desert Christian Schools. In their suit, the Christian schools say their students score better on standardized tests than students overall. They say that should be enough to satisfy UC admissions officers, who should not be "parsing through the viewpoints and content of Christian school instruction and texts to ferret out disapproved religious views."
Source
SAGGING DISCIPLINE IN BRITISH SCHOOLS
Three quarters of parents think standards of discipline in schools are worsening despite repeated Government crackdowns, research shows. The Government's own polling revealed a widespread belief that pupils are becoming harder to control. In a blow to Labour almost a decade after taking office, it also showed declining public confidence in educational standards. The damning verdict came in a survey of 4,000 adults commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills.
School discipline was rated as by far the most important issue facing education - ahead of other matters like levels of funding. Just over three quarters of respondents believed that standards of behaviour in schools were getting worse. The scale of concern will embarrass ministers who have spent billions on a raft of policies aimed at restoring "respect" to classrooms ranging from parenting classes to school behaviour consultants.
The Daily Mail revealed on Saturday that more than 400 schools now have police officers stationed on site to help curb truancy and playground hooliganism.
Declining pupil behaviour is repeatedly cited by teachers choosing to leave the profession. "Over three-quarters felt that the general standards of behaviour in schools were getting worse" the report for the DfES concluded. "Around half felt that behaviour in their local schools was getting worse."
Both parents and childless respondents believed pupils' behaviour was deteriorating. A majority also thought the Government was not giving teachers enough support to tackle unruly behaviour. Even during the past year, public confidence in the education system has ebbed away, according to research by EdComs and ICM on behalf of ministers. More than half of respondents questioned in September last year thought exam results were the "best ever" but only 36 per cent agreed by June 2006. Meanwhile only 22 per cent agreed that there were "fewer poorly performing schools" by June, down from 30 per cent in September 2005. And just 25 per cent thought the quality of teaching had "never been better" by June, down from 31 per cent.
Declining numbers believe school adequately prepares children for the world of work. Only 32 per cent thought youngsters left school with a proper grip of the three Rs.
In a further blow to Tony Blair, the research found limited support for his flagship "trust schools" aimed at changing the face of the education system. Planned legislation will give businesses, faith groups, universities and other outside organisations a say in running schools but only 15 per cent of respondents declared themselves strongly in favour.
There was clear backing for the Prime Minister's drive to give parents more choice over where to send their children, "they were least in favour of involving outside organisations in the running of schools".
DfES officials acknowledged that parents were worried about standards of discipline. They said that new measures contained in proposed legislation would strengthen teachers' powers in law to assert their authority over troublesome pupils. Laws on physically restraining violent pupils will also be clarified. A spokesman said: "While Ofsted tell us that behaviour is good in most schools most of the time, this survey shows that parents are concerned about behaviour. "This is precisely why our Education Bill confirms the right to discipline so no pupil will be able to question a teacher's authority and gives teachers the legal right to restrain a pupil where they are a risk to themselves or others."
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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.
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