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30 November, 2007

English children's literacy levels 'among the worst in the developed world'

England has plummeted down a world league table of reading standards at primary school despite Labour's billions poured into education. Our schools tumbled from third place five years ago to 19th, beaten by the U.S. and many European nations - including Germany, Italy and Bulgaria. Only Morocco and Romania suffered a sharper decline in standards since the last global reading study in 2001. Scotland also slipped down the rankings, falling from 14th to 26th. In an alarming verdict on standards in England, the study report said the performance of ten-year- olds had deteriorated "significantly", particularly among the brightest children.

The results paint a dramatically different picture to the ever-rising scores in our official national tests. The shock slide deals an embarrassing blow to ministers who have claimed that extra cash has led to continual improvement. More than 50 billion pounds a year is now spent on nurseries and schools -against 27 billion when Labour came to power.

The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study spanned 40 countries - Belgium was represented by its two sections - and five Canadian provinces. It found that children in England - Wales and Northern Ireland were not included - were less likely to read for pleasure outside school than youngsters almost everywhere else. But they had the highest number of computers.

Children's Secretary Ed Balls insisted last night that parents must take some blame, including those who let their children spend too much time on video games, watching TV and using mobile phones. "Parents have got to find a way to strike a balance," he added. "They need to make sure there's space for reading and learning. "Today's ten-year-olds have more choice than in 2001 about how they spend their free time. Most have their own TVs and mobiles, and 37 per cent are playing computer games for three hours or more a day - more than in most countries in the study. "There is a direct link between use of computer games and lower achievement." [Rubbish. Kids playing Sim games sometimes learn a lot more about history etc. than they do at school] Sue Hackman, chief adviser on school standards, said parents must not "suddenly cut off" reading with their children because they think they have mastered the skill.

The study, overseen by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, also implicated the school system in England's declining performance, even though more than 600 million has been spent on primary school literacy schemes alone since 1998. It revealed a tripling in the number of pupils who are never set reading homework and a decline in the time spent teaching reading. The PIRLS project involved giving reading tests to tens of thousands of ten-year-olds. The tests, which assessed pupils' comprehension of factual information and their appreciation of literature, were translated from English into more than 30 other languages.

England's performance will add to pressure on Gordon Brown and focus attention on Labour's ten-year Children's Plan, being unveiled next month. Ministers had trumpeted improving standards in the three Rs as a key success of Tony Blair's premiership. A decade of reforms has been accompanied by an increase in the schools and early-years budget from 27.2 billion in 1996 to 49.4 billion last year.

England's poor showing was also being blamed yesterday on a failure to put traditional "synthetic phonics" at the heart of literacy lessons. The back-to-basics method of teaching children to read - credited with virtually wiping out illiteracy in part of Scotland - became law in schools only last September.

Shadow Children's Secretary Michael Gove said last night: "While the Government says its policies are driving up standards, the independent auditors of our education system tell a very different story. "It's time the Government stopped blaming parents and accepted the case we've been making for a new focus on teaching reading, using tried and tested methods, with a test after two years to ensure our children are being taught properly."

Source




IDEOLOGY OVER INTEGRITY IN ACADEME

Is this Columbia University? A professor of anthropology calls for a million Mogadishus, a professor of Arabic and Islamic Science tells a girl she isn't a Semite because her eyes are green, and a professor of Persian hails the destruction of the World Trade Center as the castrating of a double phallus. The most recent tenured addition to this rogues' gallery is to be an anthropologist, the principal thrust of whose magnum opus is the suggestion that archaeology in Israel is a sort of con game meant to persuade the unwary that Jews lived there in antiquity.

I could refute the claims that Nadia Abu El-Haj makes in her book, but respected specialists have done so already in Isis, the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, and elsewhere. Facts on the Ground fits firmly into the postmodern academic genre, in which facts and evidence are subordinate to, and mediated by, a "discourse." There is no right or wrong answer, just competitive discourses. It does not come as news that people employ the data of archaeology to prove points of interest to them -- information in any discipline used by human beings does not exist in a vacuum. But, as reviewers noted, Facts on the Ground expands upon this insight, quite unremarkable in itself, to propose that Israeli archaeologists use altered or falsified data and do so to a single ideological end. That purpose is to demonstrate a previous Jewish sovereignty and long historical presence that did not in fact exist, thereby to cloak the "colonial" essence of Zionism. This aspect of the book is malign fantasy.

Though alumnae of Barnard have declared they will stop giving money to Alma Mater if El-Haj is tenured, it is unlikely their protests will have any effect. She is fully supported by other ideologues in positions of power at Columbia and by outspokenly anti-Israel academics around the globe. Most of the good lack all conviction, as usual.

How did we come to this? Anti-Zionism has a long, diverse history, and the moral horror of the Nazi Holocaust in the 1940s did not diminish its appeal In the early days of Zionism, in the early 20th century, many Jewish leftists rejected the idea of mass emigration to a historical national homeland and opted instead for the Bundist programme of a Yiddish-based Jewish polity in a Diaspora environment. The Soviets opposed the Bund but Zionism and Hebrew even more, supporting Israel only briefly on tactical grounds in the late 1940's. Stalin drew away from Israel and began the anti-Semitic campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans." The word translated as "rootless" is Russian bezrodnyi, a far more potent term composed of the negating prefix bez-, "without," plus the root rod-, which means anything from "birth" to "deeply-felt intimacy" (the adjective rodnoi) to "the Motherland" (Rodina) itself. Stalinist policies re-institutionalized in Russia an anti-Semitism in which Jews were shunned as homeless -- "barely human" -- by their very nature In this way, the very qualities of selfless internationalism that Jewish leftists had assiduously cultivated in the cause of world revolution were turned against them.

The Soviet posture strengthened anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist trends in the Western Left; and when Israel, a democratic state, became increasingly alienated from the Eastern bloc and joined in alliance with France, Britain, and, later, the United States, Leftists saw this as confirmation of its imperialist nature. Winning the Six Day War in 1967 did not help: if only the Jews could be cuddly victims again. But it was hard for the New Left to remain loyal to the imbecilic Soviets, and the flirtation with Mao could not last long. The Third World became the cause du jour, and especially the Arab world and the Palestinian terrorist movement.

Further help came from Columbia, from Edward Said's 1978 book Orientalism, which proposed a vague socialist agenda, a conspiracy theory, and a new set of victims of imperialism quite unlike the Soviets. These were of course the Arabs -- and it was even better that the proximal villain was the ever-sinister, colonizing, comprador Jew. But there is a problem. Said dealt with the 18th and 19th centuries, for the most part, but the Arabs were not the political player in the region then: Ottoman Turkey, a powerful empire and seat of the Muslim Caliphate, ruled them. Millions of Christian Greeks, Romanians, Bulgarians, Serbs, and Armenians labored under Ottoman misrule too. The first four broke away, but the Armenian homeland was in Anatolia itself. So in 1915, during World War I, the Turks decided upon genocide, and carried it out.

Said did not mention the Armenians even once in his book, for it would have made his passive, victimized Islamic world look rather less passive and not at all the victim. It is a glaring omission. Said's book was properly dismissed by many prominent reviewers as amateurish and dishonest -- though on other grounds. They did not even notice the Turkish and Armenian aspect. The book might have been consigned to well-deserved oblivion.

But a year after its publication, revolution erupted in Iran. And Orientalism would become the guidebook and intellectual primer for a new wave of "anti-imperialism." Following the overthrow of the Shah, Khomeini's radical Islamic followers proclaimed an Islamic revolutionary ideology with many of the same romantic and apocalyptic features that had attracted the masses -- and armchair revolutionaries here -- to Communism. (An amusing aside: Harvard held an exhibition and symposium in May 2007, partially funded by our Provost's Office, on posters of the Iranian revolution. I was asked to present a paper on Soviet propaganda art, then hurriedly disinvited when the organizers realized, as they said to me, that comparing the Iranian masterpieces to those of an atheist rAcgime might offend President Ahmadinejad. One is touched that Harvard is so alert to the sensitivities of a Holocaust denier who murders gay people and routinely calls for the incineration of Israel. So much for academic integrity on the banks of the Charles.)

Gradually, Middle East studies as we knew it at Columbia disappeared, to be replaced by what you have now. As it seems to me, Middle East studies at Columbia and elsewhere has become politicized; and other branches of the humanities have also fallen prey to ideology. Where university administrators do not actually share such extreme views and methods, they are anxious to preserve the appearance of tranquility and due process in the interests of the institutional image, even if that appearance is utterly superficial. I therefore doubt that any challenge to El-Haj can succeed; and perhaps efforts within universities like Columbia waste energy that might more effectively be channeled elsewhere. Jewish kids will keep on taking Lit Hum and enjoying convivial Shabbat dinners, but in a real sense the battle at Columbia may be lost.

What is to be done? When Berlin was divided and the Communists seized the Humboldt University in their half of town, refugee scholars founded the Free University in West Berlin. What have you in New York City? NYU is not much different from Columbia. But there are two fine institutions of learning in Manhattan where genuine Near Eastern studies, untainted by Jew-baiting, apologia for terrorism, and unscholarly chicanery, might find a home, aided perhaps by the donations of alumnae and alumni of Barnard and Columbia. The nearer one to Columbia is the Jewish Theological Seminary on 122nd Street and Broadway. The farther one (in Arabic, al aqsa) and with its noble neo-Moorish dome and minaret the appellation almost fits) is uptown, in Washington Heights: Yeshiva University. Instead of writing angry letters to Lee Bollinger, alumni can pool their resources to help create rival MEALAC departments; and Columbia students desirous of an authentic education in subjects like Middle Eastern history can earn their transferable credits there.

But, one might say, Jews have fought so hard to get into the Ivy League. Yes, and Jews in Europe fought hard for emancipation, too: some learnt skills and lessons along the way that proved useful when they realized it was time to go and rebuild our own country. Others held on and wouldn't leave. There is an old story about people who wandered and came to a plain, where they settled and built a village. But the place turned out to be the back of a great fish: it dived, and they drowned. So, there is another great university, actually a number, but a bit farther away. I have in mind the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the other universities of Israel. It is particularly appropriate to support them now, when they are threatened by boycott.

The Free University of Berlin is a historical example of how one can cultivate an alternate research center of higher quality than ones that have been corrupted, where efforts at reform yield diminishing returns. But there is an example closer to home. I was graduated from Columbia College in 1974 and delivered the Salutatory address on a medieval Armenian mystic. Professor Nina Garsoian had developed in the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department (MEALAC) a great program in Armenian Studies, and I was the first undergraduate joint major in the subject. But the subject has languished since her retirement in 1993. (I was denied tenure at Columbia in 1992 and shortly thereafter was appointed to America's oldest chair in the field, here at Harvard.)

After a series of farcical "searches," MEALAC last semester offered the Armenian position, at only a junior level, to a former pupil of mine. Carefully considering the character of the search process itself and the state of the subject and of Near Eastern studies at Columbia overall, she declined the post, accepting instead a job as director of the Zohrab Center, a library and research and cultural institute at the Armenian Diocese in Manhattan. The Zohrab Center and Harvard's Armenian Studies program have already begun our first joint project, bypassing Columbia altogether -- leaving it behind its ideological Berlin Wall.

This latest scandal leads me finally, though, to grimmer reflections. In nazified Dresden,the Jewish professor Victor Klemperer -- not Otto, the conductor, but the academic whose book LTI (Lingua Tertii Imperii) was the first study of the jargon to which the Third Reich reduced German -- noted that people of every class and profession except his own had helped him now and then through the Hitler years. His fellow academics, though, were fascist enthusiasts, unwilling to help. Nothing of equivalent horror is going on today, but perhaps the amorality of Klemperer's colleagues should be a warning against expecting that because men are learned, they must also be right.

When I wrote "What is to be done?" I had in mind Nikolai Chernyshevsky's Chto delat, so let me close with a marvelous verse of the Russian Jewish writer Isaac Babel. I think of it when I walk down 116th & Broadway, and see all that ivy concealing all that rot. Tvorchestvo vo dvortsakh ne vodvoritsya. "Creativity will not take up residence in palaces." Or in plain American, "Include me out."

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29 November, 2007

A Quiet Defeat for College Political Correctness

Maybe this is how political correctness ends; not with a bang, but with a whimper. Across the country, universities that had abandoned in loco parentis in the 1960s because it was too oppressive and intrusive have replaced it with in loco Big Brother programs of political and cultural re-education. Last fall, for instance, the University of Wisconsin unveiled an ambitious "diversity" campaign designed to root out inappropriate speech and behaviors on campus. The "Think Respect" campaign was not as controversial as the University of Delaware's re-education program that required students to confess their racial guilt and demanded that they demonstrate "correct" attitudes toward sexuality and environmentalism.

But UW's program was just as creepy. Posters appeared around the campus that included suggestions how students could "Put Up a 'No Hate' Sign in Your Room," "Become a Big Brother or Sister," and "Confront Inappropriate Jokes." ("How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?" "That's not funny.")

When not confronting such inappropriate humor, students were also encouraged to inform on one another. At the center of "Think Respect," was a "bias reporting mechanism" that encouraged students to report oppressive and racist worst, attitudes, and behavior. Students could download a form to make their allegations, which would then be investigated by the administration. The university's website encouraged a liberal use of the system:

"A bias incident is a threat or act of bigotry, harassment or intimidation - verbal, written or physical - that is personally directed against or targets a University of Wisconsin-Madison student because of that student's race, age, gender identity or expression, disability, national or ethnic origin, political affiliation, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, veteran status, or other actual or perceived characteristic." (Emphasis added.) "Students can report anything, from a hate crime to graffiti to verbal harassment."

When the reporting system was unveiled, UW Law professor and blogger Ann Althouse commented:

"Students can report anything? And remember [Chancellor John] Wiley's statement: "We will not tolerate bias, racism, disrespect or hate." We will not tolerate disrespect? You know, I want students to feel good about campus life, but isn't part of campus life having rowdy debates and vigorous arguments?.... This program should make students worry that anything other than bland pleasantries is going to get them in trouble with the administration."

Free speech champion Donald Downs, who is also on the UW faculty, noted that the program "encourages campus citizens to report not only acts of harassment or discrimination that constitute official misconduct, but all forms of `bias,' verbal and non-verbal, without that term being defined in a manner that is consistent with First Amendment principles. In other words, the present policy amounts to a speech code, as it encourages people to file reports on other people's attitudes and speech that informants deem insufficiently sensitive."

At the University of Delaware a legal challenge from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a media firestorm, and accompanying widespread ridicule, forced the university to abandon its North Korean-style indoctrination program.

At Wisconsin, the "Think Respect" program died from indifference. It simply withered away. Even at one of the most political righteous campuses in the nation, it turned out that students did not want to rat one another out to the diversity police. As the student newspaper the Badger Herald reported last week:

"The campaign now is relegated to its spot in the vast bank of inactive organizations occupying the Student Organization Office's web space and the bias reporting mechanism fills a similar role on the Dean of Students' website."

The dean who launched "Think Respect" now admits that the campaign "didn't gain momentum for subsequent years" and they "haven't had many reports" of bias or oppressive behavior.

UW Law student Robert Phansalkar wrote the epitaph for the program, whose origin he traced "to our downright insatiable desire to legislate and litigate everything." The diverse-o-crats assume that college students are unable to deal with issues like racism on their own. But the reality, he wrote, is that "we have the ability to do so."

"This is precisely why students did not turn to campaigns or reporting forms to deal with those who offended them during the past year. "It seems obvious; we simply do not rush to a computer to fill out a form online when someone has offended us - we confront the person. We do not go to counseling to discuss an offensive remark - we talk it through... "The assumption that students simply cannot take care of themselves is the root of the very kind of paternalism that the `Think Campaign' perpetuates. The campaign and reporting forms advance the mentality that we cannot deal with these problems on our own. "But, as lack of enthusiasm and disuse of these programs plainly show, we are more than capable of dealing with the racism of today on our own."

Even without Big Brother looking over their shoulders.

Source




THE COLLEGE CAMPUS: ANTI-SEMITISM'S LAST REFUGE

A 1930s Jewish joke has two Polish yeshiva students walking down the street, suddenly aware of a pair of anti-Semitic thugs behind them brandishing sticks. The boys flee, the hooligans in pursuit. As the chase continues, one Jew asks the other, "Why are we running? There are only two of them, and we are two." "Yes," says his friend, "But they are together and we are alone." That's the kind of joke the birth of the State of Israel 60 years ago was to have rendered obsolescent. A literal phoenix risen from the ashes, Israel was a source of pride to all Jews, and widely accepted throughout the West as the nail in the coffin of systematic anti-Semitism.

We mistakenly took a brief remission for a cure. A new strain of the old cancer is metastasizing throughout Western countries with large, alienated Muslim populations. The new international, Israel-focused anti-Semitism -- the 2001 Durban Conference was a classic manifestation --joins fascist Muslims and left-wing ideologues in common cause.

The new Jew-hatred isn't characterized by brutal government-sponsored Kristallnachts. It is covert and "respectable." Indeed, wearing the fig leaf of anti-Zionism, Israel hatred in Europe is more than respectable; it is fashionable. But make no mistake: Organized and aggressive anti-Zionism is, effectively, anti-Semitism filtered through an ideological spellcheck. Scapegoating Jews for the world's ills, once a tactic of the right, is today a global left-wing phenomenon.

It should go without saying that criticism of Israel is, in itself, not tantamount to anti-Semitism. Clearheaded critics treat Israel as a country like any other, including their own. They judge Israel's actions by the single standard they apply to everyone else, and speak of Israel in language appropriate to truthful exchange. But you know Israel critics have become Israel haters when: they are obsessed with Israel's moral failures and ignore others'; they respond compassionately to Arab war victims, but not to Israel's terror victims; they deny Jews' ancestral roots and continued habitation of Israel; and they employ code words, such as "neoconservatives" or "Israel Lobby," as a euphemism for Jews.

Most importantly, Israel haters maliciously appropriate the discourse of Jewish victimhood to promote hate in others through outright historical lies. They label Israel an apartheid state, call Israeli soldiers Nazis, portray Ariel Sharon eating babies (the oldest anti-Semitic blood libel), compare Gaza to Buchenwald and in short seek to normalize the idea that support for Israel is support for racism, today's ultimate taboo.

In Canada, one rarely sees open manifestations of anti-Semitism. But the noxious creed is not extinct -- as we learned during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, when various left-wing dupes -- including, shamefully, a handful of labour leaders and politicians --marched in solidarity alongside Hezbollah supporters carrying placards urging "Death to the Jews."

The new anti-Semitism is also very much in evidence on university campuses, where Israel-hatred has become an efficient industry run by professional, Islamist-funded activists posing as students, supported by a significant number of faculty sympathizers. Defending Israel on campus is an act of courage for Jewish students, who run frequent gamuts of abuse directed at Israel through a shrill barrage of agitprop, Israeli apartheid "conferences," boycott attempts, divestment campaigns and threatened or real violence directed at Israel's advocates, as in two notable cases five years ago involving Middle Eastern scholar Daniel Pipes at York University in Toronto, and former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Concordia University in Montreal.

Jewish students can choose to ignore the unremitting attacks on Israel -- most do; unlike Israel-hating activists, they are there for an education -- or combat it as best they can. Which is to say, on the whole, badly or half-heartedly. Intimidated by the slick professionalism of these full-time militants, and ill-equipped to challenge strategic lying, Jewish students on most North American campuses have ceded ideological hegemony to the insurgents.

Determined to reverse this demoralizing scenario, Montreal's Canadian Institute of Jewish Research, an independent pro-Israel think-tank (full disclosure: I sit on the board of advisors), has launched a pilot program to "take back the campus." Next week, I'll introduce you to some Jewish students and their mentors who once felt "alone" and now feel "together."

Source





28 November, 2007

Why we must destroy the government schools

A touching letter arrived last week from a woman in Henderson: "To the editor: The article in today's (Nov. 9) Review-Journal about" (a local elementary school principal allegedly) "putting a child in a dark closet brings back a horrible memory. My first day of kindergarten, which was 65 years ago in Detroit, was one which I have never forgotten. "When my mother left me that very first day, I was scared and so I cried. I cried so much that the teacher put me in the coat closet and left me there all morning. The only light was the light from under the door. There were lots of coats hanging because it was February. Maybe the light from under the door caused me to think all those coats were shadows of people. "To this day, I hate the dark. I sleep with two small lights, I must always have my head facing the hall so I can see out, and I am very claustrophobic. That is one of the meanest things that can be done to a small child for punishment."

And here I thought the mandatory government youth camps were "for the good of the children." On Nov. 19, a group called "ONE: The Campaign to Make Poverty History" placed a full-page ad in the Review-Journal, urging Nevadans to demand that the current crop of presidential candidates to "go on the record on where you stand on fighting extreme poverty and global disease that affect the one billion people around the world." The group urges candidates to take a number of stands, including an embrace of "universal primary education."

Notice it doesn't say "universal literacy." It seeks plans to impose "universal primary education" -- which any government or U.N. bureaucrat worth her salt will interpret as a call for universal mandatory state-run schools. The two are not identical.

Tracing the way Prussian-style statist education was brought to this country in the early 19th century by Horace Mann and his associates, Samuel L. Blumenfeld, a research fellow at the Institute for Humane Studies, made clear in his 1981 book "Is Public Education Necessary?" that the whole scheme was never about improving literacy, that "literacy in America was higher before compulsory public education than it is today. ..."

Digging into a January, 1828 edition of the American Journal of Education, Mr. Blumenfeld found an indigenous confirmation of what the visiting Alexis de Tocqueville was to confirm in 1831 about American literacy rates prior to the institution of the compulsory government school: "There is no country, (it is often said), where the means of intelligence are so generally enjoyed by all ranks and where knowledge is so generally diffused among the lower orders of the community, as in our own," the Journal reported. "With us a newspaper is the daily fare of almost every meal in almost every family."

No, "The reasons why this country adopted compulsory public education really had very little to do with education," Mr. Blumenfeld discovered. The founders of our public schools had something much bigger in mind: nothing less than the elimination -- through careful indoctrination of the young -- of the old pattern of selfishness and independent thought and action that had doomed their early communist experiments in places such as New Harmony, on the banks of the Wabash.

Mr. Blumenfeld concluded his historic 250-page book as follows: "After more than a hundred years of universal public education, we can say that it nowhere resembles the utopian vision that drove its proponents to create it. ... It has turned education into a quagmire of conflicting interests, ideologies and purposes, and created a bureaucracy that permits virtually no real learning to take place. ... "The only bright spot in the whole picture," Mr. Blumenfeld continued, "is the technological wonder that capitalism has brought to mankind.... Neither liberal altruism, not universal public education, nor socialism lifted the poor from their lower depths. Capitalism did.

"Is public education necessary?" Mr. Blumenfeld asks. "The answer is obvious; it was not needed then, and it is certainly not needed today. Schools are necessary, but they can be created by free enterprise today as they were before the public school movement achieved its fraudulent state monopoly in education. ...The failure of public education is the failure of statism as a political philosophy. It has been tried. It has been found wanting."

Learning and education are wonderful. The question is whether it's wise to allow this truism to justify the creation of a vast schooling monopoly and unionized jobs program for reliably thankful socialist worker-voters by a state which has obvious incentives to use the resultant vastly expensive propaganda academies to turn a once free people into a docile and malleable mob, eager to trade our dwindling wealth and freedoms for the largely mythological "services" of a burgeoning government master that sends us shrieking from pillar to post, seeking "protection" from global warming or Iranian nuclear power plants or whatever it is they've dreamed up this month.

For "The whole aim of practical politics," as the great iconoclast H.L. Mencken warned us, 80 years ago, "is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

Reform? One wave of "reform" has followed another for generations. An institution cannot be "reformed" if its bad results are inherent in its underlying structure. We cannot see that the problem is the government schools, because after a century and a half we find it hard to imagine what our society would be like without them. But we must try.

We recoil in horror from the practices of more "primitive" peoples who routinely subject their children to genital mutilation and other painful rituals, insisting the continuity of such practices is necessary to maintain their cultures. Yet how much more are each succeeding American generation's views and values warped to accept the "normalcy" of collectivism, enforced mediocrity, and government dependence by 10 to 15 years of incarceration in these state Conformity Camps?

Each year millions of moms wipe away tears as they launch their firstborn 5 or 6-year-olds into the terrifying maw of this trillion-dollar government make-work program, inhabited by older inmates already inured to the culture of violence, toadying, extortion and intimidation. Admonished to be brave, these courageous little troopers do their best to adjust to a frightening and inherently insane world of clanging bells and rushing bodies, reeking of poster paints and floor-sweeping compound and cafeteria mashed potatoes.

Failing, they burst into tears, and -- like our 71-year-old correspondent from Henderson -- quickly learn indelible lessons about how "the system" deals with those who won't knuckle down, "get with the program," learn to tease and torture and steal the lunch money of the next smallest kid in line. We must do the unthinkable. We must destroy the tax-funded, government-run, compulsory public schools.

Source




Britain: Schools minister neglects homework

Desmond Swayne, MP for New Forest West, tells me of a fearful problem affecting Hampshire schools, which have been told by the county education officer, Ian Beacham, that under new rules teachers must no longer drive pupils in mini-buses unless they have a full "passenger vehicle licence" - "a huge and expensive undertaking which entitles them to drive a coach or bus".

Threatening many extra-curricular activities, such as away sporting fixtures, this is causing such grief that Mr Swayne has asked in Parliament whether it is right that teachers should be forbidden to drive children in this way.

Schools minister Jim Knight didn't know the answer but said he would look into it. Harriet Harman, Leader of the House, suggested that Mr Swayne should move for a debate on the issue.

Had those ministers or Hampshire's education officer learned to use Google, they might have found in seconds that this is all a fuss about nothing. The two relevant EU directives on driving licences, 91/439 and 2003/59, make clear that teachers are exempted from the licensing requirements, as does a leaflet available at the click of a mouse on the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency website.

But does it not say something about the way we now allow our laws to be made in Brussels that neither ministers nor a council official responsible for enforcing them appear to know what those laws say?

Source




Latin America's education gap

Here's a new statistic that should sound alarm bells in Latin America: The region is falling increasingly behind China, India and other Asian countries in the number of students it sends to U.S. universities, which are still ranked in international studies as the best in the world. According to the new Open Doors report by the New York-based Institute of International Education (IIE), India remains the country that sends the most students to U.S. universities, with nearly 84,000 students, followed by China with 68,000 students – 76,000 if one includes Hong Kong – and South Korea with 62,000. By comparison, Mexico has 14,000 students in U.S. universities; Brazil, 7,000; Colombia, 6,700; Venezuela, 4,500; Peru, 3,700; Argentina, 2,800; Ecuador, 2,200; and Chile, 1,570.

While the number of Indian students in U.S. universities grew by 10 percent last year, and that of Chinese students by 8 percent, the number of Latin American students fell by 0.3 percent. These are startling numbers: Even communist-ruled Vietnam, which until recently was in the stone ages in terms of its insertion in the world economy, has more than 6,000 students in U.S. universities – twice the number of Argentina, whose economy is nearly three times bigger.

Why are there fewer Latin American than Asian students in U.S. universities? It's not because of economic reasons: While Latin America is not growing as fast as Asia, its economies have grown by an average of nearly 5 percent over the last four years, which is the region's best performance in 25 years. And it's not because the governments of China, India, South Korea and other Asian countries are paying for the foreign studies. To my surprise, when I asked Chinese education officials about this during a visit to Beijing two years ago, I was told that less than 5 percent of the Chinese students in the United States had government grants. Virtually all of the Chinese students' expenses are paid for by their families, they said.

IIE officials say Asian families have a long-standing culture of investing in their children's education, a tradition that may date back to Confucius, the Chinese philosopher born in the sixth century B.C. who advocated focusing on education as a key pillar of social progress.

Peggy Blumenthal, a senior official of the IIE, told me this month in a telephone interview that Asian students are also more likely than Latin American students to get financial help from their U.S. universities because they tend to come with part-time jobs as assistants to professors. While nearly 70 percent of Asian students are graduate students, and nearly half of them can pay part of their tuition by working as assistants to professors, most Latin American students in U.S. universities are undergraduates who rarely get teaching jobs, she said.

What may be even more troubling for Latin America, Asian students tend to concentrate in business, science and technology. "Overwhelmingly, Asians are graduate students and pick business, management and engineering," she said. "Among Latin American students, there are more undergraduates, and they tend to concentrate in humanities, communications and social sciences." My opinion: This is a troubling trend for Latin America because in a knowledge-based world economy in which countries that produce sophisticated goods get the biggest income, you need scientists, engineers and business managers trained at the world's best universities.

And if you look at the two best-known rankings of the world's best universities – the London Times' Higher Education Supplement's list of the 200 best universities in the world, and the University of Shanghai's ranking of the world's 500 best universities – U.S. universities overwhelmingly dominate the first 100 places. Unless Latin American families follow the steps of their Asian counterparts and invest more in their children's education – including graduate studies in the United States, Europe or wherever the best universities in their fields of study are located – they will continue losing competitiveness, and the gap separating them from Asia's booming economies will continue to widen.

Source





27 November, 2007

Conservative students more practically oriented

Colleges have been increasingly competing to offer "family friendly" policies - in the hopes of attracting the best academic talent from a pool of Ph.D.'s that includes both more women than ever before as well as many men who take parenting responsibilities seriously. A new study suggests that such policies may be important for another group that believes its needs aren't fully addressed in academe: conservatives.

The study - "Left Pipeline: Why Conservatives Don't Get Doctorates" - argues that the much debated minority status for conservatives in higher education may be the result of differing priorities of graduating college seniors of different political persuasions. The study presents evidence that conservatives are significantly more likely than liberals - at the point when college students decide whether to apply to graduate school - to value raising a family and having money. In contrast, liberals at that point in their lives are significantly more likely to value writing original works.

The authors of the study do not dispute that conservatives are a distinct minority in academe and that the imbalance is problematic. They also hold open the possibility - much proclaimed by other authors at the conference of the American Enterprise Institute where all of the work was presented - that there may be bias against conservatives (although they question whether this has been proven). But the authors of the work on the pipeline say there is considerable evidence that could show conservative self-selection out of academic careers.

"We're not suggesting causality," said Matthew Woessner, an assistant professor of public policy at Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg. "There's much more work that needs to be done." But he said that the evidence in the paper pointed away from any one explanation for the ideological imbalance. "There's a lot of nuance in the findings. What we are showing is that there are a lot of little pieces that contribute to the overall imbalance, not one single thing," he said. Woessner wrote the paper with April Kelly-Woessner, an associate professor of political science at Elizabethtown College.

The husband-and-wife social science team based their findings on analysis they did from national surveys of freshmen and seniors conducted by the University of California at Los Angeles's Higher Education Research Institute. They found that in both choices of majors and in personal values, conservatives seem to be taking themselves off the track for academic careers well before graduate school. The authors did not find evidence of statistically significant differences in grades or measures of academic performance, so most of the report is based on the premise that interests and experiences are at play, not aptitude.

For starters, the paper finds that conservatives are much more likely to pick majors in professional fields - areas that tend to put students on the fast track for an M.B.A. (or for a job) more than a Ph.D. Only 9 percent of students on the far left and 18 percent of liberals major in professional fields, compared to 33 percent of conservatives and 37 percent of those who identify as being on the far right.

Further, the study finds that not only (as has been reported many times previously) do students who identify as liberal outnumber those who identify as conservative, but that those who are liberal are much more likely to consider a Ph.D. The UCLA survey of seniors found that only 13 percent of all students were considering a Ph.D. But the numbers were significantly higher for those on the left (24 percent of the far left and 18 percent of liberals) than on the right (11 percent of the far right and 9 percent of conservatives).

More here




"Doctorates" in name only

Crappy teacher-training colleges again

Arthur Levine, former President of Columbia University's Teachers College, has issued a no-holds barred critique of doctoral-level research in the nation's colleges of education. The report is pretty long and technical, but the punch line is significant for both parents and policymakers. The short story is that our colleges of education are giving Ph.D.s to researchers who aren't qualified to hold a Ph.D. These people, in turn, are providing the research on which public school policy decisions and teacher training is based.

Levine surveyed deans, faculty, education school alumni, K-12 school principals, and reviewed 1,300 doctoral dissertations and finds the research seriously lacking. He ultimately recommends that policymakers close many doctoral programs at education colleges and instead suggests a two-year M.B.A. type of degree for would-be school administrators.

Just how bad is the quality of doctoral-level research in colleges of education? Levine's review doesn't pull any punches: In general, the research questions were unworthy of a doctoral dissertation, literature reviews were dated and cursory, study designs were seriously flawed, samples were small and particularistic, confounding variables were not taken into account, perceptions were commonly used as proxies for reality, statistical analyses were performed frequently on meaningless data, and conclusions and recommendations were often superficial and without merit...

Frederick Hess, education policy director at the American Enterprise Institute, reported on papers presented by college of education faculty from around the country at their most recent national scholarly convention. Hess had more than a little fun with paper titles such as "Identity, Positioning, Knowledge, and Rhetoric in the Pedagogical Practices of Elderly African-American Bridge Players" and "The Educational Lives of Alaska Native Alumni of the University of Alaska-Anchorage."

There were even papers on outer space, such as "Education Policy, Space, and the `Colonial Present.'" Beam me up, Scotty. This might all go for a good laugh, if it weren't for the fact that these are your tax dollars at work, and that college of education faculty have the rather serious task of training future teachers.

In his report, Levine writes, "Most universities, after a barrage of reports over the past two decades on the need to strengthen teacher education, did little or nothing." Levine notes that many universities use colleges of education as a "cash cow"-enrolling far more students than they should by lowering admissions requirements for the program, while simultaneously cutting education college expenses.

I recently reviewed the course requirements at Arizona State University for teacher certification. ASU's elementary education program requires as many hours in fine arts as it requires in reading instruction. This in a state where 44 percent of fourth graders are functionally illiterate.

In 1998, Massachusetts required an academic skills exam for prospective teachers near the completion of their college careers. Fifty-nine percent failed the test. The state Board of Education chairman rated the exam at about the eighth grade level. Newspapers reported misspellings worthy of 9-year-olds, an inability to describe nouns and verbs, and the inability to define words such as `imminent.'

Clearly, a complete rethinking of teacher training and certification is overdue. But the need for reform goes far beyond simply revamping college of education courses and admissions standards and opening up new routes to teacher certification. Policymakers must make the teaching profession itself more attractive to academically talented students, vast swathes of whom avoid the profession completely.

There was a time when schools benefited from gender discrimination, but those days are over. Bright and capable women today rightly have their pick of career opportunities, and are unlikely to enter a profession completely divorced from any recognition of merit. Teachers typically receive compensation based upon a union negotiated pay scale that recognizes length of service, not effectiveness.

Education schools are cash cows for universities, and the public education system is a cash cow for unions. The beneficiaries of the status quo have thrown children and taxpayers under the hooves of a stampede. If we want our children to have access to the education they need, improved teacher training, new routes to teacher certification, and a compensation system that rewards merit must be pieces of the puzzle.

Source





26 November, 2007

The Asian "problem"

Post below excerpted from Discriminations. See the original for links

I have referred to Asian-American resistance to racial preferences many times before. My very last post, in fact, mentions criticism of similar Canadian programs by the Asian Pacific Post. I discussed some of these old and ongoing complaints here, and have pointed out a number of times that when racial preferences in admissions are eliminated the proportion of admitted whites stays the same or actually declines while the proportion of Asians increases dramatically, as I noted here:

... the racial group most affected by the ending of race preferences in California is whites: their proportion of entering freshmen [in the University of California] fell from 40% in 1997 to 34% in 2005. Two minority groups saw their proportion of entering freshmen increase: Asians, whose proportion rose from 37% in 1997 to 41% in 2005; and Latinos, who rose from 13% to 16%. The proportion of blacks fell from 4% in 1997 to 3% in 2005.

[ADDENDUM: As I discussed here, a recent study published in the Social Science Quarterly found that "if preferences based on race, legacy status, and athletic talent were all done away with, Asian-American enrollment would jump 40 percent (while white enrollment would drop by 1 percent)."]

I have the impression - so far it is no more than that the pace and volume of Asian-American opposition to racial preference policies may be increasing. If so, an article reported earlier this week in the New York Post, "In `Wrong' Minority," may be a harbinger of things to come.

November 19, 2007 -- Three Chinese parents in Brooklyn are expected to file a federal lawsuit today challenging a popular city-run tutoring program on the grounds it discriminates against Asians, The Post has learned. The Specialized High School Institute preps gifted but "underrepresented" minorities to ace the competitive exam to get into top city high schools like Stuyvesant or Brooklyn Tech.

But the parents say it is unfair - and illegal - for the Department of Education to limit eligibility to blacks and Latinos. "The program only selects certain kinds of minorities and unfortunately my daughter didn't fall into that category," said Peggy Foo-Ching, 47, a mom from Bensonhurst who said her 12-year-old daughter's application last year was ignored.....

A Department of Education internal memo obtained by lawyers trying the case indicated that eligibility criteria excludes whites and Asians. "What this memo reveals is blatant and categorical discrimination by race. If you are white or Asian, you're not supposed to get an application," said Christopher Hajec, an attorney with the Center for Individual Rights, a conservative advocacy group. "It's not the business of the government of New York City to be counting up the Asians or whites in, say, Stuyvesant High School and concluding there are too many of them."

In an odd twist, the short notice of this lawsuit in the New York Times noted that "[s]ince the institute's creation more than a decade ago, the proportion of black and Hispanic students at the city's most elite high schools has actually decreased; last year, 2.2 percent of Stuyvesant students were black." The Center for Individual Rights, as usual, is invaluable, in part because it is indefatigable. Its press release explains that

White and Asian students are prevented from even applying to the program. One parent, Stanley Ng (pron. "Ing") was denied an application by his daughter's junior high school guidance counselor. When Ng contacted the Office of Teaching and Learning in November 2006, an official told him the program was not open to white or Asian applicants.

Read CIR's entire complaint here.

Asians As The "New Jews"

I have written before about Asians as the "New Jews." See here and here. In the first of those I quoted the following from an impressive article in the Detroit News:

Until the early 20th century, even the most elite American universities, such as Harvard, Yale and Princeton, were largely regional campuses. But faced with a high influx of academically talented Jewish students, they sought to reduce the numbers of that group. Aware that Jews (and to a lesser extent Roman Catholics) were concentrated in Northeast cities, they devised a system of national recruitment to restrict numbers of Jews while avoiding charges of overt discrimination.

Then as now, a key concept was diversity, only then it meant (in public) geographic diversity. Then as now, quotas were publicly denied even while an elaborate system to maintain de facto quotas evolved. Then as now, administrators argued that other things besides grades and examinations mattered as much or more - character, for example, or obstacles overcome. Then as now, the result was to transfer places that would have gone disproportionately to members of an academically talented minority group to members of other groups. And then as now, the ends were felt to justify the means.... There is a final "then as now" worth noting: In both cases, administrators sought to hide their practices.

As Jerome Karabel demonstrates in The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (discussed here, here, and here and here), when the Ivies decided to restrict the number of Jews they admitted early in the 20th Century, they did so by de-emphasizing pure academic merit as measured by grades, tests, etc., and elevating the importance of intangibles such as "character" and "leadership," along with taking care to cast their admissions net in waters less populated by the pesky Jews.

That process continues, or has resumed, now aimed at Asians, who are stereotyped as math/science nerds, grinds, etc. In that regard, reader Ed Chin, who gathers and distributes via email reams of interesting information dealing with discrimination against Asians, recently sent this fascinating Harvard senior thesis by Social Studies major Jenny Tsai, "Too Many Asians at this School": Racialized Perceptions and Identity Formation, about attempts to restrict Asian enrollment at New York City's highly selective Hunter College High School. From Ms. Tsai's Introduction:

My thesis investigates the origins of the perception that there are "too many Asians" in magnet public high schools....

This question grew out of my own personal experience. I attended Hunter College High School (HCHS), a magnet high school in New York City. My entering class in 1997 was 30 percent Asian, but the incoming class when I was a senior in 2003 was over 50 percent Asian. During my senior year, the view emerged among both the students and the principal was that there were too many Asian students, to the detriment of the school.1 The school's 2003 curricular review had a sub-committee devoted to HCHS's admissions process. The main concern of the admissions sub-committee was to determine the school's success in educating the brightest young talent in New York City. After comparing the demographic of the primarily white and Asian student body with that of New York City as a whole, the sub-committee deemed that the current admissions process unsatisfactory. Suggestions for improvement focused on ways to increase diversity at HCHS. Proposals included eliminating automatic admissions from Hunter College Elementary School, capping high school admissions per district in New York City, increasing the percentage of low-income students, which was hen at 10 percent, and increasing outreach to underrepresented neighborhoods.

The Chinese Parent Teacher Association reacted negatively to the proposal of capping the number of students by district, as many of the Asian students were from three or four neighborhoods in Queens-Flushing, Forest Hills, Bayside, and Fresh Meadows. They argued that the proposals would directly target the number of Asian students.... Discussions revealed that students from a variety of racial backgrounds felt that the increasing percentage of Asian students at the school threatened the culture of the school. HCHS prided itself on being a school that fostered student leadership through a plethora of student clubs, sports teams, and artistic groups. Students attested that the growing Asian student population had detracted from the creativity and independence that had defined HCHS's activity scene as the Asian students focused primarily on their academic studies. Those Asian students who were active in extracurricular activities were perceived to be disingenuous. Students felt that Asian students knew how to manipulate the college admissions committees, but lacked passion for the activities they participated in.

Sounds like deja vu (or deja Jew) all over again.




Disruptive children are prison fodder

Most prisoners have always been on the bottom rungs of the education ladder. The claim that discipline turns kids into criminals is just politically correct propaganda. The article below admits that the problem is mainly a black one and blacks have an extraordinarily high rate of offending anyhow

Something went horribly wrong after Texas decided to crack down on mayhem in public schools by mandating zero tolerance for weapons, drugs and violence on campus. Given broad discretion to remove unruly pupils from class, teachers and administrators restored order. But they also created a terribly efficient fast track to prison for a shocking number of Texas schoolchildren.

According to an analysis of statewide data for 2001-2006 and thorough studies of more than a dozen Texas school districts, the number of students suspended and the number removed to alternative discipline campuses skyrocketed after the Legislature's 1995 overhaul of school discipline laws. This, the public interest law group Texas Appleseed states, has caused a "school-to-prison pipeline" that puts inordinate numbers of youngsters on a path to dropping out of school and into the juvenile justice system. The far end of the pipe pours into Texas' massive adult prison system.

Appleseed's report, "Texas' School-to-Prison Pipeline, The Impact of School Discipline and Zero Tolerance," argues that schools that suspend and expel students to Disciplinary Alternative Education Programs for minor misbehavior not covered by the zero-tolerance mandates unwittingly funnel kids into this life-stunting pipeline. Infractions that have gotten children suspended or expelled include profanity, rough play, bringing prescription medicine to school and disrupting class.

For many at-risk youths, suspensions lead to lost academic ground and more behavior problems. Once in a DAEP, students are five times more likely than mainstream counterparts to drop out. The link to crime is clear: In Texas, one in three juveniles in a Texas Youth Commission lockup is a dropout. Dropouts comprise 80 percent of the adult prison population.

The school-to-prison pipeline is filled with black, Hispanic and special education students, who are far more likely to be given discretionary referrals for discipline than their numbers in the school population would predict. Also, contends the American Civil Liberties Union, pressure to do well on high-stakes standardized tests pressures schools to suspend poor academic performers in order to raise overall scores.

Much of this damage is avoidable: Fully two-thirds of Texas students sent from their school to a DAEP campus are transferred at campus officials' discretion. (The remaining third are mandatory removals under state law.) What's more, the harm is haphazard. Some school districts employ discretionary referrals at much higher rates than others, so where a child goes to school, rather than the offense, is a better predictor of whether a student ends up at an alternative campus.

Groups such as Texas Zero Tolerance, a statewide organization to reform public school disciplinary codes, complain that schools have taken zero tolerance to extremes, often involving police in minor student misconduct - even in elementary school. Students are being arrested at school for breaking campus rules and prosecuted in court. Schools fail to immediately notify parents when their children are interrogated by police.

School districts can improve this grim picture by employing research-based strategies and offering teachers more classroom management training. Parents must be more involved in their children's education, and schools should provide them the tools to do so, informing parents right away about behavior issues.

Appleseed says it will urge lawmakers to improve oversight over alternative education programs to ensure that minimum education standards are enforced, and to intervene at schools that make inordinate numbers of disciplinary referrals. Furthermore, lawmakers should revive a bill that passed in the House last session but died in the Senate that would have made it mandatory for districts to consider a student's intent when determining punishment. Such a law might have kept a young Katy Independent School District student out of the criminal justice system for writing "I love Alex" in small letters on a school wall.

Texas can do better. Schools can be safe for learning without turning students into criminals for minor infractions, exacerbating an out-of-control dropout problem and setting kids who are merely unruly on a path toward prison.

Source




Australia: Only a government would provide a third-world school in a first-world country



PARENTS at Victoria's most forgotten school have issued a plea for help as its dilapidated classrooms crumble around their children. Wodonga South Primary School is old, inadequate and unsafe. For 15 years the State Government has promised to rebuild or relocate the ageing school in Victoria's northeast. But, despite significant sections of the school falling down and failing to meet the Government's minimum standards, nothing has been done to fix it. The school has no heating, no counselling room, no canteen and no physical education facilities.

It has seven permanent classrooms - fewer than half the prescribed minimum. Classrooms show signs of structural faults, cracked walls and peeling paint and many have mildew, leaky roofs and broken windows. And the school is so crowded the music teacher has to conduct lessons in a storeroom at the back of the library.

School council president Stephen Hudson said businesses would be fined or shut down if they provided work conditions as poor as those of the school. "It's not fair on the kids," he said. "We're going to have two generations of children that have gone through primary school without the basic things that most kids take for granted."

The school is only 2.2ha, well below the Department of Education's 3.5ha standard. Teachers are so scared some of the school's 500 children will be injured in the tiny schoolyard that they are forced to stagger lunch breaks. Principal David Hinton said parents, teachers and students were desperate for a new school and an end to the government inaction. "It's untenable for teachers to teach in and it's unsafe for children to learn in," he said.

Education Department spokeswoman Melissa Arch said the school would receive funding in the next three years. "The school will be rebuilt on another site and the department is currently negotiating to secure land for the site," she said.

Source





25 November, 2007

A report from the University of Dallas

The 21st century offers us the iPhone, 24-hour Super Wal-Marts and a completely warped view of the world. Standards have been upended, and our word choice proves it. Peacefully arguing for your beliefs has been redefined as "fear tactics." Any insult is "hate speech." Supporting the law is demeaning and derogatory. And this only applies selectively, of course. Modern society has thrown out reasonable, universal standards to protect many of those who least deserve it.

At many of the large Catholic universities in this country pro-abortion groups have been holding the blatantly anti-Catholic play "The Vagina Monologues." Various individuals and conservative groups have lobbied to remove the pornographic play from Catholic universities. They have peacefully voiced their disapproval with letters and petitions, raising concerns that holding such an event would betray their schools' Catholic identities. These efforts have been deemed "fear tactics" by abortion advocates.

When Saddam Hussein abuses the family of a national team athlete who plays poorly it is no longer called fear tactics.

Nor is Iran's enforcement policy of its no-dating rule: beating a teen boy in public for being near a girl. There was no mention of fear tactics when protesters at a speech at Michigan State screamed in the faces of the conservative students putting on the event and had to be restrained by police. This pro-border enforcement speech was overrun by protesters who yelled and banged on the walls, inside the event, during the prayer and pledge of allegiance. They then rushed the stage and the event had to be canceled with the protesters in handcuffs. Fear tactics? No, asking friends to have pizza in a patriotically decorated room is much more coercive.

Hate speech usually accompanies fear tactics, in a sentence on a blog or in an article describing conservative events. Insulting Ms. Sheehan as "scum" is unnecessary and unhelpful, but is it hate? Sheehan wrote in her book Peace Mom, "I fantasize about killing Bush when he was a baby." Society considers Sheehan's words an expression of her free speech rights, while any insult of a minority viewpoint is called "hate speech."

Sensitivity has become skewed, and emotional rhetoric has become a societal norm. Denying the poor of the world the opportunity to come to America whenever they like feels unfair. But not all who come under the radar are the innocent poor. Illegal aliens in America kill 12 people per day. Those pushing for immigration enforcement are not racist, and their arguments are not demeaning. The families of the victims do not care about the race of the killer, just that the untraceable perpetrator will elude justice.

In defending the future of our society, we must reexamine our diction. The deliberate use or omission of the terms "fear tactics," "hate speech" and "racist" frame the debates in a certain light. None of these, as they actually occur, can be cured until they are again properly defined.

Source




Class project's use of prayer irks parent

A class craft project with the Lord's Prayer attached to it has riled a parent in Shoreline whose 9-year-old son made the cardboard item in his classroom this week. But the Shoreline School District is standing behind the project, saying it is a traditional hornbook intended to teach students about life as a Pilgrim.

Glenn Creech, of Shoreline, said he was shocked when his son, Derek, brought home the project he made at Ridgecrest Elementary Tuesday with a preprinted copy of the Lord's Prayer stapled onto it. The item had a string attached to it, and his son was wearing it around his neck as he came off the bus. "I thought that it was against the law for public schools to preach a specific religion," said Glenn Creech. "This is just outrageous."

Shoreline School District spokesman Craig Degginger said the craft was part of a larger learning project on the Pilgrims. Third-graders from two classes went around various stations manned by parent volunteers, tasting food of the period, churning butter, writing with a quill, dressing in period costumes and making a period toy. Another station was for making a hornbook — a tool once used to teach Pilgrim children how to read. It traditionally consists of a page printed with the alphabet and the Lord's Prayer protected by a layer of transparent horn.

Derek Creech's teacher, who has worked in the district for more than 20 years, has done a similar activity since she started at Ridgecrest in 1999, Degginger said. "It was a certainly legitimate lesson, well taught by a group of veteran teachers. ... This is the first time there has been a complaint, according to the principal," he said.

Schools are required by law to remain free of sectarian control or influence, according to the state constitution. The Shoreline School District policy states that subjects taught in school "may have a religious dimension" and that the study of these disciplines "shall give neither preferential nor disparaging treatment to any single religion or to religion in general and must not be introduced or utilized for devotional purposes." Degginger said the Pilgrim project, as well as the hornbook, "is in keeping with our policy."

Creech, who said his family is "not strongly religious," disagrees. "Giving someone a copy of a prayer, that could be implied that the prayer should be utilized for devotional purposes," he said. Creech said the principal of Ridgecrest has scheduled a meeting with him next week to review the activity and craft.

Source





24 November, 2007

Canadian Catholic schools remove anti-God book

If secular schools can ban all mention of Christianity -- which they often do -- religious schools should obviously be able to ban anti-Christian books. How nice it would be, though, if both sides were mature enough to allow free exchange of ideas. I get the idea that church schools are by far the most tolerant in such matters

Halton's Catholic board has pulled The Golden Compass fantasy book – soon to be a Hollywood blockbuster starring Nicole Kidman – off school library shelves because of a complaint. Two other books in the trilogy by British author Philip Pullman have also been removed as a precaution, and principals have been ordered not to distribute December Scholastic book flyers because The Golden Compass is available to order. "(The complaint) came out of interviews that Philip Pullman had done, where he stated that he is an atheist and that he supports that," said Scott Millard, the board's manager of library services. "Since we are an educational institution, we want to be able to evaluate the material; we want to make sure we have the best material for students."

Following a recent Star story about the series, an internal memo was sent to elementary principals that said "the book is apparently written by an atheist where the characters and text are anti-God, anti-Catholic and anti-religion." Millard said if students want the books, they can ask librarians for them but the series won't be on display until a committee review is complete. The Golden Compass is the first of the "His Dark Materials" trilogy of books and have been likened to the Harry Potter series.

In the U.S., the Catholic League has accused the books of bashing Christianity and promoting atheism to children. The league is urging parents to boycott the movie, which opens Dec. 7. Catholic schools in Toronto and York Region have the books on their shelves and report no complaints. The public library in Burlington, in Halton Region, lists The Golden Compass as suggested reading for Grades 5 and 6. The award-winning tome was voted the best children's book in the past 70 years by readers across the globe. While the book was first published in 1995, complaints are surfacing now because of the buzz surrounding the movie, said Rick MacDonald, the Halton board's superintendent of curriculum services.

The Nov. 1 article in the Star prompted several emails from principals wondering if the book is appropriate for schools. Pullman has made controversial statements, telling The Washington Post in 2001 he was "trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief." In 2003, he said that compared to the Harry Potter series, his books had been "flying under the radar, saying things that are far more subversive than anything poor old Harry has said. My books are about killing God."

The board is unsure how many copies of the Pullman books are in circulation at its 37 elementary schools because they were not purchased centrally and are not a part of the curriculum. "We have a policy and procedure whereby individual, parents, staff, students or community members can apply to have material reviewed. That's what happened in this case," MacDonald said, adding he did not know who lodged the complaint. The complaint was received about a week and a half ago, and it is standard procedure to remove books from the shelves during the review. Any move to ban the book would be taken to trustees. Millard said he's still trying to find additional members for the review committee, but has sent copies to those already on the committee, such as MacDonald.

Milton pastor David Wilhelm, who is also a trustee and a committee member, said hasn't read the book yet and won't make a judgement until he has. He did not know when the review would be done. Richard Brock, who heads the Halton elementary branch of the Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association, said he's had no complaints from teachers about the books being pulled. The board, he added, is within its rights to restrict distribution of the Scholastic flyer. "With elementary students, you're always going to bend in the direction of caution anyway," he said.

Scholastic Canada received a complaint via email from the board, as well as a handful of other negative emails that appeared to be part of a campaign begun in the U.S. Halton's Catholic board has 28,500 students at 45 schools in Burlington, Halton Hills, Milton and Oakville.

Source




Britain: Under-sevens 'too young to learn to read'

What utter garbage from this "expert"! Some children learn to read as early as age 3. The real problem is the "all kids are equal" doctrine that haunts thinking on the matter. Kids are NOT equal. What WOULD make sense is for children to be enrolled according to their mental age rather than according to their chronological age but that would be "elitism!", I suppose

Children should not start formal learning until they are seven, according to a world expert in nursery education who will suggest today that teaching reading and writing earlier can put them off for life. Teaching children at five to read and write can dent their interest in books later on, according to Lilian Katz, a professor of education at Illinois University, who will today address an international conference on nursery schooling at Oxford University. "It can be seriously damaging for children who see themselves as inept at reading too early," she told the Guardian. Boys were particularly vulnerable when rushed into reading too soon, she said.

Her comments come amid mounting concern over reading skills. In England, a quarter of all 14-year-olds now fail to reach the expected standards, and boys are struggling even more. Earlier this month a Cambridge University report strongly criticised Labour's 500m pound national literacy strategy for having a "relatively small impact". It concluded that children's reading skills had not improved in 50 years.

Moves in England to introduce more structured learning for three- and four-year-olds could store up problems in the long term, Katz suggests. English schools start formal teaching at five but there are plans to introduce a foundation stage for three- and four-year-olds which will set new learning goals, including one which specifies that by the time children start school at five they should be able to at least "use their phonic knowledge to write simple regular words". Katz, a former president of the National Association for the Education of Young Children and a respected authority on early years education, said: "Teaching younger children can look OK in the short term but in the long term children who are taught early are not better off. For a lot of children five will be too early. "That has a more negative impact for boys. For most boys they are growing up in cultures where they are expected to be assertive and active. In instruction they are passive and receptive and reactive, and in the long term that accounts for the negative effects. In most cultures girls tend to put up with instruction earlier and better."

The conference will examine the case for starting formal teaching at a later age. In Sweden children do not start formal instruction until six or seven. Professor Ingrid Pramling-Samuelsson, from the University of Goteborg, who is president-elect of the World Organisation of Preschool Education, will tell the conference that academics in Sweden have been "surprised" to hear that England is moving towards earlier formal instruction.

The children's minister Beverley Hughes will also address the conference about the early years foundation stage, which has been interpreted by some as the extension of the national curriculum to toddlers. The government is adamant that despite setting goals for children to reach they are not targets and it is not a formal curriculum.

A spokeswoman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: "The formal school starting age of five has served children well for decades and standards in our primary schools have never been higher. The curriculum is age-appropriate and we actively support teachers to adapt their teaching to the needs of children. We want all children to make progress in literacy and numeracy at an early age, as these skills are critical to their ability to get the most out of learning later on."

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23 November, 2007

Greenie propaganda invading the schools

Green California Schools Summit - The largest sustainable summit and expo to focus on bringing green technology and natural products into K-12 schools in California (December 4-6, Pasadena, California) announces the addition of Laurie David, Academy Award winning documentary film maker, and Cambria Gordon, children's book writer, as general session keynotes on December 6. They will join acclaimed scientist, educator and author Bill Nye "the Science Guy."

On December 5 the summit will be opened by Pasadena Mayor Bill Bogaard and will feature a keynote by actor and legendary environmentalist, Ed Begley, Jr. Parents, teachers, community organizations, school officials will come together at the summit to learn how children are affected by their school environment and what can be done to implement sustainable healthy green solutions. Experts have found that sustainable technology is not only good for the environment, but it also enhances the teaching and learning environment for students.

The Green California Schools summit is the first major event to address all aspects of the state's high performance school revolution - from planning, building and operations to curriculum and "green culture." Seventy-five educational workshops and sessions, led by top state and national experts, will cover issues ranging from funding sources for green projects to empowering students to become the next generation of environmental professionals. The exhibition floor will include a model green school building and more than 200 companies offering cutting edge green products and services.

"This is the first major opportunity that we've had in California to focus completely on K-12 schools in terms of the potential for energy savings and sustainability," said California State Architect David Thorman. Secretary of State and Consumer Services, Rosario Marin, whose agency approves all public school construction and financing, and Secretary of Education, Dr. David E. Long, join Thorman as co-chairs of the event.

About the Speakers

Among many other accomplishments, Laurie David is a global warming activist and producer of the Academy Award-winning film, "An Inconvenient Truth" and the HBO documentary "Too Hot Not to Handle." She also executive-produced "Earth to America!," a primetime comedy special about global warming. One of the foremost voices in global warming, Vanity Fair called her the "Bono of Climate Change." Her co-author on "The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming," Cambria Gordon, is an award-winning copywriter, children's book writer and environmentalist.

Published by Scholastic/Orchard Books in September, "Down-to-Earth," has earned praise for making a complicated subject child friendly. "I've never seen a more comprehensive explanation of the phenomenon in so few words," wrote Hank Greeen of the New York Times, ".they make the science relevant and enjoyable with abundant visuals and conclude with some meaty ways for kids to make a difference." Kirkus Reviews describes the book as having "A humorous tone, eye-catching graphics and celebrity connections (that) lend pizzazz to this volume."

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The Laurie David book (above) is certainly simple -- the truth is much more complex

A fundamental scientific error lurks in a book calculated to terrify schoolchildren about "global warming", Robert Ferguson, SPPI president, announced today: "The Down To Earth Guide to Global Warming", by Laurie David and Cambria Gordon, is intentionally designed to propagandize unsuspecting school children who do not have enough knowledge to know what is being done to them."

A new SPPI paper (http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/other/childrensbookerror.html) briefly examines a cardinal error, found on page 18 of the David book, where she mousetraps children: "The more the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the higher the temperature climbed. The less carbon dioxide, the more the temperature fell. You can see this relationship for yourself by looking at the graph. What makes this graph so amazing is that by connecting rising CO2 to rising temperature scientists have discovered the link between greenhouse-gas pollution (sic) and global warming."

The SPPI paper states, in part: What really makes the David-Gordon graph "amazing" is that it's egregiously counterfactual. Worse, in order to contrive a visual representation for their claim that CO2 controls temperature change, the authors present unsuspecting children with an altered temperature and CO2 graph that reverses the relationship found in the scientific literature.

The manipulation is critical because David's central premise posits that CO2 drives temperature, yet the peer-reviewed literature is unanimous that CO2 changes have historically followed temperature changes.

Case in point, on page 103 of their book, David cites the work of Siegenthaler et al. (2005). However, Siegenthaler et al. clearly state the opposite, that CO2 lags "with respect to the Antarctic temperature over glacial terminations V to VII are 800, 1600, and 2800 years, respectively, which are consistent with earlier observations during the last four glacial cycles."

"Parents and teachers should be concerned enough to demand that the publisher, Scholastic Books, recall, pulp and correct the error before mores copies reach innocent children.," said Ferguson.

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Australia: Lesbian child abuse OK -- of course!

No penalty. If it had been a male teacher ....

A former teacher has escaped immediate jail after succumbing to her love for a troubled student and having lesbian sex in bushland in Perth. Elizabeth Anne Crothers, 50, received a two-year jail term, suspended for two years, in the Perth district court yesterday after a jury found her guilty on one count of indecent dealing and one count of sexual penetration. In WA, lesbian sex is legal at 16, but the age of consent rises to 18 when one of the couple is in a position of authority over the other - as in a teacher-student relationship.

Crothers was tried on 21 counts of indecent dealing or sexual penetration of a pupil in her care between November 1998 to March 1999. She admitted having a full sexual relationship with the teenager but insisted it happened only after the girl left school in March 1999.

A jury yesterday cleared Crothers on 19 charges but found her guilty on one count of indecent dealing and one count of sexual penetration. Those charges related to Crothers digitally penetrating the girl and allowing the teen to digitally penetrate her in bushland in Perth's hills in February 1999.

The girl told the court she shared her first sexual experience with Crothers who seduced her when she was a troubled student. Crothers, a mother of two, admits she was stupid to meet a student outside school. But she insisted it was not until 2000 that she began fondling and kissing the girl, engaging in mutual digital penetration and giving and receiving oral sex in a live-in relationship that lasted several years.

Judge Michael Muller said the pair were in love and Crothers had resisted a sexual relationship with the "tortured'' child until succumbing in an isolated incident. He found she had not groomed the girl for sex and encouraged her to leave school and home so Crothers could exploit her. "I cannot find you induced the girl to leave school to take advantage of her sexually,'' the judge said.

But he said the breach of trust was very serious. He sentenced the weeping Crothers to two years on each count, to be served concurrently, and suspended the term for two years. She had faced a maximum penalty of 10 years for the sexual penetration and five for indecent dealing.

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The education consequences of a Labor Party win in Australia's imminent Federal election

Howard believes he has changed the country during his four terms, most notably to be "less politically correct", he said in an interview with me at Kirribilli House two weeks ago. And he knows that it is on education, the touchstone issue that divides Rudd and Howard, where the Opposition Leader bears the heaviest burden of political correctness.

Rudd's party has long been hostage to the education unions and educationists of the so-called progressive left, who persist with 40-year-old radical theories such as whole-word reading and student-directed learning, despite a generation of conclusive proof they do the most harm to the underprivileged children they profess to care most about. As Janette Howard, a former teacher, said during my interview with her husband at Kirribilli House, education is the ground zero of the culture wars, which she prefers to call a "standards war".

In her travels with him on the campaign trail she has found that "people are concerned about what [children] can't do anymore, that they can't spell, they can't add up . or they don't know enough history". "There's real anger about that," agreed the Prime Minister.

But Rudd has somehow managed to bypass the anger about education standards. Instead he has dazzled everyone with promises of an "education revolution" which offers little of substance other than giving laptops to every year 9 to 12 student and providing high speed broadband, as if technology is any substitute for good teachers, discipline in the classroom and the ability to read, write and think. In fact, excessive emphasis on technology confines the teacher to be a mere facilitator.

As high school teacher Jane Sloan put it so eloquently in our letters page on Tuesday: "I find myself increasingly reluctant to take up the types of mediated communication that instruments such as interactive whiteboards, computers and data projectors facilitate. "I am not particularly interested in feeding my students' desires (some would feel it as a need) to be entertained - which is how these tools are marketed to us. I believe education should be about enlivening imaginations, not simply providing people with a stock of commercially generated images and sensations that they can scroll through in their minds when the situation requires them to be thoughtful." Sloan sees students "struggling to express their ideas in writing because they have limited vocabularies, and lack the fluency and facility that the majority of educated native speakers once had".

Restoring standards in education would be the real education revolution. Concerted attempts to muscle the Labor states, which control schools, have begun under the former education minister Brendan Nelson, and now Julie Bishop, albeit with mixed success. The Government has been pushing ways to improve teacher training, introduce performance pay for teachers, push phonics as a necessary part of early reading programs, allowing more parental choice, regular assessment, a national curriculum and a more rigorous history syllabus.

It is one of Howard's greatest achievements to have incrementally dragged the debate on education away from the progressive wreckers, despite the boast of Australian Education Union president Pat Byrne, that "the conservatives have a lot of work to do to undo the progressive curriculum". His problem this election has been that Rudd will not be baited on these ideological traps, refusing for instance to be drawn into a Lathamesque "hit-list" of private schools, prompting the NSW Teachers Federation to express "disappointment".

But the monkeys on Rudd's back are such high priests of political correctness as Byrne and Wayne Sawyer, the former NSW English Teachers Association president who famously blamed the last re-election of the Howard Government on the failure of teachers to brainwash their charges and form a "critical generation". Denying such people the dues they believe they deserve after nearly 12 years in the wilderness will be the real test for any Rudd government if it is genuine about improving education. But it's hard to believe they will risk the wrath of the Howard-haters.

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22 November, 2007

BOLLINGER'S BACKBONE

It speaks well of the Columbia president, Lee Bollinger, that a group of left-wing or anti-Israel faculty members is now petitioning against him. In a letter obtained by The New York Sun 's Annie Karni, 70 Columbia faculty members speak of a "crisis of confidence" in Mr. Bollinger, faulting him for his harsh introduction of President Ahmadinejad, which, they said, "were not only uncivil and bad pedagogy, they allied the University with the Bush administration's war in Iraq, a position anathema to many in the University community." The Bush administration is apparently more of an anathema to these faculty members than is the Holocaust-denying, American soldier-killing, terrorist supporting, nuclear bomb-building administration of Iran.

The nub of the matter is the petition's reference to "the autonomy of the University in the face of outside threats and pressures," and "a determining role for faculty in the governance of the University." When the professors say "autonomy," they mean a total lack of responsibility or accountability to trustees, students, parents, alumni, or America. When they say "outside threats and pressures," they mean Jewish students and alumni, but not the Arab potentate that funds the professorship of one of the petitioners, Rashid Khalidi.

A similar putsch by leftist and anti-Israel professors ousted Lawrence Summers last year from the presidency of Harvard. Mr. Bollinger's enemies are a sign of his character. How he handles them will be a test of his backbone, and will determine whether Columbia sinks back into the troubled mediocrity that afflicted it after the 1968 strike, or rises above it into the very first rank of American universities.

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FEVER AT COLUMBIA

Columbia University is boiling. Professors find swastikas and nooses on their office doors and strenuous denials not withstanding Columbia president Lee Bollinger may soon be following in the footsteps Larry Summers. Why? Because he stepped into the maelstrom that is Middle East politics on campus. First, he invited Ahmadinejad to speak and then chastised him prior to his speech.

It was a truly disastrously performance which is currently exploited by Islamist/leftist faculty members to secure tenure for two of their members. They secured one for Nadia Abu El-Haj at Barnard. Now, they are well on their way to secure another Joseph Massad at Columbia. How? With the help of a public letter signed by 109 professors. 69 professors responded with a letter expressing their support for the president. For the first time the post Sixties steady take over of the campuses by proponents of a radical leftist/Islamist anti-Semitic, anti-American relativistic agenda is seriously challenged. Why?

Because 9/11 demonstrated the vile consequences Western education has when offered to Third World students has not only to the Third World but also to the First world. Al Qaeda achieved what the Kmer Rouge failed to do. It convinced increasing number of intellectuals to challenge the academic consensus which blamed everything on Western imperialism and nothing on indigenous Third World forces.

Democracy, Capitalism and technological innovation thrive on critical thinking. In that sense far from breaking the back of Democratic Capitalism, even tenured radicals ultimately served to strengthen it by teaching students that it is good to rebel, i.e., challenge established verities. Here and there a student such as Theodore Kaczynski took the critics seriously and became a unabomber, but those instances were too few and far between to justify a costly challenge to the system.

The trouble is that the system which worked well for the developed world has been truly harmful to the developed world by misleading its best and brightest. Not all Third World tyrants were necessarily educated in the great Western universities but their educated elites did swallowed the radical critic of Democratic Capitalism whole hog and it helped them justify their mismanagement of their home countries. The same can be said of the leading Islamists, Maoists and various National liberation commanders. If the academia had a tough time turning against the Kmer Rouge, it was because Pol Pot was "one of them." He merely put to practice what he learn in the Sorbonne. Voices trying to direct attention to the phenomenon were either silenced or marginalized. Moreover, these ideas were widely distributed in the Third World.

9/11 focused attention on the effect of education on Third World students. At first, few challenged academics directing attention to the usual suspects or root causes such as poverty, hopelessness and racism. Then came the serious research and revealed that terrorists tended to be well educated young people who bought into the fashionable Post Colonial critic and became determined to punish their "oppressors" for destroying their veritable "havens" that their homelands used to be and, indeed, bring about a return to those old time paradises. Princeton University economist Alan Krueger writes:

Pakistan, and Turkey, involving about 1,000 respondents in each country. One of the questions asked was, "What about suicide bombing carried out against Americans and other Westerners in Iraq? Do you personally believe that this is justifiable or not justifiable?" Pew kindly provided me with tab-ulations of these data by respondents' personal characteristics.

The clear finding was that people with a higher level of education are in general more likely to say that suicide attacks against Westerners in Iraq are justified. I have also broken this pattern down by income level. There is no indication that people with higher incomes are less likely to say that sui-cide-bombing attacks are justified.

Another source of opinion data is the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, headquar-tered in Ramallah. The center collects data in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. One question, asked in December 2001 of 1,300 adults, addressed attitudes toward armed attacks on Israeli tar-gets. Options were "strongly support," "support," "oppose," "strongly oppose," or "no opinion."

Support turned out to be stronger among those with a higher level of education. For exam-ple, while 26 percent of illiterates and 18 per-cent of those with only an elementary education opposed or strongly opposed armed attacks, the figure for those with a high school education was just 12 percent. The least supportive group turned out to be the unemployed, 74 percent of whom said they support or strongly back armed attacks. By comparison, the support level for merchants and professionals was 87 percent.

Clearly terrorism is being taught and, therefore, to stop it the teaching of the reasons terror is justified must stop. How? First and foremost by challenging the scholarship of the those teaching it. Second, by making their propagators face public scrutiny. When such scrutiny leads to demands for sanctions against irresponsible professors, their colleagues often rush to their defense crying foul in the name of academic freedom. This is what is happening in Columbia and this is what happened at Harvard. We must realize that this battle has only just been joined and it is not going to be short, easy or pretty.

Still, nothing less than the survival of the developed world and the defeat of totalitarianism in the Developing world is at stake. For what 9/11 ultimately taught us is that the two are ultimately connected. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, the world cannot forever continue to be half free and half slave and the young cannot forever be taught that there is no difference between the two.

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Crazy "safety" censorship of British childrens' books

A leading children's author was told to drop a fire-breathing dragon shown in a new book - because the publishers feared they could be sued under health and safety regulations. It is just one of the politically correct cuts Lindsey Gardiner says she has been told to make in case youngsters act out the stories. As well as the scene showing her dragon toasting marshmallows with his breath, illustrations of an electric cooker with one element glowing red and of a boy on a ladder have had to go.

Ms Gardiner, 36, who has written and illustrated 15 internationally successful children's books, featuring her popular characters Lola, Poppy and Max, says such editing decisions are now common

In Who Wants A Dragon? - published by Orchard Books last year - Ms Gardiner says: "I was told, 'You can't have the dragon breathing fire because it goes against health and safety.' "It doesn't really make any sense. "Sales and marketing departments are worried something might offend somebody, or that a child might copy something in a book and their parents will sue the publisher." Pointing out that classic fairy tales such as Hansel And Gretel or Little Red Riding Hood would not get published today, Ms Gardiner said: 'It's a sad reflection of modern society."

In When Poppy And Max Grow Up, published by Orchard Books in 2001, Max was originally shown on a ladder "They didn't allow that because they thought it was precarious," said Ms Gardiner. "Then I had to change the element on a cooker from glowing red to green. "It is crazy. When I go to book signings, I sometimes take with me some colouring pictures, and the kids draw the elements as red because the cooker is on and it's hot. They are not stupid. "I've had books published in Japan, France, Spain and Holland and they don't ask for the same changes. "It seems to be in Britain and the U.S. that there are problems."

Nobody from Orchard Books was available for comment but a spokesman for the Publishers Association said: "We are aware of some concerns by authors and it is something we can talk about in the industry."

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See also here





21 November, 2007

Battle-scarred teacher in L.A. barrios speaks out

Hi, my name is Migdia Chinea and I'm a recovering LAUSD "substitute." Oh, I'm also UCLA-educated with honors, refined, empathetic, college-level Spanish fluent and a Googleable professional screenwriter. To make ends meet during hard economic times, I became a "substitute teacher" for the Los Angeles Unified School District, or LAUSD - or to put it more kindly, a "guest teacher." As a guest LAUSD teacher I thought I would be an asset, but the system has never appreciated nor taken advantage of my educational or professional hard-earned accomplishments.

There's no teaching going on at LAUSD - only confinement of the sort one may find in a penal colony, complete with walkie-talkie-carrying wardens and bullhorns. And I have "confined" at many different schools within central Los Angeles in the last six months. Many students scream "suuuuuuuub" when they see someone like me - a "guest teacher" - in their classroom and trample anyone and/or anything as they push and shove their way inside.

Recently, I was privy to a narrative by a teacher in which he complained that after a one-day absence, his classroom was in shreds and wall posters were torn down. His VHS player and flash drive with all lesson plans were stolen as was his computer. Lab equipment was broken and tagged with gang symbols in permanent marker and completely nonfunctional. He was subsequently informed that his substitute teacher had walked out of the classroom numerous times throughout the day and had left the students to themselves. He wondered how the substitute could be so irresponsible and how he would break the news to his seventh-graders about their tagged notebooks with profane language and two-weeks worth of work in the garbage. Oh, woe!

I have covered the school at which that individual teaches. It is surrounded by criminal street gangs and is widely considered one of the most dangerous campuses in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The South Side Village Boys, South Side Watts Varrio Grape, Grape Street Crips, East Side Village Bloods, Hacienda Bloods, Circle City Piru and Bounty Hunters street gangs all claim turf in that area, and frequent flare-ups of gang violence are common. I have found most classes in this school to be in a complete state of disaster, absolutely filthy, with no computers available. There are no simple supplies, such as pencils, pens or paper, nothing to be found anywhere. Was this teacher's class an exception? Did he not know that some of his students are probably gang members themselves?

I have observed that many students at this school (and other LAUSD schools) are violent and unpredictable. I was present, in fact, during a violent melee involving hundreds of students that brought in several police squad cars and helicopters flying overhead. I have also endured several school "lock downs." Here's how a "lock down" works: As in a prison, the inmates and their jailers are not allowed to leave for any reason, nor let anyone out.

I then wondered if this teacher had ever asked his students why they behaved the way they did. Are there still people out there who believe that students are ALWAYS right and eager to learn and downtrodden and good. Why are these LAUSD schools so dilapidated - is it the "suuuuuuubs"? I have actually been advised to take pictures of these areas of confinement, er, pardon me, "schools," just in case someone makes an accusation after I'm long gone and I have no way to defend myself. And I always try to leave one classroom door open because I am often afraid for my life - my life.

I've been injured more than once. On Oct. 5, 2007, at another notorious middle school, I was deliberately body-slammed on the head by two to three large young men in a P.E. class of 53 students, while another teacher (someone I had never met before) was decent enough to give a formal declaration to school and police authorities of what he had witnessed. I sustained a concussion and sciatica nerve damage as a result of this personal attack intended to "terrorize [me]." I have memory lapses and continued head and leg pain. I'm told by the local police that this sort of physical abuse on teachers occurs with disturbing regularity. The LAUSD case nurse assigned to my case labeled my attack "boys will be boys."

I've been burglarized (on June 11, 2007), by a stalker with key access to my locked classroom (likely by another teacher or custodian). This theft occurred during lunch break while I was on a five-minute bathroom errand and included a $2,600 2-week-old Sony Vaio notebook, my RX glasses, credit cards, etc. The incident was also reported to the jurisdictional police. But I will have to take LAUSD to Small Claims Court, because district officials will accept NO responsibility.

I've been insulted repeatedly, e.g., "hey, you bitch!," among many vile expletives, by students at various schools. I've been vandalized. My Mini S Cooper has been broken into twice. I'm usually so tired after a full day of "teaching" that I once never even noticed the damage until I opened the car's hatchback several days later.

I've been harassed and pelted with the same Halloween candy I bought as a treat for the students on Oct. 31, 2007. In the pandemonium that usually ensues at these "underprivileged schools," the bungalow class door handles that I reported as missing came off upon touching, fell off, and the students began using these door handles as weapons - their behavior and the school's fire code violation were reported to the LAUSD Board of Directors and the fire department. What a laugh.

My class was rampaged at a barrio middle school on May 23, 2007 - witnessed by two other substitute teachers who were sent in to "help me." One happened to be a lactating mother. These two individuals were also pelted with various objects. This incident was reported to the dean and to school security. No response from the dean for two whole class periods. This was also reported to LAUSD Superintendent David Brewer - no response at all.

I've been maltreated and threatened at all of these schools. But you're not supposed to complain about maltreatment. You're supposed to contain these students and stay quiet with your head down. Is anyone aware of that? Is anyone aware that "substitutes" cannot complain about anything? Is anyone aware that with an obesity and diabetes epidemic in our youth, regular teachers sell junk food for profit to students at many schools? I have reported that fact to the State Department of Education and Social Services. But you have to do so on a school by school basis because state bureaucrats believe it's a singular problem.

I have reported every single incident listed here and many, many more not listed here. However, the LAUSD has only aggravated the situation by doing nothing and ignoring everything. In my view, the LAUSD is completely corrupt, inept and broken, with many students having serious behavioral problems and disinterested in learning, whereas the teachers remain underpaid and exhausted - some of them just marking time until their retirement and giving out charity passing grades to high school students who can barely write or do math at a third-grade level.

I believe that the students who commit acts of dishonesty (like cheating), violence and outright destruction of property should be suspended. When the recidivist students are suspended, their parents or guardians should pay a fine, which may grow incrementally according to the student's offense - and I believe that when such offenses are perpetrated against a substitute, the fine should be doubled (like driving violations in construction zones). I believe that when these citations are enforced a few times, we will all see a marked improvement in student conduct. If there are no consequences to students for unruly behavior, and all they get is a nice little talk at the dean's office, unruly behavior is reinforced. These bad students know how to lie and abuse a system that appears to be afraid of them. They know there are no consequences. They're not learning much now, and the teachers cannot be teaching much in a chaotic environment - so it's a self-perpetuating situation.

As for me, I am exhausted. I feel exploited and I'm also injured, to boot. It's almost impossible for anyone in my position - in a few short days - to instill in these students any sense of decency, good manners and respect because they should be learning these civilities at home. Please know that I get paid very little with no health insurance coverage in sight. And while those incompetents in high-level administrative positions collect their big, fat paychecks for their lack of humanity, there seem to be no end to the problems.

This is a difficult economy, especially for educated single mothers. And women must do what they can do to support themselves and their families. But the press covers this aspect of survival from the teacher's perspective very little, concentrating instead (and almost exclusively) on the students' persistent test failures. I am aware that some teachers, and some "substitutes," may be incompetent and don't care about performing well on their jobs, nor do they care about their students. However, since I'm not one of those people, I believe that the media has an obligation to acknowledge the problems and report truthfully on what is going on. The schools are a mess, filthy, dilapidated and without supplies. The students are dangerous, disrespectful and out-of-control. The country should take notice that teaching has become a very dangerous job and that my life as a teacher is very, very, cheap.

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Ludicrous under-reporting of dangerous schools

Los Angeles had not one dangerous school. Can you believe that?

A little-publicized provision of the No Child Left Behind Act requiring states to identify "persistently dangerous schools" is hampered by widespread underreporting of violent incidents and by major differences among the states in defining unsafe campuses, several audits say. Out of about 94,000 schools in the United States, only 46 were designated as persistently dangerous in the past school year. Maryland had six, all in Baltimore; the District and Virginia had none.

At Anacostia Senior High School last school year, private security guards working under D.C. police recorded 61 violent offenses, including three sexual assaults and one assault with a deadly weapon. There were 21 other nonviolent cases in which students were caught bringing knives and guns to school. Anacostia is not considered a persistently dangerous school.

One high school in Los Angeles had 289 cases of battery, two assaults with a deadly weapon, a robbery and two sex offenses in one school year, according to an audit by the U.S. Department of Education's inspector general. It did not meet the state's definition of a persistently dangerous school, or PDS. None of California's roughly 9,000 schools has. The reason, according to an audit issued by the Department of Education in August: "States fear the political, social, and economic consequences of having schools designated as PDS, and school administrators view the label as detrimental to their careers. Consequently, states set unreasonable definitions for PDS and schools have underreported violent incidents."

Critics of the law, including lawmakers who hope the policy can be changed as part of the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, say the low number is a sign the legislation is not working.

The District's definition counts only severe offenses -- generally felonies -- that have been officially verified by police. But many incidents are not formally reported by police. An investigation of the District's schools by The Washington Post this year has shown that more than half of teenage students attend schools that would meet the city's definition of persistently dangerous.

The problem is not confined to the District. In Virginia, a school gets the label by having a single severe incident -- such as a homicide, sexual assault or bomb use -- or by exceeding a certain number of "points" for lesser offenses. A school's threshold of points is based on enrollment; if it exceed its allowed number of incidents for three consecutive years, it is deemed dangerous.

In Maryland, if the number of expulsions or suspensions for more than 10 days at a school exceeds 2.5 percent of the number of enrolled students for three consecutive years, a school is considered persistently dangerous. At Crossland High School in Temple Hills, officials reported 1,927 suspensions in the 2005-06 school year, among its approximately 1,600 students, according to state data. The majority were for disrespect, insubordination and minor infractions, but more than 200 suspensions were given for fighting and making threats, and 11 were given for bringing weapons to school.

Under Maryland's definition, Crossland is not considered persistently dangerous. Yet in a school climate survey conducted last year, 75 percent of Crossland's students responding disagreed with the statement "I feel safe at school." Incidents of underreporting of violence are common nationwide.

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THOMAS KLOCEK CASE UPDATE AT DEPAUL

A little more than three years ago, former DePaul professor Thomas Klocek's professional life was turned upside down when the 15 year adjunct was essentially fired from the school after defending Israel from some spurious attacks by some Muslim students there. Klocek, a Roman Catholic, had a exemplary record in his decade and a half teaching at the Chicago Catholic university. Here's an update on the legal front of the Klocek case:

Six counts have survived motions to dismiss, four of them defamation claims, and two involving invasion of privacy. Klocek's legal team at Mauck and Baker is well stocked with evidence to substantiate those claims. A trial date is expected to be assigned at the end of this month, with the trial expected to last two weeks. From what I hear, Cook County courts are backlogged, but depending on the judge's calendar, the trial should begin within six months.

A deposition is scheduled for later his month with Yaser Tabarra, who was the executive director of CAIR Chicago in 2004. For more on CAIR's involvement in the case, click on the link below.

DePaul is playing hardball with Klocek and his legal team, making the ridiculous request to submit the former professor to three days of psychological testing. To me, well, that's nuts. But we're talking about academics here, so no one should be surprised. From Andy Norman, one of Klocek's attorneys:

We have a motion to dismiss two of the four affirmative defenses defendants have raised. Affirmative defenses are legal statements made by the defendants that say, in effect, that even if we prove our case against the defendants for defamation and invasion of privacy that there are reasons that the defendants still should prevail and we should lose.

In short, their affirmative defenses are (1) DePaul is not responsible for the DePaulia, which is independently run by students; (2) DePaul was permitted to defame Prof. Klocek because it was part of defendants' respective jobs to inform DePaul administrators, professors and students about the event of September 15, 2004; and DePaul's efforts to remedy the problem Prof. Klocek caused; (3) We made Prof. Klocek a public figure in March 2005 when we had the protest on the Lincoln Park campus and that the defendants cannot be responsible for defaming Prof. Klocek after that time because we caused him to be a public figure; (4) All the statements the defendants made about Prof. Klocek were substantially true and, therefore, not defamatory or invasion of privacy.

We have moved to dismiss ## (1) and (2) on the grounds that the defenses are not plead clearly enough to allow us to answer, and a hearing on our motion is set for 12/18/07 at 9:30 am. We have answered ## (3) and (4) with denials.

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20 November, 2007

Saving our children from the hazards of fascist schools

In Florida last week children were traumatized by protocols that for two days in a row kept them locked down in schools away from their parents. The reason given? A crime had taken place that is normally handled by the police. In these cases the two separate crimes, a robbery and an escaped convict, were used to justify a complete lock down of the area around Ft. Lauderdale.

Government schools are unsafe, frightening, and also fail to teach. Students graduate without understanding elementary book keeping, the principles of electricity, much less physics, how our courts work and many other subjects that two generations ago were assumed as basic parts of becoming a literate, functioning adult. In Maryland today parents who entrusted their children to government schools are facing jail time for refusing to do what many experts now say is hazardous to their health, immunizations. The events were reported in News Target, an online magazine that keeps Americans apprised of health alternatives. That article stated,

“State Attorney General Glenn F. Ivey has announced he is willing to criminalize parents if they don't bring them to the courthouse to have them injected, on the spot, with vaccines that contain methyl mercury -- a highly toxic nerve chemical that causes brain damage and is linked to autism. The action is backed by Circuit Judge William D. Missouri, Circuit Judge C. Philip Nichols Jr., and the chairman of the Prince George school board, R. Owen Johnson Jr. “Together, these judges and officials have conspired to turn Maryland into a medical police state, invoking the threat of imprisonment in order to achieve a vaccination goal that has more to do with politics than children's actual health or safety.”

Children have become targets of opportunity for the State, and every day more parents withdraw their children from government schools, determined to home school. But how to do that? If your children are at risk in the government school and now your house what can you do to protect them? One of the answers if provided by Dennis Klein, President, Karmel Games Inc.

The games produced by Mr. Klein provide invaluable skills for children in a form that makes learning fun and gives parents and children a space to come together where that happens. Mr. Klein founded Karmel Games in late 2003 – a rather different venture than his preceding career in the telecommunications industry! However, he brought extensive experience in product development, engineering management, marketing, and business development to his new company. He quickly established his credentials in the field by designing, developing and managing the production of his first game, Anagramania, in less than 4 months.

Rethinking school holds unsuspected opportunities for kids and parents to explore the world and we will try out these new worlds, including Great New Games, on the Spiritual Politician this Friday at 4pm Pacific time on the BBSradio.com. Coming home to learning through play and innovation may well remake the world in a form that is safer for all of us.

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The failure of state-sponsored schooling

The common argument in the libertarian movement against public schools is that they fail to educate our children. Actually, according to this argument, public schooling is like any monopolized business: expensive, inefficient, and utterly unable to provide the services wanted and needed. This is true, public schooling doesn’t work. But the proof of this is not the thousands of kids managing to go through nine or twelve years of schooling without even learning how to read and write. The proof of the failure of the whole schooling system, i.e. not only the public schools but also the private schools operating in a government controlled and licensed environment, is the small number of radicals managing to escape the brainwashing of centralized school plans.

This argument can much easier be dismissed by public school enthusiasts, but it is nevertheless the more important. Yes, public and state-controlled schools fail to educate our children and make them understand whatever it is "we" want them to understand. But the state school system is not solely intended to provide knowledge to the unknowing and ignorant, it is to provide a certain set of values and beliefs that benefit the ruling class.

The former is obviously failing, but does not provide a real argument against the political control of schooling and education. The problems and shortcomings, at least according to average Joe logic, can be solved and corrected through investing more tax money to increase the number of teachers educating in our schools. The logic isn’t that bad, even though it essentially disregards what we know of economic organization and production. If the problem can be attributed to not having a sufficient number of (fill in the blank) available, then more money should obviously be able to correct this "shortage."

It doesn’t make sense to say that the solution to something not being fully able to produce what we want, that there is a certain lack of resources to fulfill the aims, is to abolish the whole system. People generally don’t think this way – if something doesn’t work fully, then a little more effort/a little more money/one more chance can make it work. No one would take the car to the junkyard if it isn’t working – we first try to fix it.

It is true that this is what we have been doing with public schooling and the public schooling system for quite a while, but it still doesn’t work. But the system is not used by the same but different people – the people seeing the problems now are not the same as the ones who saw problems a decade ago. So we must be able to fix the problems of schooling, it is argued, by simply investing a little more money or provide yet another couple of laws. Just like a little more money was the solution to the problem for people a decade ago. The logic is not all that bad.

But look at it in another way: what about the students who do learn what the schools set out to teach them? Among those students it is safe to say that many of them were different, that they had different thoughts and values and experiences when they first went to school. Is that true when they nine or twelve years later have been educated? Too often the answer to this question is "no."

Ask anyone about democracy or rights or the state and it is obvious that something has happened to these people. Most of them, as I have argued in another article, blindly repeat the dogma of our era: democracy is superior, democracy is the only good system in a society, democracy works, democracy is every man and woman’s right. But what is democracy? Most people are unable to answer this question – "it has to do with voting."

The heterogeneous beliefs of kids going to school at the age of six or seven (or whatever) are literally untraceable when the same kids nine or twelve years later have been educated. Of course, there are differences in political views; but those differences are simply a matter of "how much more" state we "need," never the opposite and the question Why? is not asked and not even considered.

So the schooling system has essentially worked – this should be fairly obvious. But it hasn’t worked in full – there are some people who manage to go through the seemingly endless years of "education" only to end up almost the same except for having learned how to read and write. They somehow manage to keep their thoughts and values, and develop their own ideas on how the world should be without being heavily influenced by the state school system.

This is the true failure of the schooling system, and this failure is a reason politicians want to make public schooling "better." The radicals, if you will, are not only proof that the schooling system isn’t bulletproof; they are also, simply through existing, showing the horrors of public schooling: that most kids end up essentially the same when "educated."

The latter is the most important fact we can stress. "What about the radicals?" How come there is no middle ground between the big chunk of mainstream democracy hailers and the radicals? How come there isn’t more diversity in values and opinions? Why are there so very few people asking the so important question "Why"?

It is no doubt true that public schooling, be it schools run directly or indirectly by the state, throughout the western and other parts of the world has failed. But the failure is not only evident in the few people who do not want and do not need education, or in the few people who need more help to understand that which most people seem to think is "extremely important." The real failure is evident in the existence of radicals, and that existence is not only a threat to government – it is also an efficient means to make the public understand what government schools are all about. All we need to do is pose the right questions.

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19 November, 2007

ISRAEL CRITIQUE ON CAMPUS

Scholarship and truth does not matter. If it's anti-Israel it is OK

The target is professor Joel Kovel and his new book, Overcoming Zionism. The campus is the University of Michigan. But the controversy is all too familiar. On the one side are those who say universities have become centers for anti-Israel rhetoric. On the other are those who claim pro-Israel forces are stifling debate and limiting academic freedom.

Since the publication of The Israel Lobby by professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, the argument has intensified. Two back-to-back conferences that took place last month made clear just how divided the camps are. A conference at the University of Chicago, "In Defense of Academic Freedom," brought together a slew of scholars who say pressure from pro-Israel groups is taking a heavy toll on scholarship critical of Israel and on debate at university campuses.

The conference was inspired in part by the recent decision by DePaul University not to grant tenure to Norman Finkelstein, a critic of Israel and the author of The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. Finkelstein's tenure process, which included a virulent campaign by Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz to deny him the status, became one of the most publicized. Finkelstein was recommended for tenure by the his department and the tenure committee, but the dean overrode them. Some fear this incident has set a precedent for future tenure processes becoming hostage to outside politics.

A few days after the Chicago conference, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), a pro-Israel group, hosted its own conference, "Israel's Jewish Defamers." The group largely targeted Jews who compare Israel to Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa. "What we are addressing today is criticism rooted in outright, demonstrable falsehood or wildly extreme, out-of-context distortion," JTA quoted Andrea Levin, CAMERA's executive director, as saying in her introductory remarks.

The latest bout of academic warfare has taken shape at the University of Michigan - home to one of the largest Jewish student bodies - where many are up in arms over the handling of Kovel's fiercely anti-Israel book. The university, which has a contract to distribute books from left-wing British publisher Pluto Press, has been strongly criticized for distributing the recently-published Overcoming Zionism. In his book, Kovel argues that the creation of Israel was a mistake, and advocates for a "one-state" solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which Israelis and Palestinians would form a new country that isn't Jewish. The controversy led the university to temporarily halt distribution of the book and to review the relationship with the British publisher. But last week, Michigan announced it would renew its contract to distribute Pluto Press books.

The university has defended its decision, saying the relationship with the British press was one of commerce, not scholarship. "Distribution agreements are undertaken strictly as business relationships and have historically been a small part of the UM Press's business," said a statement announcing the unanimous decision. "Currently, the press distributes for five publishers. As is the case with all such commercial arrangements, books distributed on behalf of clients are not edited, reviewed or produced by the UM Press, and they do not bear the imprimatur of the press or of the University of Michigan." Still, Michigan said it would review the way such relationships were set up. Typically university presses don't have explicit guidelines for distribution agreements, "but the recent controversy surrounding the contract with Pluto Press has underscored the need for them," the statement said. Fundamental to that, Michigan said, is "the principle of freedom of expression."

Following the university's decision, the campus newspaper published an editorial supporting it: "There is no doubt that some people will have objections to Kovel's contentions, but is there any reason besides complacency and cowardice that those contentions should not be presented into the debate? While people may not agree with the content of the book, it does add to the debate, and it is exactly the type of book the university press should print."

But the decision to continue ties with Pluto Press has outraged some Jewish and pro-Israel groups. At the heart of the controversy is Stand With Us - Michigan, a local chapter of the national group. The local chapter got wind of the book from a local blogger, and in August brought it to the university's attention. Jonathan Harris, the Christian Zionist director of the Michigan chapter, told The Jerusalem Post by phone last week that the book was "an anti-Zionist screed that tries to prove Zionism is a horrible, racist ideology that brings about only bad."

The director of the University of Michigan Press, Phil Pochoda, expressed similar sentiment in an e-mail to the author, which was leaked. "The issue raised by the book is not free speech, but hate speech," wrote Pochoda. "Perhaps such vituperative and aggressive rhetoric works for the barricades, but it cannot be countenanced or underwritten by the university or the university press, even in this peripheral, distributed capacity." Despite this, the university press resumed distribution of the book.

In an op-ed to be published next week, Harris questions "why UMP would make the choice to promote and distribute Pluto books when they have 'no scholarly merit' and do not meet UMP's standards." Betsy Kellman, director of the Michigan regional chapter of the Anti-Defamation League, said in an interview on Friday that she was "shocked" by the university's decision to continue its ties to Pluto Press. "ADL has often said you can be critical of Israel, but at some point you cross the line and it turns into anti-Semitism," said Kellman. "This book is holding Israel to a very different standard than other countries, and that's where ADL steps in."

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Academic hatred of "Zionism"

The news, coming over the weekend, that Barnard College has granted tenure to an anti-Israel anthropologist, Nadia Abu El-Haj, is a setback to those who had hoped that the tide of anti-Israel sentiment at Morningside Heights would begin to recede after President Bollinger's welcome of President Ahmadinejad. Press coverage of Ms. El-Haj's case in the Nation and the Jewish Week (by the same reporter, no less) has sought to portray her opponents as McCarthyites and has insisted that she has been falsely accused. In fact, she is on the record accusing Israel of being a colonial project.

This is a point to mark. Martin Kramer, who is the Wexler-Fromer Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, made the key point when, in a remarks published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, he wrote, "The tragedy of the academy is that it has become home to countless people whose mission is to prove the lie that Zionism is colonialism. Thus research is undertaken, books are written, and lectures delivered to establish a falsehood." He called the idea that Zionism is colonialism "the root lie."

This is the lie that Ms. El-Haj is dedicated to promoting. In her book "Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society," she writes, "The colonial dimension of Jewish settlement in Palestine cannot be sidelined if one is to understand the significance and consequences of archaeological practice or, far more fundamentally, if one is to comprehend the dynamics of Israeli nation-state building and the contours of the Jewish national imagination as it crystallized therein."

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, nonsense. The Jews of Israel are no more colonizers than the Indians were in America. They lived there thousands of years ago. They never left, except for brief periods during which they were expelled by actual colonizers. There's been much debate over Ms. El-Haj's Hebrew skills; what concerns about her skills is not so much her Hebrew but her English, particularly her ability to understand the plain language meaning of the word "colonial" and how it does not apply to Jews returning to Israel from exile elsewhere.

The fact is that the Zionist movement that created the Jewish state in the land of Israel is the 180-degree opposite of a colonial movement. It was - as Menachem Begin used to phrase it when we spoke with him - a national liberation struggle. So when one is confronted by a left that sides with every national liberation struggle save for the one in respect of the Jews, it's no surprise that people start to wonder about underlying motives. The real colonizers right now are the oil-rich Arab potentates that are pouring funding into American universities, hoping to brainwash our students with claptrap about Zionists being colonizers. Looks like the Barnard trustees fell for it, in the last year that President Judith Shapiro, herself an anthropologist, was on the job.

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The Strange War on Homework

American students continue to fall behind much of the rest of the world in math and science and recent surveys of their literacy and knowledge of history, civics and geography hover between embarrassing and "Oh my God." But one of the hottest issues in American education today is the crusade to cut down on "excessive" homework; and the war is being waged not by educrats, but by parents.

"I hate school," declared a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, who complained that homework was destroying his son's life and his family and legions of anguished parents worried about the stress and self-esteem destroying effects of homework have joined his cry. After his assault on homework, Columnist Jeff Opdyke says, he received more than a thousand emails from fretting "parents, teachers, principals and guidance counselors," who spoke of "crying, fits, angry outbursts, frustration. And worse."

"Worse," included stories about parents who felt the need to medicate their children. A California mom wrote that the stress of homework was so great that "I was sent twice to see a psychiatrist to put [them] on pills." "Is there something we can do as parents," she asked, "to stop this insanity?" The insanity, presumably, was the homework, not pushing drugs on her kids.

Several years ago I wrote about the widespread opposition to so-called "high stakes" testing among the minivan set. As educational reformers discovered to their chagrin, many suburban parents thought that high standards were quite all right when they were applied to someone else's child. But the assault on the tests was a mild affair compared with the uprising against homework.

"If this is the price of excellence," one anti-homework parent complained on a recent radio call-in show, "I'll take mediocrity." He seems to echo educationist guru Alfie Kohn, who also inveighs against effects of standardized tests, grades, and musical chairs, but who seems to reserve a special animus for homework, which he blames for an epidemic of "stress and conflict, frustration and exhaustion."

Following his lead, school districts across the country are scrambling to put lids on assignments; capping the time children spend on homework. In Needham Massachusetts, the high school has gone even further to protect the fragile psyches of its young. "Less Homework, More Yoga, From a Principal Who Hates Stress," read a headline in The New York Times about Needham High School. All of this, the Times explained places the school in the "vanguard of a movement," among affluent schools that includes the formation of a group known as S.O.S. - "Stressed Out Students."

This is a genuinely strange crusade. A generation of hyper-parents has larded their children's days with band practice, piano lessons, soccer practice, volleyball, martial arts, dance recitals, and swim classes. For their part, teens find time to spend something like 6 hours a day using various forms of media; Xbox 360 sales do not seem to be suffering because kids are too busy to play video games and the malls have not been emptied of teens. And yet the cry goes up that it is Mrs. Grundy's history homework assignments that are destroying the innocence of childhood and wrecking the American family.

Of course, as any parent who has spent hours working on pointless dioramas and time-wasting cardboard volcanoes can testify, some of the complaints are not without some merit. But while some children undoubtedly do have too much homework, reports of a national homework crisis are highly exaggerated. In 2003, a study by the Brookings Institution found that the great majority of students at all grade levels now spend less than an hour a day studying, or about a quarter of the time they spend text messaging things like "NMHJC" (Not Much Here, Just Chilling) to one another.

The hand-wringing over homework also seems to miss the point because the overriding problem of Generation Me is not their excessive work-ethic. Universities and employers are not complaining that they are inundated with overstressed, burned out workaholic over-achievers. Rather the contrary. For every academic Stakhonovite who shows up at college or the office, there are legions of smug, entitled, graduates stuffed with self-esteem and great expectations but utterly unprepared for the rigors of college, work, or life.

This, of course brings us back to the parents, those obsessively involved, overprotective, indulgent moms and dads who have bubble-wrapped their children on the assumption that they are so frail and easily bruised that they must at all costs be protected against the symptoms of life, including, apparently, homework. One suspects that much of this anxiety is less about the kids, than about the angst of the grownups, many of whom seem genuinely afraid to do anything that might make them unpopular with their children, whose amusement and approval they crave so slavishly. That may also explain the endless parade of gold stars, happy faces, and participation trophies that mark the progress of modern childhood.

But for many children raised in bubble-wrap, life is turning out to be both overwhelming and disappointing, especially when they find out that the rest of world does not care as much about their self-esteem as mommy or daddy did. Of course it is true that middle school is often an ordeal and getting into college has become daunting rite of passage. But at some point grownups need to realize that life in general is full of switchbacks and speed-bumps -- most of which are a lot more stressful than an hour or two of science homework at the kitchen table.

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18 November, 2007

The battle for Middle East Studies

Post below lifted from American Thinker. See the original for links

Eminent intellectual dissidents have arisen and are taking on the leftist establishment which has dominated the study of Middle East affairs in the United States. Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami have given up hope of ever restoring balance and sanity to the hyper-politicized Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA), and have now founded an alternative organization, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA).

Academic associations sponsor academic conferences and publish journals, but they also set the tone and help establish the intellectual agenda of an entire field. Based on my own experience as a member of three different academic associations, leadership roles tend to fall into the hands of people willing to do the grunt work. Which in practice means those burnishing their resumes and those with a political agenda. With the massive amount of Saudi money flowing into the American academy, it is hardly surprising that career opportunities have been so available to those who blame the West for all the problems of the Muslim world, shy away from real problems, and are obsessed with the usual left wing academic fads.

Nibras Kazimi of Talisman Gate provides an enlightening view of the situation, and some telling anecdotes revealing some of the rot within Middle East Studies. If you wonder what's the problem, try this:

...MESA shies away from discussing contemporary Middle Eastern issues for fear than any controversy may scare away the funders.

Can we all agree that Iraq is an important issue, and that such important issues should be front and center among the priorities to be discussed by Middle Eastern scholars? Yes? Good. Then why is it that during MESA's upcoming annual conference only five (yes, FIVE) panels are dedicated to Iraq out of a total of 206! Whereas there are at least a dozen panels dedicated to gender and sexuality studies!

Furthermore, there doesn't seem to be a single panel that seriously sets out to discuss jihadism during the whole four day stretch of the conference.

Columbia U becomes even more politically correct

Administrators at Columbia University threw a bone to the four famished students on a hunger strike yesterday, giving in to some of their lofty demands. Columbia agreed to raise $50 million to beef up ethnic studies and expand programs for multicultural students, strike organizers said, but refused to budge on the protesters' biggest demand - killing the school's proposed expansion into Harlem.

"We are very happy to hear that the university is willing to meet our demands," said student organizer Jamie Chen. "We took drastic measures, and we're glad that the university has come to a point of negotiation." Columbia's concession will expand the school's multicultural student center and expand the required freshman ethnic-studies class from a several hundred-student lecture to small seminar groups. Administrators have also agreed to add diversity training to orientation programs for new faculty and hire five new ethnic-studies professors.

The concessions, coupled with threats from campus doctors, were enough for two of the students to pull out of the hunger strike - now in its 10th day. Seniors Emilie Rosenblatt and Bryan Mercer left the strike late Wednesday night after doctors said they were in serious medical danger and would be put on involuntary leave if they continued. They were replaced by two newcomers, and the four students said they would continue to strike until the Harlem expansion plan was quashed.

"It's such an effective reality check to see that our actions have real impact," said Richard Brown, 19, who joined the strike yesterday. "But the administration has made no concessions to the community for the expansion. We want to ensure they do it in an ethical manner that respects my neighbors." Student representatives and administrators met late yesterday afternoon to address the issue. Columbia's proposed expansion plan would grow the campus by 17 acres.

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The university of life

It's time we put the 'human' back into humanities, says Anthony Kronman

At the end of the second world war a programme called directed studies (DS) was established at Yale University. Its purpose was to give students an organised introduction to the civilisation for whose sake the war had been fought. Sixty years later, the contours of the programme have changed, but its basic goal remains the same: to acquaint students with the west's greatest works of literary and philosophical imagination, equipping them with a storehouse of images and ideas on which they can draw as they struggle to find or make meaning in their lives.

DS students take three-year courses in which they read Homer, Plato, Aeschylus, Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, Tolstoy and others. At any given moment, all the students are reading the same books and discussing them with their teachers in seminar-size classes. The sense of common adventure is strong and the experience of discovery often intense.

Such programmes are a rarity in the US today. They were once far more common. The ambition they express used to be a fundamental premise of American higher education: that college is a time not merely to learn a specialty and prepare for a career, but also to acquire the moral and intellectual equipment one needs to grapple with the question of what living is for.

This ambition has been discredited by the modern research ideal, which rewards specialisation above all else. Many university teachers today regard the question of life's meaning as one that no serious scholar ought to take up in the classroom. And it has been undermined by the careerist anxieties of students. Those anxieties have flourished in the absence of resistance from teachers too preoccupied with their research to see students as anything more than prospective members of their own specialties, rather than as human beings struggling for fulfilment and love, under the long shadow of death.

The dominance of the research ideal has obscured an older responsibility of the humanities - to train students in what used to be called "the art of living", an enterprise larger than any career. Having abandoned this responsibility, but finding themselves unable to compete, as producers of research, with their colleagues in the sciences, humanities teachers have sought to restore a sense of their mission and role by embracing a variety of progressive causes. This has created a culture of political correctness whose stifling uniformity encourages students to see themselves more as representatives than individuals; it blocks serious engagement with the very personal question of life's meaning.

As a result, American students graduate from college well-prepared for their careers, but under-educated in the meaning of life. In a world where the freedom to explore life's meaning is greater than ever, students are less well-equipped for this challenge than those in past generations - and if they want help in meeting it, they must look beyond their universities to the churches, which now have a dangerous monopoly in questions of spiritual importance.

The tradition of reading great books as a way of introducing students to perennial debates about the meaning of existence is one that American universities borrowed from their British counterparts. That tradition is under pressure in Britain for the same reasons it is in the US: an emphasis on research among teachers and on careers among students; the strangling effects of political correctness; and the spread of religious fundamentalism in response to the demand for a serious engagement with matters of spiritual concern.

Programmes such as DS are a way of fighting back against these pressures. The British philosopher Michael Oakeshott spoke of a "great conversation" among the writers whose works constitute the backbone of western civilisation. This civilisation is the shared inheritance of students on both sides of the Atlantic. To deprive them of it is to leave them without landmarks to navigate the difficult and thrilling business of life. There is time enough to prepare for a career, and for scholarly research. Part of a college education ought to be devoted to something else - to the question of what living is for.

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17 November, 2007

Teacher-training stupidity

Don't the educational theorists know ANYTHING about reality? They certainly don't realize that sometimes more is less. They quite reasonably want to get bright people into teaching so what do they do? They make it compulsory for aspiring teachers to undergo four years of brain-dead half-life in moronic teachers' colleges. Anybody with half a brain would NOT waste 4 years of their life that way. They would do a real degree instead. When a one year diploma was all it took to become a teacher, the applicants for teacher training were of a much higher quality. Connect the dots!

Even a one-year qualification is probably overkill in the case of someone with a good first degree or higher. I went into High School teaching with NO teacher qualifications whatever: Just a fresh Master's degree. And my students got excellent results in their exams! The story below is from Australia but I believe that the situation is similar in the USA -- with intellectual standards in American teacher-training colleges also in the basement

MEDIOCRE students are going on to become teachers because poor pay and low job status is scaring the best people away from the job. Education Minister Julie Bishop yesterday admitted there was a problem in attracting the best people into teaching, as an education expert warned of dire consequences for students.

At an education conference at Melbourne University yesterday, Professor Bill Louden from the University of Western Australia said most teachers now come from the second lowest quartile in school performance results. Mr Louden said the number of high achievers going into teaching has halved over recent years. Universities must lift their intake standards for teacher training before students begin to suffer, he said.

In a debate with opposition education spokesman Stephen Smith, Ms Bishop said low tertiary entrance scores for education was deterring bright students, and said the Howard Government was committed to lifting the social standing of the profession. "Students say they are not going into teaching because of the inflexible salary arrangements and the status of the profession - they want to be in a profession where people are paid on excellence, not on years in the job,'' Ms Bishop said.

Mr Smith said a Labor Government would also focus on getting the best students into teaching. "We have to tell young Australians (teaching) is a noble profession and absolutely essential to our fundamental economic and social prosperity and one of the great challenges for our ageing teacher stock is to become attuned to the digital age.'' He said Labor had committed to a 50 per cent reduction in HECS fees upfront for those studying maths and science, with a 50 per cent remission at the back end where the student takes up a relative occupation such as maths teacher or scientist.

During the debate, Mr Smith said university fees were scaring some students away from tertiary education, while Ms Bishop attacked Labor's plan to abolish full fee places. Ms Bishop said Labor had failed to tell universities how they would be compensated by scrapping the places- worth $700 million nationally. Mr Smith said Labor would release its plans prior to the election. Mr Smith attacked the Coalition's plan for a national curriculum for just years 11 and 12.

Ms Bishop yesterday said the national curriculum for English, maths and science would be headed by hand-picked expert groups, as the Government did with Australian history earlier this year.

A Labor Government would implement a standardised curriculum from kindergarten to year 12, so all Australian students would be learning the same material, he said. A national curriculum board would take the best of currciculum from each state and re-work it into a super-study for all Australian students.

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Bill to Expand Head Start Is Approved

Why is a program with no proven net benefits still sucking up taxpayer dollars after all these years? Ronald Reagan said that a government program is the nearest thing to everlasting life. I think this proves it

With two overwhelming votes, Congress approved a bill yesterday that would boost teacher qualifications in federally funded Head Start preschools, expand access to the program for children from low-income families and scrap a controversial system for testing 4-year-olds. The first reauthorization of Head Start since 1998 passed 95 to 0 in the Senate and 381 to 36 in the House and now goes to President Bush, who is expected to sign the measure. The 42-year-old program serves about 909,000 disadvantaged children, aiming to help prepare them for school academically, emotionally and socially.

The legislation sets a goal that by 2013 all Head Start teachers will have at least an associate's degree and half will have a bachelor's degree. It expands eligibility to families just above the federal poverty level, authorizes a funding increase and directs money to programs for younger children and migrant and Native American students. "For low-income children, having some type of early-childhood development is critically important to their success," House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said. "The reforms that are included in this bill I think are critically important so that Head Start can really be all that many of us want it to be. There are some tremendous Head Start programs around the country . . . but there are also some programs that don't fulfill the promise that we're making to parents and their children."

The bill eliminates a testing program for 4-year-olds that is supported by the Bush administration. Critics said the National Reporting System, a set of mini-tests intended to measure verbal and math skills, didn't provide a valid assessment of progress for students so young. The bill omitted an administration-backed proposal to allow faith-based groups to consider religion in hiring for Head Start.

The federal push to expand early-childhood education is part of a national movement to make preschool available to more children, particularly those from low-income homes. Several governors, including Timothy M. Kaine (D) of Virginia, are seeking to add government-funded preschool slots for needy children. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) noted that the legislation authorizes $7.3 billion in funding for fiscal 2008, up from $6.9 billion, and dedicates more money for teacher training. "Head Start teachers and staff are the heart and future of the program," Kennedy said in a statement. "They help children learn to identify letters and arrange the pieces of a puzzle. They teach them to brush their teeth, wash their hands, make friends and follow rules."

Kathy Patterson, federal policy director for Pre-K Now, a D.C.-based advocacy group, applauded the bill. "We're going to serve more kids, and one of the things we're particularly excited about is the emphasis on quality," she said. "The challenge will be in the appropriations process to make sure there's adequate funding."

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16 November, 2007

Good Marks for AP and IB: Experts Endorse College-Level Study Programs

This does however seem rather silly. Here in Australia, my son did an AP course in his final year of High School but he did it by taking an actual university course at an actual university. It is however good to hear from the report below that there are some quality choices available for U.S. High School students. But sad to hear that there is pressure to water down the History courses. Students must not learn the actual facts of history. Far too dangerous! If we are not careful they might even learn that Hitler was a socialist!

Debate rages among Washington area parents, students and teachers over which college-level track is superior: the large Advanced Placement program or the fast-growing International Baccalaureate. A report to be released today by a team of academic experts gives both high marks, with a slight nod to IB in two subjects. The experts assembled by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington-based think tank that advocates more school rigor, awarded a B-plus to the AP and IB English literature courses and a B-minus to history courses in both programs. But IB Biology received an A and AP Biology an A-minus. IB Math received a B-minus and AP Calculus AB a C-plus.

The Fordham Institute said those grades were good, compared with the mostly low marks it has given state standards for public schools. Its report concluded that AP and IB "demonstrate that independent entities can and do make programs and assessments that are rigorous, fair and intellectually richer than almost any state standard and exam for high school that we've seen."

The report -- "Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate: Do They Deserve Gold Star Status?" -- complained about indications from the College Board, which oversees the AP program, that it might revise some courses and tests. It said the College Board was pursuing changes to social studies courses that might encourage "more time talking about such themes as 'politics and citizenship' or 'continuity and change,' " which report authors worried would reduce time for learning facts about historical events.

About 14,000 U.S. high schools offer AP classes, and about 500 offer IB. The authors acknowledged the difficulty of comparisons. AP and IB are structured differently, although both give exams that enable students to earn college credit. AP has one-year courses, and many IB courses take two years to complete, so the Fordham report focused only on one-year IB courses.

Both programs lost points in math because they allowed more use of calculators than the authors considered appropriate. AP U.S. History was faulted for mentioning few specific historical events in its course plan. IB does not have a course devoted to U.S. history, but its world history course lost points for focusing too narrowly on the 19th and 20th centuries. The authors advised teachers to ignore the outlines for both courses and teach to what the report deemed rigorous AP and IB history exams.

Brad Richardson, regional director of IB North America, said he was pleased that the report praised IB, as it did AP, for preparing students well for college. Trevor Packer, a College Board vice president who oversees AP, declined to comment.

Source




British citizenship education -- just more political indoctrination

`We aim at no less than a change in the political culture of this country both nationally and locally.' This ambitious statement sounds like it should have come from a political party's manifesto, but it is actually to be found in the final report of the Advisory Group on Citizenship Education, otherwise known as the `Crick Report'. The report gave birth to the new compulsory subject of citizenship being taught in schools in England since August 2002. The stated aim of introducing this new subject into the education system was to reverse the decline in young peoples' participation in public and political life in the UK. The Crick Report argued that research revealed `a historic political disconnection'. In effect, an entire generation has opted out of party politics. However, we should be wary about citizenship education for a number of reasons:

It is not the responsibility of teachers to solve what are political and social problems like apathy, low voter turnout, alienation and an absence of social cohesion. To expect teachers and schools to solve these problems is to redefine the role of teaching and education;

* citizenship education allows politicians to evade responsibility for their failure to inspire and engage young people with politics, and the failure to create a dynamic context in which political contestation exists

* citizenship education is anti-intellectual, prioritising values over academic enquiry. The emphasis on social engineering is to the detriment of the integrity of individual subjects

* citizenship education is insidious and authoritarian, because it lays down the values that young people are expected to hold without subjecting those values to public debate;

* citizenship education will not solve the problems it was set up to address. In fact, citizenship classes make things worse, as they reduce politics and the possibility of people fighting for meaningful change to a set of values and dispositions that can be acquired in the classroom through, in effect, a programme of behaviour modification.

The debate about the disconnection of young people from politics has absorbed a growing number of academics and policy makers around New Labour for some time. Reports published by think tanks like the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) and Demos have acknowledged that the British political system is facing a crisis of legitimacy. All the political parties have lost their social base and find it particularly difficult to connect with young people. Teaching unions, exam boards, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), political parties and pressure groups have all welcomed the compulsory nature of citizenship education as playing a positive role in combating youth apathy....

One of the most striking things about citizenship education is the speed with which it has moved from the theoretical musings of policy wonks to a compulsory subject, which is seen as a panacea for a range of our political and social ills. That is not to say that there has been no disagreement over what and how students should learn. Concerns have been expressed by the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) about the quality of some teaching - in particular, the lack of intellectual rigour and content associated with the subject. But what is lacking is any real philosophical or political debate about the effectiveness and consequences of this new subject. Educationalists and policymakers alike need to address a number of fundamental questions about citizenship education.

Will it work? This is a question that supporters of citizenship education have been asked for some years. Their understandable response was to give it time. Five years down the line, it is now possible to make some preliminary observations since the subject was made statutory for Key Stage 3 (pupils from 11 to 14 years old) and Key Stage 4 (ages 14 to 16) in August 2002. There has been no rise in voter turnout amongst first-time eligible voters in the last General Election of 2005 or the 2007 local elections. Research from the British Youth Council shows that the figures for young people getting involved in any type of political or direct action campaign or pressure group activity remain static at around two per cent over the past few years. So far, citizenship education is failing to reconnect young people to our political system or promote any substantial type of improvement in participation rates....

Many educationalists and commentators now believe that a key role of teaching is to turn young people into active citizens who participate more in civil society, vote and volunteer in their local community. In a review of Key Stage 3 citizenship carried out in December 2006 amongst citizenship teachers, one of the main conclusions was that `skills and active citizenship were felt by the vast majority of our respondents to be more important than knowledge and understanding within the content of the curriculum'. Teachers have always had some role to play in the creation of citizens. A good, rounded, liberal education can contribute informally to the socialisation of our young people into broader society. However, until recently, this process was implicit and was more a by-product of a sound education. Above all, the integrity of individual subjects and their content were automatically respected and seen as the key to a proper education.

This is no longer the case. Citizenship, in particular via its cross-curricular themes, is damaging the integrity of every subject. The crude explicit requirement that citizenship concepts, values, dispositions, skills and aptitudes be spread across all subjects has resulted in a hollowing out and diluting of specific subject content. In short, citizenship education is having a directly damaging effect on subject knowledge. Academic subjects have become subordinate to the imperative of social engineering. The curriculum is increasingly seen principally as a vehicle for overt socialisation, even indoctrination, into the latest fashionable cause or value. No matter what the subject, teachers are now expected to make links in their schemes of work and lesson plans to topics as diverse as safe sex, relationships, healthy eating, diversity, homophobia, Islamophobia, voting, volunteering and sustainability, to list just a few.

Lessons in academic subjects like history, biology or geography that would once have been considered outstanding would now fail an Ofsted inspection if these citizenship themes were not included. These new requirements redefine dramatically the role of a teacher and purpose of teaching. This change needs to be challenged. Teachers should not be playing this kind of role in what is, essentially, a social engineering project. Instead, there should be a robust defence of the value of academic subjects for their own sake.

Citizenship education is an attempt to instil a new set of values in today's young generation. Proponents acknowledge that almost all the institutions that once represented the moral and social arbiters of our times - the Church, the family, trade unions, political parties and scientists - can no longer be relied on to inspire the necessary trust and respect to impart values to the nation's youth. In a recent article in the Guardian Education supplement, former education secretary Estelle Morris let slip that many parents can no longer be trusted with the task of teaching moral values, a comment I've heard increasingly (off the record) at citizenship conferences from leading citizenship advocates. Citizenship education is seen as offering future generations a moral compass now sadly lacking in society....

Amid this uncertainty over values and what our society should prioritise as important, the citizenship curriculum, and the school curriculum more broadly, has become a battleground (or gravy train) for a whole host of campaigns zealously trying to get their moral message into the classroom. Recent campaigns include more focus on fairtrade and Third World debt. Indeed, many schools teach global citizenship straight from teaching materials produced by the charity Oxfam. Public health officials demand more attention to healthy eating, obesity, safe sex - even the dangers of sunshine! Other groups demand more black history or gay history or examples of positive multiculturalism. Banks promote financial capability as a virtue. Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, has been sent to every secondary school in the country to urge greater responsibility towards our planet and environment. No doubt some of these campaigns may have worthy aims. The point, however, is that these are issues for public policy and debate, not for the classroom.

At first glance, the citizenship curriculum may look like it is promoting uncontroversial values like honesty, fairness, tolerance, etc. However, closer inspection reveals that alongside these goes a set of personal behaviours recast as moral values. For example, in citizenship literature, community is now a value, as is participation (voting), volunteering, sustainability and caring for the environment. This process of redefining certain political positions and opinions into values that are uncontested first emerged in the Crick Report but has intensified over the past two years.

In the classroom, via citizenship, many of the unresolved issues of public life are transformed into new concepts to be passed on to children as a fait accompli. Racism, environmentalism and other political ideas are converted into matters of moral and ethical behaviour. While concern for the environment may be desirable, should it be prescribed as a value? Where is the space for intellectual debate about such questions?

In the past, schools were asked to produce well-educated young people capable of making independent decisions about what to do with their lives. Now teachers are increasingly meant to produce people with a particular set of views repackaged as moral values. But the absence of any moral consensus in Britain today will not be solved through indoctrinating children into the latest fashionable values. The problem with trying to instil new values solely through the classroom is that they often lack any resonance or real connection with peoples' lives. Real values, strong values, emerge not out of schoolbooks but from strong communities and a real clash of ideas in society.

This values-led education is insidious and authoritarian. If left unchallenged, this trend could eventually destroy the spirit of intellectual enquiry within education, potentially undermining the individual student's freedom of conscience and his or her right to determine their own social and political value system. The danger is that students are now being told what to think. This may seem a wild exaggeration, but let's think about those young people who may reject the prescriptive values taught in citizenship lessons. Official guidelines quite clearly stipulate that students must demonstrate a concern and commitment for the values laid out in the curriculum in order to achieve a good assessment. So, what marks will be awarded to the young man who has concluded that there is no point in voting (rejecting the value of participation), the young woman who feels that `sustainable development' may be robbing the developing world of the most advanced technology, or the pupil who has decided to get involved in party politics - with the far-right British National Party?

More here





15 November, 2007

UCLA's Politicized Middle East Studies Professors

By Cinnamon Stillwell -- See the original for links

Earlier this year, the Center for Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. It was founded in 1957 by Gustave E. Von Grunebaum, a scholar at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute and the first president of the Middle East Studies Association. Grunebaum sought to establish at UCLA a groundbreaking Middle East and Islamic Studies program featuring an array of experts in languages, culture, and history.

Unfortunately, the best-known UCLA professors specializing in the region today, far from embodying the classical approach to the discipline in which knowledge is the overriding goal, exemplify the highly politicized world of modern Middle East studies. Ignoring the vast majority of the region and myriad pressing issues, including terrorism, the need for religious reform, women's rights, resistance to modernity, and the prevalence of tyranny, this cadre of Middle East studies professors is fixated instead on post-colonialism, the Arab/Israeli conflict, U.S. foreign policy, and shielding themselves from outside criticism. As pointed out by journalist Rachel Neuwirth, what passes for education at UCLA's Center for Near Eastern studies is, all too often, "sustained academic indoctrination."

No professor better exemplifies this politicized approach than historian Gabriel Piterberg. A devoted disciple of Orientalism author Edward Said, Piterberg's course on the subject, "The Last Conscious Pariah: The Life and Work of Edward Said," features the sort of post-colonialist jargon of which his hero would have been proud. In the section titled, "Culture, Imperialism and Resistance," readings include post-colonialist Franz Fanon, Michel Foucault, the grandfather of today's brand of academic moral relativism, and Antonio Gramsci, the Italian communist theoretician who devised a series of strategies to subvert Western democratic societies from within - a process some would argue is well underway in academia.

As did Said, Piterberg takes a relentlessly anti-American and anti-Israel stance, with which he buttresses his career of political activism. He appears regularly at anti-war protests and teach-ins organized by various leftist groups and the Islamist Muslim Student Association, and is a signatory to a 2002 petition urging the University of California to divest from Israel. On one occasion, he even canceled a class to attend a student-led anti-war protest.

In the Arab/Israeli conflict, Piterberg blames Israel exclusively, and romanticizes the Palestinian "resistance." He distorts the conflict's history by employing terms such as "ethnic cleansing" and "atrocities" to describe Israel's founding in 1948. Born in Argentina, Piterberg was raised in Israel and fought with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) against the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in southern Lebanon in the early 1980s. Nevertheless, he later charged that the campaign was not "necessary for national defense."

Following academic fashion, Piterberg opposes a two-state solution to the Arab/Israeli conflict, and favors instead the formation of a single bi-national state, despite a paucity of evidence that such a proposal is either tenable, humanitarian, or favored by a majority of Israeli citizens. He has made clear his hostility towards Israel's Jewish foundations, most notably at a speak-out held by the Muslim Student Association in 2000, when he stated, "You can't have a Palestinian state with its own rights, when you have 150,000 Jewish extremists sitting in the middle."

In April, Piterberg spoke at a UCLA conference titled, "Covering Lebanon: Media and the 2006 War," which came to the preposterous conclusion that Western media coverage of the conflict was biased in favor of Israel. He fit in perfectly with the roster of one-sided participants.

Piterburg is fond of portraying himself as a victim of discrimination for his political views. In 2003, he blamed Campus Watch for an inadvertent error made by UCLA's Center for Jewish Studies that omitted his history seminar, "Myths, Politics, and Scholarship in Israel," from a list of Israel-related courses. At the time Piterberg made this claim to the Daily Bruin, Campus Watch had yet to feature any material on Piterberg, a fact that was parodied by Middle East scholar Martin Kramer. Subscribing to the belief, common among Middle East studies professors, that criticism equals censorship, Piterberg stated, "There is an atmosphere since Sept. 11 (2001), there's an attempt to silence views that are not palatable to certain other views." No doubt Piterberg will chalk up this very article to the "attempt to silence" his views, even as he continues to enjoy a prominent platform from which to express them.

Piterberg's colleague Sondra Hale, UCLA professor of anthropology and co-editor of the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, also spoke at the "Covering Lebanon" conference. Hale was one of the signatories to a 2002 open letter warning that Israel would use the Iraq war to perpetrate "ethnic cleansing" against the Palestinians. In addition, she was a scheduled participant in the canceled American Association of University Professors (AAUP) conference on academic boycotts (focusing solely on Israel).

In January 2007, Hale helped organize a two-day workshop co-sponsored by UCLA's Center for Near Eastern Studies and the Center for the Study of Women titled, "Linking Middle East and Arab American Gender Studies." Antioch University liberal studies professor and Association of Middle East Women's Studies president Nada Elia participated. Last month, Elia was as a panelist at a UC Berkeley screening of the Palestinian terrorist-glorifying documentary, Leila Khaled: Hijacker. The event came under the dubious title, "Women, Resistance, and Political Participation." Apparently, equal opportunity for female terrorists is a pressing "feminist" issue these days. If these are the sorts of associations Sondra Hale and UCLA's Center for Near Eastern Studies are cultivating, a panelist celebrating Osama bin Laden isn't far off.

Next we come to Saree Makdisi, a UCLA professor of English with a focus, as described in his bio, on "British literature and imperial culture." But it's his interest in "the cultural politics of the contemporary Arab world" that has proven to be problematic. Makdisi reaches a broad, non-academic audience by publishing regularly in the Los Angeles Times, the London Review of Books, and the Nation.

Makdisi is Edward Said's nephew, and anti-Israel politics seem to run in the family. His biases on the Israeli/Arab conflict are clear in the title of his forthcoming book, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation. Makdisi rarely lets truth stand in the way of effective propaganda: Middle East scholar Martin Kramer labeled Makdisi an "anti-Israel agitator," and noted his fantastical claim that Israel has "actualized all the logics, apparatuses, discourses, and practices associated with the worst, the ugliest, the most violent and draconian forms of European racism."

Writing at his blog earlier this year, Makdisi condemned the requirement that Palestinians simply recognize Israel's right to exist. As he put it, "[Israel's] demand that its 'right to exist' be recognized reflects its own anxiety, not about its existence but about its failure to successfully eliminate the Palestinians' presence inside their homeland - a failure for which verbal recognition would serve merely a palliative and therapeutic function." With "peacemakers" like Makdisi, who needs war?

Makdisi is equally preoccupied with critics of Middle East studies, a field long unused to the rigors of accountability. In a 2006 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times titled, "Neocons Lay Siege to the Ivory Towers," Makdisi accuses his imagined arch nemesis Martin Kramer, along with Middle East Forum director Daniel Pipes, of being members of "pressure groups" who are also "failed academics driven by crassly political motivations" - charges easily dismissed by a cursory glance at either man's C.V.

Makdisi was a signatory to a 2002 letter addressed to the Chicago Maroon, the student newspaper at the University of Chicago, objecting to "irresponsible allegations of anti-Semitism and 'abuse of power' against faculty of the University" allegedly made by Campus Watch and other organizations against then-Chicago (now-Columbia) Arab studies professor Rashid Khalidi and various Middle East studies professors. The letter objected most strenuously to the rise in student complaints, calling them "a perversion of the classroom." Students having a say in their education would seem to constitute one of the foundations of higher education, not a perversion of the classroom. But not, it seems, for Makdisi and his cohorts.

In another example of Ivory Tower-driven paranoia, Makdisi declared in the Seattle Post Intelligencer earlier this month that "academic freedom [is] at risk on campus" by none other than "Israel's American supporters." In his op-ed, Makdisi decried the "outside interference" of scholars such Martin Kramer and organizations such as Stand With Us, the David Project, the Israel on Campus Coalition, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and, of course, Campus Watch, for somehow "severely disrupt[ing] academic processes." It seems that academic freedom is a one-way street for self-described "champions of freedom" such as Makdisi - and a dead-end one at that.

UCLA Near East history professor James Gelvin, another signatory to the 2002 University of California divestment petition directed at Israel, presents challenges of his own. His students have taken note, describing him, in one case, as "more of an advocate for the Palestinian cause" than a historian. In response to rising criticism, especially that perceived as emanating from Campus Watch, Gelvin told the Daily Bruin, "What really irks those guys is that I don't use my classroom for political purposes, and thus my lectures don't advance their political agenda." Would that Gelvin's claim were true, for it is certainly not the agenda of Campus Watch to further the politicization of the field of Middle East studies, but, rather, the opposite.

Gelvin implies that U.S. foreign policy was to blame for the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and, in a larger sense, the rise of Islamism. Accordingly, in a course titled, "The History of the Near and Middle East," Gelvin assigns students the book, Islam in Transition: Muslim Perspectives, which is co-edited by Georgetown Islamic studies professor John Esposito. Esposito is a celebrated recipient of Saudi financial largesse at Georgetown University and, perhaps not coincidentally, one of the prime apologists for Islamism in the field of Middle East studies. One reading assignment from the book is Sayyid Muhammad Husaid Fadlallah's, "We Must Think Before We Act; September 11 Was a Gift to the U.S. Administration," whose title alone suggests a decidedly subjective view of the matter. Similarly, Gelvin's subtitle under a discussion section on the war on terrorism for the same course is, "The Mess That We're In." To be fair, Gelvin's course readings include offerings from all sides of the political spectrum, not to mention the oft-ignored words of al-Qaeda leaders, but one wonders in what context it's being presented?

Gelvin's role as the organizer of a conference to be held at UCLA's Center for Near Eastern Studies this month titled, "Jihadi Islam Conference/Workshop," would seem to answer this question. While the conference's subject matter is laudable, especially in light of the dearth of attention paid to terrorism in the field of Middle East studies, its conclusions may prove debatable. According to Gelvin's description, the conference seeks to "propose alternative approaches" to the "underlying assumption of Islamic or Middle Eastern exceptionalism." Appearing on a panel alongside UC Irvine professor Mark LeVine, whose own forays into delusion are well-known (he once declared, "It is time for the United States to declare a truce with the Muslim world, and radical Islam in particular,") Gelvin will provide what he calls "A Historian's Reply to Terrorology." Applying the lessons of history to the present is praiseworthy, but doing so while ignoring the specific nature of today's threats is little more than willful blindness.

Between the politicized polemics, the blatant biases, and the na‹ve approach to foreign policy proffered by UCLA's Middle East studies professors, there is certainly room for improvement at the Center for Near Eastern studies. This is isn't to say that no professors are rising to the occasion, but those in the public eye are conveying a consistently biased impression that is fostering distrust in Middle East studies at UCLA. One might question whether the Center for Near Eastern studies' fiftieth anniversary is a cause for celebration, or an opportunity to reexamine its future course. One thing's for sure, Gustave Von Grunebaum must be turning in his grave.

Source




Ersatz School Choice

"Vouchers go down in crushing defeat"

That headline thundered from Wednesday's Salt Lake City Tribune, as it announced that more than 60 percent of Utahans who voted on whether to uphold the statewide school-voucher program said no. It was a big setback for the voucher movement. The Utah legislature had approved the program by one vote. But the teachers' union, which opposes vouchers, gathered enough signatures to put the question to the voters. It poured a ton of money into its successful effort to have the people veto the law. This was the tenth time in over 30 years that voters have defeated school vouchers or education tax credits, says the National School Boards Association. It may not look like a win for the cause of educational freedom, but in the long run it might be. That depends on what we do about it.

I doubt if Utahans rejected vouchers for the right -- that is, libertarian -- reasons. More likely, they did so either because they bought the union's argument that vouchers would drain the government schools' coffers (unfortunately, they wouldn't have) or because they feared who might turn up at the private suburban schools. Regardless, the voters' acceptance of vouchers would have jeopardized the private, relatively independent schools in the state. So I see Tuesday's ballot results as a dodging of the bullet.

The law passed by the legislature would have required private schools to "[g]ive a formal national test every year" to each student. A "national test" means only one thing: a standardized test approved by the education establishment. This might sound innocuous, but it's insidious. Who controls the exam controls the curriculum. And who controls the curriculum controls the school. The law also would have compelled schools to publish the test results. Would schools have taken a chance on getting poor test results (even if their kids were learning anyway)? No. Schools wanting eligibility for vouchers would have had no choice but to teach to the test. Teaching to the test means teaching kids how to take tests. How would that create school choice?

Unsurprisingly, governments tend to attach conditions to the money they give away. It is no rebuttal to say it's really the parents' money. For most -- but not all -- parents, that would be true (some would be subsidized), but the point is politically irrelevant. It would be seen as government or public money. And that means most people would find plausible the argument that the ultimate recipients of such money must be accountable. "Accountable" would mean accountable to the government's school bureaucracy. Voucher advocates are aware of this. In Utah they accepted the testing requirement, although given that provision, one wonders how the game could have been worth the candle.

It's the Government

All of this gets to the crux of the voucher issue. We can demonstrate that an unhampered private sector is more effective and efficient than government in whatever it does because it is entrepreneurial, unlike a bureaucracy. But that doesn't get at the fundamental issue -- which is this: government should not be in charge of educating our children. Why not? Because it's the government -- the institution that rests on the morally flawed premise that it is all right for politicians to take other people's money without their consent, interfere with their peaceful transactions, and exploit the weak. Why on earth would we want schools built on that foundation?

It is tempting to try to use government as a shortcut to freedom. Look how readily libertarians embrace medical marijuana and physician-assisted suicide, both of which, in the name of expanding choice, would further subordinate the individual to the Therapeutic State. So it would be with vouchers. (These days, government schools are undisguised agencies of the Therapeutic State.) Exactly how does luring nongovernment schools onto the plantation advance the separation of school and state? There are no shortcuts to liberty.

Source





14 November, 2007

Radicalizing mathematics

Those who worship at the altar of Political Correctness and believe American public schools are doing just a dandy job of educating youth might want to consider the following: China graduated almost 200,000 engineers, 44 percent of the undergraduate degrees, in 1999, according to the National Science Foundation, and has plans to eventually graduate a million engineers each year.

In contrast, U.S. engineering schools churned out just 73,000 engineers in 2004, according to Ronald Barr, Past President of the American Society for Engineering Education, totaling less than 5 percent of all bachelor's degrees awarded. "Our graduate schools are filled with foreign nationals who last year earned 58 percent of the engineering Ph.D.s awarded in the United States. This country relies heavily on these grads to fill our technological needs, but more and more U.S.-trained engineers are returning home after graduation," Barr wrote back in 2005.

Barr makes the case that students must excel at math and science to succeed in the engineering field. So you would think there would be a renewed focus on that third R - Rithmetic. But in some New York City schools, math class has become a vehicle for leftist teachers to indoctrinate students to socialism. If the kids learn a little math along the way, it's likely an accident.

Click on www.radicalmath.org and be amazed. Right away you'll notice the organization's mission: "RadicalMath is a resource for educators interested in integrating issues of social and economic justice into math curriculum and classes."

These folks recently held a conference attracting 400 math teachers and education professors entitled "Creating Balance in an Unjust World: Math Education and Social Justice." The official program's first page started with a passage from Paulo Freire, the Brazilian Marxist educator and icon of the teaching-for-social-justice movement: "There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to [. . .] bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of our world."

Ellen Davidson from Simmons College led the first session of the conference entitled: "How Unfair Is It? Analyzing World Resource Distribution in Mathematically Rigorous Ways." The workshop promised to design lessons to "help children build stronger conceptual mathematics skills while simultaneously helping them understand social injustice."

Sarah Ludwig led a workshop on Teaching Mathematics Through an Economics Justice Lens and a group of Chicago public high school students took attendees through a social justice mathematics project involving racial profiling. But I really wish I could have been there for: "Beyond Barbie: Moving from Scale to Social Justice," facilitated by Portland State's Swapna Mukhopadhyay. The workshop description reads: "In this hands-on session" - whatever that means - "we will focus on how mathematizing Barbie doll in terms of proportional reasoning opens up to a deep interrogation of some vexing social and cultural issues of our global world. Besides unpacking the relationship between self image, self worth and body image that result in eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia, we will also look at the labor issues - particularly in terms sweatshops conditions - in toy manufacturing." Got that? And you thought calculus was hard.

It turns out that RadicalMath got its start with a grant from the New York City Department of Education. The conference's principal organizer, Jonathan Osler, is a math teacher at El Puente Academy, a small "social-justice" high school in Brooklyn. Back in 2005, he and two math teachers from other schools applied for the DOE's Zone Teacher Inquiry Grants Program. According to City Journal's Sol Stern, some of the social-justice issues that math classes explore are: check-cashing locations ripping off poor people, H&R Block and Jackson Hewitt ripping off poor people, and foreclosure agencies ripping off poor people.

When informed about the "Creating Balance" conference, the school's chancellor Joel Klein told Stern, "This is a private conference, at which a range of views will be expressed. It seems that many of these views are hardly `radical.'"

Hardly radical? It used to be that kids would actually learn some math in high school before going off to college to be turned into Commies. It probably doesn't matter whether these kids can add, subtract and multiply. After all, social justice demands that society provide for them from cradle to grave. But, has anyone warned the Chinese?

Source




No provision for a genuinely gifted child

The parents of a seven-year-old science prodigy have begun a world-wide search for a university place for their child, with the warning that "a great mind could be lost" if he is not offered the chance to pursue his studies at degree level. Ainan Celeste Cawley, the son of a British father and a Singaporean mother, passed his O-level chemistry in Singapore at the age of 6 and is studying for an A level in the same subject.

The case of the child genius, whose parents claim that he could walk at six months and construct complex sentences by his first birthday, has provoked both curiosity and concern. Experts believe [with no evidence] that the lack of a normal childhood can do irreparable long-term psychological damage.

Yesterday Ainan's father, Valentine, said that it had been apparent from birth that his son, who likes drawing and watching Mr Bean videos when not studying, was very unusual. "As a toddler, he would seek out science books in the library, showing a preference for dense texts with complicated illustrations of scientific matters. These he would absorb quietly and comment on later. "By the time he was 3 or 4, he was interested in hyper-dimensional shapes and would draw their shadows in two dimensions as a form of intellectual play," he said.

Mr Cawley, a writer, said that his son showed an interest in chemistry when he was 6 and picked up a chemistry O-level paper at his aunt's house. "He was 6® and he got all the questions right. It turned out that he had taught himself chemistry on the internet," he said.

He denied that child prodigies were doomed to failure at university and said that it would be unfair to allow his son's mind to "stagnate". "Imagine you are the strongest man in the world and someone says to you, try lifting something small like a banana. It's like asking him to deny his true nature. Well, it's the same with a child prodigy," he said.

The parents are looking for a sponsor for their child's university education and say that one of them would accompany him during his studies. Syahadah Cawley, his mother, who is an artist, denied that they had put any pressure on him. "He is home-tutored most of the time, but he goes to school for PC classes and Malay lessons and has friends there," she said.

Mr Cawley added: "He is a very cool dude. You have never seen anyone more relaxed and laidback in your life." The couple said that it was too early to tell if their other sons, Fintan, 4, and Tiarnan, 1, were equally gifted.

Professor Tim White, of the School of Materials Science and Engineering at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, said he had no doubt that the child was a chemistry prodigy. "He has an excellent grasp of the subject - he is well able to write and balance equations, draw molecular formulas, understands the chemical properties, knows about radioactivity and so on. Clearly, a normal school would be incredibly frustrating for Ainan," he said. He added that his own university had decided not to offer a place to Ainan because the laboratory benches were too high, with shelves out of reach and chemical dispensers too big for the child to hold.

"There were considerable logistical barriers - chemistry is an experimental science, and unlike gifted child musicians and mathematicians, quite special requirements would be needed," he said. Professor White had mixed feelings about sending a seven-year-old to university. "He is a boy, but it would certainly be a great shame if he become frustrated and lost his enthusiasm for science by being constrained in an environment that did not stretch his abilities and imagination," he said.

Priya Naidu, a lecturer at the School of Chemical and Life Sciences at the Singapore Polytechnic, said that the child was a "cute little boy with the attention span of a seven-year-old", but the academic ability of a 17 to 18-year-old chemistry student. "He has the capability to learn very quickly and is reading up on university texts and scientific journals." But Joan Freeman, Visiting Professor in the Psychology of Education at Middlesex University, said that she thought Ainan's parents were making a terrible mistake. "To send a child to university at 7 is like you are not regarding him as a human being, but as a performing monkey," she said.

Ainan himself was not available for interview. His mother said: "He is rather shy with new people. Most of the truly gifted are introverts - studies show this."

Source




British A-level successor derided as second-rate

Diplomas are the poor relation of A levels and will not transform the school system, education experts will say in a report today that will be seen as a devastating attack on one of the Government’s pet projects. The 14-19 diplomas, which will be introduced next year, are designed to end the divide between practical and academic learning.

Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, hopes that they will become the “jewel in the crown” of the education system, making the A level redundant. But according to a report by education experts, the diplomas are “the latest in a long line of broad vocational qualifications occupying the ground between academic qualifications and apprenticeship” and would “suffer in the shadow of A levels”.

The Nuffield Review, led by Professor Richard Pring, from the University of Oxford department of education, said that the introduction of the diplomas had been rushed.

When the Government released details of the new diplomas last month there were three academic subjects (science, humanities and languages) but the original 14 were more vocational, raising questions about whether they could compete with A levels. The subjects included hair and beauty, travel and tourism and society, health and development.

Of the first diplomas, the report said: “Such middle-track qualifications have in the past been regarded as an alternative for the less academically able and the review predicts that teachers will view diplomas in the same way — with A levels and GCSEs remaining the more prestigious qualifications. “It is unfortunate that the three new diploma lines will be developed later than their vocational counterparts, as this means the diploma brand will have to forge its identity as a broad vocational qualification.” The Government had to decide now, the report said, whether GCSEs and A levels would run alongside diplomas or be included in their framework.

Ministers scrapped next year’s scheduled review of A levels, announcing instead that all qualifications for 14 to 19-year-olds would be reviewed in 2013. But the report’s authors said that the reform of A levels could not wait until then. Dr Ken Spours, from the University of London’s Institute of Education, said: “The diplomas will not transform the 14-19 system. As long as A levels remain unreformed, diplomas will end up being regarded as a poor relation.”

Diplomas are designed to appeal to employers by giving pupils a grounding in core subjects and practical skills. Several universities said that they would accept the engineering diploma as entry to their degree courses.

The report’s authors, who have been evaluating high school education since 2003, questioned the purpose and role of the diplomas. They also criticised the “lack of genuine involvement of qualifications experts, practitioners and awarding bodies” in the diploma’s development. But Professor Pring said that they did offer some benefits. “There is, no doubt, enthusiasm from many schools and colleges for the opportunity that diplomas may provide for a more flexible approach to the curriculum.”

Source





13 November, 2007

Best school in town and still they want to close it

The envious British Left again: Stoke-on-Trent is failing its pupils badly, so how on earth does it think it will raise standards by shutting its successful grammar school?

There are many reasons why St Joseph's College, a Catholic grammar in Stoke-on-Trent, is a thriving school. Its academic performance at GCSE and A-level puts it in the top 200 in the country. Its pastoral care is sensitive and exhaustive. Its extra-curricular activities are the best the state system has to offer. And its head teacher, Roisin Maguire, is, says Ofsted, an "outstanding leader".

But it's the smell of fresh bread, wafting from a DT laboratory, that gets me. It's the interrupted year 9 French class who wait, in turn, to give different reasons why each and every one of them "loves coming to school". It's the first XV rugby team sheet stuck to the noticeboard in the school reception. And it's the sixth-former, Katie Bailey, who has no fear in asking to plunder my contacts book so that she can "get into journalism".

Astonishingly, this happy, confident establishment - one of 164 grammar schools remaining in the country - is threatened with closure. Under plans drawn up by Serco, the private company enlisted by Stoke-on-Trent council to tackle the authority's educational needs, it is possible that St Joseph's could close in 2010 to be replaced by a nonselective Catholic school on the same site, with a different set of governors and staff. It would be the first grammar school to shut for nearly 20 years.

Stoke-on-Trent, a Labour council, turned to Serco because it was in freefall, having been named the third worst local authority for education in the country. Serco, in turn, has responded by drafting four proposals to restructure the authority's secondary schools. The "favoured" proposal at present is to shut all the secondary schools in the area and reopen 12 new secondary schools - a mixture of trust schools and academies - and four new special schools in the district, with a 200m pound boost in funding.

The restructuring is, says Ged Rowney, director of children and young people's services, a "great opportunity" and one that it is "essential we grasp". This is all well and good. Stoke-on-Trent does need to do something about its secondary schools. But why meddle with its best? The council says that for the process to be "fair" it needs to consider all schools in its restructuring process, not just the failing ones. Part of the problem for Stoke is that its schools are 23% under capacity - which means, for efficiency's sake, some will have to shut. But again, why St Joseph's? "It's something I find very hard to fathom," says Maguire. "Yes, we're selective, but that's not why we're good. There are selective schools in this country who are not doing so well. It's about what you do with the kids once you get them. This school isn't a good school because it's Catholic or it's selective. It's a good school because we know every child and we love them and care for them and we challenge them."

Maguire explains that unlike most grammar schools, St Joseph's does not simply take the brightest pupils. Indeed, Ofsted does not even class St Joseph's as "a grammar". It does have an entrance test, but it is one that 75% of applicants pass. After that, entrance is determined by "faith criteria", whereby the child's parents are asked to fill out a form, co-authored by their relevant "religious leader", on how righteous their 11-year-old is. About 80 students in every year are Catholic and the remaining 30-40 are from a variety of other faiths. In the sixth form, St Joseph's takes another 50-70 pupils from nearby city state schools. "There are many very bright children who do not get into St Joseph's," says Maguire. "We've built strong links in the community - my best English teacher now works two days a week in other city schools. And children from those schools come here for revision classes, too. "Stoke has so many problems. It is right at the top of the league tables for teenage pregnancies and Neets [young people not in education, employment or training], and right at the bottom for education. We are one of the things that Stoke can be really proud of. Why would you want us to go to the wall?"

St Joseph's is not quite at the wall yet. Rowney insists that although the closure of all the schools and the reopening of new secondaries is the "favoured" option, there are three others that would keep St Joseph's open. But if the favoured option does come to pass when the final decision is made in February, you can be sure there will be little noise from Westminster.

Labour's Department for Children says it will keep out of local authority decisions. But it has made it clear that it wishes to make it easier for parents to shut grammar schools. Apart from restructuring plans, such as the one Stoke-on-Trent is proposing, the only way to shut a selective school now is by parental ballot. The ballot requires 10 parents to trigger a petition and then 20% of parents in the affected area to sign it. Since this law was passed in 1998, only one ballot has come to fruition - and it failed to close the selective school.

Labour wishes to make the system simpler by shortening the ballot process and, possibly, by allowing petitioning parents access to the contact details of other parents in the area. "It is absolutely right," said Jim Knight, the schools minister, last month, "that we keep the parental ballot arrangements under review. We are firmly committed to giving local parents the right to abolish selection at existing grammar schools."

The modernising Conservative front bench might now know where it stands on this issue, but the party as a whole continues to twist its knickers on grammar schools. When David Willetts, then shadow education spokesman, said the 11-plus exam "entrenches advantage" he set off a backlash among backbenchers, who consider the maintenance of grammar schools a touchstone Conservative issue. They had, perhaps, forgotten that Margaret Thatcher and John Major failed to use their 18 years to revive the 11-plus.

David Cameron considers the row over grammar schools to be the "shallow end" of the education debate - and has said he admires Labour's academies programme. He has, however, indicated that he will shut no grammar schools. So don't expect a raging debate at next week's prime minister's questions about St Joseph's College.

"The Tories just can't get involved," says Sam Freedman, of the Policy Exchange think tank. "It doesn't work for them politically. I can't see them intervening. As for Labour, that's tricky. There may be some backbenchers who are ideologically opposed to a private company restructuring a local authority's schools and who may feel strongly enough that they wish to fight to save this one school. But then again, it's a grammar school. They're between a rock and a hard place."

The parents and pupils of St Joseph's are already making a noise. The website of the local Sentinel newspaper, which broke the story last Monday, has been bombarded with comments from parents and old pupils. Facebook and MySpace sites have been set up to organise support. A petition on the Downing Street website already has hundreds of names. Why not add your own?

Source




Leftists cannot stand the competition of other ideas

It shows that they know how little foundation in reality their views have. Centers for African American Studies or Women's Studies (etc.) are fine but not a center for the study of Capitalism and Limited Government

Organizers of the Academy on Capitalism and Limited Government Fund hoped to turn their new program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign into a Hoover Institution of the Midwest, a model for getting more free market ideals and ideological diversity into major research universities.

But when a faculty committee was able to get all the details of the agreement that created the new center, it found provisions that were "fundamentally inconsistent" with university values that are designed to ensure a diversity of views. Specifically, the panel found that portions of the agreement would have restricted funds to research designed to reflect certain points of view, and that donors were given control over matters traditionally left to academics.

The faculty panel - which was appointed by the chancellor - said it was "deeply troublesome" that the agreement to accept the center was made without faculty consultation and that many details were kept secret until recently. The panel called for Chancellor Richard Herman to renegotiate the deal for the academy and on Tuesday, a spokeswoman confirmed that he had pledged to do so. Faculty leaders praised Herman for backing away from a deal that has angered many professors - even while it was cheered by many conservatives.

The agreement to create the center was signed in July 2006 between the university and a group of wealthy alumni but for almost a year there was very little public information about the arrangement, although rumors started to spread about it. In the summer of 2007, the academy became more public, planning a debut conference and announcing its plans to support research, conferences and events promoting capitalism. Funds were placed in the university foundation, not an academic department, and faculty members started to complain that it sounded like a research center was being created with donor control and an ideological agenda. Those complaints led the Faculty Senate to urge Herman to appoint a committee to study the issue. He did - and the professors on the panel (nominated by the Senate) were from a range of disciplines and political perspectives.

The panel's report said that some of the work envisioned in the new center was "outcome neutral," such as the idea of supporting work on "the philosophical, moral and economic underpinnings of capitalism." But other kinds of research agendas, the panel found, "unmistakably signal an ideological predisposition or presupposition." For example, the governing documents the university agreed to said that the center's research would focus on "the relationship between economic growth and reduced government size" and how "free market capitalism can become more effective in providing opportunities and prosperity for individual nations." Another topic cited for research support: "why communism, socialism, government bureaucracy have failed to bring prosperity, and how capitalism brings material wealth to a broad spectrum of society."

There is nothing wrong with any Illinois professor holding those views or doing work that supports those views, the panel said, but there is something wrong with a research center supporting only such work and thereby refusing to support research that might, for example, find that Nordic countries with high tax rates have brought considerable wealth to their societies.

Further, the panel found that documents creating the academy had it housed indefinitely in the university foundation, governed by a self-perpetuating advisory board, and that the board would be making funding decisions, assuming the chancellor's approval. The faculty panel found that it was "highly problematic" to house such an organization in the foundation, the university's fund-raising arm.

Two key principles were at stake, the panel found: institutional neutrality and university autonomy. On the former, the panel said that "a university ... and especially a public university exists for the common good, not for the propagation of the views of its donors."

The faculty panel repeatedly stressed that its objections were on issues of principle, not politics and that it would have had the same reaction to a center with a different ideology - even if the would-be donor could point to greater diversity that might result from the gift. The panel report imagined a situation where the American Socialist Party, citing the lack of socialists on campus, proposed a center that would support research "examining how public ownership of the means of production and higher income equality achieved by a redistributional tax system will bring economic and moral well being to a broad spectrum of society." Such a donation would be rejected, the panel said, just as the one that was accepted should have been rejected as a "breach of the principle of neutrality."

On the issue of autonomy, the report noted that donors are entitled and welcome to work with fund raisers and academics on shaping gifts that reflect donor interests. But for donors to play a role in handing out grants or approving recipients for research is inappropriate, the panel said. Decisions about who receives funds for academic work - whether research or teaching - "lie at the core of the university's functions" and need to be made by professors, the panel said.

While the panel was emphatic that the relationship with the capitalism center needed to be renegotiated, it said that the faculty would be open to an arrangement with these donors that met university standards, and the report stressed that it was not trying to discourage the involvement of the donors.

Nicholas C. Burbules, chair of the Senate at Illinois and professor of educational policy studies, said he thought the faculty panel issued "a very strong report" with an emphasis "on the most important things - they stuck with issues of academic principle and policy." Some Illinois professors have criticized the politics of the donors, and Burbules said it was important that no attention was paid to that issue in the report.

He said that faculty thinking on the capitalism academy has evolved. At first, as people heard just little bits of information, there was a "what the heck is going on here" feeling. Then as more information came out, many professors felt "anxiety" and there was considerable criticism of the chancellor for making the agreement. But Burbules said that he thought that the chancellor acted correctly in agreeing to renegotiate the deal, and that professors appreciated his quick response to the report. "We're open to working in a collaborative way with the donors," Burbules said, as long as any arrangement shows "unambiguous" respect for academic principles.

James E. Vermette, a businessman and investor who was one of the founders of the center, said that he had "no problem" with renegotiating the agreement with the university, and that he thought that all that would be needed would be "some wording or clarification." He said he has not read the report.

Vermette said that he and other founders wanted research to be "objective and neutral," and that he didn't have any problem if some of the research supported didn't adhere to his views on capitalism. But he also said it was "absolutely wrong" to say that the original agreement sought to favor some views over others and that the founders' "basic principles" can't change. "We understand what the university is all about," he said. "I'm confident that rational people will be able to work their way through this - as long as our basic principles don't change."

Anne D. Neal, a member of the advisory board for the capitalism program and president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, was more critical of the faculty report. She said that "it goes without saying that the principle of neutrality is central to academic research. Donors cannot condition their gifts on preordained conclusions, and any language that suggests otherwise should be modified."

But she said that she did not believe all departments and programs at Illinois were held to the same standard, saying that she found "ideological terms" in the African American Studies and Research Program at Illinois, and noting that the women's studies program presumes that people should "integrate feminist theory into their professional work and everyday lives."

Neal added: "While the committee report raises serious and legitimate questions, I am left with the nagging feeling that the committee's concern about `ideological predispositions' goes only one way - and that its problems with the Academy on Capitalism, underscored by its repeated, snide footnotes on the benefits of Sweden's state-run economy - expose its own ideological predispositions rather than a genuine, consistent concern about a free marketplace of ideas."

Source




Death by Political Correctness: Who killed Antioch College?

Leftism destroys anything it gets to control -- even a once distinguished college

It is 9:30 on a sunny Monday morning in October, a time, day, and month when most college campuses bustle with activity: students hurrying to class or relaxing between classes on library steps or tree-covered lawns. Here, on the 200-acre campus of Antioch College, a 155-year-old liberal-arts institution best known nowadays for a campus culture that long ago drifted from the progressively liberal to the alarmingly radical (people still talk about the anti-date-rape policy that required a separate verbal consent for each step of an amorous encounter, famously parodied on Saturday Night Live in 1993), the phrase "bustling with activity" is not what comes to mind. What comes to mind is the neutron bomb.

There are plenty of trees on Antioch's historic campus in Yellow Springs, a town of 4,600 about 20 miles east of Dayton in rural southwestern Ohio--soaring oaks, walnuts, maples, and firs, many likely more than a century old. And there are plenty of buildings--dozens of residence halls and classroom facilities, along with a library that has seen better days and a turreted Victorian-era main building designed by James Renwick Jr., architect of the Smithsonian Institution's landmark castle in Washington, D.C., and St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. As for Antioch students, however, there are none to be seen this morning, except for an occasional shadowy figure moving silently among distant trees like one of Ohio's long-vanished Miami Indians on a solitary hunt. A visitor to the campus might infer that ultra-radicalism doesn't sell, at least when the price is the nearly $40,000 per year it costs to attend Antioch College.

On June 9, 2007, the trustees of Antioch University, an adult-education offshoot of Antioch College that now dominates the college administratively, financially, and in terms of overall student population, announced that Antioch College would suspend operations on July 1, 2008, with a possibility of reopening in much-altered form in 2012, and that its entire faculty, including tenured professors, would be laid off.

The reasons for the shutdown given by the trustees and by Tulisse Murdock, Antioch University's chancellor since 2005, were many: years and years of incurable deficits, this year totaling $2.6 million on an annual college budget of $18 million; an extraordinarily low endowment of just $36 million (neighboring Ohio liberal arts colleges Oberlin and Kenyon boast endowments of $700 million and $167 million respectively); and a chronically low student enrollment that topped 600 only once during the preceding 25 years (compare that with Oberlin's enrollment of nearly 2,900) and has declined precipitously since 2003.

During the 2006-07 academic year, for example, only 330 full-time students were enrolled in Antioch's bachelor-of-arts and bachelor-of-science programs--once so highly regarded that Antioch could boast that it had more graduates who went on to obtain Ph.D.'s than any other college in the country. This fall, after news of the pending shutdown decimated the incoming freshman class, there are just 220 Antioch College undergraduates left. That represents a decline of almost 90 percent from the 2,000 or so young people who attended Antioch during its peak enrollment years of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Antioch's students, its faculty--whose numbers have also drastically shrunk (just 37 today, down from 140 during the early 1970s)--and many residents of Yellow Springs, a pleasant college town of handsome old houses and businesses that advertise their liberal-leaning, Antioch-friendly "green" and "fair trade" consciousness, are fighting to save the college, citing its long and illustrious history. Antioch's first president, in 1853, was the famous education reformer Horace Mann, and until things went bad, Antioch regularly turned out graduates who went on to become stellar public figures, writers, and scholars: Coretta Scott King, wife of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, anthropologist Clifford Geertz, Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, the District of Columbia's Democratic congressional delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, and, most recently in the news, Mario R. Capecchi, co-winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology for his work on embryonic stem cells in mice. (This was Antioch College's second Nobel; Jose Ramos-Horta, president of East Timor, who had received a master's degree in 1984 in a peace-studies program now incorporated into Antioch University, won the Peace Prize in 1996.)

A group of Antioch College's chronically lethargic alumni says it has rushed to raise $18 million in donations and pledges in a last-ditch plan to save the college, and at an emergency meeting of the university's trustees in Yellow Springs on October 25 presented a $100 million business plan (based on an aggressive five-year fundraising drive) designed to cure their alma mater's deficit, keep its doors open, and revive its attractiveness to high-school seniors. The trustees had been expected to issue a decision on October 27 whether to accept or reject the alumni plan, but they declined to do so, leaving Antioch College in an even more precarious state, given that autumn is the time when colleges and universities do their most aggressive recruiting and prospective high-school graduates start filling out their college application forms. Discussions among trustees and alumni were continuing on November 2, as this article went to press....

An archaeologist called upon to estimate just when the plague swept through--that is, when the college reached its peak of flourishing and then abruptly stopped--might come up with, say, the year 1965, judging from the vintage mid-century look of the brick-and-plate-glass "newer" buildings. Indeed, the college did then enjoy a sustained and impressive growth spurt and a frenzy of construction. The school, which had never enrolled more than 1,000 students in its history, nearly doubled in size from 1954 to 1964, and it continued to grow after that, reaching its all-time peak undergraduate population of 2,470 in 1972.

Even during the 1950s, Antioch had a reputation as a "beatnik college." It had phased out varsity sports starting in the 1920s (it had once fielded football and baseball teams) and historically eschewed fraternities and sororities. It had no dress code, unlike most colleges in those days, and students tended to be arty overachievers with avant-garde political views. Antioch's pioneering work-study program, called "co-operative education" (shortened to "co-op" and part of the curriculum to this day), and the college's practice of giving students a voice in its governance drew earnest, highly individualistic young people who liked the idea of obtaining real-world job experience, often in science labs or on archaeological digs but also in private businesses, when still in school, while also being able to take time off to enlist in political causes. During the heyday of the civil rights movement, for example, Antioch was famous for its students who traveled to southern states to help register black voters. A graduate student, Alan E. Guskin, later to become president of Antioch College and chancellor of Antioch University, formed a student organization in 1960 that inspired John F. Kennedy to set up the Peace Corps. The favorite campus entertainment on Friday nights was that echt-1950s bohemian pastime: folk-dancing.

Nonetheless, Antioch also had a reputation for academic rigor and was nearly as competitive in admissions as Harvard. It accepted only one out of four applicants (the average combined SAT scores of those who got in was 1350 in 1960), and students had to pass a stiff comprehensive examination at the end of their first year. Today that test is long gone; Antioch does not require its applicants even to submit their SAT scores, which are said to hover around 1075, and it admits a majority of those who apply. It was during the glory years of the 1950s and early 1960s that Antioch produced its most famous and distinguished graduates.

Although political views at Antioch might have tilted leftward even back then, the students of the 1950s and early-to-mid 1960s prided themselves on their willingness to hear out their more conservative classmates in lively all-night dorm discussions on politics and philosophy, inspired by professors who encouraged them to test all their assumptions against the evidence. "We were completely respectful of every point of view," recalled Rick Daily, a Denver lawyer who graduated from Antioch in 1968 and is treasurer of the alumni committee that is struggling to save the college from closure. "We even had a Goldwater Republican in our graduating class," Daily said in a telephone interview.

That was Antioch then. Antioch now might be fairly represented by a September 21 article in the student newspaper, the Record, consisting of a gloating account of the invasion by 40 gay and lesbian Antioch students (a full fifth of the current student body) of an evangelical Christian book-signing event at a Barnes & Noble store located in a mall in nearby Beavercreek, Ohio. Record reporter Marysia Walcerz described the hours-long "Gay Takeover," whose participants wore rainbow-tinted bandannas, ostentatiously held hands and kissed, and did their best to shock both authors and customers in this socially conservative sector of Ohio, as a "success .??.??. for direct action executed in style."

A July 20 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Ralph Keyes, author of the bestselling Is There Life After High School? and a 1967 graduate of Antioch who moved with his family back to Yellow Springs some 20 years ago, described similar adventures by Antioch students in the intimidation of people who do not share their views. Keyes took pains to reassure the Chronicle's readers that he himself had been proudly "left-wing" as an Antioch student, but he also detailed a once-tolerant campus culture that had deteriorated since his student days into "insults, name-calling, and profanity." As Keyes described it (and others connected to the campus corroborate his observations), Antioch students regularly engaged, both inside and outside their classrooms, in the practice of "calling out" (public humiliation followed by social ostracism) their classmates for even the most trivial violations of an unwritten campus code of ideological propriety.

One of the called-out was a Polish exchange student who had made the mistake of using the now-taboo word "Eskimos" instead of "Inuit" in reference to Alaskan aboriginals. Another called-out student had worn Nike sneakers, verboten among the radically sensitive because they are supposedly products of Indonesian sweatshop labor (the Nike-wearer was so demoralized by his treatment that he transferred). Keyes lamented what he called the "crack-house decor" of Antioch's student union, whose second floor features a 30-foot wall of student-painted graffiti with themes and language running the gamut from revolutionary to obscene. The Antioch school "uniform" for many students seems to consist of as many tattoos and piercings as the human dermis can hold (a tattoo parlor in downtown Yellow Springs looks designed to accommodate this student fashion statement)....

The adults who could have and should have intervened to put a lid on the excesses of a culture created by 18- to 22-year-olds with little experience of the outside world in fact let that culture run untrammeled and amok, all in the name of Antioch's vaunted ideal of "community." The very existence of Antioch University, the chain of adult-education satellite campuses that morphed into Antioch College's parent institution during the 1990s and now threatens, Cronus-like, to devour its child, contains a bitter irony: The satellite campuses came into being 40 years ago because Antioch wanted to get in on a bit of late-1960s radical chic known as "bringing education to the streets."

Hard as it may be to believe, Antioch began its existence as a Christian college. Its founders belonged to a Second Great Awakening movement that called itself the "Christian Connexion" and eschewed the creeds of mainline churches in favor of what it viewed as a strictly Bible-based faith. Antioch College got its name from the city in ancient Syria that was an early center of New Testament Christianity. Antioch was one of the first coeducational colleges in the United States, among both students and faculty, and from the beginning it admitted black students. The standard curriculum, required of all students, would come as a shock to most of today's undergraduates: Latin, Greek, foreign languages, and a stiff array of science courses. Antioch was actively involved in the abolitionist movement, and when the Civil War broke out, the college shut down temporarily so that students and professors could fight on the Union side....

Armed with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, Antioch began in 1965 to recruit impoverished "high-risk students" from "high-risk schools"--which usually translated into black graduates of inner-city high schools who, unlike the middle-class, high-achieving blacks who had sat side by side with whites (albeit in very small numbers) in Antioch classrooms for nearly a century, were not prepared for college work. They were also not prepared for life in sleepy, artsy-craftsy Yellow Springs, or for coexistence with bookish, highly competitive classmates preparing for careers as physicists, lawyers, and doctors. Many of the Rockefeller students were older than the traditional college age, and some had children (Antioch obligingly provided them with free daycare). "There was a lot of tension," said Antioch's archivist, Scott Sanders, in a telephone interview, "and these were inner-city kids, so there was a certain amount of lawlessness. They brought skills to Antioch that they'd learned on the streets: fighting, drawing guns. There were specific instances of violence that were very alien to the other students."

While all this was going on, as alumnus Michael Goldfarb, a writer and former public radio correspondent who matriculated at Antioch in 1968, wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed piece, "Antioch created coeducational residence halls, with no adult supervision. Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll became the rule, as you might imagine, and there was enormous peer pressure to be involved in all of them." Goldfarb described having a gun drawn on him in a drunken rage by "a couple of ex-cons whom one of my classmates, in the interest of breaking down class barriers, had invited to live with her." ...

The financial crisis of 1979 triggered a further drop in enrollment at Antioch College (as well as further departures of professors), but the Birenbaum-instigated budget cuts seemed to stabilize the Yellow Springs campus. Its student population remained at a more or less steady, if not especially healthy, 500 or so for more than two decades. The widely-publicized date-rape policy that catapulted Antioch onto Saturday Night Live and into nationwide ridicule in 1993 was a kind of object lesson in what can happen when demographic implosion (reducing the student body to its most radical core) unites with a laissez-faire administration philosophy that consists of giving even the most extreme factions everything they want.

The extremists in this case consisted of a group of student feminists who called themselves "Womyn of Antioch" (a title that might have sent up a red flag to administrators elsewhere) and claimed to be reacting to two incidents of date rape on the Yellow Springs campus in 1991, which they said the administration had ignored. No Antioch students were ever charged with those offenses either formally or informally, much less found by a college tribunal to have committed them, much less prosecuted for any crime by outside authorities. Antioch's archivist Sanders said that the alleged rapes might have been more a matter of "perception" than reality. Nonetheless, when the Womyn "stormed" (the word comes from Antioch's website) an Antioch community meeting and insisted on pushing through the policy they had drafted regardless of parliamentary niceties, the administrators and faculty who were supposed to be on at least an equal footing with the students at those meetings, if not their superiors on the basis of maturity and experience, said, oh, okay...

The change in academic emphasis, coupled with the date-rape policy, whose main effect was to alter Antioch College's male-female student ratio from 50-50 to 40-60, coupled with a growing public perception of the college as a haven for crazies, made it difficult for the college to increase its enrollment. Figuring that the financially strapped school needed a critical mass of 800 students in order to generate the minimum revenue necessary to maintain academic quality, the administration adopted the mantra "800 by 2000." When that goal was not met (enrollment in 2000 was 515), the mantra changed to "800 by 2002" (enrollment in 2002 was 577)....

Much more here





12 November, 2007

Free speech under attack at the CUNY Soviet

Post below lifted from Democracy Project. See the original for links

The faculty union of the City University of New York known as the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) has a penchant for aiding and abetting terrorists and supporting political causes with the member's dues. Now determined to forever silence all criticism, one of the prominent union big wigs has just filed a $2 million lawsuit to shut down the one remaining gadfly, Dr. Sharad Karkhanis Professor Emeritus from Kingsborough Community College who has been tirelessly exposing the malfeasance of the PSC and the incompetence of its leaders in his influential internet newsletter The Patriot Returns.

The subject of much of TPR's biting satire is aimed at the union's excessive promotion of a one-sided political agenda instead of winning better contracts for the members. TPR has carefully documented the PSC leadership's pursuit of revolution instead of their jobs, elaborating on their campaigns to devote more time and resources to future global crusades. This includes such activities as mobilizing the membership to protest the Republican Party at the Republican National Convention in New York.

Additionally, the PSC has passed a resolution sympathizing with Hugo Chavez, sponsored a conference called Educators to Stop the War, calling for teachers to develop an anti-war curriculum. The PSC leadership has organized and funded New York City Labor Against the War and Labor for Palestine, donated $5000 to support the legal defense of Lori Berenson, in prison for helping Peruvian Marxist terrorists, and donated thousands to the defense of Sami Al-Arian convicted of conspiracy to aid terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. According to TPR, the PSC even hosts an "International Committee" replete with a foreign policy spokesperson, who has issued public statements against economic and military aid to Israel and a statement condemning the war in Afghanistan, "joining in solidarity with the victims of U.S. military power," namely the Taliban. The New York Sun, reported that while the leaders of the PSC have been running amok in politics, their union failed to deliver a new contract and in the past five years the member's health and welfare fund reserves fell by 97% "with only a trickle of money remaining for faculty members' prescription drug, dental, and medical insurance plans."

One of the union leaders, Professor Susan O'Malley, a member of the PSC executive committee, former chair of the University Faculty Senate and professor of English has been a regular target of Dr. Karkhanis's irreverent discourse. Past issues of TPR have exposed O'Malley's pleas to find a teaching position for convicted terrorist conspirator, Mohammad Yousry. TPR documented her protests against the firing of imprisoned Weather Underground terrorist Susan Rosenberg and her attempts to find Rosenberg a job at CUNY. Also past issues attacked O'Malley's support for anti-religious Professor Timothy Shortell's bid for chairmanship of the Sociology Department of Brooklyn College. He is noted for his claims that all religious people are "moral retards" and "an ugly, violent lot," and statements, "Christians claim that theirs is faith based on love, but they'll just as soon kill you."

The legal claim focuses on several allegedly defamatory statements made in the March 12, 2007 issue of The Patriot Returns entitled: MOHAMMED ON HER MIND! Karkhanis wrote that O'Malley "is obsessed with finding jobs for terrorists and, in particular, for Mohammed Yousry" and "She does not worry about the "ordinary" adjunct ~ but she is worried about convicted terrorists!" and that "...she is recruiting naive, innocent members of the KCC faculty into her Queda-Camp, to infiltrate college and departmental Personnel and Budget Committees in her mission - to recruit terrorists in CUNY." O'Malley's lawyer claims that these and others are "false, damaging, and defamatory statements regarding Professor O'Malley" and that "(t)hey are intended to inflict harm through their falsehood. The statements were made to injure Professor O'Malley's reputation and to lower the opinion of her in the CUNY community."

In a certified letter, O'Malley's lawyer instructed Karkhanis "to retract the above defamatory statements immediately and to refrain from making any other defamatory statements." However, Karkhanis is standing by every statement he has made saying that he would rather serve time in jail than retract his statements. He considers the lawsuit "an attempt to infringe on his freedom of speech" and views O'Malley as a public figure that he has a right to satirize and criticize.

TPR is an influential dissenting voice inside the CUNY community and functions as a check against the abuses of power of an omnipotent union that seeks to censor all criticism of the leadership. O'Malley who is on the "Editorial Collective" of the magazine Radical Teacher has earned the title from TPR, "The Queen of Released Time" for seeking union positions and political activities in order to be released from teaching assignments. The timing of this lawsuit is apparently calculated to benefit O'Malley and the union leaders by shutting down The Patriot Returns in anticipation of the coming campus chapter PSC elections and the 2008 university-wide union elections. A campus free of dissention from the pages of TPR would pave the way to PSC incumbent election victories.

Although this is a case of silencing political opposition, putting politics aside, all in all this is a not a partisan issue of left vs. right. It is not a money issue either, for what could a prominent union leader gain by suing a retired scholar with two cents to his name. As a free speech issue that rises above the plight of one poor professor in CUNY, who has paid his union dues for forty years and now frets over how to obtain the necessary legal funds to go to battle for his rights, it is an issue that threatens all concerned citizens and purveyors of opinions who write, blog and dissent in the free market of ideas in America. It is an issue that should concern both conservatives and liberals alike. The academic elites are clamping down on overly opinionated Americans, attempting to humble and scare voices of all political stripes into silence.

But the bottom line is that Karkhanis has simply offended Susan O'Malley. In today's climate of reverse McCarthyism, anyone who is insensitive to a person's feelings is labeled a fascist, racist, homophobe or Islamophobe. The elites have put the albatross of political correctness around our necks censoring offensive views, remarks, jokes and in this case Karkhanis's political satire in TPR. O'Malley, a victim of nothing more than allegedly repugnant opinions, chose to terminate free speech with a lawsuit, rather than responding in kind and continuing the debate. But this is nothing new. For over a decade O'Malley and the union leadership have been ordering TPR to stop publication, and have successfully shut down all other forums for holding the union leaders accountable for their actions. But Karkhanis refuses to be silenced.

The United Federation Of Teachers (UFT), New York City's largest teacher's union was founded in the 1960's in a less litigious climate than today. In those days, the union, frequently the target of dissention and vicious attacks against its leaders, contracts, and policy, settled their disputes on the delegate assembly floor, often with rancorous debate, name-calling and accusations, without resorting to censorship or lawsuits. The critics of Albert Shanker, president of the UFT, branded him with far worse epithets than being lambasted as a recruiter for terrorists. Shanker was vilified as a racist, militant extremist and depicted as becoming so power hungry that he was feared to be intent on destroying the planet if he got hold of a nuclear device which was the scenario presented in the Woody Allen movie Sleeper (1973). However, Shanker never took Woody Allen to court for public defamation and injuring his reputation with his irreverent humor.

Name-calling may offend, but it never harms one's life or limb, or sets fire to one's home or property. Criticism may hurt someone's feelings, but cannot injure one's reputation. O'Malley has caused more damage to her reputation by suing a distinguished retired professor for criticism, than the criticism itself has wrought.

Just as Albert Shanker, or any prominent figure in the spotlight, O'Malley is a union leader who is in the public arena. She is fair game for criticism of her actions and has to take the hits. In a democracy one is generally held directly accountable to those she serves. She has made some unwise and foolish decisions, like attempting to find teaching jobs for convicted terrorists. If she can't take the heat and be accountable to dues paying members for her actions, she should go home and take up knitting, an enjoyable craft that will garner no antagonism or public criticism. No longer would she be the target of Dr. Karkhanis mocking satire on the pages of The Patriot Returns. If Professor Susan O'Malley would rather remain in the public arena, she should stand up and take it, lick her wounds and stop bellyaching. Instead of behaving like a sniveling child, she should offer a rebuttal to TPR's accusations. However, when all's said and done, she should be very, very ashamed of herself and retract this frivolous lawsuit at once, which even she herself has deemed, "very, very silly."




Telling students what to think comes naturally to some

In a dilution of academic responsibility, US professors are defending indoctrination, argues David Horowitz

In its latest response to complaints about the politicisation of higher education in the US, the American Association of University Professors has embraced a novel view: "It is not indoctrination for professors to expect students to comprehend ideas and apply knowledge that is accepted as true within a relevant discipline."

Under this precept, put forth in the association's recent report, Freedom in the Classroom, teachers are no longer held to standards of scholarly or scientific or intellectually responsible discourse, but to whatever is "accepted as true within a relevant discipline". With this formulation, the AAUP jettisons the traditional understanding of what constitutes a liberal education and ratifies a transformation of the university that is already well advanced.

Since the 1960s, many newly minted academic disciplines have appeared that are the result not of scholarship or scientific developments but of political pressures brought to bear by ideological sects. The discipline of women's studies, the most important of these new fields, freely acknowledges its origins in a political movement and defines its educational mission in political terms.

The preamble to the constitution of the National Women's Studies Association proclaims: "Women's studies ... is equipping women not only to enter society as whole, as productive human beings, but to transform the world to one that will be free of all oppression." This is the statement of a political cause not a program of scholarly inquiry.

The AAUP has issued its defence of indoctrination fully cognisant of the fact that these new academic disciplines view their mission as using the classroom to instil an ideology in their students. These programs include, in addition to women's studies, African-American studies, peace studies, cultural studies, Chicano studies, gay-lesbian studies, post-colonial studies, whiteness studies, communications studies, community studies and recently politicised disciplines such as cultural anthropology and sociology. At the University of California Santa Cruz, the women's studies department has renamed itself the department of feminist studies to signify that it is a political training facility. It has done so without a word of complaint or caution from university administrators or the association.

Under the association's new doctrine, these sectarian creeds are shielded from scrutiny by the scientific method. In the new dispensation, political control of a discipline is an adequate basis for closing off critical debate. The idea that political power can establish truth is a conception so contrary to the intellectual foundations of the modern research university that the AAUP committee could not state it so baldly. Hence the disingenuous compromise of "truth within a relevant discipline".

At the time its report was finalised, a new edition of the AAUP's official journal, Academe, featured two articles defending the feminist indoctrination of university students. The first was "Impassioned teaching" by AAUP chapter president Pamela Caughie, head of the women's studies department at Loyola University. Caughie wrote: "I feel I am doing my job well when students become practitioners of feminist analysis and committed to feminist politics." This is the attitude of a missionary seeking to ground her students in feminist dogma, not a professor seeking to educate them about women. In the second article, Julie Kilmer of Olivet College describes the need to publicly expose and intimidate students who resist such indoctrination and suggests how to do this. The publication of two such articles can hardly be regarded as coincidental. It reveals the slope on which the AAUP now finds itself.

Some defenders of the AAUP's position say indoctrination is not really indoctrination if the student can object to a professor's classroom advocacy without fear of reprisal. But how would students know that there was no penalty for refusing to embrace a professor's political assumptions? How would they deal with Kilmer's threats to expose them and break down their resistance, or with the pressure implicit in Caughie's "impassioned teaching"?

Source




Degraded British High School qualifications

The reputation of A levels has been dealt a blow after the head of an exam board expressed doubts about their value. Simon Lebus, group chief executive of the Cambridge Assessment board, part of Cambridge University, said that examiners, regulators and politicians had all been wrong in failing to address declining public confidence in "A-level currency". Mr Lebus said that it was "hard not to be troubled" by research showing a decline in standards in A-level maths and science. "There is no doubt that confidence in the value of the A-level currency has suffered over recent years," he said.

In a lecture to the exams regulator, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), he said: "We all, the QCA, the awarding bodies, politicians and the Department for Children, Schools and Families, in its various guises, have been remiss in not being readier to debate the impact of changes in A level, perhaps not least because operating within a culture where there has been an expectation of consistently improving levels of attainment, we may not have felt a need to do so." The A-level pass rate has risen for 25 successive years, reaching 96.9 per cent this year, with nearly one in ten candidates achieving three A grades.

The Government and examination boards have emphasised that improvements to A-level standards are the result of better teaching and learning, even though opinion polls have shown that nearly half the public believe that A levels have become easier. Defenders of A levels also point out that the examination has in effect changed from a university entrance examination to a school-leaving certificate for 18-year-olds.

But Mr Lebus said that the education establishment should no longer simply "take refuge" in the technical arguments. He cited research from Dr Robert Coe, of Durham University, showing that A-level results for pupils of the same ability improved by two grades between 1988 and 2006. He also referred to Sir Peter Williams, appointed in July to review the teaching of maths in primary schools, who has said that the A-level "gold standard" had been declining for a "long period of time".

Mr Lebus was speaking as the Government embarks on a consultation over plans to hand full independence to the part of the QCA responsible for regulating exams and monitoring standards. In September Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, suggested that this would reassure parents, pupils, universities and employers that exam standards were being maintained. To counter complaints about A-level grade inflation the Government is to introduce an A* grade for the 2010 exams, which will be awarded to students who achieve 90 per cent and above.

Mr Lebus said that it would be possible to monitor standards through a national script archive that would store a representative sample of answers given by A-level students every year.

Source





11 November, 2007

Environmentalist propaganda at elementary school

Third-grade teacher Debbie Robles made her acting debut before a packed auditorium of youngsters at Rancho Elementary School in Novato. She bombed. Playing the villain in a school assembly Wednesday aimed at educating the students about global warming, Robles - dressed in a witch's black attire and prancing around the auditorium as "Queen Carbon" - drew the biggest response from more than 500 students who attended two "Curb Your Carbon" assemblies. "My own daughter Hannah asked me, 'Do you have to be my mother today?'" Robles said.

Teachers, parents and volunteers helped organize the assemblies and participated in the skits to help raise awareness about global warming and what people can do about it - exchanging traditional light bulbs for compact fluorescent bulbs, for example. School officials distributed more than 500 CFLs last week. On Friday, Rancho students will be given bilingual "Cancel-a-Car" coupon books filled with ways they can fight global warming. Once the coupons are returned to school, teachers will track what conservation efforts are made and the date. Teachers will help monitor the progress. As the carbon reduction increases, images of cars will be crossed out on a giant poster kept at school.

Another Novato school, Lu Sutton, joined the program last month, bringing to eight the number of Marin schools that have introduced the program that began earlier this year at Bacich Elementary and Kent Middle schools in Kentfield. The program is being financed by a $200,00 donation from the Earth Day Every Day Fund of the Marin Community Foundation. Three nonprofits, the Marin Conservation Corps, Strategic Energy Innovations and Cool the Earth are implementing the program and hope to introduce it to 25 Marin schools by the end of the year.

Robles wasn't the only teacher making her acting debut. Principal Candee Adams played "Mother Earth," fifth-grade teacher Sue Spry played "The Sun" and Debbie Dees was "Mother Nature." Fourth-grade teacher Cathy Stanek played "Polar Bear." The title of the skit was "Save Some for Me." "Too much carbon makes me feel like I'm wearing a blanket," Adams said as Robles' character swirled around the stage.

"I'm Queen Carbon, not a role model," Robles said in her introduction. "Do you want to save the Earth? It's up to you to choose. "Yes, I'm Queen Carbon, and I've got the Carbon Dioxide Blues."

Eco-friendly ideas in the coupon book include buying reusable water bottles instead of bottled water, walking or cycling to school, reducing junk mail, washing clothes with cold water and reducing time showering. Toward the end of the skit, "Mother Earth" asked the students, "Boys and girls are you willing to help me?" A resounding "yes" was the response.

Source




Columbia's high intellectual standards again

`All modern discoveries are by Muslim scientists'

Muslim scientists have made all discoveries of the current age, said University of Columbia's Arabic and Islamic Studies prof George Saliba at a seminar at the Government College University (GCU) on Monday. The seminar, titled The Problems of Historiography of Islamic Science, was held at Fazl-e-Hussain Hall. Saliba gave a critique of the standard classical accounts of the rise of Islamic science. He detailed problems in the accounts and explained alternative historiography that described the rise of an Islamic scientific tradition as a result of social and political conditions within the nascent Islamic empire.

He said Muslim philosophy was the impetus behind Islamic science that had contributed to various disciplines including botany, zoology, algebra, trigonometry, physics, chemistry, astronomy, physics, chemistry, physiology and mathematics in the pre-industrial era. He said the use of decimal fractions was not a Western invention and that it was discovered by a Muslim scientist. He said the binary system, on which the computer was based, was also invented by a Muslim scientist. He said Arab/Islamic science was not an intermediary between Greek science and European science, but was rather the Renaissance that integrated the Islamic science with European science. Saliba also visited the English Language and Literature Department where he engaged faculty members in a conversation on the Islamic and Renaissance paradigms. staff report

Source




Not all charter schools work well

Schools that take problem kids have an uphill battle

Ohio became a test tube for the nation's charter school movement during a decade of Republican rule here, when a wide-open authorization system and plenty of government seed money led to the schools' explosive proliferation. But their record has been spotty. This year, the state's school report card gave more than half of Ohio's 328 charter schools a D or an F.

Now its Democratic governor and attorney general, elected when Democrats won five of Ohio's six top posts last November, are cracking down on the schools, which receive public money but are run by independent operators. And across the country, charter school advocates are watching nervously, fearful the backlash could spread. Attorney General Marc Dann is suing to close three failing charter schools and says he is investigating dozens of others. It is the first effort by any attorney general to close low-performing charter schools.

Gov. Ted Strickland said he wanted to carry out his own crackdown. "Perhaps somewhere, charter schools have been implemented in a defensible manner, where they have provided quality," he said. "But the way they've been implemented in Ohio has been shameful. I think charter schools have been harmful, very harmful, to Ohio students."

Some 4,000 charter schools now operate across the nation, most advertising themselves as a smaller, safer alternative to the neighborhood school. Nationwide, the movement has gained traction among Democrats, partly because of the successes of a few quality nonprofit operators. But some charters are mediocre, and Ohio has a far higher failure rate than most states. Fifty-seven percent of its charter schools, most of which are in cities, are in academic watch or emergency, compared with 43 percent of traditional public schools in Ohio's big cities.

Behind the Ohio charter failures are systemic weaknesses that include loopholes in oversight, a law allowing 70 government and private agencies to authorize new charters, and financial incentives that encourage sponsors to let schools stay open. Even the Republican-controlled legislature recognized a problem in December, passing a law that requires failing charter schools to improve or face closing in mid-2009. Speaker Jon Husted of the Ohio House, the Republican who wrote the law, said Mr. Dann's lawsuits, based on an untested legal strategy, were precipitous and had usurped the legislature's powers. "This is like suing the American Cancer Society just because they haven't yet cured cancer," Mr. Husted said.

The partisan struggle here comes just as the charter school movement has been making important inroads among Democrats. In the 1990's, President Bill Clinton and other centrist Democrats endorsed charters as a useful new option that could improve public schools through competition. But teachers' unions, a backbone of the party, have fought them, partly because most operate nonunion. This year, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama and former Gov. Bill Richardson, candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination, have all voiced support for quality charters. So have a few teachers' union officials.

Charter school advocates worry that Mr. Dann's crackdown may prove popular with Democratic and independent voters nationwide. Ohio's labor leaders enthusiastically applaud it. "If chronically lousy charters aren't closed, the charter movement will continue under assault from its opponents," said Todd Ziebarth, a policy analyst at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. After Ohio's first 15 charters were authorized in the fall of 1998, they proved popular, especially in Cleveland, Dayton and other cities where parents were dissatisfied with often chaotic public schools. Others were added at a breakneck pace. Experts said too many opened too fast.

Federal money helped fuel the growth, with up to $450,000 available to every new school in its first three years. Ohio sweetened that incentive with $50,000 more. Some Ohio charters were formed, not to innovate in the classroom, but to take advantage of the start-up money, experts said, which is in addition to state financing allocated by enrollment numbers.

Ohio's charter authorization system also encouraged rapid growth. Most states limit the number of authorizing agencies to a handful; New York, for instance, has three. Ohio allows 70 groups, including universities, nonprofits and many unconventional agencies to be authorizers. One provincial sponsor, the Lucas County Educational Service Center, has authorized scores of schools around the state, more than any similar agency in the nation.

Many people with good intentions but few educational credentials rushed to open charter schools. William Peterson, a former University of Dayton football star with no experience in school administration, opened four, all now in academic emergency. One, the Colin Powell Leadership Academy in Dayton, is the target of a lawsuit by Mr. Dann.

Source





10 November, 2007

Racist UC to turn its back on academic merit?

Anti-Asian and pro-black policy under consideration

Any plan to change the undergraduate admissions system at the University of California is likely to bring charges that it's yet another politically correct attempt to reinstitute race preferences. That applies especially to reforms that de-emphasize grades and test scores. A set of major revisions now proposed by BOARS, UC's Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools, will be no exception. It would make more high school graduates eligible for consideration for UC but end the virtual guarantee of eligibility that students with high grades and test scores - those in the hypothetical top 12.5 percent of California high school graduates, many of them Asians - now enjoy. Only those in the top 4 percent in their respective schools would still be guaranteed a place in the system.

Yet complex as they are, the proposals and BOARS' analysis of the flaws of the existing system are buffered with enough reasoning to be worth the debate, if not the backlash that could follow if they're adopted.

The UC admissions system is now a two-step process: (1) achieving eligibility for some UC campuses, though not necessarily Berkeley, UCLA or San Diego, on the basis of a combination of SAT or ACT test scores and grades in the UC-required "a-to-g" high school courses, and (2) "comprehensive review" of an eligible applicant's entire record by the campuses to which he or she applies, from grades and test scores to extracurricular achievements, community service and handicaps overcome.

The board, said BOARS chairman Mark Rashid, an engineering professor at UC Davis, would like to loosen the "prefilter" now imposed by the eligibility requirement and put more weight on the comprehensive review of each applicant at the campuses to which the student applies. There would still be minimum requirements - completion of the 15 "a-to-g" courses - English, math, science, social studies, etc. - that UC demands, a GPA of 2.8 or higher in those courses and the SAT Reasoning Test, formerly the SAT I. But the SAT II subject-matter tests would no longer be required. Since the SAT I was revised to include writing and more substantive math items, UC believes, scores on the SAT II tests contribute little additional information in predicting whether an applicant will be successful at the university.

At the same time, BOARS says, because a large percentage of poor, Latino and black students don't take the SAT II tests, that requirement alone - not grades or test scores - has shut out a large percentage of those groups from the pool of eligibles. The largest disqualifying factor among students taking the "a-to-g" courses is students' failure to take the SAT II tests. Moreover, says Rashid, the current guarantee of eligibility for students with a combination of high grades and test scores adds almost nothing in practical terms. Students who are guaranteed eligibility for UC but aren't admitted to the campuses to which they apply are bumped to a campus - inevitably Riverside or Merced - where there is space. But almost nobody takes those offers. "By inviting a broader pool of prospective students to apply and be evaluated under comprehensive review," Rashid says, "campuses can make a better and more fair determination of academic merit by looking at all of the students' achievements in the context of their particular schools and personal circumstances. "This is what our selective campuses do now when they choose among eligible students; every applicant should get the same opportunity."

BOARS calculates that without the SAT II requirements many more students would be UC eligible. The existing system, Rashid maintains, denies the campuses the opportunity to choose students who might contribute more than those admitted now. Obviously, elimination of the SAT II requirement doesn't mean that thousands more applicants will be admitted. But it would enlarge the pool from which campuses can choose. And it's here that the plan becomes vulnerable to criticism and dispute.

Leaving aside suspicions of bad faith by admissions officers - that in applying the more squishy criteria of comprehensive review, they'll pursue diversity and overlook competence by giving blacks and Latinos preferences, either consciously or otherwise - the system will still find it tougher to justify its decisions.

When hard numbers - tests, grades - are used at least to define eligibility for the pool from which campuses choose, decisions can always be defended with "objective" facts. That those numbers sometimes don't mean much doesn't make the alternative criteria any easier to defend. And, of course, the numbers do mean something. There may not be much difference between 650 and 700 on an SAT math test, but there surely is between 500 and 750.

In the decades before (and just after World II), the Ivy League and other elite colleges downplayed tests and grades in order to pick the "whole man," meaning white shoe WASPS from the right social backgrounds. Comprehensive review may never become the black-brown version of that, but UC could still have a hard time persuading the skeptics.

Source




Parents Are Idiots, or So Believes the State

The perils of vouchers. Tax relief for anybody with kids who are not using government schools would be a better start -- but getting government to make its own services completely optional will be a huge hill to climb

Thank goodness parents are idiots. Otherwise, at least half of the current tax-funded bozos - the so-called public servants whose sole mission is to supplant parental rights and decision-making - would be unemployed, taking their aggressive panhandling to the streets nonetheless. And, we can't have that, can we?

Of course, not all parents are idiots. One special class of the omniscient exists; those parents employed by government or associated organizations (can you say teachers unions). These folks are never idiots since they drink from the fountain of enlightenment. The fountain whose source is the never-ending stream of tax dollars, and whose drain is the never-clogged pipeline of bloated salaries.

Parents are idiots. Yes, that is a harsh statement. However, from what I read - from what the state and its minions believe, it is absolutely true. Offensive, but true.

Alright, put up or shut up! Fair enough. A recently published study on public school choice looked at the schools parents chose when they were allowed to select between the various Milwaukee public schools. The study reports that many parents chose schools based on nonacademic reasons; parents chose schools for reasons other than the state's definition of a quality program.

So there you have it, parents are idiots simply because they do not choose the state solution. Moms and dads failed the test of parenting as defined by the state. Remove the children and begin mandatory indoctrination, for parent and child alike.

This is by no means the first study to report such findings. In fact, this study is but one of many that defines the abilities of parents solely on their choosing, or not choosing, the state-defined correct answer.

Let's take a different look at this logic: Consider the intelligence of leaders in the market place. For example: We know that many business are run by idiots. How do we know that? Well, we know for certain that many businesses do not use the government-favored solution for sending documents and packages. That's right. In case you were unaware of it, many businesses owners choose to bypass the US Postal Service when they need to send important, time-sensitive stuff in a cheap, competent manner. Amazing, isn't it? These seemingly intelligent and successful folks actually forgo the government solution in favor of a free market one. Our conclusion is obvious: Based on the logic applied to parents and school choice, these business owners must be idiots. In fact, they are idiots. Call in the bureaucrats to stop the madness.

Here is the rub for all systems of so-called choice under a government-funded - taxpayer-funded - system of education: Parental choice will always fail to meet the arbitrary standards and ends of the political effete . er, elite. No, wait, effete was correct. This will be true whether the system is one which includes choice of schools within a school district, charter schools, or any of the assorted voucher programs or proposal. In all cases, parents will choose UPS and FedEx when the correct choice - in the eyes of the state - is USPS.

It's a rainbow that many like to chase, looking for the pot of gold that is government-funded school choice. But, like any true rainbow, the end - the pot of gold - is over the next hill, just out of reach. Choice cannot exist when the ends are politically defined. And, no market can exist where goods must conform to government standards.

Ardent voucher advocates believe that parents will spend government funds in a manner that provides the best education for their children. Setting aside for the moment the fact that vouchers are theft and can never be associated with a free market solution, it is true that parents will choose what is best for their children. Nevertheless, what is best is never the ends deified by the state; politically-derived curriculum, tests, and standards.

Just as in Milwaukee, parents will opt for something else; something better. And, with each parental choice, government, the teachers unions, and many so-called advocates of school choice, will begin to build a case against the abilities of parents to choose what is best for their children. Regulation upon regulation will appear. The promised land of innovation and entrepreneurship associated with tax-funded school choice will never be reached. Private suppliers of education will be forced to conform to the ends defined by the blobs that suffocate DC and every state capital. And, these ends will never be the ends desired by parents.

The assumed array of educational programs will begin to look like shelves of generic food; cans with white wrappers that read "Education. Caution: contains state indoctrination." The consumers - the parents and students - will not be sovereign under this system. No, only the state will have control. You can paint the pig - government-run education - and dress it up as choice, but it will be the same pig nonetheless. Advocate for vouchers and know for a fact that the end result is more studies claiming that you are an idiot. Advocate for the end of tax-supported, government-run schools and the only thing that you have to fear is the hobo village of educrats searching for handouts. Not too worry, they are neither too bright nor too ambitious.

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9 November, 2007

British private schools may relinquish charity status to escape hostile Leftist bureaucrats

SOME independent schools may voluntarily give up charitable status to escape the threat of "hostile voices" and "sabre-rattling" by regulators at the Charity Commission. Schools exploring the move believe it would have only a limited impact on their finances and would free them from rules that could prove intrusive and bureaucratic. From next year the presumption that all education is charitable and so can enjoy tax breaks will end. Instead, schools will have to prove they provide a "public benefit", for example, access for poor families.

Many head teachers have complained at what they see as threats from some Charity Commission executives. "Someone, somewhere [in the Charity Commission] has got an antiindependent school agenda," said Bernard Trafford, chairman of the Headmasters' & Headmistresses' Conference, which represents more than 250 independent schools. Trafford, headmaster of Wolverhampton grammar school, said that while abandoning charitable status would "go against our heart", the possibility was now being considered by his school and others. "A lot of us will explore this option now these kind of crazy, hostile voices are being floated again," he said.

Rosie Chapman, executive director of policy and effectiveness at the commission, has said it could freeze bank accounts and "go nuclear" against schools that fail to meet the public benefit test.

Steps being taken by schools to prove public benefit include increasing bursaries for pupils from poorer families and opening sports facilities. Moves such as sponsoring city academies are also being explored. Lord Adonis, the schools minister, will use a speech next week to the Girls' Schools Association of independent schools to promote academies.

Charitable status brings independent schools an estimated 100m pounds in tax breaks a year. But schools have been advised that if they turn themselves into companies, Vat could not under European law be imposed on school fees. They have estimated that the other tax benefits of charitable status could be replaced by a fee increase of 2.7%-5%.

Chris Woodhead, the Sunday Times columnist who chairs the education firm Cognita, said he was in discussions to acquire a number of schools worried about whether they could survive as independent charities under the law. He said: "If the public benefit test means, as it seems it will, that [charity] schools have to devote more and more time and resources to propping up state schools, what does that mean for the education of their own children and how will their parents react?"

Andrew Hind, chief executive of the Charity Commission, said: "The public benefit requirement is not something any charity should fear. It is an opportunity for charities to articulate even more clearly the value they bring."

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Israel in the classroom

Much of the discussion on university campuses places Israel in a uniquely hostile and one-dimensional framework, using special criteria and double standards, while erasing the context of terror, war threats of mass destruction. The bulk of courses, guest lectures, conferences, rallies, film festivals, boycott and divestment campaigns, and other activities related to Israel focus on "the occupation", as if history began in June 1967, or, in other cases, with the spontaneous creation of the Palestinian refugee crisis in 1948. Palestinians are consistently and patronizingly portrayed as hopeless victims, Israel is painted as the arch villain.

To counter these distortions, courses, lectureships, debates, and other special programs in Israel Studies must confront this false paradigm. These and related activities need to place Israel back into context, if not as an ordinary country, at least as part of history and in a comparative framework among the countries of the world. Israel is not perfect and should not be portrayed in an idealized manner, no more than it should be demonized by boycotts and through terms such as "apartheid" and "ethnic cleansing".

While the Arab-Israeli context cannot and should not be ignored, it is important to expand the discussion to include many other dimensions. These include culture, economics, society, politics and law - all standard elements in the examination of any nation. The Jewish cultural renaissance, including literature, art, dance, architecture and film is a central part of the Israeli reality. In this realm, the role of the revival of the Hebrew language and the tension resulting from 4000 years of history placed into a modern secular framework provides important insights that are not restricted to Israel. Different aspects serve as an interesting basis for comparison with other societies attempting to bridge the ancient and modern, such as India, Turkey and China. And while the generations of conflict and violence certainly impact on Israeli culture, and are reflected in the writing of Agnon and Oz, for example, these are not the only significant factors, and should not be over-emphasized.

Similarly, in examining the complexities of Israeli society, there are many aspects that can be analyzed usefully in a wider comparative framework. The tensions over the role of religion in modern Israel can be assessed alongside similar situations in countries with a dominant Moslem context, particularly Iran but also Egypt and the North African nations; or relative to Christian dominated societies in North America and Europe.

In the political realm, Israel provides an interesting and significant case study among parliamentary democracies. The party system, which is a relic from the pre-state period and the Zionist movement, was developed in the context of European democratic movements of the 19th century, and can be compared and analyzed in this framework. The instability of a multi-party system and the influence of these groups on the economy and in social life are often compared to modern Italy and some of the newly democratic countries of Eastern Europe. Here too, Israel is by no means sui generis, and should not be presented as such.

The double standards, myths and singling out of Israel have spilled over to economics, including recent allegation by Naomi Klein and other ideologues that stress and overemphasize the military factors (more demonization). Some of the factors that explain the steady growth in the Israeli economy are relatively unique - such as the Russian aliya that increased the population by one-quarter in a decade. Many olim are well educated and skilled workers, and this contributed to rapid growth. But broader factors are involved, including the ideological transition from a socialist system controlled by political operatives in labor unions to a more open economy, a significant decrease in government control, and increased competition.

Returning to the conflict, the responses of Israel to terror and warfare should be broadened from the simplistic approach in which Palestinians are victims and Israel is uniquely evil. Instead, in this as in other areas of academic research and teaching, a comparative approach is called for, based on examining other ethno-national conflicts and peace making efforts (more or less successful). Terms such as "occupation", demands for a "right of return", a separation barrier (or "apartheid wall") and similar dimensions also apply to the conflict in Cyprus between Greek Christians and Muslim Turks. In Sri Lanka, the majority Sinhalese have been attempting to prevent minority Tamils from forming a breakaway state. As in the Israeli case, this conflict includes suicide bombing attacks and more conventional forms of warfare. Other examples with similarities, as well as important difference, include Northern Ireland and the Balkans (Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia).

The same approach is applicable when dealing with human rights claims and in discussions of Israeli responses to terror within the framework of international law. The vast majority of such discussions on university campuses again treat Israel as a singular case, without context or comparative perspective. Instead of segregation and discrimination based on ideology and interest, the study and teaching of Israel, across the various disciplines, needs to be re-integrated into the general academic discourse. The sooner this happens, the better.

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Lessons from India

School choice only helps education

Illinois schools got bad news recently: About 30 percent more schools failed under the federal No Child Left Behind Act this year than last. But to fix these schools, the act first needs to be fixed.

The act's objective is to ensure basic reading and math competency in every child. But it is failing even in this modest task because it is applying a totally backward strategy: Instead of promoting national standards and parental accountability, as is the case in many countries, including India, it is doing the reverse: fostering local standards and federal accountability. This has consigned kids to a low quality education while disenfranchising schools and teachers, the very opposite of what the act set out to do.

Since 2002, the act has required the 90 percent or so of school districts nationwide that receive federal money for at-risk kids to test 3rd- to 8th-graders in reading and math. The schools also are required to report their test results broken down by income, ethnicity, disability status and other categories.

The act mandates what proficiency gains schools must post every year to receive a passing grade or face penalties. For instance, the Illinois schools that passed this year increased their proficiency rate both overall and in every subgroup to 55 percent from 47.5 percent last year. By 2014, all kids in all subgroups have to be proficient for their schools to receive Uncle Sam's blessing. Schools that fail a few years in a row can lose federal funding.

This is nothing to sneer at given that this funding constitutes more than 10 percent of Illinois' $20 billion-plus education budget. But the huge loophole in the act is that it allows states to define what constitutes "proficiency." This has triggered a wholesale "dumbing down" of standards. The Chicago Tribune recently reported that 572 more Illinois schools would have failed this year if the state had not tinkered with its math and reading exams. This means that many Illinois kids are still stuck in failing schools but don't even know it. What's more, given that not all states have lowered their standards equally, it has become far more difficult to tell how kids in one state stack up against another. This is contrary to trends elsewhere in the world.

In India, every kid in every school must take a national board exam after the 10th and 12th grades (before that, schools administer their own annual exams at the end of each grade). The "boards" are far from perfect. But they ensure basic learning and allow apples-to-apples comparisons across schools. For example, students who score 75 percent on a math exam all can safely be assumed to have the same proficiency level regardless of whether they went to a big or small, city or rural, school.

But, unlike the United States, the Indian government does not penalize schools that don't meet its expectations. Parents do. India has a robust private kindergarten through 12th-grade market that almost all middle-class and above families use. James Tooley, an education professor in England, found that 75 percent of children even in some urban slums attend private schools. The upshot is that parents can yank their kids out of substandard schools that don't prepare them adequately for the "boards" and enroll them in ones that do. The exams simply put crucial information in their hands to make comparisons.

This might seem counterintuitive to the American teaching establishment given its legendary hostility to school choice, but parental accountability is actually empowering for teachers as well. Because parents in India pick the schools their children attend, they are far less prone to blame teachers when their children underperform -- and far more to prod their kids to take responsibility. Even when a few disgruntled parents do pull their kids, they don't threaten the financial health of the whole institution. This is in stark contrast to No Child Left Behind, where a few failing kids could jeopardize federal funding for the entire school.

The No Child Left Behind Act is up for renewal this year. Lawmakers serious about its promise of leaving no child behind ought to look for reforms that give parents a yardstick by which to measure school performance and school choice.

There are many candidates for a national exam that are superior to India's "boards" which, thanks to the ossified federal bureaucracy that administers it, are based on outdated pedagogy. America's private testing industry has produced stellar high school exams, such as the ACT, that give a fairly accurate measure of student knowledge. These can be adapted to lower grades.

Meanwhile, obstacles preventing many states from embracing school choice are federal regulations that bar federal money from flowing to schools that don't meet the gazillion regulations concerning teacher training, lunch programs and so on. Rolling back these regulations should be top on the list of the No Child Left Behind reforms.

None of this will be easy. But legislators can't shirk this assignment if they want American students to compete with their global peers.

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8 November, 2007

The Leftist attack on history scholarship continues

History is so pesky for Leftists that they grab any opportunity to distort it

Columbia University's bizarre idea of academic freedom continues as its women's college affiliate, Barnard, voted to grant tenure to Nadia Abu El-Haj, who was born in America and is of Palestinian descent:

[She] contended in her first book, "Facts on the Ground," that Israeli archaeologists searched for an ancient Jewish presence to help build the case for a Jewish state. In their quest, she wrote, they sometimes used bulldozers, destroying the remains of Arab and other cultures.

Meanwhile, the Arabs who control the Temple Mount in Jerusalem which not only houses mosques built upon land occupied by synagogues the Arabs demolished over a thousand years ago but many Jewish and some Christian sites, is busily destroying all archeological evidence of Jewish residency there. This continues the religiously destructive practices of the Jordanians who, when they controlled eastern Jerusalem from 1948-1967, did not allow Jews to visit their religious sites despite signing a treaty pledging to do so.

Instead the Jordanians destroyed synagogues and other Jewish buildings, using the stones to pave streets and for urinals, built a hotel on a Jewish cemetery and forbade any Jew from living under their jurisdiction. Naturally the UN or no one else complained about these gross violations of religious rights. And obviously Barnard believes Ms. El-Haj's projecting one's own historical distorted scholarship onto the enemy is worthy of reward:

Tenure, college officials said, "gives scholars the liberty to advance ideas, regardless of their political impact, so that their work may be openly debated and play a critical role in shaping knowledge in the scholar's academic field."

Under this reasoning soon Holocaust denial, flat earth proponents, planets and sun revolving around the earth believers and David Irving's biography of Howard Hughes among others will soon find an honored place in the Columbia-Barnard curriculum. Isn't that what "shaping knowledge" is all about?

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The Groves of Academe, or You Can't Make It Up, Episode 8,968

As of now, in the autumn of 2007, it costs $52,202.00 a year to be an undergraduate at New York University. That's Fifty-Two Thousand Dollars, and then some. And what do you get for all that dough? Well, one thing you get are cultural events like today's screening of a 53-minute film called Q2P, followed by a "discussion" with the filmmaker, Paromita Vohra. Larry Craig: listen up! Here's something to get your feet tapping. Sponsored by NYU's Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the Department of Media, Culture and Communication, the Center for Religion and Media, and the Council on Media and Culture, Q2P, set in Mumbai,

observes who has access to toilets and who doesn't, and how gender, power, and the need to "go" make up public space and bodily well-being.

That's right folks: four separate entities at one of our premier institutions of higher learning got together to bring us a "a day-long conference on Sex, Gender and the Public Toilet: Outing the Water Closet Bringing together pioneering scholars of sex and gender with leading design professionals and activists to consider, critique, and reconstruct the public rest room."

Think about it: "pioneering scholars of sex and gender," "leading design professionals and activists" all under one roof to talk about sex, politics, and public toilets. A load of merde, you say? Quite possibly. An outrageous travesty as well? No doubt. But think of what it means for the art of satire. Who could possibly make this up? Back in the 1950s, Kingsley Amis wrote the splendid academic satire Lucky Jim, wherein he ridiculed that pseudo-scholarship which gloried in a "funeral parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non problems." But how do you satirize "Sex, Gender and the Public Toilet: Outing the Water Closet"? What obloquy is severe enough for these "pioneering scholars of sex and gender," these "leading design professionals and activists"?

I sometimes despair, concluding that these malevolent clowns have forced us to that position Wittgenstein described at the end of the Tractaus: "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darueber muss man schweigen": "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." But I cheer up when I remember that, although phenomena like "Sex, Gender and the Public Toilet" are beneath contempt, that doesn't mean we should fail to let the world know about them. The sponsors of this ludicrous exercise in cultural pathology thoughtfully included contact information: the email address is center.religion.media@nyu.edu, the telephone number is 212.998.7608. I hope many right-thinking people will avail themselves of that information to upbraid the people responsible for such hogwash.

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Britain: A degree is no guarantee of full-time jobs or equal pay for women

A quarter of graduates do not have full-time jobs more than three years after getting their degrees, according to government figures. The Higher Education Statistics Agency, which examined the career progression of 24,000 people, also found that 20 per cent of those who were employed were not working in graduate occupations.

Women were more satisfied with their careers, although they were paid less than men in their first jobs. “There was a 1,000 pound difference in the average salaries of male and female graduates who had studied full-time, although a higher proportion of men were in higher-paid work,” the report said. “There was a larger gender difference among part-time graduates, where the average male salary was 3,133 higher than for females. Women were more likely to be working part-time than men at every level, regardless of their mode of study and qualification.” Graduates are normally questioned by the agency six months after leaving university, but this was its first follow-up survey, looking at their progress after 3˝ years. Catherine Benfield, the project manager, said the gender gap statistics were fascinating. She said: “Women said they were more satisfied with their careers to date but when you look at salaries they are behind. Maybe they have lower expectations.”

While 89 per cent of graduates were in some kind of work – including voluntary and unpaid – only 74 per cent were in full-time paid employment. Five per cent were still studying full-time. Graduates in medicine, dentistry, education and agriculture had among the highest employment rates.

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7 November, 2007

Leftist opposition to school choice in Utah

In today's political taxonomy, "progressives" are rebranded liberals dodging the damage they did to their old label. Perhaps their most injurious idea - injurious to themselves and public schools - was the forced busing of (mostly other people's) children to engineer "racial balance" in public schools. Soon, liberals will need a third label if people notice what "progressives" are up to in Utah. There, teachers unions, whose idea of progress is preservation of the status quo, are waging an expensive and meretricious campaign to overturn the right of parents to choose among competing schools, public and private, for the best education for their children.

Utahans next week will decide by referendum whether to retain or jettison the nation's broadest school-choice program. Passed last February, the Parent Choice in Education Act would make a voucher available to any public-school child who transfers to a private school, and to current private-school children from low-income families. Opponents of school choice reflexively rushed to force a referendum on the new law, which is suspended pending the vote.

The vouchers would vary in value from $500 to $3,000, depending on household income. The teachers unions' usual argument against school-choice programs is that they drain money from public education. But the vouchers are funded by general revenues, not the two sources of public-school funds. Every Utah voucher increases funds available for public education. Here's how: Utah spends more than $7,500 per public-school pupil ($3,000 more than the average private-school tuition). The average voucher will be for less than $2,000. So every voucher used will save Utah taxpayers an average of $5,500. Because the vouchers are paid from general revenues, the departed pupil's $7,500 stays in the public-school system

Booming Utah has about 540,000 public-school pupils and the nation's largest class sizes - and expects to have at least 150,000 more than that a decade from now. By empowering parents to choose private alternatives, the voucher program will save Utah taxpayers millions of dollars in school-construction expenses.

School-choice opponents argue that it'll produce less racially and socially diverse schools. But because students are assigned to public schools based on where they live, and because residential patterns reflect income, most of Utah's public schools are either mostly wealthy and white or mostly nonwealthy and nonwhite. Utah's Office of Education reports that the state's private schools - operating one-third below full enrollment - have a higher percentage of nonwhites than do public schools.

The voucher program will enable demand for private schools to match the supply. A privately funded scholarship program, Children First Utah, for low-income pupils can support only 15 percent of applicants. Although most of the total value of the new vouchers will go to low-income families, the program amounts to a reduced government subsidy for such families - at most $3,000 rather than more than $7,500 per pupil.

By September the National Education Association, the megalobbyist for the public-education near-monopoly, had already spent $1.5 million to support repeal of the voucher program. The Wall Street Journal reports that the NEA has approved expenditures of up to $3 million. Teachers unions in Maine, Colorado, Arizona and Wyoming had also contributed to the fight against choice.

Intellectually bankrupt but flush with cash, the teachers unions continue to push their threadbare arguments, undeterred by the fact that Utah's vouchers will increase per-pupil spending and will lower class sizes in public schools. Why the perverse perseverance? Two large, banal reasons: fear of competition and desire for the maximum number of dues-paying public-school teachers.

Although among the reddest of states, Utah is among the most supportive states regarding public education: It has the fifth-highest proportion of K-12 students in public schools. Nevertheless, on Tuesday Utah voters can strike a blow against the idea that education should remain the most important sector of American life shielded from the improving force of competition. What will defenders of that idea - former liberals, now known as progressives - call themselves next? Surely not "pro-choice."

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Middle school cancels "gender-switch" day after parents object

A Bay Area Middle School has canceled a scheduled cross-dressing or "gender-switch" day after parents complained, according to an Oct. 30 Pacific Justice Institute news release. The Sacramento-based institute is a legal organization that defends parental rights, religious freedom, and other civil liberties. Adams Middle School in Brentwood encouraged students to cross-dress - boys wearing girls clothing, girls wearing boys' clothing - on the last day of "Spirit Week," Friday, Nov. 2. Parents were given little notice of the event, said the Pacific Justice Institute, and only found out about it after flyers were posted at the school.

A parent of a seventh-grader met with the principal, Adam Clark, to voice her concerns about the event, and was told that it would go ahead as planned. Clark told the parent she could keep her son home if he did not want to be part of the event. The parent contacted Pacific Justice Institute, which told her she needed to enlist other parents to contact the school with their concerns. The Institute itself prepared to intervene, if necessary.

On Oct. 30, the school removed the flyers advertising the event and confirmed it had been canceled. Instead, the school encourages students to wear school colors. Clark told Institute attorney Matthew McReynolds, "We want to encourage our students to be free thinkers, [but] we felt that the overall message wasn't coming across clear to some members of the community."

Encouraging student cross-dressing to invite "free thinking" is not unique to Adams Middle School. A 2002 article by the Culture and Family Institute of Concerned Women for America reported how the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) encourages cross-dressing through a curriculum developed for Kindergarten through third grade.

The curriculum guide, produced by the Lesbian and Gay Parents Association and the Buena Vista Lesbian and Gay Parents group in San Francisco, Preventing Prejudice: Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender Lesson Plan Guide for Elementary Schools, features a book, Jesse's Dream Skirt, by Bruce Mark, about a boy who enjoys wearing his mother's dresses and wants a skirt for himself. The lesson plan accompanying the book says the book's key message is "respect means keeping our minds open. Having open minds means giving people freedom to be who they want to be."

The GLSEN web site still offers the plan as a resource. According to the Network, "Preventing Prejudice is an instructional tool for educators at the K-5 level. It consists of sixteen field-tested lesson plans developed by elementary school teachers, including such topics as: What is a Boy/Girl?; What Makes a Family?; Freedom to Marry; and Coming Out."

The Brentwood School District's web site offers an "East Contra Costa Quick Resource Guide," which lists under "Gay and Lesbian," the Gay and Lesbian National Hotline, the Empowerment Program (which helps women in "disadvantaged positions"), and Rainbow Community Center of Contra Costa County. The center, according to its web site, "envisions a society that embraces acceptance, safety and equality for all, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity/expression."

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Grammar schools by another name?

The British Labour party has always done its best to abolish Grammar (selective) schools on the grounds of "elitism" but have now rediscovered the virtues of selectivity. Now they are trying to plant a mini-grammar-school within each "comprehensive" school! But the Grammar schools provided a total environment very much like a private school and that is sadly missing in a rowdy and dangerous comprehensive school. So the new approach is still second-rate

England's million brightest pupils will be targeted by a new champion for gifted and talented children, under plans to ensure that the most able youngsters make it to university regardless of their social background. The first priority for John Stannard, a former director of the National Literacy Strategy, will be to target the 300 secondary schools that up until now have refused to take part in the government's gifted and talented (G&T) programme - often because of ideological opposition to selection.

Mr Stannard's appointment, made under the personal direction of Gordon Brown, is part of a drive to extend massively the reach of the G&T programme by raising the proportion of children selected in each school from 5 to about 10 per cent.

The move reflects government disappointment at progress in the scheme, set up in 1999 amid concerns that middle-class parents were abandoning the state sector for private schools because comprehensives were failing to nurture the most able.

Latest figures show that a significant minority of schools - 9 per cent of secondaries and 35 per cent of primaries - have still failed to identify any G&T children, leaving the number benefiting from the extra tuition offered under the programme stuck at 733,000. The Prime Minister is determined that all schools should take part to bring students numbers up to one million of Britain's eight million state school population.

Mr Stannard told The Times that his appointment should send out an important message that state schools would make every effort to cater for the needs of the brightest pupils. "There is a purpose in reassuring middle-class parents that goes beyond the intrinsic value of doing so. "If you keep depleting the state sector of the more able students then that depletes the sector right across the board. It means that schools that do well have a much greater struggle to do so. With a wider range of pupils, you have a greater pool of ability for raising aspirations," he said.

Mr Stannard is keen to ensure that bright pupils from socially disadvantaged backgrounds benefit from the programme. Previous research has suggested that most participants come from better-off families who can afford fees and fares to the extra tuition offered under the programme. He also wants to ensure that those who may be regarded by teachers as underachievers or even troublemakers are picked up by the scheme.

Current government criteria for identifying G&T children states that they may "not necessarily be well behaved", that they may "be bored by routine tasks" and may "appear arrogant or socially inept". "Kids who are very bored can be very stroppy because they do not have enough to do and they are not catered for by their school. They may not be recognised as gifted, particularly in areas of social disadvantage," he said.

The criteria for identifying children for the programme will include teacher assessments and diagnostic tests as well as national Key Stage tests that children sit at the ages of 7, 11 and 14. The scheme applies to children who are academically gifted or who have a talent in the arts or sport. The scheme will apply to children as young as 4. They will qualify for summer schools at universities, as well as extra online tuition, Saturday morning masterclasses and activities with bright children from other schools.

Lord Adonis, the Schools Secretary, emphasised that there was no hard and fast criteria for identifying G&T children and said that it would be left to individual schools to decide precisely how many children to identify. However, he said that secondary schools should pay particular attention to the Key Stage 2 results attained by children in the last year of primary school. He denied that this would put extra pressure on primary school children, effectively making tests at primary school a university entrance exam. "It is vital we do more to support able pupils in state schools, particularly those schools which currently have low numbers going to university," he said.

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6 November, 2007

Black parents send their kids back to Africa to escape British government school mayhem

African parents know what African kids need, even if white do-gooders do not

Scores of British school children are being sent away to take their GCSEs in Ghana, exchanging truancy and gang culture for traditional teaching and strong discipline, including the cane. "When I was in London I was bad basically," said Abena, 16, from Hackney, east London, with braces on her teeth and a swagger in her step. "I stopped going to school and in my head I was, like, thinking money, money, money."

Dispatched to Africa, far from the world of gangs, theft and knife crime, she found herself at the Faith Montessori boarding school in Accra, Ghana's capital, where the fees are 1,200 pounds a year. Most of the school's expatriate children spend holidays with relatives or guardians in Ghana, returning to Britain once a year. During term time they live in dormitories 10 to a room.

For the parents it is a chance to save their children from the thuggery that has seen 21 teenagers shot or stabbed to death in London alone this year. Abena and three other British pupils at her school now believe they are receiving a rigorous education that was lacking in Britain. "When your friends know that you've gone to Ghana they know that you're going to get straightened up," said Sienam, 17, from Edgware, north London, who has been at school in Accra for three years. "I used to be really bad," he said, muttering about gangs and the kind of playground violence that he has put behind him. "When my friends in London see that I've changed it wakes them up a little bit. I get respect but in a different way."

According to Oswald Amoo-Gottfried, the school's founder and director, the key to the success of pupils such as Sienam is the kind of discipline that has long since fallen out of fashion in Britain. "I believe in caning," he declared. "I tell the parents: if you don't want your child punished, then your child doesn't belong here." His school is quiet, the atmosphere studious. The youngest children sit in neat sailor suits; older pupils wear blue shorts and white shirts, while the senior students dress in smart trousers and T-shirts emblazoned with the school badge. In one classroom 30 pupils are arranged in rows of desks facing their male teacher and the white board. They remain silent until asked a question.

Amoo-Gottfried is a friendly faced disciplinarian who has seen more than 20 London children of African parentage pass through his school in the past five years. "Children must be taught. You don't sit down and discuss directions with a child - you tell them where to go," he said. Children are beaten for misbehaving or failing to do home-work, but not for poor results.

Sienam admitted that he had been caned "many, many times" by his teachers in Ghana. "Any time you do something you know you shouldn't do or step out of line, you get caned," he said. The cane "works to some extent", he conceded.

Isaac, 17, from Norwood, in southeast London, said he became involved in gangs and stealing before his parents sent him to Ghana. After four years at school in Accra he is softly spoken and articulate and hopes to sit international GCSEs at the end of this academic year before returning to Britain for A-levels.

When they first arrive the teen-agers are often "a lot wilder", said Amoo-Gottfried, but with time and discipline they become "domesticated". He puts the troubles of the British pupils down to a lack of good role models - a reason many West Indian families cite for sending their children to school back home. "In London father has run off to work early in the morning, mother the same. So you find the children left to themselves and, as they say, the devil finds work for idle hands. Here they see professional people - lawyers, doctors - whereas in the UK most of the Ghanaians are blue-collar workers."

The list of consistent A, B and C grades on a results sheet pinned to the notice board is a source of pride and several of Amoo-Gottfried's former pupils are now at British universities.

Michelle Asante, 23, attended Archbishop Porter girls' school in Takoradi, Ghana, and went on to complete a sociology degree at Sheffield University before going to drama school. "The school I was attending in Plumstead [southeast London] wasn't great and my mum felt I wasn't being challenged. There was a lot of fighting," said Asante, who is now an actress. "Education is so important in Ghana - people take it as their only means of escaping poverty. With education you can do anything, no matter how poor you are."

The pupils at Faith Montessori agree discipline in Africa can be tough but also see their lives changing for the better. Abena and "the London boys", which includes James, 16, from Edmon-ton Green, north London, also admit that while they are benefiting from a Ghanaian education, they miss home and look forward to going back to A-levels and university.The years of mischief are behind them, Isaac said: "What gets you respect over there is disgrace over here."

Source




"Racist" American Leftist professors

They are so keen to tell everyone else what to do so what do they do themselves? It seems that it is a case of "physician heal thyself". Affirmative action very rarely extends to them welcoming blacks to within their own ranks. And the Left always tell us that such under-representation proves "racism"

A new survey of the top 100 departments in 15 science and engineering disciplines (including the social sciences) finds that "few science and engineering departments have more than a single [underrepresented minority] faculty member." Despite the increased representation of members of minority groups among bachelor's and Ph.D. degree recipients, the analysis finds that the proportion of black, Hispanic and Native American instructors generally drops at every point in the academic pipeline, with the majority of minority faculty members concentrated at the assistant professor level.

"A National Analysis of Minorities in Science and Engineering Faculties at Research Universities," by Donna J. Nelson, an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Oklahoma, differs from previous studies in one key way. By surveying department chairs (and, in a limited number of cases when data were not available through chairs, scanning departmental Web sites and directories), Nelson collected information on the entire population of tenured and tenure-track faculty at every top 100 department in each of the 15 fields (as ranked by the National Science Foundation based on research expenditures), as opposed to just a sample.

"In some cases there are zero people from underrepresented groups" at particular faculty ranks in particular disciplines across all the departments surveyed, Nelson said at a press briefing in Washington Wednesday. Without the entire population represented, Nelson said, it would be impossible to pinpoint some of those prominent zeros. Astronomy, for instance, has no black or Native American assistant professors at any of the top departments (40 departments in astronomy's case because NSF only ranks the top 40 in the discipline). And there's not a single Native American professor at any rank in astronomy or civil engineering. Among the other results:

* The proportion of underrepresented minorities - defined in the report as black, Hispanic and Native American - together made up 28.7 percent of the U.S. population in 2006. But their representation among the faculty ranks at all levels in top departments in 2007 varied from 2.2 percent (astronomy) to 13.5 percent (sociology). Among the engineering disciplines, civil engineering, with 6.1 percent of the faculty identifying as members of the underrepresented minority groups, had the highest representation, and electrical engineering, with 3.3 percent, the lowest.

* Only five of nine engineering and physical science disciplines increased their proportion of minority faculty from 2002 to 2007.

* Nelson found a number of disparities between the number of minority Ph.D. recipients in the hiring pool and the racial distribution of assistant professors (the newly hired). In computer science, for instance, 3.2 percent of Ph.D. recipients between 1996 and 2005 were black, while blacks made up 1.8 percent of assistant professors at top 100 departments in 2007 (and 1.3 percent among the top 50).

* Further up the ranks, the proportion of minorities tends to fall further. Among the top 50 departments, only three disciplines - chemistry, math and electrical engineering - had more minority associate rather than assistant professors. And none had a majority of their minority faculty at the full professor rank (Nelson writes that the opposite can be said for white males).

* As for women, despite the fact that they make up more than 50 percent of bachelor's degree recipients in fields like chemistry and political science, in those fields they represent, respectively, 13.7 and 26.1 percent of all professors at top 100 departments.

Source




Australia: PC warriors serve up a slanted education

IN her address to her union's conference in 2005 the Australian Education Union president Pat Byrne openly acknowledged the ideological bias that dominates the school system. As she put it: "We have succeeded in influencing curriculum development in schools, education departments and universities. The conservatives have a lot of work to do to undo the progressive curriculum."

This bias is the consequence of historical factors originating in the politics of the 1960s that led to a domination of school curriculums by the ideology of the politically correct Left. Correspondingly, the majority of high school teachers appear to have many values compatible or consistent with this ideology. This ideological hegemony is one of the salient features of "progressive" education. This means that for the numerous students with non-Left views, the education system presents additional challenges.

Although many teachers are likeable people who generate a pleasant atmosphere in their classrooms, what pervades in the school system is a way of looking at the world characterised by the Left, an outlook presented not as ideological but as normal, correct, legitimate and just. More importantly, in terms of assessment, what also exists is a subtle un-stated pressure to ideologically conform if students want to succeed academically.

It should be noted that most of the teachers exerting this pressure would probably be unaware that they are doing so because they would be unaware of the bias affecting their assessment. From the teachers' perspective, they are simply sharing their enthusiasms with their classes and responding positively to what they prefer to see in students' work. Meanwhile, the politically incorrect arguments presented by some students in their essays would be assessed more severely because, from the teachers' perspective, they are genuinely seen to be flawed.

As a private tutor, what I have noticed by closely observing patterns of ticks and comments made in the assessment of students' papers, is that when students clearly indicate in the introduction of their essay that they share their teacher's politically correct beliefs, the teacher automatically clicks into what I describe as a non-critical frame of mind. Consequently, the teacher is less inclined to notice mistakes in grammar, argument or in the presentation of evidence. Meanwhile, if students cross the teacher's bias, the opposite happens. The teacher clicks into a critical frame of mind, finding every justification in the essay to deduct grades.

Due to the psychological subtlety of this behaviour, it is highly likely that the teachers displaying their bias would not recognise it as such, but rather see the grade solely as the product of their professional judgment. It is human nature to display an affinity for those who appear to be like-minded, and to favour them, and this is as true for the assessment of essays as it is in most human interactions. However, because so many teachers share an ideological disposition, the aggregate effect of this tendency is a politically correct bias that appears to be both systematic and widespread. In addition, this bias is so prevalent and so deep-seated that it has achieved a degree of normalcy or a taken-for-granted quality, thereby being virtually invisible to many involved with the system. This is much like the way we become more aware of the constant hum of an air conditioner when it is suddenly switched off than when it is running.

Consequently, if greater intellectual diversity was introduced into the education system, for example, to reflect the degree of diversity in the mainstream community, it would probably initially appear strange to many people, especially to many of those working in it.

Unfortunately, some teachers are not subtle in expressing their Left-wing bias, being quite militant in the expression of their views and intolerant of dissent. Although evidence of commendable attempts at broad-mindedness and fairness among teachers can be found, evidence of blatant bias is far from rare in the school system.

For example, a student came to me late in his Year 11 to receive early preparations for Year 12. Soon after I commenced helping him in English, he reported to me a recent incident when he suspected that he had experienced ideological bias in the assessment of an essay. He had written an informative piece that appeared to be broadly appreciative of the US in its victory in the Cold War, which the teacher had severely criticised. Concerned, he made an appointment to see his teacher to discuss the matter. Unfortunately, what resulted was a severe haranguing, with the teacher yielding no quarter and even boasting to the student that she was anti-American. To many of the politically correct, the US is perceived as an international villain for being a militaristic capitalist superpower.

When the student renewed his attempt to put his case, her convoluted and uncompromising argument worked its way towards a reference to Pearl Harbor. Initially stunned by this irrelevancy, the student soon realised that this was a cruel dig at his Japanese heritage. It did the trick. The student ceased putting his complaint. Coming to the teacher with what he felt was a legitimate grievance, he left feeling that his efforts were futile. He also found the experience somewhat humiliating.

Teachers responsible for scenes like this are probably likely to forget them minutes later. Unfortunately, the students involved are likely to remember them long afterwards. It is also highly likely that these teachers would not remotely see themselves as politically or ideologically oppressive, or as part of a system that creates an environment where free thought and expression can be compromised. The idea that the beliefs of the politically correct, which are seen by them as so noble and emancipating, especially when they were touted by radical students in the '60s, could have become a means for compromising the intellectual freedom of the young in the 21st century would be unimaginable to them.

As for the student who expressed those moderate pro-American views, upon appreciating the realities of the school system, he produced politically correct essays, perfectly tuned into his teachers' biases, to receive A grades that were (thank goodness) hassle-free. Like the characters Winston Smith and Julia in George Orwell's classic anti-totalitarian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, students with non-Left views need to learn to outwardly conform to inwardly remain free.

Prevailing educational practices suggest that the custodians of the education system, like the teachers' unions, have not realised that they are on the wrong side of a growing desire among Australians for greater intellectual diversity and freedom. There is a need for an education system that would better serve the young in terms of their need for knowledge and acceptance. However, as the president of the Australian Education Union recognised regarding the process of reform, there will be a lot of work to do.

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5 November, 2007

UCLA Bigots

An academic golden anniversary should be celebrated with pride. Pride in past achievements; pride in the excellence of faculty; pride in the quality of their work. It is also the opportunity to reflect on possible shortcomings since critical self-evaluation is the best guarantor of future progress.

Of the many areas of research conducted by the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies, celebrating its golden anniversary this year, contemporary history -- and especially recent events in the Israeli-Arab conflict -- has been most controversial in the past few years. Perusing a number of articles authored by faculty at the CNES, it is difficult to escape the obvious: there is hardly any instance where Israel is depicted favorably. We are constantly reminded of the "racist Zionist ideology," the "apartheid state of Israel," the "illegal occupation of Palestinian lands," the "brutal oppression of the Arab population" and many other similarly unconvincing statements. Is this the striking consensus of in-depth, impartial research-which all self-respecting academics should pursue-or is it rather what some enlightened French intellectuals would condemn as la pensee unique?

One may argue that the broad consensus reached by the CNES faculty on these issues corroborates the validity of the presented positions. But isn't the university's role to challenge received ideas even when they are wrapped in collective "expert" agreement? Could there be any Galileo emerging today in the CNES without being pilloried by the faculty?

There is, however, an unspoken consensus on a reality so striking that the most vituperative academics cannot dispute. The reality of Israel, a country that after sixty years of relentless attempts at its annihilation has seen its population grow tenfold; a country whose GNP per capita is comparable to Europe's; a country that enjoys a vibrant academic elite, an efficient judicial system, a rich diversity of respected ethnic and religious minorities; a country where peace demonstrators march by the tens of thousands and where dissent is allowed and encouraged; a democratic country that is governed by the rule of law; in a word, a country that stands in sharp contrast to its Arab neighbors who simmer in envy and resentment against what they disparagingly call the "Zionist entity."

But this reality never appears in the work produced by CNES faculty. An examination of the work of a small sample of this faculty, three representative CNES scholar-teachers, is quite telling with respect to the Center's anti-Israel bias.

Saree Makdisi, a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA, for instance, would make us believe that "racism is, and has always been, at the heart of what Israel stands for as a state." He condones Palestinian Arabs suicide bombers and calls Israel "a fantasy of the Jews." The idea of a Jewish people entitled to have a sovereign nation in their own ancestral land is anathema to him, while he never questions either the national rights of those Arab countries created by the same mandatory process as Israel or the national aspirations of the Palestinian Arabs-a "people" of whom no one ever heard prior to the late 1960s. Such a blinkered vision of reality is unbecoming of a professor at a prestigious university.

James Gelvin, a full professor at UCLA's History department, who teaches a course in the history and origins of the Israeli-Arab conflict? signed a petition in 2002 calling for the University of California to sell its investments in all companies that do business in the state of Israel. Gelvin was only one of 165 University of California professors, including twelve at UCLA, who signed this infamous petition. It reads in part, "We, the undersigned are appalled by the human rights abuses against Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli government, the continual military occupation and colonization of Palestinian territory by Israeli armed forces and settlers, and the forcible eviction from and demolition of Palestinian homes, towns and cities" (In reality, no "Palestinian towns and cities" have been demolished by Israel). Gelvin told the UCLA student newspaper The Daily Bruin that he had signed the petition because "(Israel) is a government that is now committing an invasion") At the time, Israel was being subjected to a fierce Palestinian terrorist campaign that took over 400 lives in 2002 alone.

When in March 2004, UCLA's law school invited an Israeli diplomat and legal advisor to Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Alan Baker, to give a brief talk in the Faculty Room of UCLA's law school, Gelvin protested. He wrote to law school dean Norm Abrams that "Many of us in the UCLA community regard the Palestine question as one of the great moral issues of our time and the quest for Palestinian rights equivalent to the American civil rights struggle of the 1960s or the anti-apartheid struggle of the 1980s as a moral imperative. At a time when most of the international community has condemned the separation fence, particularly with respect to the suffering inflicted on over 700,000 residents of the West Bank, the illegal annexation of land by the Israeli government, and the Israeli government's attempt to impose a unilateral solution to a problem which our own government maintains can only be resolved through negotiations, feting an apologist for Israeli actions can only undermine the reputation of UCLA." The murderous rampages of the Palestinian terrorists that have killed over a thousand Israelis since 2000, and which were the sole reason Israel was forced to build the fence, go unmentioned by Gelvin

How could a teacher with such strong prejudices be fair and objective when teaching a course about the history and origins of the Arab-Israel conflict? A number of his former students have complained in their evaluations of his course that Gelvin's teaching of the history of the conflict has not, in fact, been objective or fair. One student has described Gelvin as "not a historian but rather an advocate of the Palestinian cause." Another relates that Gelvin attempted to blame the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980's on Israel (in reality, Israel played no role whatsoever in this conflict). Still another recalled that Gelvin's only reference to "terrorism" in the course was to the activities of what he called the "Stern Gang" (whose actual name was Lehi, or "Fighters for the Freedom of Israel,"), an underground group that fought for Israel's independence from Britain prior to 1948. According to this student evaluator, when Gelvin was asked why he only discussed Israeli violence against Palestinians, he replied to the effect "that none of the Palestinian terrorism was on as grand a scale as the Stern Gang attack" (not true).

Gabriel Piterberg , an associate professor in UCLA's History department, also signed the 2002 divestment petition. He justified his action by telling the UCLA student newspaper Daily Bruin" that Israel was the "principal culprit" in the conflict. He claims that Israel was created by means of "ethnic cleansing," "massacres," "atrocities" and "rape" of the Palestinians" at its birth in 1948, even though many Palestinians, including Palestinian National Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, have acknowledged that the primary responsibility for the displacement of Arabs during the 1948-49 war lies with Arab leaders and governments. Piterberg says his "facts" about the founding of Israel are derived the writings of such Israeli "scholars" as Benny Morris and Meron Benvenisti, whose work has been shown to be hopelessly biased against Israel by the University of London professor Efraim Karsh, in his groundbreaking study "Fabricating Israel History: The New Historians.

According to Piterberg, 150,000 Jewish "extremists" living in Judea and Samaria must be expelled from their homes in order to create the Palestinian state he desires. The Daily Bruin writes that Piterberg "openly voices his anti-Israeli views,." and "virulently [i.e., poisonously] opposes Israel's government. He is open with his message - going on the radio, appearing on local news and speaking out at campus rallies - that if the suicide bomber is a terrorist, then so is the Israeli pilot who attacks Palestinian civilians" (actually Israeli pilots go to great lengths to avoid harming civilians). According to the Bruin, Piterberg has placed on his office door "a poster of four or five Israeli officials dragging a young Palestinian through the streets with the caption `End the Occupation.' " When the Palestinian terrorist organizations launched a massive "Intifada" against Israel in September and October of 200, killing several Israelis in cold blood, Piterberg's reaction was "the killing of Palestinians will continue." He characterizes the late Yasser Arafat as "a "founding father" figure and `the person who brought back the Palestinian cause' - certainly not the man who was responsible for the violence in Israel"(Bruin, January 11, 2005).

The extremes to which Piterberg carries his anti-Israel prejudice are revealed in "Erasures," a lengthy article that he published in the July-August issue of New Left Review:

The best-known Zionist slogan, `a land without a people to a people without a land', expressed a twofold denial: of the historical experience both of the Jews in exile, and of Palestine without Jewish sovereignty. Of course, since the land was not literally empty, its recovery required the establishment of the equivalent of a colonial hierarchy-sanctioned by Biblical authority- of its historic custodians over such intruders as might remain after the return. Jewish settlers were to be accorded exclusive privileges deriving from the Pentateuch, and Palestinian Arabs treated as part of the natural environment. In the macho Hebrew culture of modern times, to know a woman, in the Biblical sense, and to know the land became virtually interchangeable as terms of possession. The Zionist settlers were collective subjects who acted, and the native Palestinians became objects acted upon.

What utter balderdash! The phrase "a land without a people to a people without a land" was never a "Zionist slogan" and was never said (except to disagree with it) by any Zionist or Israeli leader. Rather it was a phrase used by three nineteenth Christian proponents of a Jewish return to the land of Israel, who wrote before the (Jewish) Zionist movement was even begun by Theodore Herzl (see Adam M. Garfinkle, "On the Origin, Meaning, Use and Abuse of a Phrase," Middle East Studies, October 1991, for a thorough debunking of the anti-Zionist myth of this supposed "slogan"). Nor did any Zionist or Israeli with any power or influence ever suggest that "Jewish settlers were to be accorded exclusive privileges deriving from the Penteteuch," or advocate "the establishment of the equivalent of a colonial hierarchy-sanctioned by Biblical authority." Most Zionist leaders were, are still are, secularists who opposed any fundamentalist reading of the Jewish Bible. But even religious Zionists, such as Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazic chief rabbi of mandatory Palestine, opposed any discrimination against, or hostility to, Arabs. As for the claim that Zionists regarded women as objects of "possession" (an obvious play for feminist support of the anti-Israel cause), it has no historical or factual basis whatsoever.

Once again we must ask: how could an instructor with such an extreme pris partis for one side and against the other in a conflict possibly teach this subject to his students in a fair, balanced, and accurate way?

What is wrong with the CNES faculty, if not la pensee unique, a sclerotic ideological consensus that rejects factual truths when they run against the cherished "theories" to which the professors subscribe? What should be proscribed in academic circles seems to have turned into the norm in Near East Studies. This pens‚e unique has a name: it is called "Palestinianism"-a fig leaf that might be convenient for some to hide darker prejudices against anything Jewish or Zionist.

Is there anything to celebrate in this 50th anniversary? Surely, the CNES can celebrate consistency as the pre-Renaissance Church celebrated the immutability of its dogmatic teachings on science. But this time, the CNES will not have 350 years to finally acknowledge its error as did the church. Many of CNES graduate students will soon be aware of crucial Middle East facts they were never told and they will be incensed for having been subjected to this kind of sustained academic indoctrination.

Source




Flag-burning 'lesson' from shifty Leftist professor provokes UM student

A University of Maine student alleges her former professor offered extra credit to class members if they burned the American flag or the U.S. Constitution or were arrested defending free speech. On the first day of class, associate professor Paul Grosswiler offered the credit to members of his History of Mass Communications class, according to sophomore Rebekah McDade. Disturbed by the comment, McDade dropped the class and intends to take the course again next semester with a different professor. "I was offended," McDade said Friday. "I come from a family of military men and women, and the flag and Constitution are really important symbols to me because of my family background."

In an e-mail responding to a request for comment from the Bangor Daily News on Friday, Grosswiler said he thought McDade misunderstood the class discussion, which was intended to elicit thought about the First Amendment. He said he has held this same discussion for years without incident. "I don't intend for students to burn either the Constitution or the flag, and over the years hundreds of students have understood that," Grosswiler wrote.

The incident was made public recently when The Leadership Institute, a Virginia-based nonprofit organization, distributed a press release detailing the classroom discussion. The Leadership Institute was founded in 1979 by Morton Blackwell and has a mission to identify, recruit, train and place conservatives in politics, government and the media, according to the organization's Web site. A field representative for the institute met McDade on Oct. 1 at UM, when she shared her experience and expressed an interest in spearheading a group "Students for Academic Freedom," Blackwell said Friday.

The group's initial goal would be to convince UM to enact a "Student Bill of Rights," as other colleges have, which would protect students from professors who treat and grade students differently based on religious or political beliefs, McDade said. The institute has assisted McDade in the startup process, she said. "When we heard the story, we said `Hey, this is probably worthwhile our doing a news release,'" Blackwell said. "When you expose leftist abuses, it invigorates conservatives. I am sure that the administration, like most administrations we deal with, is not happy when leftist abuses come to life. They far prefer to have students under their thumb and indoctrinated."

McDade said Friday she was a little uncomfortable with the publicity and that it might have gotten out of hand. She said her intent was not to put the focus on Grosswiler, but to give students an opportunity to voice their concerns. A journalism and political science double major, McDade said the first class of her fall semester at UM began with the typical syllabus introduction and class overview. Despite repeated "liberal" comments made by Grosswiler, McDade said, she was not uncomfortable in the classroom until the flag burning comment. "Everyone is entitled to their own political beliefs, and more power to you if you are passionate about it," McDade said.

When Grosswiler listed the extra-credit opportunities, McDade said the class of approximately 50 students grew very quiet, and some questioned whether he was serious. At first, student Kathleen Dame said she thought Grosswiler was joking, but then he went on to explain to the class that burning the flag was not illegal. While Grosswiler approached the topic in a serious manner, Dame said she felt he used it as a tool to educate the class on the First Amendment. "It was pretty outlandish and [he was] trying to prove a point," Dame said Friday. While McDade said she would not be surprised if students followed through with the flag burning, Dame disagreed.

UM spokesman Joe Carr said Friday that Grosswiler's classroom comments were not intended to be taken literally and that extra credit would not be granted for carrying out such activities. A second person in the class did submit a complaint about the lecture, but Carr did not know in what form it was filed. When asked whether the university would pursue disciplinary action, Carr replied, "No." He said Grosswiler has worked at the University of Maine since 1991, is one of the more veteran professors in the department of communication and journalism, and is a "well-respected member of the faculty."

In his e-mail Friday, Grosswiler, who is a former BDN employee, explained that he refers to provocative examples, such as flag burning, to demonstrate the courage necessary to support free expression. "If they don't tolerate thought that they hate, they don't believe in the First Amendment," he wrote. "I applaud the student's exercise of free expression. If she had stayed in the class, I would have given her extra credit for publicizing her opinions."

Source




Disastrous British schools

The 600 worst-performing secondary schools in the country face being taken over by the best or shut down completely under a new drive by the Prime Minister to improve classroom standards. Gordon Brown laid out his vision for education, saying that he wanted to raise educational aspirations across the board to ensure 100 per cent success for young people and close the social-class gap in school attainment.

His priorities include the introduction of cash incentives worth about 10,000 pounds to attract teachers into the toughest schools and a drive to increase the take-up of apprenticeships. Although he recognised improvements in schools in the past decade, the Prime Minister said that there was still much to do. "This is a determined and systematic agenda to end failure," he said. "We will see it through. We will not flinch from the task."

Mr Brown raised the bar for school performance. Previously the Government expected a minimum of 25 per cent of pupils to get five GCSEs at grade C or above. Now schools will be expected to ensure that at least 30 per cent of pupils do so. The number of schools below this level has declined from 1,600, when Labour came to power in 1997, to 670 today [due to grade inflation], but this was still too many. Schools that fall below this threshold will be given annual improvement targets. The worst among them may face "complete closure or takeover by a successful neighbouring school in a trust or federation, or transfer to academy status, including the option of takeover by an independent school".

Mr Brown said that he wanted to ensure that every 18-year-old was either headed for university with good academic qualifications or ready to go to work with vocational qualifications.

As part of a drive to increase the number of apprenticeships from 130,000 today to 400,000 by 2020, employers will receive o3,000 for every apprentice they take on. A clearing service to match aspiring apprentices with businesses would be introduced and there would be a guarantee of an apprenticeship place in every local authority for everybody who wants one.

A new scheme called Teach Next will be set up to attract leading people from other professions into teaching. Those working in the toughest schools will be given "golden hello" payments that could be worth at least 10,000, and all teachers will be encouraged to update their qualifications.

Alan Smithers, Professor of Education at the University of Buckingham, said that the floor target of 30 per cent good GCSE grades, including maths and English, was not the right approach. "Mr Brown has not addressed the question of how the children in the worst-performing schools get there," he said. "If some schools end up with high levels of children from low incomes, they may be doing a very good job with those children but still not meeting the criteria." John Dunford, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, agreed: "Improvement trends, not just raw results, must be taken into account when judging the performance of teachers and schools."

Source





4 November, 2007

Report: Most public students in South are now poor

A rather silly article reproduced in full below. Why is it silly? 1). Flight from mismanaged public schools by those who can afford it is entirely to be expected -- and therefore says nothing definite about the poverty levels in the State concerned overall; 2). Enrollment in school meal programs is a misleading criterion of poverty. Just about anybody who puts their hand up will be enrolled for meals in at least some of the States concerned

For the first time in more than 40 years, the majority of children in public schools in the South are poor, according to a report released Tuesday. In 11 Southern states, including Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida, a significant increase in the number of poor children attending public school has sent district officials scurrying for solutions on how to best educate kids who are coming from economically disadvantaged homes. "The future of the South's ability to have an educated population is going to depend on how well we can improve these students' education," said Steve Suitts, a program coordinator with the Atlanta-based Southern Education Foundation, a nonprofit organization that focuses on Southern educational issues and conducted the study.

In places like Memphis, where roughly 80 percent of students come from low-income homes, that has meant adopting models that address teaching children in poverty. In Florida's Miami-Dade County, where 61 percent of students are on free or reduced-price lunch, that has meant strengthening efforts to improve all students' math and reading scores and curb dropout rates.

Twenty years ago, Mississippi was the only state in the country with such a high percentage of poor public-school students. However, as textile mills shut down in the Carolinas, Appalachian coal mines cut workers and a recession swept the nation, families in the South were especially hard hit, the Southern Education Foundation report found.

Also hitting the South disproportionately were federal cutbacks in anti-poverty programs, the region's higher rates of underemployment and the increased birthrates of Hispanic and Black children, who are statistically more likely than their White peers to be born into poverty. Now, a majority of public-school students are considered low-income in a total of 14 states, including 11 in the South. The South shows tremendous variability, with 84 percent of students considered low-income in Louisiana, 75 percent in Mississippi, 62 percent in Florida and 49 percent in North Carolina.

Source.




British grade inflation unmasked

The millions of pounds spent attempting to raise the standard of English in primary schools has had almost no impact on children's reading skills, according to a devastating critique on the education system. Pupils feel anxious about school tests and are losing their love of reading in the drive to improve literacy levels, according to a review published today by the University of Cambridge.

There was no strong evidence to support the Government's claim that national testing in primary schools drives up standards, the review concluded. It added that the current system could be giving up to a third of children the wrong grades. The researchers, who include some of the country's leading educationalists, called for a significant overhaul of primary school testing and recommended that national standards should be monitored using a sample survey of pupils instead of collecting results for every child in the country at ages 7 and 11.

The research by academics at the universities of Bristol and Durham and the National Foundation for Educational Research represents the latest findings of the Cambridge Primary Review, the biggest inquiry into primary education for decades. The Durham University study, led by Peter Tymms, concluded that the National Literacy Strategy, which includes the "literacy hour" daily English lesson, had made a "barely noticeable" impression on reading standards, which had barely improved since the 1950s.

The report said: "500 million pounds was spent on the National Literacy Strategy with almost no impact on reading levels." The apparently dramatic rise in primary school test results "exaggerated the changes in pupils' attainment levels and were seriously misleading". Professor Tymms has in the past criticised ministers for suggesting that tests do not reflect the true nature of rising standards. But the independent statistics watchdog has backed his conclusions.

Wynne Harlen from the University of Bristol gave warning in his report that primary school national tests were too narrow. "There is considerable research evidence that high- stakes tests put teachers under pressure to increase scores, which they do by teaching to the tests, giving multiple practice tests and coaching pupils in how to answer questions," he said. "There is firm evidence that this results in considerable stress for pupils." The report calculated that pupils spend about nine school days in Year 5 and 13 school days in Year 6 practising for and taking tests. "This is time that teachers and pupils could use in other ways," it said.

Despite these concerns, a third report in the series - this time from the National Foundation for Educational Research - found that standards in English primary schools compared favourably with other countries' results. In reading, English primaries are still in the top group of countries, outperforming France, Germany, Italy, and the US. In maths, there has been significant improvement from 1995 to 2003, with England surpassing schools in the United States, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Scotland, Norway and eight other countries. In science, English schools were also among the top performers in the world. [On the wishy-washy PISA critieria, maybe]

Steve Sinnott, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said that the testing system must be changed. "There is every reason to act to dismantle a testing system whose only effect seems to be to create stress for pupils and teachers," he said. Nick Gibb, the Shadow Schools Minister, said: "Millions of pounds have been spent on education but we haven't seen improvements. As a result, many children, particularly those from poorer backgrounds, are not getting the opportunities they deserve." But Lord Adonis, the Schools Minister, rejected the findings, stating that primary standards were at their highest levels. "This is not an opinion, it is fact," he said.

Source




Terrorist supporters at CUNY feel some heat

No one could accuse Sharad Karkhanis of pulling his punches. The emeritus professor at Kingsborough Community College publishes The Patriot Returns, an online newsletter that critiques the leadership of the faculty union at the City University of New York. The overall thrust of the newsletter is that the Professional Staff Congress, which is an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, is poorly run, focused too much on leftist politics to be effective on behalf of its members.

By carefully monitoring meeting minutes, newsletters, blogs and the like, Karkhanis acts as a self-appointed watchdog of the union. And he can bark. He mixes his analysis with choice nicknames. Barbara Bowen, the president of the union, is dubbed "Dear Leader," after the North Korean dictator.

One of Karkhanis's other favorite targets has been Susan O'Malley, a professor of English at Kingsborough and a member of the union's executive board. The newsletter has dubbed her "The Queen of Released Time" for her ability to win time off from teaching for her union or Faculty Senate duties. O'Malley is now fighting back - she's sued Karkhanis for $2 million, charging him with libel and defamation. To O'Malley, the issue is one of her damaged reputation. Given that faculty unions normally pride themselves on defending the right of dissenting professors - especially those who poke fun or criticize those in power - some professors see the lawsuit as an attack on academic freedom.

The full lawsuit hasn't been filed yet, but preliminary exchanges have focused on comments Karkhanis made about O'Malley and her push to protect the job rights of Mohammad Yousry, who was fired from CUNY and who was convicted (in a controversial case that some believe was unfair) of supporting terrorist activities and of Susan Rosenberg, a CUNY instructor who served jail time for her role in the Weather Underground. In several references, Karkhanis mocked O'Malley for her efforts on behalf of these individuals, whom he dubbed terrorists, and questioned why she was so focused on them.

In comments he says are satire, he referred to O'Malley's "Queda-Camp," to her desire to "bring in all her indicted, convicted and freed-on-bail terrorist friends" to college jobs, and so forth. He wrote that she "does not worry about the `ordinary' adjunct - but she is worried about convicted terrorists."

Prior to filing the suit, O'Malley's lawyer sent Karkhanis a letter demanding that he retract all of these statements or face a lawsuit. Her lawyer, Joseph Martin Carasso, said in an interview Thursday that the suit that has now been filed does not detail the statements that could be challenged later and that there could be many beyond those noted in the letter.

Karkhanis said that he does not believe O'Malley to be a terrorist (or a queen, which he calls her frequently), and that he is using satire to point to larger issues. He also noted that O'Malley has been a prominent player in union politics in New York City, where she has taken numerous public positions on issues - some controversial. And he said that the factual basis behind the terrorism jabs - that O'Malley went to bat for these individuals - has been demonstrated by e-mail messages he posted on his Web site.

Carasso, her lawyer, said it was "not prudent" to comment on the claim that the Web site's references to O'Malley as a supporter of terrorists are satire. He did say, however, that "falsely accusing or alleging someone is a terrorist or is aiding terrorists in the current year, post-9/11, is a serious charge" and that O'Malley has "suffered as a result." He added: "There are people who know her on campus and in the academic community only as a result of the defamatory statements he's made."

The principles of academic freedom are important and are part of why O'Malley is suing, Carasso said. "What the Web site is trying to do is to silence Susan O'Malley by branding her a terrorist, which is the exact opposite of a free debate." (O'Malley did not respond to e-mail messages seeking an interview and Carasso said he was responding on her behalf.)

Several CUNY faculty members who have been critical of their union have been blogging in defense of Karkhanis, arguing that his blog deserves First Amendment protection and suggesting that leaders of the union are nervous about the popularity of his newsletter, particularly given active opposition that came close to unseating the union leadership in the last election and that is expected to mount another challenge soon.

KC Johnson, a Brooklyn College professor, noted that "PSC president Barbara Bowen has suggested that academic freedom protected" the right of a professor to assert in a blog that religious people were "moral retards." Johnson asked: "Will she now similarly apply her flexible definition of the concept, and rebuke O'Malley's attempt to silence Karkhanis?"

Rina Yarmish, chair of mathematics and computer science at Kingsborough and head of the faculty union there, said that she was concerned about the suit against her colleague. "There is no question that she did try to find them jobs," she said of those for whom O'Malley's assistance was criticized. Yarmish said that she did not see how anyone could have read the newsletter's criticisms, however barbed, as meaning that O'Malley is a terrorist. "I don't think anyone interpreted it that way," she said. What Karkhanis did, she said, was "to make public to the faculty certain items that were not well known."

Of the suit, Yarmish said that "an attempt to silence a person for criticizing another individual really is tantamount to denying him the right to academic freedom, which is a mainstay of academic life." Yarmish led the slate that challenged the union leadership in the last election and her critique of the union is similar to that made by Karkhanis. Both complain that contracts have not won economic gains for faculty members, and both complain that an emphasis on political issues has left the union without political clout.

Dorothee Benz, a spokeswoman for the Professional Staff Congress, said via e-mail that the union "is not a party to Susan O'Malley's lawsuit against Sharad Karkhanis. We are unfamiliar with its details and cannot judge its legal merits." As to the newsletter and its author's rights, she said: "The PSC is a strong defender of free speech, and we defend Karkhanis's right to free speech. The PSC itself has been a frequent target of Karkhanis's vitriol, and much of what he has said about us is inaccurate and repugnant, but we have never questioned his right to free speech."

Benz added, however: "Free speech, however, has limits, as any first year law student knows. O'Malley's case concerns one of those limits, where the right to free speech comes up against the harm caused by libelous statements. Whether accusing someone of aiding and training terrorists, in a post-9/11 world, rises to meet the legal standards that define libel is up to the courts to decide."

As for Karkhanis, he said he would not back down, and that he planned to continue his work. His newsletter, he said, "is the only voice to opposition for Barbara Bowen and the union. It is a very strong voice. It is humorous. It has satire. It has pictures. It has news people are not privy to."

Source.

Lawyer Mitchell Langbert has a running commentary on the case. He regards the lawsuit as a breach of that "collegiality" which Leftists often proclaim as an excuse for not hiring conservatives.





3 November, 2007

Britain: Teachers' Muslim dress order

A SCHOOL was yesterday accused of MAKING teachers dress up as Asians for a day - to celebrate a Muslim festival. Kids at the 257-pupil primary have also been told to don ethnic garb even though most are Christians. The morning assembly will be open to all parents - but dads are BARRED from a women-only party in the afternoon because Muslim husbands object to wives mixing with other men. Just two members of staff - a part-time teacher and a teaching assistant - are Muslim.

Yesterday a relative of one of the 39 others said: "Staff have got to go along with it - or let's face it, they would be branded racist. "Who would put their job on the line? They have been told they have to embrace the day to show their diversity. But they are not all happy."

The day aims to belatedly mark Eid, the end of Ramadan. Sally Bloomer, head of Rufford primary school in Lye, West Midlands, insisted: "I have not heard of any complaints. "It's all part of a diversity project to promote multi-culturalism."

Source




Islamic bias in textbook

The parents of children at Houston Elementary School plan to complain to the school board about concerns they have with a seventh-grade history textbook, which they feel pays an undue amount of attention to the teachings of Islam. When Jim Self asked his son last week what he was learning in school, he was surprised to hear his 12-year-old boy say that he was learning about the Prophet Muhammad. That night Jim Self and his wife, Korina, flipped through their son's textbook, "History Alive!: The Medieval World and Beyond," and found at least three chapters dedicated to the Islamic faith, including an entire chapter dedicated to the Prophet Muhammad.

Since then, the couple has started a campaign to remove the textbook from their child's classroom. The book is used in classrooms throughout the district. "I don't think we would have an issue about it if (it wasn't so) in-depth," said Jim Self, who fought in Iraq as a Marine from 2003 to 2004.

Among the Selfs' concerns about the textbook is its definition of the word "jihad," which is described in the book as "the human struggle to overcome difficulties and do things that would be pleasing to God." Other concerns stem from a passage on page 86 of the textbook, which quotes the angel Gabriel's words to the Prophet Muhammad. The Selfs said the textbook mentioned Jesus only twice, and other major religions were only given a paragraph of explanation.

One of the Selfs' biggest concerns, though, is that such detailed explanation of Islam is a violation of the separation of church and state. "If he was in college and he was studying world religions, fine," Jim Self said. The Selfs, who are Christians, worry that their reaction to the textbook will cause people to label them as religious "wackos." "We're just regular people," Jim Self said.

The Selfs don't have an issue with their son learning about other cultures, but said that each culture should be represented equally. "They want to take the Ten Commandments off the steps of the Supreme Court, but you're going to teach my 12-year-old son how to pray?" Jim Self asked.

In fact, the Selfs' asked that their son not be named to avoid unwanted repercussions. But that didn't stop them from telling Houston Elementary's administration that their son will not be participating in history class, a request with which the school has complied. "I was very clear that my son will not be studying these next few chapters," Korina Self said.

However, Anne Cecchetti, curriculum coordinator of instructional media services at Lodi Unified School District, had a different take on the textbook, which she said has been approved by the state board of education. "We're just explaining something. That's education," Cecchetti said. "When you start espousing a religion, that's when you have a problem with the separation of church and state." Cecchetti was surprised that the Selfs had not been informed of Lodi Unified's school board policy that allows any resident or employee to challenge a textbook if they feel the book is inappropriate. Forms for requests for formal reconsideration are on hand at each school site, according to board policy.

Korina and Jim Self have been encouraging other parents to look at the textbook and make their own conclusions. Korina Self said she would be collecting signatures of parents who disapproved of the textbook during the next few days. She also said she would bring the matter to the attention of the school board during its next meeting on Nov. 6.

Parents in Arizona requested that the same textbook, which was being used on a trial basis, be pulled from classrooms in Scottsdale Unified School District because they felt the book contained Islamic propaganda, according to an article in the East Valley Tribune newspaper. TCI, the book's publisher, ended the trial period before the school district could act, saying that the book did not match with new state standards. Natasha Martin, spokesperson for TCI, said the book does comply with California's state standards and it was thoroughly reviewed by the state before being approved. "It is common for parents in the state to raise concerns about the teaching of Islam because they do not know that it is required by the state standards, and they don't understand that all major religions are taught as part of the sixth and seventh grade world history courses," Martin wrote in an e-mail.

Denice Shigematsu, principal at Houston Elementary, also said the book complies with a California state standard requiring students to learn about diverse religions. Shigematsu said she has only received one complaint about the book this year. Shigematsu said she had received two separate complaints about textbooks in previous years, but the complaints were resolved once the parents met with the teacher and discussed how the curriculum was being taught. However, that information isn't comforting to parent Jordi Domenech, who said the text should cover all religions equally, or none at all. That's something, Domenech said, that should be taught at home.

Source




University of Delaware Dumps Brainwashing Program

Late Thursday, University of Delaware President Patrick Harker released on the school’s website a Message to the University of Delaware Community terminating the university’s ideological reeducation program, which FIRE condemned as an exercise in thought reform. He stated, “I have directed that the program be stopped immediately. No further activities under the current framework will be conducted.” Harker also called for a “full and broad-based review” of the program’s practices and purposes. While concerns remain about the University of Delaware’s commitment to free expression, FIRE commends President Harker for his decision to immediately terminate the Orwellian residence life education program. FIRE will have more on this development tomorrow. President Harker’s message is reproduced in full below.

A Message to the University of Delaware Community

The University of Delaware strives for an environment in which all people feel welcome to learn, and which supports intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, free inquiry and respect for the views and values of an increasingly diverse population. The University is committed to the education of students as citizens, scholars and professionals and their preparation to contribute creatively and with integrity to a global society. The purpose of the residence life educational program is to support these commitments.

While I believe that recent press accounts misrepresent the purpose of the residential life program at the University of Delaware, there are questions about its practices that must be addressed and there are reasons for concern that the actual purpose is not being fulfilled. It is not feasible to evaluate these issues without a full and broad-based review.

Upon the recommendation of Vice President for Student Life Michael Gilbert and Director of Residence Life Kathleen Kerr, I have directed that the program be stopped immediately. No further activities under the current framework will be conducted. Vice President Gilbert will work with the University Faculty Senate and others to determine the proper means by which residence life programs may support the intellectual, cultural and ethical development of our students.

Source





2 November, 2007

More proof that America's universities are mini-Soviets -- complete with brainwashing

ALL whites are racist -- and deny it at your peril

A mandatory University of Delaware program requires residence hall students to acknowledge that "all whites are racist" and offers them "treatment" for any incorrect attitudes regarding class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality they might hold upon entering the school, according to a civil rights group.

"Somehow, the University of Delaware seems terrifyingly unaware that a state-sponsored institution of higher education in the United States does not have the legal right to engage in a program of systematic thought reform. The First Amendment protects the right to freedom of conscience - the right to keep our innermost thoughts free from governmental intrusion. It also protects the right to be free from compelled speech," said a letter from Samantha Harris, director of legal and public advocacy for The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education to university President Patrick Harker.

The organization cited excerpts from the university's Office of Residence Life Diversity Education Training documents, including the statement:

"A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. 'The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination..'"

The education program also notes that "reverse racism" is "a term created and used by white people to deny their white privilege." And "a non-racist" is called "a non-term," because, the program explains, "The term was created by whites to deny responsibility for systemic racism, to maintain an aura of innocence in the face of racial oppression, and to shift the responsibility for that oppression from whites to people of color (called 'blaming the victim')."

The "education" regarding racism is just one of the subjects that students are required to adopt as part of their University of Delaware experience, too, FIRE noted. The "shocking program of ideological reeducation," which the school itself defines as a "treatment" for students' incorrect attitudes and beliefs, is nothing less than "Orwellian," FIRE said. The school requires its approximately 7,000 residence hall students "to adopt highly specific university-approved views on issues ranging from politics to race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy and environmentalism." "FIRE is calling for the total dismantling of the program, which is a flagrant violation of students' rights to freedom of conscience and freedom from compelled speech," the organization said.

On a foundation blog, a student noted that one residence assistant told students, "Not to scare anyone or anything, but these are MANDATORY!!" And the training program for those who indoctrinate students includes the order: "A researcher must document that the treatment/intervention was faithfully applied (ex: specific lesson plans were delivered to every student, etc.)." Further, the school requires "a systemic change" as a result of the program, FIRE noted. As one RA told students: "Like it or not, you all are the future Leaders, and the world is Diverse, so learning to Embrace and Appreciate that diversity is ESSENTIAL."

"The University of Delaware's residence life education program is a grave intrusion into students' private beliefs," FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. "The university has decided that it is not enough to expose its students to the values it considers important; instead, it must coerce its students into accepting those values as their own. At a public university like Delaware, this is both unconscionable and unconstitutional."

According to university materials, RAs are instructed to ask students during one-on-one sessions questions such as: "When did you discover your sexual identity?" "When were you first made aware of your race?" and "Who taught you a lesson in regard to some sort of diversity awarness? What was the lesson?" "Students who express discomfort with this type of questioning often meet with disapproval from their RAs, who write reports on these one-on-one sessions and deliver these reports to their superiors. One student identified in a write-up as an RA's 'worst' one-on-one session was a young woman who stated that she was tired of having 'diversity shoved down her throat,'" FIRE said. This particular student responded to the question, "When did you discover your sexual identity?" with the terse: "That is none of your damn business," FIRE said.

Requirements for students include: "Students will recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society," "Students will recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression," and "Students will be able to utilize their knowledge of sustainability to change their daily habits and consumer mentality," FIRE said.

The foundation said students even are "pressured or even required" to make social statements that meet with the school's approval. "The fact that the university views its students as patients in need of treatment for some sort of moral sickness betrays a total lack of respect not only for students' basic rights, but for students themselves," Lukianoff said. "The University of Delaware has both a legal and a moral obligation to immediately dismantle this program, and FIRE will not rest until it has."

A spokesman for the school, contacted by WND, said he was not ready to make a statement about the situation right away. But the foundation's letter to Harker noted, "we have never encountered a more systematic assault upon the individual liberty, dignity, privacy, and autonomy of university students than this program," which "requires students to adopt highly specific university-approved views on issues." "Such utter contempt for the autonomy and free agency of others is the hallmark of totalitarianism and has no place in any free society, let alone at a public university in the state of Delaware," the letter said.

Especially alarming, Harris told WND, is that the school defines learning specifically as "attitudinal or behavioral changes," not acquiring any sort of knowledge and ability. Such thinking "represents a distorted idea of 'education' that one would more easily associate with a Soviet prison camp than with an American institution of higher education," FIRE said. "As another example, after an investigation showed that males demonstrated 'a higher degree of resistance to educational efforts,' the Rodney complex chose to hire 'strong male RAs.' Each such RA 'combats male residents' concepts of traditional male identity,' in order to 'ensure the delivery of the curriculum at the same level as in the female floors.' This language is disturbingly reminiscent of a pivotal scene from George Orwell's '1984,' in which the protagonist's captors tell him that 'The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them.'"

No small danger, FIRE noted, is being presented to the university through such apparent constitutional violations. "Simply put, the residence life education program is a legal minefield," the group said.

One student reacted to the indoctrination with rebellion. On the FIRE blog, he wrote: "Take the issue of homosexuality, and the rights that should or should not be associated with it. As a Christian, I believe that the Bible says homosexuality is wrong, and is a sin against God. As such, I cannot accept it as a legitimate lifestyle. While I accept homosexuals as people, I do not accept their choice as right, and subsequently I do not think that homosexual couples should be given marital rights. I accept that others do not hold the same views as me. But it is wrong that under the Residence Life curriculum and school mandated curriculum that I should made to feel guilty for my views. . It is not the school's right to try to convince me to embrace the values that Residence Life has chosen. Essentially, if I do not change my views, I will be labeled by my RA as not embracing diversity, and not accepting of certain groups, and thus my RA will try all the harder to change me. This is not the school's job, or right."

Source




The Nanny State (the Ninny State?)

Post below lifted from Russ Wilcox. See the original for links



Almost every week I see an article about a school being sued by stupid parents because a teacher or a coach has done something to upset a child's self-esteem. Today in my local Florida newspaper is another story - this one about a volleyball coach who has been fired for "grabbing a student's shirt". In Rhode Island, where I live in the summer, there is an ongoing case about a parent suing (of course, with the help of the ACLU) the principal of a high school for his objecting to the female student wearing a tee shirt that contained an obscenity relating to the President. My goodness, who are these babies that need such protection from slights in life, and how are they going to handle some real problems they will face as adults?

Not only are these parents creating adults who will be perpetual children who fly into tantrums when everything doesn't go just right (and we all suffer the consequences of these adult brats - especially road rage), but they are robbing their children as well. I had a high school track and football coach who threw a baton at me when he thought I was slacking in a race, and who picked me up and hurled me into my practice opponent to show me what the result of a proper block should be. When I got over it, I was proud to receive these harassments; most of my team members had similar experiences, and I was now one of them. Even now, more than 50 years later, my friends and I still remember these incidents involving me and them and that coach with great amusement and affection. (I'm sure that this causes feelings of horror among liberal do-gooders.)

In graduate school and in the Army, group solidarity was built by subjecting the group to some wearisome and, sometimes, humiliating experience. It worked, we became a team, and we got over it, but I shudder to think of what would happen to such a coach, a teacher or a platoon sergeant in today's silly, liberal, mush environment.

There is an excellent book about this phenomenon and its consequences called "The Nanny State" by David Harsanyi , and many others have also noticed this state of affairs; here is an interesting 2002 article on the subject:




Homeschooling growing in Australia

As government schools deteriorate both behaviourally and educationally



THOUSANDS of students are being pulled out of Queensland state and private schools to be educated at home by their parents. The home schooling revolution is being driven by parents looking to shield their children from bullying and undesirable teenage peers. Home education is a "lawful alternative" for students of a compulsory school age, but Education Queensland sets out strict guidelines. Those wishing to go to university have to sit a special tertiary admissions test.

Homeschooling Association of Queensland president Robert Osmak estimates more than 22,000 children are now being home schooled in the state. This is double the figures obtained through a government working reference group in 2002. "I'd say the majority of parents are moving to home schooling out of despair," Mr Osmak said. "Their children have been terribly brutalised. They've been beaten up in the school yard on a regular basis."

Mr Osmak said the mother of a teenage Brisbane student had contacted him this week after her son was hit from behind, pushed to the ground and had his head smashed against the concrete at a state school. "The thug was only suspended for three days. Nothing is being done to protect the children who are being hurt," he said. Mr Osmak said he had written to Education Minister Rod Welford seeking a meeting to discuss some of the complaints by parents to him and streamline access to home schooling.

Mr Welford declined to meet with Mr Osmak, but indicated Education Queensland was providing information to the families and recognised home schooling was a "legitimate option" which parents could apply for on behalf of their children. In a lengthy letter to Mr Osmak, Mr Welford wrote: "Please be assured that my department takes issues of bullying, harassment, violence and discrimination seriously. Schools have codes of student behaviour and behaviour management programs for developing respect and safety towards others."

Mr Osmak, a former teacher with 23 years' experience in the state and private system in Queensland and overseas, has home schooled his nine children. "Two of them are in business, one of boys is employed and three of the girls are at TAFE. The two youngest are still being schooled," he said.

Valma Cronau, who heads a Gold Coast support group, said hundreds of home schooling families met regularly for social functions. She said one of the reasons for home schooling her children was to teach them Christian values. Other factors included removing them from peer pressure, and contact with drugs and "political correctness". To ensure students are being taught properly, EQ requires parents to apply for home schooling on behalf of their children and be granted registration. For continued registration, a parent is required to provide an annual report.

Source





1 November, 2007

New Zealand school incriminates mother for slapping son's hand

Post below lifted from NZ Conservative. See the original for links

There were several interesting aspects to this case:

1. The mother says her family feels traumatised after a visit from CYF and later (for a separate incident), by three policemen. The policemen questioned (interrogated?) her child separately. I wonder if that was without a third party witness? She feels she has been labeled a "child abuser" for a simple smack on the hand.

2. The mother was in favour of the changes to s59. Obviously, she bought the line that this law change was around stopping violent abusers from getting off serious abuse by a legal loophole. It wasn't.

3. She did not want to be named because she 'fears losing her children'. There were a few notable cases in Sweden where parents said they had been threatened with losing their children if they made any aspect of the case public. It is likely that those that will speak out are going to be in the minority. We can expect this theme of blackmailing parents by threatening to remove their children for unfavorable public attention will continue here.

4. We can see that it will not take much for people to 'dob in' parents for a minor smack, and this in turn will create the climate of fear. She was dobbed in by a school teacher when the child said he got a smack, and a neighbour. Had the child been 'educated' that a smack is a bad thing, so he thought he could use it to gain attention, or as an excuse, not realizing the implications?

5. Ruth Dyson, Associate Social Development Minister believes the CYF intervention was not a result of the law change, but 'reflected greater community sensitivity to child abuse'. Firstly, note how a smack on the hand, that leaves no mark, is equated to child abuse by Dyson. Also, reflect that the law change encourages zealots to report such infractions.

Over time, there will be an increase in cases where the punishment of removing children from basically good families will far outweigh the "crime" of physical discipline. Will we learn of these cases however? Will parents be forced to remain silent for fear of never getting their children back?

Update and related link: Dave at Big News has the Mother's side of the story in the form of a letter to Family First.

11:00PM - As usual, scrubone weighs in with a worthy post on this topic, by reminding us how hard Sue Bradford [of the NZ government] tried to sell us that this is all about the violent abusers, not a little smack




Australia: Grammar comeback?

GRAMMAR will return to Queensland classrooms in Years 11 and 12 under a revised English syllabus requiring that students be taught grammar, spelling and punctuation. The Queensland Studies Authority, which is responsible for school curriculums, says a new senior English syllabus to be taught from 2009 will remove the "over-emphasis on critical literacy" used to analyse literature. Critical literacy is a theory used to analyse texts which holds that language is never neutral and should be dissected to reveal how the writer is manipulating the reader.

The changes are based on a report by the executive dean of arts at the University of Queensland, Richard Fotheringham, which recommends the syllabus be more specific about the novels, plays and poems that students should study. The report was commissioned last year by Queensland Education Minister Rod Welford, who has called for "plain English guidelines" and criticised the "post-modern mumbo jumbo" in the state's English syllabus.

In an article in the QSA journal, director Kim Bannikoff said the revised syllabus would encourage teachers to use a range of approaches to texts. "The narrow focus on 'socio-critical elements' will be reframed so students are assessed on their evaluative thinking skills and decision-making in the reading and writing of texts," he says. Mr Bannikoff refused to elaborate, but a QSA spokesman said socio-critical elements were what developed students' ability to critique texts. "The narrow focus in the past refers to the over-emphasis on critical literacy," the spokesman said. Mr Bannikoff said the syllabus would ensure students studied a range of classic and contemporary novels, poems, plays, films and other works. Teachers can expect more specific advice about what to study and assess.

The QSA spokesman said the syllabus would specify the range and balance of texts to be studied rather than setting mandatory reading lists. The changes were greeted with suspicion by the English Teachers Association of Queensland, whose president, Gary Collins, said teachers would resist plans to remove critical literacy from the syllabus. "We certainly believe a critical literacy approach shouldn't dominate all teaching and assessment tasks," Mr Collins said. "But it would be a decidedly retrograde step if it were to be removed entirely."

A spokeswoman for Mr Welford said the minister was considering the report.

Source