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31 October, 2005

A SKEPTICAL VIEW OF THE LATEST BRITISH EDUCATIONAL REFORM PROPOSALS

UK prime minister Tony Blair's latest education reforms, designed to give schools more 'autonomy', have caused something of a controversy within his own government. Blair says that his plans represent a 'pivotal moment' for schools, and the move has been widely seen as an attempt by the prime minister to revive his credentials as a bold reformer. Some, including deputy PM John Prescott, counter that this will flatter the middle classes while disadvantaging the poorest pupils.

Who's right? Who knows. Blair's big reform, with its rhetoric of expanding parental choice and new freedoms from local authority control, clearly is a sop to the middle classes, whose desperate search for control over the minutiae of their child's education has been widely noted and frequently ridiculed. Then again, given the empty character of these reforms, it is doubtful whether poor children will find themselves really disadvantaged, or merely aggrieved. Whatever 'autonomy' means in Blair's dictionary, it does not mean the freedom of schools to provide a decent, rigorous, liberal education - or the ability of parents to choose such an education for their child.

The new proposals, outlined in a White Paper published today, involve allowing schools to opt out of direct control by local education authorities (LEAs), allowing schools themselves to decide how pupils are selected and the courses and teaching methods they offer. Under this new regime, promises Blair, every school 'who want[s] it' will be able to transform itself into 'a self-governing independent state school', backed by businesses, faith organisations and parents' groups (1).

So it's goodbye to the state-run bog-standard comprehensive, and hello to a kind of private education on the cheap, where a certain kind of parent can choose the school he or she wants without shelling out thousands in fees. 'What we do have to do is raise aspiration and get people to think about the education that best suits them, put their parents in the driving seat, as it were, so that parents can exercise real choice', said education secretary Ruth Kelly (2). If you are the kind of parent who wants the best for your kids, goes the argument, you will want to put in the time and emotional energy required to tailor-make their education. And if you want to tailor-make their education, you should be allowed to do so.

But is a good parent one who wants to insinuate him or herself into every detail of a child's education? What if parents would prefer to spend their home life playing with their kids and introducing them to new experiences, rather than hunching over a revision guide or ferrying them from one extra-curricular hot-housing activity to another? Yes, many parents have become quite obsessed with their children's schooling, and demand more involvement. But part of this is because the education system has become so chaotic and mediocre that they do not feel able simply to let the schools do their job; part of it is because politics has narrowed so much that parents increasingly try to live their lives and achieve their ambitions through their chilren. Either way, for the government to pretend that parental involvement in schools is not a necessary evil but something that parents really really want is a typically dishonest manoeuvre.

And what does 'opting out' of state control really mean, anyway? If a bunch of parents were to opine that teachers were spending far too much time and energy on teaching kids about safe sex and healthy eating and scrutinising them for potential signs of trouble at home when they should be teaching Latin instead; if they were to decide that their schools' meals did not in fact have to be healthy, organic, locally sourced and expensive, and that children would do better to provide their own lunches; if they were to argue for a return to frowned-upon methods of classroom discipline, like the odd telling off; if they were to rule that basic literacy and numeracy targets were a waste of time and should be replaced by the whole-class teaching of entire Shakespeare plays and the recitation of multiplication tables..

If one of Blair's new parent-power schools were to decide that what they wanted for their pupils was a traditional liberal education, would they have the freedom and autonomy to go down that route? It's hardly likely, given that for every mention of 'autonomy for schools' the government brings in at least two other policies exercising more central control over what children eat, how teachers teach, how schools structure their timetables and how parents help their children with their homework. When it comes to education, the New Labour administration just can't leave it alone. This is the politicisation of education, and its consequences are equally terrible for all.

There are many criticisms to be made about the comprehensive school system, just as there are about the grammar school system that preceded it. But both, at least, were coherent systems of education, rooted in a distinct educational philosophy. The New Labour approach, by contrast, continually presents education policy as a means to instrumental ends - social inclusion, the politics of behaviour, flattery of its core voters among the middle classes.

Having destroyed the ethos of education, through insisting that schools play a greater role in everything from healthy eating to bullying prevention to teenage pregnancy reduction, the government now intends to abdicate responsibility for a school's performance on the learning front

Source



Anti-bullying programs for all schools

Good if they can make it work

AUSTRALIAN Government schools which don't adopt anti-bullying programs from next year may lose their funding, the Federal Government said today. Education Minister Brendan Nelson, speaking via video to the second conference of the National Coalition Against Bullying (NCAB), said there would be reporting requirements for all schools to show how they were tackling the issue from January. "Research shows that one child in six is bullied by peers each week in Australian schools," Mr Nelson said. "Up to 50 per cent of children have been bullied in the past year. Victims of bullying are two to three times more likely to contemplate suicide than their peers and school bullies are four times more likely to engage in serious criminal activity as adults. "This disturbing research was the catalyst for the development of the National Safe Schools Framework."

A spokesman for Mr Nelson said the Government had allocated $4.5 million to implement the framework. The Government's four year school funding program would be contingent on schools participating. "It is a condition of the Government's $33 billion school funding program that schools implement the anti-bullying strategy," he said.

NCAB chairman and former chief justice of the Family Court, Professor Alastair Nicholson, said victims of bullying were more prone to depression and poor academic results. "For the bully it can mean an equally uncertain life that is likely to involve a breakdown in relationships, possible criminality and a lifetime habit of controlling those who are weaker and more vulnerable, thus perpetuating the problem," he said.

Prof Nicholson said a good friend had recently confided in him about his experience of bullying and sexual abuse at a boarding school during the 1960s. His friend told him it had "left him without a partner, no kids and no trust in love or relationships". "I felt enormously sad when I heard this story," Prof Nicholson told delegates. "But it made it even clearer to me that we are on the right track in tackling this problem and seeking to prevent yet another generation of children being subjected to this sort of treatment."

Source



NYC: Poor kids shun tutoring: "More than 84 percent of poor students in the city's worst schools entitled to free tutoring this year have not signed up for the benefit, according to city Department of Education data released yesterday. Education officials said the agency has received applications for tutoring from 32,307 of the 205,322 kids who are eligible because they attend schools funded by federal poverty aid and failed to meet state standards. Under the No Child Left Behind Law, students in such schools may transfer to a better school or get tutored for free. The percentage of eligible kids whose parents do not sign them up prior to the start of the tutoring service has crept up slightly in each of the last two years, prompting criticism the city does not do enough to promote the benefit".

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

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

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

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30 October, 2005

TEACHING THE TEACHERS IS A FARCE

Educational reformers had reason to take heart earlier this year when Arthur Levine, the president of Columbia University's Teachers College, issued a report blasting the nation's schools of education. You can't go wrong attacking ed schools, even if you're the head of a famous one yourself. Mr. Levine singled out the "inadequate to appalling" graduate programs in educational leadership and called for the abolition of the Ed.D. degree. These programs, he asserted, suffer under the weight of lax admissions standards, weak faculties and inappropriate degree requirements and are often cynically used by their host universities as "cash cows." A rather bold bit of truth-telling on his part; and apparently there are three more such scathing reports coming from Mr. Levine, as part of a project underwritten by the Annenberg, Ford, Kauffman and Wallace Foundations.

Now, one shouldn't get too excited and expect such daring words to generate perestroika in the closed and self-perpetuating universe of ed schools. Mr. Levine deliberately refrains in his report from naming any specific institutions that are failing. Moreover, his enthusiasm for reform has somehow not extended to any effort to get his own institution to eliminate the Ed.D. In fact, Mr. Levine has played his reformist cards so close to the vest that his own faculty and students appear to have been shocked, and bitterly upset, to find out that he believed such things. So real change is going to be glacial at best. But still, it's encouraging to see such a notable figure in the education world begin to acknowledge how much is amiss in the way this country teaches teachers.

In keeping with this candor, we should acknowledge that there are similar deficiencies in graduate education in nearly all academic fields, across the board. Those professors who like to look down their noses at the ed schools and call for their elimination would do well to look in the mirror first. For one of the most striking deficiencies in American graduate training, in fields ranging from history and literary studies to physics and psychology, is the appalling inattention given to teaching--that is, to precisely the work that newly minted Ph.D.s will be expected to engage in for the rest of their careers. If, that is, they're lucky enough to get an academic job at all.

In fact, the problem goes beyond inattention. In the best graduate institutions, students are socialized into the view that teaching is a lowly activity. This view is everywhere reinforced by the willingness of universities to use graduate teaching assistants and untenured adjunct faculty to carry more and more of the instructional load.

It's a wonder that there are as many outstanding college teachers as there are. In my own graduate years, I saw eager-beaver teaching assistants subtly encouraged by their advisers to cool it and spend as little time as possible on their teaching, lest they be taken for unserious and unscholarly lightweights. They were there to do research and eventually to get jobs like. . .well, like those of their advisers, in which the teaching responsibilities are dumped on lowly graduate students.

In effect, most American graduate schools prepare students for jobs that they will never have and fail to prepare them--even conveying disdain--for the jobs that they will most likely have. No area of American higher education is more in need of reform, and none is less likely to receive it. As our chief means of forming college teachers, graduate education could hardly be more dysfunctional if we had set out to make it that way.

The result can be seen in every American college and university, where good teaching is rarely recognized and even more rarely rewarded. But this state of affairs may not continue indefinitely, as a new force for reform could come from the outside, from the consumer. William Strauss and Neil Howe have recently argued in the Chronicle of Higher Education that with tuition and the resulting debt reaching surreal levels, and colleges and universities failing to reverse the post-1960s collapse of academic standards, parents and students are increasingly skeptical about the value of a college education.

Parents born after 1961, Messrs. Strauss and Howe have found, experienced that collapse of standards in their own college educations and are determined not to tolerate another overpriced and underperforming disappointment for their own children. This is the generation that "propelled school choice, vouchers, charter schools, home-schooling and the standards-and-accountability movement." These parents will be more likely to treat higher education as a market, in which smart buyers exercise discretion.

Academics tend to be contemptuous of markets, which is why the for-profit University of Phoenix is their bete noire. But markets will do a better job of sorting these things out, at least in some aspects, than the accredited professionals who, after all, merely respond to a system that rewards time spent on research and scoffs at time spent on teaching. Such incentives need to change.

It will be a good thing if parents and students become more demanding, and it will be a very good thing if more sources of information are made available to them about what constitutes good teaching and where it is taking place--and not taking place. There is a huge and completely unanswered need for college guides that are as frank, intelligent and unsparingly honest about the quality of undergraduate instruction as consumer guides are about, say, cars and stereo equipment. Unless, that is, we think of higher education as nothing more than a credential and a badge, a source of social prestige that we buy for ourselves and our kids. In that case, we will continue to get what we pay for.

Source



BRITAIN: "LEARNING TO LEARN" IS THE LATEST EXCUSE FOR A FAILURE TO TEACH

Contemporary educational thinking is obsessed with the question of method. Hardly a month goes by without weary teachers being exhorted to adopt another brain-based, evidence-informed or student-sensitive technique. At the same time, the once privileged position of knowledge, and by extension the teacher, is being questioned. To raise standards in the future, it is said that the student and his learning must take centre stage.

One proposal that neatly encapsulates the elevation of method and diminution of content is the idea that schools should teach pupils how to learn. Advocates of the 'learning to learn' agenda have been warmly received within policy circles. Schools minister David Miliband has referenced the idea in a number of key speeches, and reports commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) and the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) (3) have addressed the notion. Techniques associated with learning to learn have also been piloted in schools.

The learning to learn agenda can be broken down into two core propositions and one proposal. Proposition one states that the world in which we live is changing with such rapidity as to render traditional canons of knowledge redundant. Following from this, proposition two asserts that teaching that aims to transmit knowledge will fail to equip pupils for the world in which we live. Finally, the supporters of learning to learn propose that schools should adopt teaching techniques that encourage students to focus on their own learning. By doing so, they will develop the skills and attitudes required to adapt to an uncertain future.

If we address these points in reverse order, we will see that there are a number of reasons why educationalists might want to question this agenda.

A vast array of teaching techniques has been included under the banner of learning to learn. These include generic approaches to marking student work and providing them with structured feedback, as well as teaching methods which claim to be based on neuroscience. Strategies that attempt to modify directly students' attitudes towards learning, as well as methods of organising classroom activities using real-life problems and extended projects, have also featured.

Some of the approaches are quite sensible. In terms of assessment it is right, for example, that teachers should explain their grading and provide pupils with a sense of how their work might be improved. Equally, practitioners must take care that the messages they transmit, both formally and informally, do not encourage the less able to reach the conclusion that they are incapable of development.

But while some of these approaches have been tested with impressive results, a recent report produced for the DfES makes it clear that there is nothing close to a unified, commonly accepted definition of learning to learn. Rather, there exists a miscellaneous set of attributes and approaches that have been grouped together on the arguably tenuous basis that they all encourage pupils to consider the how, as opposed to the what, of learning. A concept this baggy is unlikely to make for clear curriculum development.

While the overall coherence of the notion of learning to learn might be questioned, it is possible that it could become more focused and refined through the process of implementation and evaluation. This project would have a sound footing if the rest of the learning to learn agenda were valid. So is it true that existing forms of teaching ill-equip pupils for the future? And is the world in which we live changing so fast as to call into question the position of received knowledge?

The advocates of learning to learn evidently take a rather dim view of forms of schooling in which the teacher and their subject-knowledge have been the organising principle. The suggestion that teachers should address how students learn implies that this has not been a concern in the past. Some advocates of learning to learn seem to believe that many teachers exhibit a rather self-indulgent preoccupation with their own knowledge. Others argue that the dialogue between teachers and students has been frustrated by the lack of a commonly held educational vocabulary.

Certainly, there is some truth to the claim that our ability to make explicit the process of learning has been encumbered by the collective ignorance of educational ideas. But the suggestion that teachers have been so fixated with their knowledge as to have shown little regard for their pupils' learning is little more than a stereotype. This might describe ineffective teachers, but the effective delivery of subjects necessarily draws teachers into a discussion of the means of education, be that study skills, revision techniques, or the procedures that are specific to their discipline. In doing so, teachers involve their pupils in a discourse about their learning, even if they haven't dubbed it learning to learn.

This leaves us with the final component of the learning to learn agenda: the notion that rapid change is making received knowledge redundant. Advocates of learning to learn concede that some rudimentary areas of knowledge should still be taught, such as the practical elements of maths and English. And they acknowledge that most students only learn about their learning in response to significant content, even if it's of little practical or lasting value. But no purpose is served, they conclude, by compelling students to engage with more challenging areas of the curriculum, such as Shakespeare, if this results in them developing negative attitudes towards learning in general.

I would suggest that advocates of learning to learn have got it wrong on both counts. If we accept the growing rapidity of social change - which is unlikely given the parlous state of contemporary politics - then knowledge in fact becomes more, not less, important. In a period of flux it may be true that past ideas provide no easy solutions to the problems of the present, but they enable one to frame these problems in their specificity. In contrast, ignorance leaves one lacking the perspective required to differentiate between problems that are old and resolved and those that are really new and require innovative thinking.

And while the proponents of learning to learn are right to suggest that many students find the more advanced areas of the curriculum remote and unforgiving, they are wrong to argue that we should organise on this basis. The fact that many students experience aspects of the curriculum in this way is a sad testimony to their diminished conception of themselves and the failure of the schooling they have experienced. Our response should be to make a more compelling case for knowledge and general education. And to make this case convincing, we need to do more than appeal to the past or to the notion of eternal truths.

(From Spiked)

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

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

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

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29 October, 2005

DISDAIN FOR KNOWLEDGE

Cognitive scientists are generally agreed that one of the most important faculties of the human brain and its associated sensory apparatus is the ability to detect patterns. It is patterns that make the world intelligible, that carry meaning, that make it possible for the past to be a guide to the future. So primordial and so powerful is this faculty, however, that it brings with it also a large capacity for error, for imputing patterns where there are none, or at least none that are meaningful.

It is with that in mind that I hesitate to claim that I have detected a pattern in some things that I have read lately. But denying that there is a pattern in these bits of published news and opinion strains my bump of skepticism. See what you think.

1. A student at the University of Iowa published an opinion piece in the campus newspaper titled "On schooling's useless lessons." The upshot was that she is in college to qualify for her chosen profession and cannot understand why she is required to take courses in subjects she deems irrelevant to her goals. Listen:

"[M]ost students aren't going to be mathematicians, historians, or chemists. So why do we have to take these classes?...

"Not only did the gen-ed classes waste my time and money, but they also hurt my GPA..Statistics and astronomy bored me, so I opted not to attend class and neglected to study for them..As it turned out, my GPA was below3.0 after my first year. I had to take summer classes to raise it..I cannot imagine what I would have done if I were not admitted [to my chosen professional course]. I would have had to change my major.

"How is this fair?"

If that doesn't break your heart, you're made of sterner stuff than I.

2. A week later an AP wire story appeared in my local newspaper, informing me that an heiress to the Wal-Mart fortune has surrendered her 2004 degree from the University of Southern California after a classmate revealed that she had done the Walton scion's homework for over three years, netting about $20,000 for her efforts.

3. Same day. New York magazine published an article that opens thus:

"This story begins, as it inevitably must, in the Old Country.

"At some point during the tenth century, a group of Jews abandoned the lush hills of Lucca, Italy, and -- at the invitation of Charlemagne -- headed for the severer climes of the Rhineland and Northern France."

The author is a frequent and, presumably, trusted contributor, and New York magazine is, so far as I know, a respectable publication. So who was responsible for fact-checking? If you haven't caught it yet, here's the problem: Charlemagne died in 814 CE. No one is expected to know that particular fact, but many generally educated persons might recall that he was crowned Holy Roman Emperor at Christmas in 800. This would make his survival into the tenth century highly unlikely on the face of it.

Two points define a line; are three sufficient to establish a trend? Let me just note that the student's intended major was journalism; that the heiress's degree was from the Annenberg School for Communication at USC; and that, obviously, the New York author is a working journalist. One, already in the business, evidently doesn't know a simple fact of history (and didn't check it out). The other two have made quite manifest, in their distinctive ways, their disdain for knowledge.

But my aim is not to disrespect journalists or the schools in which they train. The problem I am suggesting is far wider. Thus my last piece of evidence:

4. Same day. The Wikipedia, an online project to create an encyclopedia by means of contributions and editing by volunteers, irrespective of their knowledge of their subjects or ability to write coherently, has just lately begun to come to grips with the fact that some substantial proportion of the articles thus generated are substandard. They have therefore launched "Project Galatea," whose aim is to have still more self-selected volunteers impose "large-scale, sweeping stylistic improvements." Note that the improvements hoped for are stylistic, not a matter of accuracy or adequacy. In the "Philosophy" of the project, prospective stylists are told this:

"While there is no need to be an expert on the article you're working on (in fact, there are some advantages to being completely ignorant of the subject to start with), by the time you're done, you will have at least a working knowledge of the topic."

Another point, spang on my line. How worried ought I to be? How worried are you?

Here is what I wonder: Whence this notion that citizens, especially those who aspire to careers of informing the rest of us, need not bother with what once would have been considered the common body of knowledge? And where on earth did the idea arise that knowledge might actually be a hindrance?

I do not blame computers or the Internet. Well.except for one thought that gives me pause. How is it that these tools that were to make achieving our lofty goals easier have instead been commandeered to move the goal posts?

What or whom then to blame, if any? Nicholas Carr has written lately in his blog "Rough Type" about the other-worldliness of much of the literature of the World Wide Web and the simple, communal, yet transcendent virtues it is imagined to foster. He notes, too, the strong preference for the amateur over the professional. I'm inclined to see this as a particular instance of a more general phenomenon, the replacement of the adult by the adolescent as the paradigm citizen.

Adolescents already know all they need to know. They are uninterested in what may have come before them and confident that it did so for naught. They see instantly into the heart of the world's problems and believe them to be simple of solution. They value sincerity, authenticity, getting real, over experience or effort. Approved attitude trumps informed opinion with them, and does so by means of social pressure rather than by, say, demonstrated efficacy. And their sense of entitlement can sometimes border on solipsism.

More here



MORE ON THE NYC DISASTER

From top down, starting with Chancellor Klein, the Mayor has relied almost exclusively on non-educators to set policy about matters in which they have no expertise, but impose with raw and unmonitored power. They have abolished curriculum and replaced it with a single, mandated teaching style and methodology that has been discredited and despised by almost all educators, except those whose careers tend to prosper and wallets fatten by its advocacy.

The public has a stake in the demoralization of the entire public school professional staff citywide. Some people see educators' universal loathing for Chancellor Klein as nothing more than spoiled unionists griping because someone is finally standing up to them and showing them who's boss.

It is bad enough to show contempt for teachers in every way imaginable, plus more that nobody ever dreamed possible. But worse yet is the devastating damage being done to a whole generation of children, whose alleged educational gains under Bloomberg and Klein are fraudulently manufactured by their corrupt consultants and press agents.

The reign of Chancellor Klein, under union and sanity-busting Mayor Bloomberg, has formed many unholy alliances, among the most spectacular of which is Columbia University Teachers College. In the past, its admirers hailed TC as the high temple of progressivism. Throughout the twentieth century, with only minor exceptions for deviant professors who strayed from the party line, Teachers College could reliably be counted on to instill generations of new teachers and administrators with pure progressivist doctrine. In recent years, those who entered its hallowed halls were greeted by a bronzed head of John Dewey, the patron saint of Teachers College. Given its devotion to progressivist principle. Teachers College became home to critics of standardized testing and standardized instruction. With the advent of the Bloomberg/Klein era of education reform, Teachers College has abandoned almost all of its progressivist principles in exchange for power over the school system's instructional program and millions of dollars in grants and contracts.....

Teachers College, though it has been paid to help set the tone, is not wholly to blame for some of the bizarre and unprecedented antics of the current Department of Education. In the last hour since I started this essay for the New York Resident, I got two phone calls from bewildered teachers. One is a thirty-four year master teacher in Region 3 who was formally censured by the principal because he was sitting at his desk taking attendance during a ninety-minute class session. Teachers are under orders to be circulating around the room every minute. This teacher has for decades spent 6 hours after school for no extra pay, every day, communicating with parents, planning lessons and processing papers.

The second received a letter in his file reprimanding him for asking why it is required to use a stopwatch issued by the DOE to time precisely the mandated length of each lesson. Mayor Bloomberg is no more the "education mayor" than China is a "people's republic." The schools are suffering from a reign of terror and our children have been made into caged birds that can neither fly nor sing.

(Excerpt from another post by RedHog)



UK: Asbo bars London teenager from going to school: "A teenager has become the first youth in Britain to receive an anti-social behaviour order that bans him from going to school. The two-year Asbo on Gary Addy, 16, stops him from going within 50 metres of any educational premises in the east London borough of Newham unless he has prior permission from the headteacher. Police and officials from Newham council imposed the order last Thursday after staff at Eastlea community school in West Ham complained that the teenager assaulted them with eggs and water in July."

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

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

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

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28 October, 2005

How Do We Get Students Ready for College?

A lament frequently heard by college professors is that many incoming students are not ready for college-level work. Even though what passes for “college-level work” isn’t what it used to be at many institutions, professors still report that their students struggle with reading, writing, and basic math. (Lest one think that such laments are only heard at unselective, fourth-tier schools, Patrick Allitt’s book I’m the Teacher, You’re the Student, which recounts Professor Allitt’s difficulties in teaching American history at Emory University, will serve as an antidote.) The question is, what can be done about this problem?

In the October 14 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Charles B. Reed (chancellor of the Cal State system) and Kristin Conklin (a program director at the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices) address that question (“Enrolling in College, Ready or Not”). Reed and Conklin write,

After they are admitted, students must meet institutional placement standards, measured by tests that colleges require them to take. Most of those tests focus on language skills like critical reading and writing, as well as mathematics, because those skills are the foundation of further learning. If a student can’t meet certain standards, he or she must take remedial or developmental education before moving on to regular college-level course work.

Quite true, but many students who manage to pass the placement tests still have serious academic deficits, and it is an article of faith that passing a semester in remedial (“developmental” is a lovely euphemism, but I decline to use it) English or math will suffice to get a student ready for regular college studies.

The authors recognize that the solution to the problem does not lie within higher education, but rather in the years that precede it. K-12 academic standards have been eroding for years, thanks to the “best practice” notions widely taught in American education schools. Required reading on that depressing subject includes Rita Kramer’s Ed School Follies, Martin Rochester’s Class Warfare, and Cherie Pierson Yecke’s The War Against Excellence. Today, your typical high-school graduate believes that school is just a rather boring, obligatory use of his time that is tolerable only because it leads to the paper credentials necessary to unlock the door to high-paying employment. Put a lot of young people with that attitude in a classroom and a professor has little choice but to water down the material and make sure he keeps the kids entertained. On that point, one more book to read—Generation X Goes to College by Peter Sacks.

Here is what Reed and Conklin propose: “[E]ach state needs to agree on one consistent set of readiness standards for all public higher education within that state. Otherwise schoolteachers and students cannot have a clear, focused view of what being prepared for college means and how to achieve that.” A quintessentially bureaucratic approach—have public officials come up with a set of standards.

It isn’t by accident that government schooling is the way it is. Millions of teachers are doing things exactly as they believe they should—and want to. The soft, undemanding approach to education suits most of them perfectly. Why, for example, is it now rare to find a teacher who will take a red (or purple or any other color) pen to a student essay and give it severe, line-by- line scrutiny? Without that, students simply won’t learn to write well. Alas, the idea that there are rules for good writing is now regarded by writing theorists as the stuff of Neanderthals. And besides that, grading essays takes a lot of time and criticizing the way students write is apt to upset them . Even if the teacher were capable of giving students a useful writing critique (something we should not assume), it’s much easier not to bother.

State “college readiness” standards are bound to become a political game in which the end-product will be an impressive-sounding document that won’t accomplish anything. The officials and interest groups involved will find a way to say that students need to be proficient in English and math that will take up enough pages to justify all the time that went into writing the document. Whatever the standards ultimately say, the teaching of the 3Rs will continue pretty much as it has in the past. Public education, after all, is not like a business where people need to worry about losing their jobs if they don’t perform.

Speaking of public education (or more accurately, government schooling), the complaints about students who are not college-ready almost always pertain to those who have spent their K-12 years in government schools. Most children who have either attended private schools or who have been home-schooled are well prepared for anything college professors throw at them. Sometimes, in fact, those students find that college courses are too simple and boring. Private schools don’t have elaborate standards for “college readiness,” nor do parents who home-school. Somehow, though, the results are much better when the focus is on learning rather than on meeting bureaucratic standards.

Several years ago the writer Jonathan Rauch made the case for “enlightened defeatism” with respect to big government. Much as I want to hope that somehow government schooling will change its stripes and start graduating lots of students who are eager and well equipped to learn in college, I strongly suspect that enlightened defeatism is in order about that. No matter what conferences are held and what standards are written, freshman classes at most colleges and universities will continue to be largely composed of “disengaged students,” as Professor Paul Trout calls them. (See his article “Disengaged Students and the Decline of Academic Standards,” Academic Questions, Spring 1997.)

For decades educational “progressives” have been promoting the idea that institutions need to adjust to the supposed needs and desires of the students. That is the implicit message in all the talk about “learning styles” and “multiple intelligences”—schools must conform to their students. To suddenly do an about-face and insist that students and teachers must adjust to some definite set of college-readiness standards is simply too jarring to imagine.

Source



British schools 'should be allowed to punish disruptive pupils'

What an original thought!

TeachersS must be given explicit legal rights to punish pupils and to restrain unruly children by "reasonable force", ministers will be told today. A government task force on behaviour in schools will say that present powers to maintain discipline are too vulnerable to legal challenge. It will also press for schools to be given rights to seek orders from magistrates against any parents who are unwilling to co-operate with teachers. "Some parents and carers need to be challenged to take their responsibilities seriously," the report by 13 senior head teachers will say.

The group will call on Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, to introduce a national charter that will spell out the rights and duties of parents, pupils and teachers in keeping order in schools. Ms Kelly set up the behaviour task force this year to bring forward proposals for enforcing "zero tolerance" of indiscipline and classroom disruption. The group, led by Sir Alan Steer, the headmaster of Seven Kings High School, in Ilford, Essex, will publish its recommendations today. Details were leaked to The Times Educational Supplement.

The task force said that teachers' powers to act "in loco parentis" against unruly pupils were open to challenge. It said: "The Government should introduce a single, new piece of legislation to make clear the overall right to discipline pupils."

It welcomed the Violent Crime Reduction Bill, which gives head teachers the power to search pupils for weapons without their consent, but said that additional powers might be necessary to enable them to search pupils for stolen property and drugs.

The recommendations come two days after David Bell, the head of Ofsted, reported a slight improvement in behaviour at schools in his annual report. However, he said that disruption remained "a major problem" for some secondary schools.

When Sir Alan met Tony Blair to discuss the work of his task force, he told the Prime Minister: "We do not want to produce a report that just ends up in the filing cabinet." The report recommends changes to procedures for dealing with disruptive pupils. Parents should retain the right to appeal to an independent panel against a school's decision to expel their child. But panels should be prevented from reinstating pupils on procedural technicalities. The task force said that all schools should develop policies on the use of mobile phones by pupils. The National Union of Teachers backed the recommendations

Source



Sticking to the book

Books are better for student study than digital detritus

Yesterday The Sydney Morning Herald quoted HSC students denouncing critics of Year 12 English courses - we think they meant us. Apparently because "the media lies" it is important for young people to know what the reptiles of the press are up to, the students said. Presumably by studying episodes of the D-Generation's Frontline TV series, which is on the NSW syllabus. Or the book jacket that students in that state can study. Not the book, just the cover and publisher's blurb. Or any of the modern movies that are on course lists around the country. Or blogs and other digital resources, including the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission website - which is also set for study in NSW, even though the organisation no longer exists.

Using literature to learn how to critically analyse what authors are up to should be a core component of any English course. But the world is not short of good books suited for the task. Books - not blogs, not digital ephemera, but books, the artefacts that really inquisitive students will find behind the paperback cover set for study. Reading a whole book takes time and discipline, and it is about the best way imaginable to learn how to analyse authorial intent and interpret their arguments.

But all that examining the ATSIC site will do is expose students to propaganda from an organisation that in the end represented only itself. There are all sorts of objective sources that set out the condition of indigenous Australians that could be provided to support any of the many books by Aboriginal authors about the poison of racial prejudice. The study of ATSIC is irrelevant. And The Australian believes that studying the D-Generation for advanced English courses betrays the educational interests of students and will appal parents who want kids to develop a love of literature. And if students are really interested in analysing the motives of powerful organisations, here is a question to critically consider: "The study of senior school English is shaped by a contempt for the Western canon and a belief held by education theorists that all texts are equal. Discuss."

The above is an editorial from "The Australian" newspaper (a national daily) of 22 October

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

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

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

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27 October, 2005

FASCIST CALIFORNIA TEACHER'S UNION

Below is a letter from two members of the CTA to all other members

In every public school in California, we teach our students about our right to freedom of speech. We teach them the value of being able to disagree, but still respect the opinions of those you disagree with. Apparently, freedom of speech is not something our union, the California Teachers Association (CTA) supports.

We wrote to you last week because we strongly disagreed with the political and financial decisions being made by the leadership of the CTA. The purpose of our email was to express a legitimate opinion and to inform our colleagues of our concerns.

Never in our wildest imagination did we believe that the CTA would threaten us with jail time for exercising free speech! Two days after we sent our email, the CTA announced that it was seeking to press criminal charges against us. This is what was reported in the Sacramento Bee:

"CTA Chief Counsel Beverly Tucker sent letters Friday asking the district attorneys of Sacramento, Alameda and Los Angeles counties to investigate the e-mails and `take appropriate action including filing criminal charges.'" (10/15/05)

This is what happens when you challenge the political agenda of our union's leadership.

They do not tolerate a different point of view and instead threaten us with criminal charges because we dare disagree with them. We will never stop speaking out on what we believe and no amount of threat or intimidation will deter us.

We can only assume CTA leadership reacted this way because we are telling you information they don't want you to know. For example, did you know that the CTA has already spent over $60 million THIS YEAR ALONE on political consultants and television ads? They have spent so much money on politics that they are seeking a $40 million loan just to keep providing basic services to teachers. According to a sworn affidavit by CTA Controller Carlos Moreno, an inability to get this loan would "cause great financial harm to CTA and affect CTA's ability to continue to deliver its current level of services to members over the long term."

How is it that our current leadership allowed our union to spend so much money on politics that it must now put itself even deeper in debt in order to provide actual services for teachers? Did you know that our leadership had a private meeting in June where they voted to raise our dues by $180 in order to cover the debt created by all of this political spending?

Our union leadership has grown quite adept at wasting our money on politics. In the past few years alone the CTA has spent over $100 million on political consultants and television ads supporting ballot measures that have NOTHING TO DO WITH EDUCATION!

Here are just a few examples, and you decide for yourself if you agree or disagree with how our leadership spends OUR MONEY. Did you know that CTA:

*Spent $10,000 fighting AGAINST the Three Strikes Law?
*Spent more than $2 million this year on ballot measures dealing with prescription drugs, state energy policy and an abandoned effort to regulate the way people buy cars?! (WHAT DOES THAT HAVE TO DO WITH TEACHING???!!!)
*Spent more than $2 million in 2004 in support of a losing ballot measure that would have made it easier to raise taxes?!
*Spent close to $3 million last year in a botched effort to roll back Prop. 13 and raise property taxes?! Then tried to do it again this year, spending more than $2 million, and botched that one too! (AN UTTER WASTE OF YOUR MONEY!)

Now what on EARTH does state energy policy, and shopping for cars, have to do with education? And what does it get us, as teachers in the classroom? Not a thing.

The millions they wasted on things like that abandoned car shopping campaign sure could come in handy in my classroom. Or yours.

As we mentioned, the CTA leadership is seeking criminal charges against us for sending you these emails. Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with our view of the union leadership, we hope you will at least support our right of free speech to voice our opinion.

More here



AUSTRALIA'S LITERACY LAG

IS there a literacy problem with senior school English students? Not so, according to Mark Howie, head of the English Teachers Association NSW. In a paper posted on the Australian Association for the Teaching of English's website, under Latest News, Howie argues the literacy crisis is a media beat-up and that critics' concerns "have no basis in fact".

Never mind the research carried out by academics at the Australian Defence Force Academy, where 600 undergraduates had to be tested as many found it impossible to write a well structured and grammatically correct essay. Howie also appears unaware of the admission by Roslyn Arnold, dean of education at the University of Tasmania, that as many as one in 10 students undertaking teaching courses need remedial lessons as a result of inadequate writing skills.

As to why many students, after six years of secondary school, are at risk, one needs to go no further than looking at how English teaching has changed through the years and how Year 12 is examined. The NSW English (Standard) and English (Advanced) Paper I is a case in point. This week's paper provides ample evidence of how English has been dumbed down and how examinations are so user-friendly that all can succeed. Not only does the paper include numerous visual images, as writing is no longer considered privileged, but, in question one, where students are asked about a particular book, all they are asked to look at is the front and inside covers.

In addition to the concern that the comprehension questions are more suited to Year 10, also troubling is that questions such as "In what ways might the front book cover and inside book cover appeal to a potential reader" ignore the fact there may be some students wanting to argue the counter case.

The way section III is structured is also flawed in that not only are the questions so broad and nebulous that students can easily use pre-prepared answers, but none of the questions ask students to critically analyse individual texts in any substantial way.

Adrian Mitchell, head of the department of English at the University of Sydney, describes Paper I as bland and like "cold gravy". He also suggests that many of the illustrations in the paper are facile and unimaginative and that, in attempting to meet the needs of all, the paper fails to stimulate and challenge better performing students.

An interesting exercise is to compare Year 12 NSW English Paper I with equivalent papers produced during the mid-1990s. Not only did the 1995, 1996 and 1997 papers contain fewer pictures and images, with the result that students were expected to read more, but the material and the questions were more challenging.

Being able to use pre-prepared answers because of generic questions and shifting the emphasis from close textural analysis to discussing texts in terms of broad themes and ideas is also a criticism of the NSW Advanced English paper.

No matter what type of text, whether poems, plays, novels, multimedia websites, speeches or hypertexts, the same question is asked on the basis that they are of equal worth. Thus a Paul Keating speech and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission website are treated in the same way as Shakespeare's King Lear and Jane Austen's Emma.

It should be noted that the malaise represented by the adoption of what Baden Eunson, an academic at Monash University, describes as English lite, is not restricted to NSW. On comparing what is expected of students, as represented by present examination papers and what was expected from Victorian Year 12 students during the '60s, Eunson makes the point that an emphasis on teaching and assessing correct grammar, punctuation and spelling has largely disappeared.

The draft English examination being circulated as part of Western Australia's extension of outcomes based education to the senior years also represents a watered-down, critical literacy view of English. Questions such as, "Write a set of instructions for the use of the 21st century" and "Write a contribution to an online chat room in which you discuss something (for example, sport/project/hobby/film/performance/event/gaming community)" appear to have little substance or worth.

As one of the teachers contributing to the Perth-based PLATO website says: "What level of language expression, grammar and spelling would be acceptable for writing in a chat room? A student could argue that any old rubbish is acceptable, 'cz thts wot eye rte in a cht rom'."

Source



Tennessee: No. 1 reason teachers ousted is sex : "Sexual impropriety is the No. 1 reason teachers lose their licenses in Tennessee. Two in five teachers whose licenses were revoked by the State Board of Education from 2003 through the present were accused of sex-related violations or inappropriate contact with students, according to a Tennessean review of state records. In about a third of the 35 sex-related revocations, teachers who had licenses in more than one state lost their Tennessee license when they got into trouble somewhere other than Tennessee. New rules passed by the state board last week would also allow for administrators to lose their licenses if they fail to report teachers who resign after allegations emerge. The idea is to prevent problem teachers from moving from one district or state to another."

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

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

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

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26 October, 2005

BIG SHOWDOWN OVER BRITISH EDUCATION: BLAIR SOUNDS GOOD

But can he make it happen? Three different reports below:

Prime Minister Tony Blair has unveiled plans for a huge shake-up of state education - describing it as a "pivotal moment" for his last term in office. The reforms will be "irreversible" and driven by the needs of parents and pupils. They will also free schools from local authority control, he said. Teachers will have an "unambiguous right" to discipline children, he said.

But reports say Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott fears the plans will disadvantage the poorest pupils.

Public school educated Mr Blair said he had been lucky enough to have "a very privileged education", during his speech to parents in Downing Street. Outlining the reforms, he said: "We will continue to put more money into our schools, but we will also complete the reforms we began so that in time we will have a system of independent, self-governing state schools with fair funding and fair admissions." The changes would be "driven above all by the needs of pupils, the wishes of parents and the dynamism of the best teachers", he said. "We want to see that change being made irreversible."

A White Paper, to be published on Tuesday, will allow schools, not councils, to decide how pupils are selected and the courses and teaching methods they offer.

But Mr Prescott fears the plans will see the poorest pupils paying the price for making schools independent and giving parents more choice.

BBC education correspondent Mike Baker said the reforms would see the majority of schools becoming "trust" schools. These would have the "freedoms of city academies and a more arm's-length relationship with local councils", he said. They would also be backed by businesses, faith organisations and parents groups. Under the plans, local education authorities would have a more strategic role, monitoring standards and commissioning services rather than running schools.

The paper will also see transport subsidies for poorer pupils and school choice advisers to help parents select schools.

They would also make it easier for independent groups to open state funded schools.

Mr Prescott has questioned whether the 17 new city academies championed by Mr Blair have raised standards. He is said to be worried about plans to bring some of the ethos of public schools to the state sector.

Ex-Labour education secretary Baroness Morris said she agreed that head teachers should have the right to manage their own schools. But she argued that Britain's most successful schools should federate with mediocre schools, giving them the leadership expertise they need to raise their standards

(From The BBC)



Blair takes a cane to the Left over school reform

TONY BLAIR has set the stage for the biggest showdown with the Left in his last term of office by promising to force through changes to enable state schools to match the best in the private sector. As left-wing MPs began mobilising against the schools White Paper, which is to be published today, Mr Blair made it plain that he would face down his critics and introduce legislation early next year to create "irreversible change" and "real parent power".

Although John Prescott is among ministers who fear that the plans might disadvantage the poor, Mr Blair said in Downing Street yesterday that complaints from the Left that the Government was privatising public services and giving too much to the middle classes were a version of the old "levelling-down mentality that kept us in opposition for so long".

Criticism from the Labour back benches was swift. Ian Gibson, the MP for Norwich North, said that he was "dismayed that all the good work that is being done could be destroyed by the changes that are taking place. "There will be a lot of people disquieted about that and there will be a lot of lobbying going on to try to row back on some of the proposals." Members of the far-Left Campaign Group are also reported to be spoiling for a fight.

Mr Blair, who appears to be relishing one of his final reforming battles, confirmed the key plans, disclosed by The Times last Monday. He said that the proposals could be taken "to their final stage". All schools are to have the same freedoms as city academies. All will be able to take on external partners and no one will be able to veto parents starting new schools or new partners coming in simply because there are surplus places locally. Mr Blair admitted that in health and education there would be, in a sense, a market. "The parent and the patient will have much greater choice. But it will only be a market in the sense of consumer choice, not a market based on private purchasing power. And it will be a market with rules. Personal wealth won't buy you better NHS service. The funding for schools will be fair and equal."

Mr Prescott has said at least twice in Cabinet that the new generation of schools run by independent charitable trusts with the power to set their own curriculums and teaching methods was promoting the "public school ethos" and discriminating against the poor. Cabinet sources said that he had secured some changes to the proposals, and that he was prepared to go along with the White Paper.

Yesterday Mr Blair insisted that the reforms would help the poorest inner-city pupils because they were aimed at schools that were underperforming and aimed at giving "as good an education in the state sector as anyone can buy in the private school system". "I have no doubt that the changes will be controversial in certain respects, but I have also no doubt that they are right for the country, and in particular right so that every child in our country, not just those from a privileged background, gets the best chance to succeed," he told parents. Mr Blair said that in two years almost all secondaries would be specialist schools, and there would be 200 academies by 2010. Academies could provide a legal model for independent state schools, with independent schools allowed to join the state system.

Under the plan it would be easier for parents to complain or to replace the school leadership. They would also have greater choice and have a say on the curriculum, meals and uniform. It should be possible to reform failing schools more rapidly, and schools should be free to seek partners such as charities, and businesses.

(From The Times)



The historical background

TONY BLAIR is said to enjoy comparisons between himself and Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister but, on schools at least, he has more in common with John Major. In September 1995 Mr Major declared that "all state schools should gain the benefits of becoming self-governing, independent schools free to parents". Mr Blair said yesterday: "We want every school to be able quickly and easily to become a self-governing independent state school."

Mr Major ran out of time, hampered by party divisions over his plan to make schools grant-maintained. Mr Blair faces opposition in Cabinet and on Labour's backbenches to his proposals. Will he also run out of time? The Prime Minister dismisses the comparison of his plans with grant-maintained schools, arguing that the latter enjoyed unfair privileges, "creating a two-tier system". The same criticism is levelled against his plans by John Prescott and Labour's traditional wing. The "parent power" reforms, they say, favour elite schools while condemning the poor to sink schools.

However, Mr Blair is clearly conscious of the impending judgment of history on his commitment of "education, education, education". His rhetoric to parents yesterday suggested that he believes this latest Education White Paper will fix the problems facing schools for all time. Government's role in future, Mr Blair said, will be to remove itself from the education system "except to help where help is needed". Will Mr Blair's successors be able credibly to promise that education is their priority when power resides in the relationship between 24,000 schools and their parents?

The White Paper faces two big questions if it is to achieve such revolutionary ends. Do parents want the power offered to them to shape the school system, and will local authorities give it up? Mrs Thatcher claimed "parent power" as a slogan before her landslide 1987 election victory. Mr Blair understands the electoral consequences of opposing consumer choice. He now seeks to make "real parent power" his legacy as Labour leader

(Comment from The Times)

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

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

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

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



25 October, 2005

ISRAEL'S EDUCATION SYSTEM

I normally restrict my posts to cover only the three "allied" countries of the USA, the UK and Australia but I am also a great supporter of Israel. I think I am just about as Zionist as a WASP can be. So what I hear about the school system in Israel is a great sadness to me. I reproduce below an article from 2003 as background and follow it up with a current article:

The everyday threats to life and limb in Israel make it hard for Israeli policymakers and citizens alike to focus on much more than the immediate security situation. The abysmal performance of Israeli students on international educational exams, however, should be no less a source of concern about the country’s future.

Jews in Israel, it would seem, are fast becoming a glaring exception to the title ``the people of the Book." Last year’s international exams in math and reading comprehension found Jewish students in Israel lagging far behind their contemporaries in other industrialized nations.

In an international literacy test, Israeli students floundered in the bottom third of of 35 industrial states, next to such centers of learning as Slovenia and Moldava. Approximately 30% of eighth-graders in Hebrew-language schools failed the last Education Ministry reading comprehension exam, and the average grade of Jewish pupils in written expression was 56.

Over half of the eighth graders tested failed the international math exam, receiving grades from 0-45. Israel was the only country to rank in the bottom third of industrialized nations for the last three years running.

A comparison of the results of standardized international tests over the last five years shows that the gap between low achievement schools and high achievement schools has widened dramatically despite the Education Ministry’s focus on improving the performance of pupils from low achievement schools. Over that period, the gap has grown from 11 points to nearly 18.

Unfortunately the source of that increased gap has not been improved performance in schools in more affluent areas. Scores are declining across the board. Overall there has been a 10-point drop in mathematics scores, and a similar decline in reading comprehension. In 1997, the average grade of Jewish eighth-graders on international math exams was 60. Last year, the comparable figure was 50. In reading comprehension, the average score dropped from 69 to around 60.

A number of studies correlate scores of pupils in mathematics to overall national wealth. And that correlation can only be expected to grow in coming decades as human resources, rather than natural ones, play an increasingly large role in wealth creation.

To be sure, Israel is still producing its share of geniuses. Israel has been a world leader in the high-tech revolution, and Israeli science continues to be responsible for an astounding number of breakthroughs in medical research. Nevertheless, in a world in which knowledge is increasingly correlated to the ability to earn a decent living, it is not enough for a country to produce a disproportionate share of geniuses. A country where technical knowledge is not dispersed over a wide swath of the population will have difficulty attracting international investment in non-labor intensive fields, and income gaps will continue to grow.

THERE ARE NO EASY answers to the educational failure of the Israeli school system. Yet some clues as to how the overall performance of Israeli Jewish students could be improved might be garnered from the success of SHUVU, a network of independent religious schools for children from Russian-speaking homes. On the face of it, the SHUVU system would seem to have few factors operating in its favor. In general, immigrant students do even worse than the national average on mathematical exams. The average score for new immigrants on the most recent international exam was 42.

The general economic level of the students’ homes is low. Nearly half the students come from single-parent homes. Contrary to a common myth, SHUVU is not an elite system – approximately 40% of the families are from the Moslem republics of the former Soviet Union. Finally, many of the teachers in the SHUVU system are products of Bais Yaakov seminaries and lack a B.A. (The success of these teachers should perhaps force a reconsideration of the government’s refusal to recognize a Bais Yaakov teaching degree.)

Despite these negative factors, the level of math instruction in SHUVU schools is way above the national average. Using the Ministry of Education guidelines as a base, SHUVU adds another 20-25% more material each year. Dov Kaplan, a doctoral researcher in science education at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who has headed the math departments in both secular and SHUVU schools, attests that the level in the SHUVU schools is significantly higher.

When the new curriculum was instituted five years ago, teachers insisted that the goals set were impossible, but experience has shown otherwise. On a visit to a SHUVU school in Ashdod last year, Education Ministry Director-General Ronit Tirosh was shocked to find second-graders at the beginning of the school year multiplying single-digit numbers in their heads. She remarked that the SHUVU curriculum should become a model for all Israeli schools.

From the beginning of first grade, SHUVU schools work on mathematical thinking, not just rote memorization. The recent Education Ministry survey found that Israeli junior high schools are particularly weak in developing independent cognitive mathematical thinking.

Three times a year, the students are tested on all the material learned. In the lower grades, the average scores are well over 90%, and even with the addition of much more difficult material in fourth-grade, the average scores remain consistently above 85%, and never dipped below 75%. Of the 130 SHUVU students in Nahariya who participated last year in the Orange Math Olympiad for grades 6-10, 90 reached the first level of the competition, 30 made it to the semifinals, and two were finalists.

To some extent, the success of the SHUVU schools in math instruction needs no explanation. More hours are devoted to math instruction than in state schools, teachers receive classroom supervision two or three times a year, all teachers have thrice yearly training seminars, and every teacher has a hot-line to SHUVU’s methodological center in Jerusalem if problems arise in teaching the material

But Dr. Shmuel Lazinkin, head of the methodological center, attributes much of SHUVU’s success to intangible factors. Chief among these he lists the dedication of the teachers. Strikes are unknown in SHUVU schools, despite the fact that salaries are often late. Though teacher salaries are lower than in the general school system, teachers contribute many teaching hours without pay to private instruction of weaker students and those transferring from other school systems.

Equally important is the learning environment in the schools. Israeli schools have among the highest rates of violence in the Western world. Only in the United States do more students carry weapons to school. Fifteen percent of Israeli students age 11-16 come armed for ``self-protection" at least once a month. Nearly half the male students and over a third of the female students in that age group experience physical harm in a violent episode in the course of the school year.

In such a Blackboard Jungle of rampant violence and poor discipline learning becomes impossible. No wonder that in a recent study of 28 Western nations, Israeli students reported the highest levels of dissatisfaction with school.

Over the last three years, I have personally visited at least 10 SHUVU schools and the contrast to these grim statistics could not be more stark. The enthusiasm of the students is palpable. And that impression is borne out by a survey of SHUVU parents. Eighty-four per cent of the parents feel that there is less violence in the SHUVU system; nearly 80% that the cultural level is higher; and 70% that the decorum is superior. (Virtually all the rest thought the two systems were equal.) Not surprisingly, 84% of the parents report that their children enjoy school quite a lot or very much.

While the SHUVU model cannot be automatically exported to all Israeli schools, much could clearly be learned from its successes.

Source



The Ultra-Orthodox system is showing the way forward

Israel's failing education system is ripe for an educational variant of the "broken windows" theory. Our test results in math and reading comprehension increasingly resemble those of countries from which we import foreign workers. A 2003 international study revealed that the level of student satisfaction in Israel is the lowest of 28 industrialized countries. Many of these failures result from the rampant violence and general air of disrespect in schools. The status of teachers is low in the eyes of their students and society in general. According to a recent poll published by "Mishmar HaChinuch," an educational watchdog group, few parents would advise their children to consider teaching as a profession because of its low status.

Teachers themselves have contributed to their low status and lack of authority. When they come to class dressed in bare midriffs and décolletage, imitating their students imitating Britany Spears, they are viewed as figures of ridicule, not serious professionals. Two Bar Ilan professors recently found that Israeli teachers place fewer demands on their students and more readily accept sloppy work than teachers in the rest of the developed world.

A number of the new Education Ministry reforms are designed to reduce the general air of anything goes. Students are to stand when their teachers enter the room, and dress codes have been instituted for students and teachers. These reforms are straight from the haredi [ultra-Orthodox] educational system, where uniforms for girls and strict dress codes for boys are the norm. No haredi student would think of calling a teacher by his or her first name, and teachers are usually addressed in the third person. Not surprisingly, teaching is the highest status calling for haredi women, despite pay scales lower than the secular system, and one of the highest for men.

To judge by the educational marketplace, even secular parents are discovering the virtues of haredi education. SHUVU, a system originally created for Russian-immigrant children, added nearly 2,000 students this school year, 10% of them from native Israeli families and another 70 French immigrants. A SHUVU school in Kfar Saba designed for native Israelis opened last year with 28 students. Despite the sustained opposition of the municipality, the school began this school year with 122 students, as many as the building can hold. The Kfar Saba example is part of a larger pattern. In 1999, a haredi-run school with 25 first-graders opened up in Tzoran near Netanya. For the first month, the 25 six-year-olds had to run a gauntlet every morning of jeering demonstrators, some with large dogs.

The next year the school reopened in nearby Kadima with 125 students, and the third year with 300. Among those 300, were three children of the principal organizer of the original demonstrations against the school. He was so struck by the poise with which the young Bais Yaakov teachers guided their charges past the screaming demonstrators that he chose them for his own children.

Even Modi'in, a city without a single haredi resident, now has a haredi-run school (or did until two weeks ago when the city refused permission to reopen.) LeMa'an Achai started two years ago with nine students. It began this school year with 130 students, from a mixture of secular and national religious homes, in temporary headquarters in Modiin Ilit.

These schools have one thing in common: virtually all the teachers are Bais Yaakov-trained. And in each case word of mouth has enabled the schools to mushroom in size. In a survey of SHUVU parents, over 80% attribute their decision to transfer their children to the general respect for learning and lower levels of violence. In addition, they almost invariably cite the dedication of the teachers.

There is perhaps a larger lesson behind the success of haredi teachers operating in a framework of respect and authority. As we approach Rosh Hashanah, a day devoted to crowning G-d over us as King, we would do well to consider how much we suffer from the feeling of living in a hefkervelt [a world where anything goes]

More here

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

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

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

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



24 October, 2005

BUREAUCRATS DEFEAT BLAIR

A radical plan to give parents much greater choice over the schools their children attend has been blocked by Whitehall in a humiliating rebuff to Tony Blair.

The proposal - to bring forward by several months the date at which parents apply for school places - was originally put up for inclusion in the long-awaited White Paper to be unveiled this week by Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary. The Prime Minister enthusiastically supported the move, which would have boosted pupil numbers at popular schools while less popular ones could have closed. Just weeks ago he told colleagues it would be in the White Paper.

However, the proposal was rejected by senior officials at the Department for Education and Skills, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt. Instead, the paper will contain vague promises to offer more schools greater "freedom" and more "independence". Thousands of primaries and secondaries will be offered "trust" status, giving them more say over their own day-to-day affairs, while more resources will be directed at brighter children between the ages of 11 and 14 to ensure that they do not fall off the pace during their first years at secondary school.

There will also be greater emphasis on "banding" children of differing abilities, along with measures to deal with "disengaged parents" who let their children play truant and who do not do enough to make sure that homework is done properly. Ms Kelly is said to have endured a "rough ride" when she outlined the proposals to the rest of the Cabinet on Thursday. Some Left-leaning ministers protested that the measures were aimed at satisfying middle-class families and would do little or nothing to help those from disadvantaged communities. Mr Blair, however, is infuriated at the refusal by the department's leading officials to countenance the admissions plan. It would have seen parents, who currently "choose" a secondary school for their children in October or November, doing so in January of the same year.

This would have given local authorities more time to ensure that the best schools could expand to take more pupils. The Prime Minister told colleagues he was quite prepared to see worse-performing schools close if necessary.

Source



HOW E-TUTORING WORKS

A few stars are still twinkling in the inky pre-dawn sky when Koyampurath Namitha arrives for work in a quiet suburb of this south Indian city. It's barely 4:30 a.m. when she grabs a cup of coffee and joins more than two dozen colleagues, each settling into a cubicle with a computer and earphones.

More than 7,000 miles away, in Glenview, Ill., outside Chicago, it's the evening of the previous day and 14-year-old Princeton John sits at his computer, barefoot and ready for his hourlong geometry lesson. The high school freshman puts on a headset with a microphone and clicks on computer software that will link him through the Internet to his tutor, Namitha, many time zones away.

It's called e-tutoring - yet another example of how modern communications, and an abundance of educated, low-wage Asians, are broadening the boundaries of outsourcing and working their way into the minutiae of American life, from replacing your lost credit card through reading your CAT scan to helping you revive your crashed computer.

Princeton is one of thousands of U.S. high school students turning to tutors in India. "Hello Princeton, how are you? How was your test?" Namitha asks. "Hello, yeah ... I'm good," Princeton replies. "It was good."

Namitha works for a company called Growing Stars, based in Cochin and Fremont, Calif. Princeton and his 12-year-old sister Priscilla each meet with their online math teacher twice a week. The chitchat ends quickly and a geometry worksheet pops up on Princeton's computer screen. Teacher and pupil speak to one another, type messages and use digital "pencils" to work on problems, highlight graphs and erase mistakes. Princeton scrawls on something that looks like a hyped-up mouse pad and it shows up on Namitha's screen. He can also use a scanner to send copies of assignments or textbook pages that he needs help understanding. "Here we go," Princeton says, as they begin a lesson on such concepts as parallel lines and complementary angles in the quiet coziness of the family's suburban home. Above him, on the desk, sit plastic figurines of Mickey and Minnie Mouse and the Statue of Liberty. On the walls are framed photos of his family, including his grandparents who - by coincidence - live in southern India. His mom, Bessy, brings him orange juice and cookies.

"India has very good teachers, especially in math and science. Also, these subjects are culture-free so it is comparatively easy for Indian teachers to teach them," says Kiran Karnik, who heads India's National Association of Software and Service Companies. "Online tutoring is an area which shows enormous potential for growth." Most companies are reluctant to talk about earnings. But Shantanu Prakash, chief executive of India-based Educomp Datamatics, estimates that Indian online tutoring companies earned about $10 million last year, 80 percent of it from the United States. That's small change in the Indian information technology industry - a business built largely on the outsourcing that is shifting jobs from the West to cheaper, foreign locations. Annual export revenue from offshore outsourcing last fiscal year totaled $17.2 billion. But about a dozen Indian software firms are banking that online tutoring will flourish in America, where falling standards are causing concern.

The first e-tutoring businesses started less than three years ago, and already thousands of Indian teachers coach U.S. students in math, science or English for about $15-$20 an hour, a fraction of the $40-$100 that private tutoring costs in the United States. The Indian firms have benefited from the growing U.S. government-financed tutoring industry - which had revenues last year of nearly $2 billion. That growth is partly due to the No Child Left Behind law, which requires schools to test students in math and reading every year from third grade through eighth grade.

While the outsourced tutoring companies are competition for their U.S.-based counterparts, the National Education Association - a professional organization that represents millions of American teachers - "enthusiastically supports the continued and expanded use of distance education," according to a statement and its guidelines for promoting quality teaching in class and online.

However, not every child has Internet access at home, said Denise Cardinal, an NEA spokeswoman. "We think that good tutoring and good public schools should be available to every student, regardless of the family's income," she said. Princeton's family, like others with college-bound students, pays its own tutoring bills, seeing online tutoring as a way to get high-quality instruction at a lower cost.

Most full-time teachers at Growing Stars earn about $230 monthly. But while the money is good by Indian standards, what's missing is one-on-one contact. "This is a bit like teaching in a void," says Priya Shah, who helps high school students improve their English writing skills. "The lack of eye contact is a disadvantage, but it's a gap which one overcomes with time." But the work is much less stressful than teaching a class of 40 kids or more, and the tutor can adapt to the individual student's learning pace.

That was evident during Princeton's class. "Princeton, let's go over that again," Namitha says a couple times when he didn't understand, patiently redrawing a diagram on the screen. When he gets answers correct, Namitha flashes a smiley face on his screen. "Oh, I am smart," Princeton half-jokes.

The system isn't perfect. Sometimes Princeton has to repeat himself so Namitha can hear him. Or his computer freezes up. "It's so old," he says. "That's why I'm asking my dad to get a new one." But despite the glitches, Princeton's mother, Bessy Piusten, is pleased with the results, saying her children have been getting all A's and B's since they started online tutoring about two years ago.

Daughter Priscilla, who takes online algebra lessons, wants to be a neonatal physician. Princeton wants to be a pharmacist. Their mother is a respiratory therapist at a Chicago hospital, and her husband is a radiology technician.

At the end of the session, Namitha assigns Princeton problems for their next meeting. "Homework! C'mon!" Princeton protests. "Fine, fine. But without homework, life would be wonderful," he says. His little sister, who is watching, giggles. Princeton acknowledges that because of his tutor "math is now easy for me." Maybe some day, he adds, he'll be able to chat with his tutor via video screen. But either way, he prefers an online tutor over an in-person one. "If I talk back to that person, they won't do anything to me," he says, laughing. "This way is much better."

Source

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

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

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

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23 October, 2005

PRACTICAL HELP FOR HURRICANE VICTIMS MOOTED

Reps. John Boehner (R-OH) and Bobby Jindal (R-LA) today led a group of House education leaders in introducing the Family Education Reimbursement Act (H.R. 4097), an innovative proposal to assist the students and families affected by the Gulf Coast hurricanes as well as the public, private, and charter schools that have enrolled displaced students. For one year, the bill would create Family Education Reimbursement Accounts to allow families and schools to bypass existing bureaucracies and provide reimbursement to schools on behalf of children displaced by the storms.

“As the Gulf Coast rebuilding and recovery effort continues, we must not lose sight of the needs of the schools and communities that have welcomed displaced families. Public, private, and charter schools have all opened their doors to hurricane affected students, and we should put in place a simple reimbursement process for schools that cuts through the layers of bureaucracy,” said Boehner, chairman of the Education & the Workforce Committee.

"Parents know that the continued education of their children is a top priority, especially at a time such as this," Jindal said. "I am confident that, through this legislation, everyone can work together to make sure that children who have been uprooted will continue to have the educational opportunities they deserve, that their parents are empowered to make the best choices for their children, and that the communities and schools that have opened their doors to so many students are not financially punished for that generosity. This legislation will cut through the typical red tape and bureaucracy that otherwise might have hindered parents in their efforts to give their children the best education possible."

“As the recovery continues, we cannot allow red tape and bureaucracy to stand in the way of meaningful assistance for the schools that have so generously opened their doors to the students who have lost their homes, their schools, and their communities. Reimbursement accounts are a simple, straightforward plan to empower families and provide relief to the schools that have enrolled displaced students,” said Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA).

More here



NOW WHY WOULD LOONY-LEFT CALIFORNIA BE SO BAD AT EDUCATING ITS KIDS?

When it comes to mastering reading and math skills, California's students lag behind their peers across most of the country, according to results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress released Wednesday.

The test, often called the nation's report card, has been around for decades. This is the second time that every state has been required to participate under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Administered to fourth-and eighth-graders every two years, the assessment is now seen as a key indicator of No Child Left Behind's progress. Taken by 660,000 pupils nationwide, the exam shows California's fourth-graders ranked 44th in math and 48th in reading. The state's eighth-graders fared even worse: 44th in math and 49th in reading. Nationwide, 36 percent of fourth-graders have achieved proficiency in math, compared to 28 percent in California. In reading, the results are more bleak: 31 percent of American fourth-graders are proficient, compared to 22 percent of Californians.

The results also highlight the continued achievement gap between white and minority students: In California, 46 percent of white fourth-graders were proficient or above in math. But just 12 percent of African American students and 14 percent of Latinos reached that level. Nationally, math scores rose slightly, but reading scores were flat for both grades, compared with results of two years ago.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell said while it's clear California must do more to improve student achievement, "there are valid reasons to question the fairness of state-to-state comparisons." In a statement, O'Connell said the exam "is not aligned to the content taught in California's classrooms." [I believe it!] He also pointed out that California has the highest proportion of English learners and tested a higher proportion of them than any other state.

No Child Left Behind supporters like Russlynn Ali say O'Connell is making excuses. "NAEP is not directly aligned to any state standards," said Ali, executive director of the Education Trust-West, an Oakland-based group that works to improve minority and low-income student achievement. "But it is regarded by experts nationwide as an assessment of the common sets of skills that students should be able to master no matter what state they live in."

While California does have a higher proportion of English learner and low-income students, who traditionally score lower on standardized tests, the state's white and affluent students didn't fare much better, Ali pointed out. For example, California's white eighth-graders only outperformed their peers in New Mexico, Mississippi and Louisiana. "For the fifth largest economy in the world, these data are simply embarrassing," Ali said.

More here

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

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

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

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22 October, 2005

AMERICAN NON-EDUCATION

A magazine cover story about postmodern life on the American college campus depicts three monkeys in cap and gown, covering their ears, eyes and mouth, a parody of the hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil caricature. But students at many colleges actually get quite the opposite. They're required to hear, see, speak and study all about evil, as long as it's the evil oppression of everybody in American society.

Parents, inoculate yourselves. It may be too late for your children.

There's an emphasis on multicultural studies and few campuses have escaped the disease, and it's not yet Halloween. The title of a course taught to undergraduates in American studies at New York University, for example, is called "Intersections: Gender Race and Sexuality in U.S. History and Politics." You might think this is a strange way to get at American history. The class spends a week analyzing the murder of Teena Brandon (aka Brandon Teena), a young woman who pretended to be a man, and includes the screening of the movie, "Boys Don't Cry," the narrative version.

The following week students study the life and murder of Tupac Shakur, the "gangsta" rapper whose rough and raw lyrics glorified drugs, abusing women and the violence that finally took his life. There's "Queer Lives and Culture," "Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora," and a discussion of the relationship of gender, race and war in Haiti through the lens of "Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism." One teaching assistant of this course describes herself as an "anti-racist queer activist feminist." That covers just about everything, except the tuition for a year at NYU, which parents shell out $40,000.

Smith College, the elite school that once was only for women, and still is, sort of, has a different problem. About two dozen women who arrived as female have become male, more or less. The Financial Times reports that some of the more traditional "girls in pearls" on campus think the new "guys" should transfer to a co-ed college. Smith has long been "gay friendly," but now that girls have become "boys" Smithies joke that the school motto is "Queer in a year or your money back." It's not a joke, and it costs $37,000 a year.

Somewhere Sophia Smith is spinning. The Massachusetts woman who left her fortune to create a college where women "could develop as fully as may be the powers of womanhood" did not have a third sex in mind. Once known for their dedication to academic rigor, Smith students voted to change the school constitution to purge all "gender-specific" language. No "she" and no "her," but an all-purpose "student." The Rev. L. Clark Seelye, the first president of Smith College, said that the study of English should produce clarity of thought and expression. Other seats of higher learning have gone farther, creating synthetic pronouns, using "hir" for "her" or "his," and "ze" for "she" and "he". You thought "herstory" for "history" was a joke.

Smith is not alone in disfiguring what passes for education. A popular introductory freshman course at the University of Pennsylvania deconstructs Herman Melville and other dead white males (if not white whales), seeking hidden meanings of homosexuality, pederasty and incest. Majors in the humanities are down, and why not? In "Binge: What Your College Student Won't Tell you," author Barrett Seaman finds lots of colleges that promote gay-ity. Vassar College has a "Homo Hop" and the Queer Student Union at Williams College holds a "Queer Bash" with gay pornography, widely attended by straight students. Adrienne Rich, a lesbian poet, encourages young women to experiment with homosexuality and bisexuality.

An authentic liberal education promotes both character and understanding with a rigorous study of what Matthew Arnold called "the best that is known and thought in the world." When dead white males like Thomas Jefferson and John Milton are replaced, or must compete with popular studies about transgendered males and newly-minted homosexual heroes in classic novels, students are deprived of any trace of disciplined thought. They're doubly vulnerable when at the same time they're encouraged to indulge in undisciplined social experimentation without anchors of moral reference.

"Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies, Afro-American Studies, Women's Studies, Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Studies," writes Roger Kimball, author of "Tenured Radicals," in New Criterion magazine, "are not the names of academic disciplines but political grievances... Parents are alarmed, rightly so, at the spectacle of their children going off to college one year and coming back the next having jettisoned every moral, religious, social and political scruple they have been brought up to believe." These studies inhibit debate, corrupt young minds and infect learning with a virus for which, like bird flu, there is not yet an antidote.

Source



MORE BRITISH GLOOM

One school in four no better than mediocre, says Ofsted. And you can be sure that "mediocre" is a very polite way of putting it

The head of Ofsted cast doubt yesterday on the effectiveness of key government programmes for raising standards in schools. David Bell said that one in four schools continued to offer "nothing better than mediocrity" to their pupils despite an overall decline in levels of outright failure. Pupils who had fallen behind in English and maths continued to struggle at secondary school despite initiatives costing hundreds of millions of pounds to help them. Primary schools were ignoring efforts to broaden the curriculum, while a minority of head teachers were actively resisting attempts to improve classroom standards.

Mr Bell gave warning in his annual report for the 2004-05 academic year that "the challenge of dealing with some persistent weaknesses in our education system should not be underestimated". A "significant minority" of primary schools had failed to use materials designed to improve teaching standards across the curriculum as part of the Government's Primary National Strategy. "Primary schools have been reluctant to risk losing hard-won improvements in English and mathematics and have missed opportunities to broaden the curriculum by not giving enough emphasis to other subjects," it said.

Schools with the worst results "lacked a sense of urgency and determination in taking effective action to improve achievement". Ofsted said: "Overall, schools have not evaluated sharply enough the impact of actions on the achievement of all pupils." Many schools gave their most able children extra work to do "rather than matching the curriculum more closely to their needs and providing sufficiently challenging teaching".

Pupils in greatest need of help were "too frequently" left with untrained classroom assistants, while teachers concentrated on the rest of the class.

The Chief Inspector was even harsher on the Key Stage 3 National Strategy, which cost 670 pounds million last year and aims to boost standards in the early years of secondary school. Catch-up lessons in English and maths for children who had fallen behind were unsatisfactory in a quarter of secondaries and good in only a third. Ofsted said that "well under half of pupils" had caught up with their peers by the age of 14.

Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, announced on Monday that she will spend a further 450 million pounds by 2008 on catch-up tuition, including one-to-one and small group lessons. The Department for Education and Skills has also awarded a 178 million pound contract to the consultancy firm Capita to advise schools on improving the primary and secondary strategies over the next five years.

Ofsted concluded that the Key Stage 3 strategy, introduced in 2001, had made an "inadequate" impact in 20 per cent of secondary schools. In half of schools, "the intended substantial transformation in the effectiveness of teaching and sharp rise in standards have not yet occurred".

Some teachers know too little about their subject, particularly in mathematics, to respond effectively to pupils' questions. The report raised concerns about maths teaching generally. There had been a "marked drop" in maths achievement at GCSE compared with results in national curriculum tests at 14. The initial positive effect of the national numeracy strategy in primary schools had slowed and there was evidence of a rise in unsatisfactory achievement by the youngest pupils. The report said: "Renewed momentum to tackle these issues and improve achievement is needed."

Ofsted said that the Government's Primary Leadership Programme, which focuses on heads of the 4,500 weakest schools, had been "compromised by the resistance to change of a small minority of schools and their failure to recognise that raising standards needs to be a key outcome of the programme".

More herre

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

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

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

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21 October, 2005

THE "CULTURAL COMPETENCE" RACKET

by Norman Levitt

A new buzzword has entered the lexicon of academic fashion in the USA, threatening to drown poor professors like me in yet another wave of coy euphemism. The term is 'cultural competence'. Like its predecessors 'affirmative action,' 'diversity,' and 'multiculturalism', it attempts to cloak problematical and even disturbing policy initiatives in linguistic vestments that suggest that no right-minded person could possibly demur. A 'culturally competent' academic, one might naively surmise, would be one who has absorbed and is able to propound some of the deep values - ethical, aesthetic or epistemological - that embody the stellar achievements of Western culture, one who could explain, for instance, why Dante or Kant or Ingres is present, at least subtly, in the assumptions under which we all live. Or something like that.

This, alas, would be a comical error. 'Cultural competence' is, in essence, a bureaucratic weapon. 'Cultural competence', or rather, your presumed lack thereof, is what you will be clobbered with if you are imprudent enough to challenge or merely to have qualms about 'affirmative action', 'diversity' and 'multiculturalism', as those principles are now espoused by their most fervent academic advocates. Cultural competence, like the UK's proposed new identity card, is something a professor is supposed to keep handy at all times, and to display with a straight face whenever confronted with a socially or ethnically charged situation, in order to dispel any suspicion of racism, sexism or Eurocentrism that might arise in the minds of the professionally suspicious.

The term has been around for a couple of years, drastically mutating as it puts down deeper roots. Originally, it was fairly innocuous. It was largely restricted to the healthcare professions, and referred to the ability to function effectively with members of ethnic minorities and immigrant groups by dint of insights into the local community's idiosyncratic prejudices, fears and assumptions, insofar as these differed from the norms of middle-class white society. It seems obvious that such knowledge could be helpful to a doctor, nurse or social worker hoping to convince patients or clients from these groups to keep medical appointments, complete a course of antibiotics or have their children vaccinated. Though cultural competence, in this sense, presumes a degree of open-mindedness and empathy, it seems only vaguely political, at most.

Now, however, cast loose from its original moorings, the phrase has become emphatically political. I offer the reader, with some trepidation, the formal definition as jargonistically set out by some purported educators: Cultural competence requires that individuals and organisations:

a) Have a defined set of values and principles, demonstrated behaviours, attitudes, policies and structures that enable them to work effectively in a cross-cultural manner;

b) Demonstrate the capacity to 1) value diversity, 2) engage in self-reflection, 3) manage the dynamics of difference, 4) acquire and institutionalise cultural knowledge, and 5) adapt to the diversity and the cultural contexts of the communities they serve;

c) Incorporate and advocate the above in all aspects of leadership, policymaking, administration, practice and service delivery while systematically involving staff, students, families, key stakeholders and communities.

If we divest this of its thick integument of happy talk and explore the details, we find that in practice it means deference, even servility, toward the norms and values espoused by fervent multiculturalists, along with tame assent to whatever measures they propose to achieve their aims. Attempts to explicate the idea occasionally slip into language that reveals the underlying political programme:

In the context of higher education, cultural competence necessitates abject refusal to articulate or defend ideas that might make certain protected groups uncomfortable. Professors can only be deemed 'culturally competent' if they openly profess the approved corpus of received values.

Here is an illustrative if fragmentary list of transgressions that would likely strip an academic of any chance of being designated culturally competent:

* Suggesting that affirmative action might conflict with other standards of justice and equity, or that opponents of affirmative action are not ipso facto Klansmen waiting for their white sheets to come back from the laundry;

* Taking issue with the claim that Malcolm X was a paragon of humanitarianism and political genius;

* Disputing the wisdom of feminist theory as regards the social constructedness of gender;

* Asserting that the early demographic history of the Americas is more accurately revealed by scientific anthropology than by the Native American folklore and myth celebrated by tribal militants;

* Expressing doubts that 'queer theory' should be made the epicenter of literary studies.

Likewise, to maintain that hiring, retention and promotion within the university should focus on the traditional academic virtues of the scholar, rather than assigning enormous importance to the candidate's race, ethnicity, sex or sexuality, would banish one permanently from the culturally competent elect. To deny that feminist theorists should call all the shots on matters having to do with sexual harassment would be an act of self-immolation.

Much more here



MILITARY MEN MAKE GOOD TEACHERS

The six-year-old Troops to Teachers program recruits and prepares former members of the armed services to teach in public school. A new report on the 7,500 teachers who have gone through the program from Virginia's Old Dominion University reveals that nine of every ten principals surveyed say the former troops are unusually effective, particularly in areas of greatest need. They are more likely to teach in high-poverty schools. They are also more likely to teach hard-to-staff subjects such as math and science. The program also adds diversity: 37% of the former members of the armed forces are non-white, compared with 15% of the general teaching force, providing role models for minority children.

The news gets better: more than 80% are men. That's a badly needed jolt. The number of men teaching in K-12 classrooms has plummeted from 31% in 1986 to 18% this year, and the academic performance of boys in those grades has plummeted as they've left - an under-noticed national problem with sweeping implications. Junior high and middle schools - grades 6 through 9 - appear to have taken the biggest losses, and suffered the greatest impact. During those middle school years, gender gaps in verbal skills double in size, an assortment of research shows. That sets boys up to fail in high school. And they do, graduating and attending college far less often than girls do. Troops to Teachers is one of the few effective counter-strategies that has been found. Finding a way to boost the numbers would be even better news.

Soldiers know the importance of preparation, unlike high school seniors who are long on college ambitions but short on preparation to make those dreams come true. This week, the National Center for Education Statistics defined the problem quite sharply. Though an impressive 62% of high school seniors said they plan to attend a four-year college, only a third of those have mastered even low-level math skills. The news doesn't get any better for the more ambitious students, those planning on getting a graduate degree. Only about half of those can handle intermediate math skills. This not the first time surveys have picked up this mismatch. A poll sponsored in part by the Gates Foundation this year reported that nearly 90% of young people of all races and income levels would like to get a college degree. But according to the Census Bureau, only about a third of 25-29 year-olds have college degrees. Among African-Americans, 17% have earned degrees. Among Hispanics, 11%.

The reason for the mismatch is clear: Only 32% of high school seniors graduate from high school with the skills they need to succeed in college, according to a 2005 report from the Manhattan Institute. Recent reports from Achieve Inc., a school reform group led by business leaders and governors, help explain the gap between ambition and reality. While more than 70% of high school seniors enter two- and four-year colleges, nearly half end up taking either remedial English or math courses. The odds of dropping out rise sharply with the number of non-credit, remedial courses a student is required to take.

Much of the blame for the poor preparation falls on the students: Only 56% who took the 2005 ACT college admissions test studied a college-preparation curriculum: four years of English and three years each of math, science and social studies. So much ambition, so little preparation. Such a needless waste.

More here

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

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

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

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20 October, 2005

TOP TEN SCHOOL RULES FOR TEACHERS



You think it's a joke, don't you? Or at least a bit exaggerated. Go here and you will see every one of the ten rules multiply documented.



DANCE AND COOK TO QUALIFY FOR UNIVERSITY!

Top marks in cooking and dance could help West Australian students into university law degrees, ahead of those who studied physics and chemistry. n education lobby group opposed to the state's new curriculum yesterday described the 50 new subjects being finalised by WA's Curriculum Council as nonsense. The changes mean that old subjects that did not count towards tertiary entrances will be scrapped.

Curriculum council acting chief executive Greg Robson has described the rewritten courses as intellectually rigorous, providing real challenges for students who reach the top levels in each course. "All we are trying to do is recognise a broad array of achievement," Mr Robson said. He said he understood that some teachers were reluctant to accept that food science and technology was as worthy a subject as physics but that view was out of date. "It makes a lot of sense to acknowledge high standards wherever they are. "There is a huge difference between a highly-talented chef and what he or she prepares and the average Joe like me who has trouble cooking a steak."

Among the new subjects being drafted are physical education, food science and technology, dance, religion and life, building and construction, children, family and the community, Australian indigenous languages and recreational and environmental studies. But People Lobbying Against Teaching Outcomes claims it is outrageous for subjects such as food science and technology -- no matter how challenging -- to be considered on a par with the sciences and mathematics. PLATO co-founder Greg Williams said until universities set pre-requisites for entry to courses that presently did not have any, the system would be open to manipulation. "I don't have a problem with these courses coming into the calculation of a student's tertiary entrance score -- they can put needlework in as far as I'm concerned -- but I have a problem with the fact that level 8 physical education is being considered equally as difficult as level 8 calculus," he said.

The new courses are part of the state's outcomes-based education model in which no student can fail and everyone achieves at least one of eight levels of difficulty. Federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson has been highly critical of OBE and the introduction of similar models in other states. The State School Teachers Union is generally supportive, claiming the present system treats students, who are not destined for university, as second-class citizens. Under the proposed OBE model, any subject can be examined for university entrance, with only those students who achieve at the top three levels (six, seven and eight) in each subject considered for a tertiary place. "In theory you could do metalwork, woodwork, cooking and English and if you get high enough 'levels' in those you can get into one of the most demanding university courses that doesn't set any prerequisites. And at the moment that includes law," Mr Williams said.

Mr Williams's criticisms come as a delegation of university physicists prepare to meet Mr Robson and other Curriculum Council chiefs today to discuss concerns about OBE. Introduced to West Australian primary schools 10 years ago, the OBE model has similarities to those systems already in place in NSW and Victoria. The council claims universities have backed the new courses saying these will provide students with greater opportunities than current subjects.

Source

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

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

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

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19 October, 2005

"DISPOSITIONS" THEORY

Enforced ideological conformity that the Soviets would have been proud of

The cultural left has a new tool for enforcing political conformity in schools of education. It is called dispositions theory, and it was set forth five years ago by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education: Future teachers should be judged by their "knowledge, skills, and dispositions." What are "dispositions"? NCATE's prose made clear that they are the beliefs and attitudes that guide a teacher toward a moral stance. That sounds harmless enough, but it opened a door to reject teaching candidates on the basis of thoughts and beliefs. In 2002, NCATE said that an education school may require a commitment to social justice. William Damon, a professor of education at Stanford, wrote last month that education schools "have been given unbounded power over what candidates may think and do, what they may believe and value."

NCATE vehemently denies that it is imposing groupthink, but the ed schools, essentially a liberal monoculture, use dispositions theory to require support for diversity and a culturally left agenda, including opposition to what the schools sometimes call "institutional racism, classism, and heterosexism." Predictably, some students concluded that thought control would make classroom dissent dangerous. A few students rebelled when a teacher at Brooklyn College School of Education showed Michael Moore's movie Fahrenheit 9/11 in class and dismissed "white English" as "the language of oppressors." Five students filed written complaints and received no formal reply from the college. One was told to leave the school and take an equivalent course at a community college. Two of the complaining students were then accused of plagiarism and marked down one letter grade. The two were refused permission to bring a witness, a tape recorder, or a lawyer to meet with a dean to discuss the matter.

K. C. Johnson, a history professor at the school who defended the dissenting students, became a target himself. After writing an article in Inside Higher Ed attacking dispositions theory as a form of mind control, Johnson faced a possible investigation by a faculty Integrity Committee. The Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education entered the case on Johnson's behalf, accusing the college of viewpoint discrimination and a violation of academic freedom. FIRE is a national civil liberties group that does what the American Civil Liberties Union should be doing but usually won't. FIRE said: "Brooklyn College must confirm that it tolerates dissent, that it is not conducting another secret investigation of one of its own professors." FIRE says the college has "disavowed any secret investigation."

Backing down:

Another battle over dispositions theory has been unfolding at Washington State University's college of education. The college threatened to terminate a student, Edward Swan, 42, for failing four "professional disposition evaluations." Swan, a religious man of working-class background, has expressed conservative opinions in class. He opposes affirmative action and doesn't believe gays should adopt children. His grades are good, and even his critics say he is highly intelligent. One teacher gave Swan a failing PDE after spotting the statement "diversity is perversity" in Swan's copy of a textbook.

At the start of the current semester, Swan was offered a choice: Sign a contract with the college or be expelled. The contract included mandatory diversity training, completing various projects at the faculty's direction, and the possibility of above-normal scrutiny during Swan's student teaching this fall. Instead of signing, Swan contacted FIRE. "Almost immediately, Swan's situation changed," said an article in the local newspaper, the Moscow-Pullman Daily News. The faculty told Swan he did not have to sign the contract and would not be expelled. Judy Mitchell, dean of the college of education, said the school would continue using the PDEs. A reporter asked her if Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia would pass a PDE if he were a student at the college. "I don't know how to answer that," Mitchell replied.

David French, president of FIRE, then jumped in. "I commend the dean for her honesty," he said. "But the answer is alarming because Scalia shouldn't fail any 'character' test because of his beliefs." Obviously, the dean had a problem. She couldn't say that no conservatives need apply, and she couldn't tell her faculty that the PDE s would be waived for someone like Scalia. In both the Johnson and the Swan cases, the colleges backed down when FIRE went public, but neither agreed to avoid using dispositions theory for apparently ideological purposes. The lesson for education students is clear: Say what you think in class, and if the administration moves against you, give FIRE a call

Source



DIVERSITY CONUNDRUM

(Post lifted from Colossus of Rhodey)

We've said it before (most recently here), and we'll say it again: "Diversity" doesn't equate to any academic benefits, and those who argue loudest for "diversity" never can answer why the supposed "benefit" of their ideology doesn't apply to HBCs -- Historically Black Colleges. John Rosenberg picks up on the latest example. And, like John's Florida A&M post, more recently Delaware State University recently revealed its own share of ... troubles. Wonder how that will affect enrollment.

Notice what John posts about the University of Kentucky:

That explanation (about reasons why black enrollment dropped) brought an angry response from several black Kentucky lawmakers, who accused the university of offering poor excuses for its own failure to maintain diversity...

However, at Delaware State the "legacy of an historically black institution" cannot be "disregarded." Today, Delaware's very own race hustler, Jea Street, continued to say as much:

"All are welcome at our university, and should be welcome, but we can't stand idly by and allow the legacy of the institution to change. He (DSU President Allen Sessoms) needs to go, and the board needs to go. The onus falls on the governor. I want to hear two words from him: 'I quit.' "

Don't believe Street for a second. If Sessoms' efforts to "increase diversity" succeed, and whites begin to outnumber blacks at DSU, Street will be screaming bloody murder about DSU's "lost legacy" and will have forgotten all about his "all are welcome" statement mighty quick.

But therein lies the conundrum: Sessoms, like those black lawmakers Rosenberg noted in Kentucky, want "diversity" -- apparently for its supposed educational/academic benefits. However, one of the reasons Sessoms is under fire (by black lawmakers and alumni alike) at DSU is precisely because of his spoken efforts to increase ... diversity! Loudmouths like Street are constantly in the newspaper and local TV screaming about how [public] school choice in Delaware is leading to "resegregation"; but it's plain 'ol Jea just wants his cake and to be able to eat it too -- as evidenced by his ranting about DSU.

For the record: We at Colossus believe that HBCs should be allowed to maintain their unique legacy and identity. But we also recognize that "diversity" is a pitiful excuse for a desire to increase "academic achievement," and university efforts to do whatever it takes to increase such "diversity" (ie, minority enrollment) are largely a waste of time of money.

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

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

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

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18 October, 2005

Schools boot out bureaucrats to win pupils to new 'brands'

Amazing progress towards choice coming in Britain

Companies and top head teachers will form rival education "brands" to run groups of secondary schools under government plans for a classroom revolution. Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, aims to create local education markets to increase competitive pressures on state schools to improve standards.

Local authority controls will be swept away to give rival brands the freedom to respond to "parent power". Schools will be allowed to write their own curriculum to create greater choice and tailor education to the needs of different pupils. Ms Kelly has drawn up a list of businesses and charities to be invited to enter the schools market. The Times has learnt that new providers could be in place by next September, underlining Tony Blair's impatience at the current pace of reform.

Ambitious heads will be free to become "chief executives" of chains of schools, and private schools will be encouraged to protect their charitable status by establishing their brands in the state sector. They will be given funding to run state schools, which would use the power of the private school's image to attract parents.

Ms Kelly will publish a White Paper next week that will promise to abolish bureaucratic obstacles and harness "parent power" to reshape the education system. Local authorities will lose powers to block the expansion of popular schools or prevent new providers entering the market. School Organisation Committees, in which council officials decide policy with representatives of heads and governors, will be abolished. Instead, heads will run their own affairs in charge of "independent state schools". Councils will be left to ensure that local markets operate fairly, for example in admissions policies.

Local authority boundaries will be broken down to encourage providers to enter the market. Organisations will be able to run groups of schools across the country as part of their "brand", seeking new business by offering to run underperforming comprehensives. The Department for Education and Skills (DfES) will also steer them towards struggling inner-city schools to ensure that poorer pupils have the same opportunities as those in wealthier suburbs.

Brands will be held accountable for the performance of all schools within their group. Parents will be able to lobby for new providers to take over the management of schools if they are dissatisfied with standards. Heads with records of academic success would be encouraged to expand their influence by taking over several schools. Assistant heads in charge of individual schools would be accountable to this "chief executive" for the success of the brand in responding to parental demands

Source



Labour councils will resent loss of empires

Another commernt on the new British reforms

The Government's White Paper plan for sweeping reform of secondary schools gives substance to Ruth Kelly's pledge to put "parent power" at the heart of education. Head teachers will be free to shape schools in response to parental wishes, subject only to rules on fair admissions. New providers will vie for parental support to take over under-performing schools.

Successful heads will be free to extend their influence to other schools. Companies, charities and fee-paying schools will be encouraged to create "brand" identities that give purpose and pride to groups of comprehensives, particularly in inner-city areas. The package promises to be the most "new Labour" of Tony Blair's education reforms with its aim of using consumer pressure to reshape public sector provision.

But the proposal to establish local education markets threatens a showdown with many Labour MPs, who will see it as further evidence of Mr Blair's desire to open public services to private providers. Labour councils will also be hostile to the move to break up their education empires and relegate them to an advisory role. School organisation committees, set up by Labour in its first term as part of moves to abolish grant-maintained status, will go. They are seen as obstacles because heads who wish to expand come under pressure from their council and other schools.

The proposal to allow schools to design their own curriculum, subject to DfES approval, will be seen as particularly radical given the hostility that Ms Kelly attracted for her rejection in February of reforms set out by Sir Mike Tomlinson, the former head of Ofsted, to replace GCSEs and A levels with a diploma. New school providers will be able to negotiate their own pay and conditions agreements with teachers, in the same way as city academies [charter schools], to encourage innovation.

Teachers' unions will be fearful that this marks the end of national salary scales. However, their experience in academies so far has been one of improved conditions. The White Paper will confirm the creation of 200 academies by 2010 and ministers are confident that the goal will be achieved quite comfortably.

The reforms have been driven by a Prime Minister who is desperate to stamp his legacy on education and health before he stands down. Last week he told his monthly press conference: "By the end of the third term I want every school that wants to be, to be able to be an independent non-fee paying state school with the freedom to innovate and develop in the way it wants and the way the parents at the school want, subject to certain common standards, and the White Paper will be the route map to make this happen."

Mr Blair highlighted the example of Haberdashers' Aske's Hatcham College, a successful inner-city school in South London where 86 per cent of pupils gained five good GCSEs last year. He said it had raised standards without altering its intake of pupils. "The whole purpose of our reform programme is to give the kids in the poorer more disadvantaged areas the chance of a really good school," he said. The school has formed a federation with a second academy, the Haberdashers' Aske's Knights Academy, that has opened on the site of the Malory School in Bromley, where only 15 per cent of pupils passed five good GCSEs

Source



NYC REARRANGING THE DECKCHAIRS ON THE TITANIC

New York City Schools Chancellor Klein has redefined contraband as any token of love, gratitude, or holiday cheer, worth over five dollars retail, gifted to teachers by students and their parents. If no security bugs caught me secreting a Santa Claus mug into my knockoff gym bag, I should for now avoid the wrath of the Office of Special Investigations, which is the closest modern equivalent of King Henry the Eighth's Court of Star Chamber. But as a respecter of the spirit of giving, I am high-risk as a tempter of fate.

Klein has ruled that because teachers are far more prone to corruption than is the general population and can be assumed to put their souls on market for a silk tie, they must be protected from their impulses. Any seasonal gift worth more than a slice of cherry pie must be returned to the sender.

Not only does that decree assume the worst of teachers' judgment, an attitude recognized as Klein's calling card, but also it is unenforceable, counterproductive, and insulting to all. It implies that educators can be bought, that their sense of honor is apocryphal, that students and parents have no other motive than seeking to bribe or otherwise curry favor, and that a crisis of integrity has arisen across the board. Parents by their own initiative have expressed outrage at the chancellor's patronizing, paternalistic, and hypocritical fiat. The same Conflict of Interests Board that is lauding Klein for his five-dollar cap, two summers ago allowed one of Klein's senior deputies, already drawing pay equal to that of a U.S. Supreme Court Judge, to hold a different six-figure, unrelated, overlapping second job.

Is Klein for real or is he spoofing Scrooge? Is his meanness tongue-in-cheek, or is it yet another self-caricature? How do we appraise the gift? Do we send parents flyers admonishing them to attach original receipts? Do we snip the ribbon and ravage the wrapping paper in view of the child wherever and whenever presented with the gift? Was it on sale? Was it the genuine designer article or an intellectual property rights violation? This is the stuff of satire, but it also the grist for the mill of disgust.

If a confidential informant claims that there was a $7.99 price tag on a gift that you, the teacher, failed to regurgitate, you will be called down to the Office of Special Investigations weeks after being advised that an allegation of employee misconduct has been lodged against you. You will be provided no details and may stew in speculation before your hearing. It will have a predetermined outcome and be held by a retired police detective who will be prosecutor, jury, and judge. There will be no legal oversight or standards for evidence gathering or admissibility. This is no bona-fide judicial forum.

You will be provided with no copies of any written allegations, witness testimony, or other evidence whatsoever. Subpoenas, hidden cameras, undercover surveillance agents, and other techniques may deployed to nab you absconding with a your cache of donated #2 pencils.

The Chancellor has lost many of his natural allies among reformers and educational researchers and historians. He has shunned many of the finest material assets and thinkers in the professional community. He has estranged men and women of all parties, wings, factions and philosophies. Deploying troops to interdict ten-dollar bonuses of scented soap demeans him and our common cause of serving children

From Redhog

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

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

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

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17 October, 2005

PAY FOR PERFORMANCE WORKS IN SCHOOLS TOO

Note the unbelievable bit I have highlighted in red. Is there hope for sanity yet?

I came to visit the Meadowcliff Elementary School. ... About 80% of Meadowcliff's students in the K-to-5 school are black, the rest Hispanic or white. It sits in a neighborhood of neat, very modest homes. About 92% of the students are definable as living at or below the poverty level, a phrase its principal, Karen Carter, abhors: "I don't like that term because most of our parents work at one or two jobs." This refusal to bend to stereotypes likely explains what happened last year at Meadowcliff.

Students' scores on the Stanford achievement rose by an average 17% over the course of one year. They took the Stanford test in September and again in May. Against the national norm, the school's 246 full-year students rose to the 35th percentile from the 25th. For math in the second grade and higher, 177 students rose to the 32nd percentile from the 14th. This is phenomenal. What happened in nine months?

Meadowcliff has two of the elements well established as necessary to a school's success--a strong, gifted principal and a motivated teaching staff. Both are difficult to find in urban school systems. Last year this Little Rock public school added a third element--individual teacher bonuses, sometimes known as "pay for performance." Paying teachers on merit is one of the most popular ideas in education. It is also arguably the most opposed idea in public education, anathema to the unions and their supporters. Meadowcliff's bonus program arrived through a back door.

Karen Carter, the school's principal, felt that her teachers' efforts were producing progress at Meadowcliff, especially with a new reading program she'd instituted. But she needed a more precise test to measure individual student progress; she also wanted a way to reward her teachers for their effort. She went to the Public Education Foundation of Little Rock. The Foundation had no money for her, and the Little Rock system's budget was a nonstarter. So the foundation produced a private, anonymous donor, which made union approval unnecessary.

Together this small group worked out the program's details. The Stanford test results would be the basis for the bonuses. For each student in a teacher's charge whose Stanford score rose up to 4% over the year, the teacher got $100; 5% to 9%--$200; 10% to 14%--$300; and more than 15%--$400. This straight-line pay-for-performance formula awarded teachers objectively in a way that squares with popular notions of fairness and skirts fears of subjective judgment. In most merit-based lines of work, say baseball, it's called getting paid for "putting numbers on the board."

Still, it required a leap of faith. "I will tell you the truth," said Karen Carter. "We thought one student would improve more than 15%." The tests and financial incentives, however, turned out to be a powerful combination. The August test gave the teachers a detailed analysis of individual student strengths and weaknesses. From this, they tailored instruction for each student. It paid off on every level.

Twelve teachers received performance bonuses ranging from $1,800 to $8,600. The rest of the school's staff also shared in the bonus pool. That included the cafeteria ladies, who started eating with the students rather than in a nearby lounge, and the custodian, whom the students saw taking books out of Carter's Corner, the "library" outside the principal's office. Total cost: $134,800. The tests cost about $10,000.

The Meadowcliff bonus program is now in its second year, amid more phenomena rarely witnessed in "school reform." Last year's bonuses were paid for by an anonymous donor; this year the school board voted to put the pay-for-performance bonuses on the district's budget. The Little Rock teachers union thereupon insisted that Meadowcliff's teachers vote for a contract waiver; 100% voted for the waiver. Another grade school, with private funding, will now try the Meadowcliff model.

The Meadowcliff program has the support of both Little Rock's superintendent, Roy Brooks, and Arkansas' director of education, Ken James. Superintendent Brooks, who was recruited from the reform movement in Florida, has cut some 100 administrative positions from the central bureaucracy and rerouted the $3.8 million savings back to the schools.

At his offices in the capitol building, Director James calls himself an "advocate of pay for performance" for a couple of reasons. Financial incentives of some sort are needed, he says, to stop math and science teachers from jumping ship to industry. And school districts like Little Rock's have to innovate fast because jobs and population are migrating internally, mostly into northwestern Arkansas. The Springdale district alone, he says, near Fayetteville and Bentonville, "hired 180 new teachers this year." Little Rock has to find a way to hold its best teachers. The teachers I saw at Meadowcliff Elementary seemed pretty happy to be there.

"School reform" is one of the greatest of the great white whales of American politics. It's by now virtually a mythical beast, chased by specialists, commissions, think tanks, governors. Gov. Bill and Hillary Clinton were famous Arkansas school reformers. With No Child Left Behind, President Bush has flung the reform fishing net over the whole country. The biggest urban school systems--New York, Chicago, L.A.--get most of the ink. But maybe the solutions are going to be found in places like Little Rock, where talented people can fly beneath the radar long enough to give good ideas a chance to prove themselves.

Source



No Disaster Big Enough to Permit School Choice

Leftists know if the lose control of the schools, they are REALLY had-it

Katrina was one of the most devastating hurricanes to ever strike the United States. Federal, state, and local governments' responses to it, sadly, were almost as calamitous. For some politicians, though, there has never been a disaster big enough to convince them to loosen government's grip on the people. Just take a look at education: Whether it is parents from hurricane-ravaged Louisiana trying to get their children's education back on track, or just parents faced with hopeless public schools, government has consistently stood in the way of families trying to help themselves.

Recently, as part of its disaster relief package, the Bush administration outlined a plan to provide federal educational relief to the families whose lives were destroyed by Katrina. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the administration is "proposing up to $2.6 billion in funding for elementary, secondary and post secondary relief" including "up to $488 million to compensate families for the costs associated with attending private schools." That last part translates into federal school vouchers.

Without question, there are excellent grounds to oppose Bush's plan, including the vouchers. Perhaps the most compelling one is that the Constitution grants the federal government no specific, enumerated, power--the only kind it may legitimately exercise--over either education or disaster relief, and if the government has proven one thing in the aftermath of Katrina, it is its complete inability to handle anything it was not specifically designed to confront. This, however, is not even close to the objections to Bush's plan voiced by most of its opponents. They are happy to involve the federal government in both disaster relief and education. What they object to is any proposal that might give victims even a little educational freedom.

Sen. Edward Kennedy demonstrated this in a press release late last month. He said that although he applauded the administration's relief efforts, he was "extremely disappointed that [Bush] has proposed providing this relief using such a politically-charged approach. This is not the time for a partisan political debate on vouchers."

That said, pressed to not completely ignore the desires of the roughly one-third of parents in hard-hit southeastern Louisiana who had sent their kids to private schools before Katrina, Kennedy is reportedly preparing to offer them his own, big-government brand of assistance: a convoluted proposal to dispense through public schools all aid for displaced students attending private and religious schools. According to a recent report in Congressional Quarterly, Kennedy's plan would route all relief funds for students in private schools through local public school districts, which would then supply private schools with books, computers and teachers, as well as oversee all expenditures. In addition, all instruction would have to be taught on a non-ideological and non-sectarian basis.

Details of this proposal are still being worked out, so nothing is set in stone. But from what we have so far, it seems Kennedy's concept of compassion is either to push thousands of Katrina's youngest victims into public schools, or to push public schools under private school roofs.

Of course, government compassion ending when politicians and special interests might lose control is nothing new--education has proven it for decades. Kennedy, countless other politicians at every level of government, and special interest groups ranging from teachers unions to school board associations, have long preferred to trap students in disastrous public schools rather than give parents choice. Apparently, they aren't about to let some natural disaster change that.

Despite their objections, none of those who feed from the government trough can change the fact that the private sector has always been far more reliable than government, whether in education or disaster relief. Indeed, much as Wal-Mart provided water and filled prescriptions well before FEMA arrived in the Gulf Coast, private schools all over America, often at their own expense, took in refugee students before hearing a peep from Washington. Even the prestigious Phillips Academy in Massachusetts enrolled 19 displaced students according to Education Week, five of whom had attended public schools before the catastrophe. For politicians like Ted Kennedy, though, none of that matters. There will never be enough proof either of government failure or private sector success to justify getting government out of the way and letting parents take control of their children's education.

Source

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

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

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

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16 October, 2005

DAVID GELERNTER REPORTS ON THE CLOSED MINDS OF THE MODERN UNIVERSITY

Universities are the mighty fortresses of the American left. The assertion that American universities encourage a freewheeling clash of ideas might be the mother of all phoniness in the United States today.

Richard Lamm is the former Democratic governor of Colorado (1975-1987), now a free-thinking, self-described "progressive conservative" who teaches public policy at the University of Denver. In the journal of the conservative National Assn. of Scholars, Lamm has written about the time he submitted an article about racism to a university publication called the Source — which is run by the administration, not by students.

Lamm's submission compared the harm wrought by racism to the good that comes out of working to overcome obstacles. His article discussed the success of the Japanese, Jews and Cubans in the U.S.; all three have suffered bigotry and prospered. Mexicans in America have done less well. But Mexicans and Cubans are equally Latino and face similar kinds of prejudice. If Cubans have thrived and Mexicans haven't, racism can't possibly be the whole story.

Exactly the sort of provocative, challenging article any university would be proud to publish, right? Only kidding. Lamm reports that the Source rejected his piece: "too controversial"; then he appealed to the provost, and then the chancellor. They agreed with the editors. Too controversial.

According to the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, "administrators countered that the decision not to run Lamm's article was more an issue of editorial space than academic freedom." Maybe that's what university officials were thinking. But no one in this news article denies that they said what Lamm says they said.

If you believe that our universities promote freewheeling debate, that Bill Bennett is a racist and that the United States will be a better place if Dick Cheney apologizes to Charlie Rangel, I have a bridge for sale; you might want to check it out. Maybe I'll just list it on EBay and wait for the crowd of bidders.

More here



LIGHT BULBS AND LOCKED BATHROOMS THE LATEST VICTIM OF NYC NUTTINESS

Classrooms are dark but students still find their way. The light bulbs, called ballasts, have burned out throughout my building. Replacing them had always been a simple matter. No sooner was a call placed to the on-site custodian than the job was done. New York City Schools Chancellor Klein has put an end to that. To streamline the system, he has taken simple repairs out of the hands of custodians and required the work be farmed out only to outside electrical contractors. Six months have passed, nobody has shown up, and nothing can be done. Flickering fluorescence and the sun alone brighten the printed page for the eyes of students for whom the illuminations of books are already fading fast, thanks to Klein's discredited but embraced "Balanced Literacy" mock-curriculum.

Lighting is no longer a problem in bathrooms that have been padlocked all day every day due to violence and vandalism that the Chancellor's regulations have effectively ignored. Perhaps Klein will dispense constipating agents to students like those ingested by international drug "mules" to ensure self-control until the proper time. The one hundred percent statistical drop in toilet terror coupled with total student self-discipline will surely enable Klein's publicists to give him credit for a re-hauled educational focus.

Denied bathroom access and dimmed ceiling lights don't strike us as related to a lousy syllabus and hallway hooliganism, but they are all symptoms of the same wasting disease of cynicism and neglect.

At Daniel Beard Middle School, each day starts with ten-minutes of mandated "academic enrichment." This "innovation" is in keeping with Tweed's view that change for the sake of change creates the needed illusion of new ideas. All teachers are given the same material and script. It consists of a reading passage, usually biographical, followed by questions that are remarkably devoid of ingenuity. Though the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln fall in February, a month that includes Presidents Day and the anniversary of the monumental World War II battle of Iwo Jima, we are not mentioning these or indeed any other notable people or events of meaningful history. Instead we are concentrating on Ramona Hernandez, who has "fast become one of the leading authorities on the Quisqueyana culture."

Next we have Emma Ortega, who "knelt at a shrine adorned with skulls.at pyramids revered by the Aztecs.to utter an unusual prayer. Save us from Wal-Mart." The next hero is introduced as " a forty-nine year-old Hispanic man named Jorge Pagan, who has HIV which causes AIDS and.was a professional boxer." He goes on to punch in a wall and save a kid from drowning. The details of being Hispanic and having AIDS bear no relevance to the narrative. The reference was no slip or failure of literary flair. By subliminal persuasion it carries an impertinent message of pseudo-pertinence. Even in an unlit class, students can see the light.. They can distinguish the bloom of knowledge from the artificial flower of propaganda.

The teaching of anything, including propaganda, is incompatible with a chaotic environment. The Chancellor claims that his Student Discipline Code has been stiffened, is executed without fear or favor, and works. But reality speaks the terrible truth. Said one model teacher whose cry was heard live by an alarmed City Council at a public meeting, "words cannot describe the nonsense and abuse that has to be put up with to just stand in these classes. Forget about teaching!"

How is the Chancellor dealing with this Red Alert? He has created a week of "interactive theater instruction" for bullies. (At least he has not named a star after each of them and registered it in the Copyright Office) .He has instituted "impact schools" where the worst offenders are so regaled that their only regret is being returned to their original school. Recidivism is a certainty. That leaves the law-abiding students up the creek and lost in space. The climate that intractable troublemakers create is plain to any concerned member of the public who walks the halls uninvited, unannounced, and unescorted. Keeping this from happening seems the primary function of the safety agents.

More peace officers are assigned full-time to New York schools than staff the police forces of many medium-sized cities. Not least among the pressures they face is the re-classifying of crimes so that grave violations find their way into the "infractions" column. Such choreographing of the facts makes life easier for managers who equate public relations with education.

Chancellor Klein enjoys the full and blind backing of his master, Mayor Bloomberg, whose immense political and economic clout does the double duty of shielding them both while endangering, indeed cracking up public education. Holding this team accountable is like hitting a moving target that plays peekaboo all over the map. The road to recovery is slick and rocky. Easy street is a blind alley, it's been said. But though it'll take time, my students are eternal optimists and are at least betting it won't be "light" years.

Source

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

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

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

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15 October, 2005

Fighting Against Liberalism in education

(From Stop and Think)

The Alliance Defense Fund is branching out to challenge violations of college students' First Amendment rights of religious freedom, freedom of speech and freedom of the press. The ADF has launched a new website devoted to educating people of injustices occurring on college campuses regarding the violation of First Amendment rights. The ADF is representing students forced to take oaths against their will, to undergo mandatory "diversity" training and victims of religious discrimination.

It seems if you're a liberal in this country you have "rights" whereas if you think along different lines you don't. Why? Has faith in God become anathema to the Americans? We all know that there are hypocrites in religious circles, but hypocrisy rears its ugly head in EVERY facet of life in America. Instead of banning religion why not ban hypocrisy instead? And why "diversity" training as a mandatory requirement to achieve an educational diploma so you can work for a living doing something besides digging ditches or waiting hand and foot on the elite in this country? Why are politics in the classroom in the first place? It sounds like the old Soviet Union to me. It also reeks of the fascism of Nazi Germany and the stink of Red China. Since when has choosing sides on political issues been more important than allowing American citizens the right to an education?



Breaking up the monolith

(The OECD is the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development -- an international economics body)

The OECD'S director for education, Barry McGaw, says public schools should be run more like private schools, with parents and teachers given more say and competition and diversity encouraged. Dr McGaw believes it would help convince parents that public education is worthwhile. As the drift from public to private schools continues, and the number of students of school age starts to decline, education bureaucrats must consider ways to bolster the popularity of public schools if they are to continue to offer a high-quality alternative. The [Australian] federal Education Minister, Brendan Nelson, is so keen on what Dr McGaw has suggested he has hinted he might make it a condition of federal funding for the states. The ideas certainly deserve serious consideration.

The demand for choice is a relatively new pressure for the government school system. In 1971, government schools were the overwhelming choice of parents. Seventy-eight per cent of students were educated at them. By this year that figure had fallen to 67 per cent and it is projected to fall to 64 per cent by 2010. While the advocates of government schools rightly praise the high standard of education available, the centralised uniformity which used to be the government system's great boast has come to be seen as a drawback.

Parents feel wary of the public school system in part because it is so vast, and so hard to change. Last week parents from one Sydney public school felt angry enough about a staffing decision to protest noisily in State Parliament after letters and a petition to the Education Minister, Carmel Tebbutt, proved fruitless. They got nowhere. Ms Tebbutt told them she could not intervene in a staffing matter, and their school had been treated exactly the same as any other. So it had. That is precisely the problem. The parents were perfectly justified in wanting the right to choose. They are concerned - as they have every right to be - about their school and their children, not the bureaucratic needs of an enormous statewide system. Why should it be necessary for honest citizens to invade Parliament House and risk arrest over such a simple matter?

While some state schools involve parents in decisions about staff, it is clearly not mandatory. And if anger and vehement protest cannot change even one recruitment decision, what chance do parents in general have to alter more fundamental trends? One virtue of Dr McGaw's suggestion may be that it would oblige teachers to engage more closely with the concerns of parents, without requiring them to surrender professional control. Any such change would allow individual schools to follow their own paths, and diverge from centrally dictated standards. Some schools would flourish, others might not. There would have to be safeguards to ensure individual schools did not deteriorate through neglect.

The continuing flight to private education shows that parents want choice and are willing pay for it. As things stand, only the relatively wealthy can afford to choose. Why should choice not be available, within the government school system, to all?

Source

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

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

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

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14 October, 2005

NAIVE MOTHER IN NYC

She expected civility from black kids

City education officials are investigating the claims of a pair of boys from Oklahoma who moved to Brooklyn to experience diversity, and instead say they got schooled in racism and violence. Mom Lisa Brown, 33, told the Daily News she relocated her family from their small Oklahoma town so her husband, a Brooklyn native and social worker, could more easily find work and her sons could experience different people and ways of life.

Brown enrolled her sons, Sloan, 12, and J.T., 13, at Ebbets Field Middle School in Crown Heights. But when the boys, who are white, showed up, their mom said, they got a chilling indication of what was to come. "Oh my gosh, we are going to have fun this year," a security guard muttered, according to Brown.

Things quickly got worse. Sloan was beaten mercilessly, called "cracker" and "white boy," and chased into traffic by his new classmates, his family said. The abuse got so bad that Sloan routinely bolted out of the building to find his brother and run to a nearby subway, dodging verbal and physical attacks, he said. "It almost makes me cry," Sloan said. "I'm scared to go back." The brothers skipped school all last week while their parents tried to sort out the mess. "Do I have to send the National Guard in to get my children an education?" asked the distraught mom.

When Brown tried to alert Principal Marge Baker to the abuse, "the principal refused to take the calls," she charged. Brown filed several police reports at the 71st Precinct stationhouse about the alleged abuse, but said she was ignored. Police sources said precinct cops did take the incident seriously but believe school staff are in a better position to deal with what appeared to be a series of schoolyard fights and bullying.

The boys' stepfather, Ken Brown, requested a transfer for the boys on Sept. 28, but Education Department officials noted he can't seek the change because he is not a custodial parent. Eventually, the fedup mom went to nearby Elijah Stroud Middle School to transfer her sons there, but said the principal told her: "They'll have the same problem here."

Education officials promised to help the Browns - after being contacted by The News. "The principal was not sufficiently attentive to this situation," the Education Department said in a statement. "Upon learning of the situation, the region is taking immediate action to arrange a transfer for these children. "We will fully investigate what happened, including whether racist statements, which are not tolerated, were made and take appropriate action."

Brown said the Education Department called her several times over the weekend, after The News made queries, pledging to get the kids into Elijah Stroud and chastising her for calling in the press. Despite the principal's warning, Lisa agreed to send her boys to Elijah Stroud tomorrow. "I'll make sure my kids are safe because it is the school system's job to make sure they are," she said.

For Sloan and J.T., escaping Ebbets Field Middle School will be a relief. The school opened in September as one of the city's many new small schools, with plans to "become the crown jewel" of Crown Heights, according to the Education Department Web site.

The Browns said their ethnically and racially diverse neighbors in Prospect Heights have embraced them, and they thought New York was "the greatest place on Earth" - until they started battling the school system. "I was excited to expose my children to a complete variety of people," Lisa Brown said. "I thought it would be an advantage. I always told my children that children could be cruel - but not to this extent."

Source



CORRUPT EDUCATIONAL SUPERVISION IN NYC

Supervisors can be humps in any business. That convenient truism has entertained disgruntled workers since the Egyptian pyramids were built. Groaning and passing the buck can be a fair and amusing tactic to elude personal responsibility and there's a time and place for everything. We're only human.

But New York City's Department of Education is unique, because whether its supervisors have harsh or mild temperaments, none has been held back for failure to possess an inkling of knowledge about the specialized area of his supervision. Subordinates typically have far greater training and experience than their superiors.

Anecdotal evidence, no matter how overwhelming, can always be contradicted and credibly challenged by diligent opportunists, planted in key places, who will dig up and plug fake research or bribed testimony to abet the perception that the nearly unanimous point of view of teachers is actually isolated and idiosyncratic. Chancellor Klein has many impressive job titles available for such mercenaries whose honor is on the market for the highest bidder.

Knowledge must be power because the judgment of many supervisors is lame. Klein's new breed of assistant principal is often in charge of subject areas of which they are totally ignorant. They rate the job performance of teachers who after decades of training and experience have developed expertise in those same areas.

In one ordinary case, the assistant principal took over the music department. He unflinchingly admitted that he couldn't tell Beethoven from beets, notes from nuptials, or cellos from cellophane. The school orchestra had made brilliant progress under the leadership of their teacher. His marvelous skills as an educator complemented his resume', which included his having studied music for thirty years, been a composer contracted to a major publisher, and a regular performer at Lincoln Center. Still, the assistant principal ruled him an "unsatisfactory" teacher.

Because of this, the teacher's salary was frozen, he became ineligible to teach special after-school programs, and he was on track for eventual dismissal. Later it was alleged that there was a "hit" on him. His earlier refusal to accept a transfer was an obstacle to the placement in his position of an aspiring teacher who reportedly was close to a local educational bureaucrat. No matter. The assistant principal became a principal soon after. The teacher resigned in disgust. The children lost.

In the same school the prestigious post of science department head defaulted to a different assistant principal who didn't know biology from black magic, chemistry from clairvoyance, or geology from gee-whiz. The teacher was an idealist with an engineering degree. After having worked for twenty years for a Department of Defense contractor, he was a natural in the classroom, merging proficiency with evangelical zeal. His supervisor couldn't pass a test that his seventh grade students had aced, but he had to humor her whose observations were mere stabs in the dark.

The social studies supervisor, to her infinite credit, was a bit coy about flaunting her no-nothingness, although she dutifully ticked off some critical comments in the one-size-fits all checklist used for formal lesson reviews. She had been a teacher for only two years and was blind to history, geography, and economics, but she was ambitious and knew how to network. All who traced her career attributed its advancement to fixings unrelated to the kind of merit most of us used to take for granted.

One of the English teachers, author of monographs on Milton and Carlyle, was under the thumb of the principal himself, who couldn't write a coherent letter to his Parent Association without the intercession of that virtual angel called "Spell Check."

In fourteen hundred public schools in New York City, this is the norm. Flying high as a supervisor is an almost overnight affair even before one has earned one's wings in the classroom. It used to take twelve years or more; now it is commonly achieved in two. To escape the rigors of the classroom and to leap tens of thousands of dollars of salary in a single bound, new teachers jump onto the supervisory runway as soon as possible.

Competent and credible supervision is vital. Supervisors should be appointed only after they have passed muster in the classroom and are experts in the subjects of their responsibility. They should have competed successfully in an open process in which backgrounds are screened and unrigged interviews held with administrators, teachers, and parents, as was standard before Klein replaced appointments with anointments.

Teachers should do their best work under all circumstances whether under their control or prescribed for them. But in education as in the military or corporate world, there will be greater productivity and loyalty from a workforce that looks up to its leadership than one that is forcibly reminded at every turn of its inadequacies. Teachers and supervisors should belong to the same united federation of servants to children

Source

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

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

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

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13 October, 2005

Helping the Poor Earn Doctorates

LOL. With a 1.7% success-rate! Yes: 1.7%, not even 17%. Does government get any dumber than this? They could have got more like a 70% success-rate if they had required a minimum IQ of 120 in those they helped but IQ is of course anathema. All men are equal, don't you know. -- Post below lifted from Thomas Reeves

Since the 1960s, the federal government has made dramatic and costly efforts to assist the education of minorities and the poor. The list of programs includes one designed to help low income and underrepresented students reach graduate school and earn a Ph.D. The results have not been encouraging, and one wonders why.

The Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program, operated by the United States Department of Education, was first funded in 1989-90. It provides participants with research grants, academic counseling, seminars, summer internships, and assistance with admissions and financial aid. The grants are made to participating colleges and universities. Campus officials find promising undergraduates, usually in their sophomore year, and steer them toward the McNair Program. According to the enabling legislation, at least two-thirds of the participants must be low-income and first-generation students. The remaining third may consist of those who are "underrepresented in graduate education," meaning those of Hispanic, African-American, or American Indian/Alaska Native descent. Of course, one applicant may fit both categories, and in 2001-2002, 71% of the participants were Blacks and Hispanics. Whites made up 18% of the people in the Program, while fewer than 5% were of Asian, American Indian, and other origin.

In 1989-90, 14 projects were funded, serving 415 people and costing $1.5 million. In 2001-2002, the last year for which we have data (www.ed.gov/programs/triomcnair/mcnairprofile1997-2002.doc, there were 156 grantees serving 3,774 students. The cost was $35.8 million.

The bad news is that in 2000-2001, 24% of participants failed to complete their undergraduate degrees, and only 39% of those who graduated were accepted into graduate programs (up from a mere 13% in 1998-1999). Of that number, 16% earned Master's degrees and only 1.7% earned a doctoral degree. Another 2.4% received a "terminal degree." Of course, earned doctorates often take many years to complete, and it may be that in time the 1.7% figure will rise a bit. More whites and American Indian/Alaska Natives were successful than members of other ethnic groups.

McNair Program leaders claim that it has helped produce nearly 500 people with earned doctorates. Whether the results warrant the cost, however, remains debatable. This is not a major expenditure of the Department of Education, of course, but it still should be accountable to the taxpayers.

One would hope that in the future, McNair Program reports will spend less time reporting the ethnicity, color, age, and sex of Program participants and more on the specifics of how promising students were identified and the means by which they were assisted. Moreover, we do not know what fields the nearly 500 doctorates were in. Are these disciplines truly academic and scholarly? Are the graduates moving into fields in which there are serious shortages? (An American Indian student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in this program wants a Ph.D. in history in order to be the historian of his tribe. Another student, of Arabic descent, apparently thinks she needs a doctorate in order to be a translator in a hospital.) One would also like to see the financial side of the Program broken down to include its administrative costs. Whole bureaucracies on hundreds of American campuses exist to feed on state and federal programs of this sort, and they have never been known especially for their efficiency and effectiveness.

It would also be helpful to see specific descriptions of some of the participants. Are the long-neglected poor whites in the trailer courts being courted as eagerly as urban blacks and Latinos? Why are Asians so poorly represented? And why in 2000-2001 were 69% of participants women? Perhaps federal dollars are being invested very wisely. But we will need a lot more information in order to reach that conclusion



DECEITFUL BRITISH EDUCATION BUREAUCRATS

Post lifted from the Adam Smith blog

The Department for Education and Skills is opposite to the Adam Smith Institute, in that it is on the other side of Great Smith Street and a mere stone's throw away (no we don't). It is opposite in another sense, in that it believes social engineering to be a legitimate function of education. It has been trying to pressurize universities to admit more applicants from poorer backgrounds at the expense of more qualified ones less socially deprived.

The ASI takes the view that if schools are not equipping their students well enough to get them into good universities, then they could use some improvement. The DfES takes a different tack, and tries to get admission rules changed to admit more poorer-background students despite their under-performance. To that end they have recently called for some university places to be left open until A-level exam results are known. In the UK admission is often granted provisionally on the basis of predicted results, and the DfES case was that socially deprived students tend to be under-estimated. By leaving places open, those who surpassed expectations might secure admission.

Astonishingly, it seems their research shows the opposite of what they told us. Tony Halpern in the Times tells us that:

"The DfES-commissioned study shows that poorer teenagers were the most likely to have their predicted results exaggerated by their teachers. Teachers at state schools overestimated the true performance of their students far more than those in the independent sector."

Dr Geoff Hayward, who produced the report for the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service, said that he was "mystified and annoyed at the way the DfES had presented the research." He said it did not support the notion that poorer students were disadvantaged under current admission practices. His group found that 51 percent of poorer students had grades over-estimated by their teachers, versus 41 percent of the richer ones.

This looks very like breathtaking and wilful deceit by ministers mis-reporting evidence in order to justify their actions. In addition to the question of propriety, there is another question. If keeping those university places open does not help poorer students to gain admission, then why are they doing it? If poorer applicants perform proportionately worse than anticipated, surely they would be better relying on their predicted grades to secure places, rather than the poorer actual grades?

(Natalie Solent writes on the matter in more detail)

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

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

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

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12 October, 2005

TOTALLY INCOMPETENT BRITISH TEACHING METHODS

Almost half of children are leaving primary school without the basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic. Official unpublished figures obtained by The Times reveal that, after six years of schooling, 44 per cent of 11-year-olds have not achieved Level 4, the expected standard set by the Government, for the combined “three Rs”. Ministers repeatedly emphasise that meeting this grade is critical for pupils to cope with the secondary school curriculum; 70 per cent of pupils who achieve Level 4 get five good GCSEs at 16, compared with 12 per cent who do not.

Two months ago Jacqui Smith, the Schools Minister, boasted that “this Government’s unrelenting focus on the basics is paying off”, after new figures for Key Stage 2 test results for Level 4 showed that 79 per cent of 11-year-olds had passed English and 75 per cent had passed maths this year. However, the Government omitted one statistic, which showed in a provisional estimate that the combined percentage of all pupils who had passed Level 4 in reading, writing and maths tests was just 56 per cent.

In an e-mail shown to The Times, a member of the Department for Education and Skills, responsible for compiling the data, wrote: “We have not in the past provided an analysis of those pupils achieving Level 4 and above in the [sic] all of the above subjects, but have done so for English, mathematics and science. This figure will be released in the final 2004 KS2 publication, scheduled for June 2005.” The results published in August did not include this figure, however. Instead, they revealed that 68 per cent of pupils had achieved Level 4 in English and maths; 79 per cent passed the English test, which combines reading and writing scores. When the English scores are extrapolated into reading and writing tests, those who failed at writing may have passed Level 4 English because their reading ability had pulled up the overall scores. The Opposition is now calling on the Government to publish the final combined figure and question why it has been suppressed.

Last week Ofsted, the schools watchdog, said that thousands of children were starting secondary school unable to read and write properly because of poor teaching in one in three English lessons. In December David Bell, the chief inspector of England’s schools, said urgent Government intervention was required to rescue pupils from illiteracy. His endorsement of the traditional phonics methods of teaching English was backed by Nick Gibb, the Shadow Schools Minister.

Ed Davey, education spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, accused the Government of taking “their eye off the ball of the basic skills in primary education”. “This is hugely embarrassing for Ministers boasting of improvements and proves there are questions regarding how they are running the education policy,” he said.

However, Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, insisted it was the tests, not the ability of children, which were at fault. “End-of-year SAT tests are treated like rocket science but they’re very rough and ready and need to be taken alongside other reports.”

Much of the poverty of ability in reading, writing and arithmetic appears to lie with boys lagging behind girls in reading and writing. Alan Smithers, director of education and employment research at the University of Buckingham, says that, to overcome this, intervention is needed at a much earlier age. He suggests that if children as young as 3 practised sitting still, talking to each other and grasping pencils in a more formal kindergarten setting, they would be more ready to learn to read and write when they reach primary school

Source



MORE ON NYC DE-EDUCATION

"Less is more" and "Size doesn't matter." Whether architectural credo or as a subliminal, salacious message, people get stuck on mythical truisms. These maxims are glue traps to the New York City Department of Education, whose Chancellor Klein has embarked on a frenzy of fixing schools by dissolving them into tinier cells of infamy.

Large high schools are being split into four "personal touch" ignorance-bearing academies. This revolutionary ruse has been pulled before. The late Andrew Jackson High School, whose halls were bloodier than the alleys of Medellin, was reduced to four quaint nurturing learning hothouses. No longer a player on the police blotters, that high school has literally disappeared from the map and public consciousness. Some beat reporters, in quest of an expose', no doubt credit the Klein garrison state with cleaning up that particular academic toilet.

Fragmenting a huge failing institution into puny satellites and spinoffs will give the DOE cover to patch the recent revelation that applicants to its high schools have identified themselves as repulsed by eighty-six percent of their choices. Because of the baby boom of mini high schools, each with its own handsomely paid administration, that percentage will dramatically drop, just in time for the tabloids to pass on verbatim the Chancellor's inevitable self-congratulatory press release.

The release of the New York City High School Directory is awaited with breath more baited than that for the 9/11 Commission Report or the Academy Awards. Every school is glowingly spotlighted. Each is depicted as a fountainhead of specialized learning. There are more "unique focuses" than there are masterpieces at the Louvre.

No doubt someone was hired to thumb through an encyclopedia, identify every wide and narrow area of human endeavor, and forge a name for a new high school consecrated to its pursuit. From aviation to zoology, with perhaps some horticulture as an academic antipasto, there is a Gothic edifice to hoodwink the undiscerning, much as the slapped on paint over facades of incinerated South Bronx structures for tourists coasting from Boston to see en route here during the glory days of the Dinkins Administration.

An Oxford University professor, so worldly that from tinkering in his attic he devised a jamming device to thwart the signal of all boomboxes within a hundred yard radius of his beach cabana, was wildly impressed that these schools each sounded unique in more ways than there are fishes in the sea or lovers in Don Juan's black book. That High School Directory is such a state-of-the-art whitewash that not even he could believe that scarcely one-percent of the seniors in one of these urban temples knows how to outline an essay or diagram a sentence. I would bet my tax-deferred annuity that not one-half of them knows what alphabetical order means.

In answer to its own question, "What is special about small schools?", the Guide to NYC Small High Schools exclaims: "You will be safe. Everybody will know your name. You will learn fewer subjects well." Perhaps they should fine tune that last disclaimer.

These schools' concentrations are evident from their titles. Most are along the lines of "Expeditionary Learning," "Global Citizenship," "Urban Planning," and my odds-on-favorite, the "Peace and Diversity Academy." There are two schools for "social justice." Perhaps they will be varsity rivals. Other schools run the gamut, or the gauntlet, from "Aerospace" to "Hospitality Management" to "Ballet Tech." Selected supervisors might just as well rotate alma maters every other day for all the expertise they will possess, or know or care which is which. Instead of high-handed initiatives and grandstands, Chancellor Klein should reconcile his policies to proven traditional working models, and endear himself just a little to the real educators whom he has estranged.

(From Redhog)

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

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

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

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11 October, 2005

CALIFORNIA DISTRICT GIVES UP ON DUAL-LANGUAGE TEACHING

Seems to be a small win for NCLB

The Vista Unified School District has all but given up on its dual-language strategy of educating Spanish-speaking students and has been moving to a "structured immersion" program to help them learn English more quickly, officials said last week. The change comes roughly seven years after voters approved a ballot measure that outlawed bilingual education, but that allowed districts such as Vista Unified to continue the programs if parents signed waivers requesting them.

For years, the Vista district encouraged the waivers, until consistently low scores on standardized tests ---- which state and federal laws say must be administered in English ---- convinced them that change was needed, officials said. "Evidence came to the district's and board's attention that (bilingual) programs were not providing results as quickly as possible in terms of standardized testing," said Superintendent Dave Cowles. "The scores were not reflecting the progress we wanted to see." Test results released last month showed that 18 campuses in Vista Unified were failing to meet proficiency standards under the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, largely because of the scores of non-English speaking students, officials said. Roughly 7,100 non-English speakers are enrolled in the Vista Unified district, according to data provided by the district.

In the last several years, when students first entered school, parents were given a choice: either put the child in a predominantly English-speaking classroom or in a bilingual program known as "dual immersion" that included instruction in Spanish. When Proposition 227 passed in 1998, strictly limiting bilingual education in California, Vista Unified continued to emphasize its dual-language classes, allowing students to be taught in their native language and in English. Through the 2004-05 school year, more than 50 percent of the district's Spanish speakers were enrolled in the dual immersion bilingual program, according to Monica Nava, the district's English language development coordinator.

That number dropped to 22 percent this year, after Vista Unified trustees decided in 2004 that it was time to accelerate students' transition to English. By the start of the current school year, 16 of the district's elementary schools had begun structured English immersion programs, in which all materials, assignments and testing are in English. "This is the first year we've really gone for a full court press on the immersion program," said Cowles. "Our goal is to shift English language learners into (it), so they can learn English faster." Vista's program represents a sort of middle ground between bilingual and English-only programs, officials said. The new approach begins with 70 percent of instruction in English, but increases to 80 percent in the second and third years. Students who meet academic standards would then advance to an English-only program, while those who do not would remain in the classes....

Of the 18 campuses that failed to meeting state testing standards, eight were sanctioned this year by the federal government for failing to meet testing standards at least two years in a row. To pass the English and math portions of the test, 24.4 percent and 26.5 percent of students, respectively, must score at or above their grade levels, an increase from last year, when 9 percent to 16 percent of students needed to pass. Under the federal law, all categories of students ---- including non-English speakers ---- must meet those thresholds for the school to measure up. For most of the federal standards, nearly all Vista schools missed their target on the English test because one of the school's subgroups ---- English-language learners or a combination of English learners, Latino students or socioeconomically disadvantaged students ---- failed the test.

But officials are hopeful that next year will be better. "There is no question that the only thing we can do to benefit English learners the most is to move into English instruction as quickly as possible," Trustee Steve Lilly said last week. "I'm really optimistic and truly expect that we will see an increase in state language arts scores come this spring because so many more of the kids are spending their day exposed to English."

More here



Outsourcing Education is Nothing New

A recent trend in tutoring children is outsourcing. The students work at their computers in America, and their online tutors work with them from their computers in . . . India. Shocking? No. If you believe that the prime responsibility for educating children should rest on the parents, then ALL teaching outside the home is outsourcing.

In America, of course, most people are used to outsourcing the job to the public schools. But our governments' schools haven't been doing so well. So there is growing competition...Now even from India. A September 7 C/NET article informs us that "Companies like Growing Stars and Career Launcher India in New Delhi charge American students $20 an hour for personal tutoring, compared with $50 or more charged by their American counterparts."

How good are they? The report quoted enthusiastic parents, but it probably takes actual usage to tell. Of course, American Federation of Teachers' spokespeople warn us that the industry is unregulated. But then, our public schools ARE regulated, so take that for what it's worth.

Experts that I know suggest that judging even American services can be tricky. "The bigger the ad budget," says one, "probably means poorer word-of-mouth -- and it's word-of-mouth that keeps good, independent tutors busy."

But more sources for education sounds better than fewer. Whether down the street, on the other side of town, or the other side of the globe, the more options we have, the more likely we will find better sources for teaching.

Source



THIS SOUNDS LIKE A GOOD BOOK FOR HOME SCHOOLERS

Excerpt from a review of "America’s Glorious Cause" by David McCullough, Simon & Schuster, 386 pages

David McCullough has written another book that will be bought and read by hundreds of thousands of Americans, perhaps millions. Professional historians, their degrees framed on the walls of their offices and their salaries funded by hard-working taxpayers, will eat their hearts out once again. Their books will not sell or be read except as a requirement for their own graduate seminars. The reason is obvious. Professors in academe today generally discount good, old-fashioned narrative history for Marxist theory, psychoanalytical biography, social history, quantifying studies, or postmodern deconstructionism. They write only for themselves, and their prose is politically correct, agenda-driven, dull, vapid, or impenetrable. Once upon a time college professors commanded a wide audience and helped make the American people historically literate. Now that job is left to David McCullough and others like him who have not forgotten that a historian’s principal job is to tell a good story and to tell it with passion, insight, suspense, poignancy, and power. McCullough does so brilliantly.

History is about people—living, breathing, flesh-and-bone people—and McCullough never forgets this. His latest effort, 1776, is all about the people who fought for the Glorious Cause in the year of the Declaration of Independence. He clearly loves the cause and those who followed General Washington in a year that was full of victories and defeats, drama and boredom, courage and cowardice, sacrifice and selfishness, and optimism and despair for the American rebels. McCullough takes the reader into the ranks of the American troops, into their disease-plagued camps, their battlefronts, their homes, their love lives, their thoughts and beliefs. His extensive use of primary documents, including letters, diaries, and memoirs, generates an intimacy and an immediacy that makes for a page-by-page adventure. The reader can’t help but become a participant in the Glorious Cause

More here

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

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

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

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10 October, 2005

Scientists oppose "outcomes" education

How the Left shudder at the prospect of kids gaining real knowledge! Knowledge is the best antidote to Leftism

A delegation of scientists is making a last-ditch attempt to stop West Australian schools adopting an "airy fairy" education system they claim protects students' self esteem at the expense of competition and the pursuit of excellence. The Australian Institute of Physics yesterday voiced its opposition to a planned radical overhaul of the curriculum in the state's upper-school classrooms. The AIP has backed the recently formed education lobby group PLATO - People Lobbying Against Teaching Outcomes - in its claims that the new system will stifle students' competitive urges by rewarding them for achieving at any level. Institute state chairman Igor Bray will be among a three-person delegation of physicists from Curtin, Murdoch and the University of Western Australia to meet state Curriculum Council representatives on Thursday. Professor Bray said they would discuss teachers' concerns that "outcomes-based education" would let down poor students by giving them a false sense of their own competence.

Under OBE, no student can fail and every student achieves at one of eight "levels". Only students who achieve at levels six to eight are considered to be in the running for university. "The Curriculum Council does not see competition among students as an important factor but we do - we see it as vital," Professor Bray said.

Outcomes-based education will strip the hard sciences of their exclusivity from next year, placing teenagers destined for work as laboratory assistants and tradesmen in physics classrooms alongside future doctors and scientists. Theoretically, a student could pass Year 12 physics after achieving simple "outcomes", such as demonstrating the knowledge that energy can be transferred, that it appears in different forms and that it interacts with matter to produce different effects. A student who did not understand physics formula could also pass or "achieve".

Source



Having destroyed the rest of the educational system .... "The Institute for America's Future and the Center for American Progress, co-chaired by Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano (D), on August 23 called for $325 billion in additional federal education spending over the next decade, including more than $9 billion a year to create a nationwide, universal preschool program. Although the coalition has not released a specific plan, typical universal preschool proposals call for replacing the current largely private, parent-driven preschool system with a taxpayer-funded system that would likely add one or two years of 'voluntary' preschool for all children onto the current K-12 public education system."

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

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

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

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9 October, 2005

CALIFORNIA TEACHERS RESORT TO LIES

They are almost unsackable at the moment and they badly want to keep it that way

Opponents of Proposition 74, the teacher tenure initiative, have begun airing two ads against it. Below is the text of one of the spots and an analysis by Peter Hecht of The Bee Capitol Bureau:

STEPHANIE FLOYD-SMITH, seventh-grade teacher: Governor, you've already broken your promises on education. Now you're sponsoring Proposition 74, a ballot measure that allows one principal to fire a teacher without giving a reason - or even a hearing. While doing nothing to improve teacher training.

RENEE STEWART, elementary school parent: Parents like me are voting no on Prop. 74 to send the governor a message: Stop playing politics with our schools. And get to work on smaller class sizes, up-to-date textbooks, and restoring music and art classes - the things our kids really need.

ANALYSIS: The initiative, which would extend teachers' probationary periods from two to five years, does make changes in the dismissal process for teachers. But the changes aren't as severe as the ad makes them sound. School boards could dismiss teachers who receive two consecutive unsatisfactory performance evaluations. That's less documentation than required under current law, but the evaluations presumably would cite reasons for a district's unhappiness with their efforts. Teachers who were dismissed could get a hearing - but only after they were fired. Current law provides for a hearing before a teacher is let go.

Finally, principals can't fire teachers single-handedly. While they can make a recommendation, school boards have the final say on whether a teacher is dismissed.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's aides have acknowledged that he didn't keep a promise he made to education officials last year, when he persuaded them to accept suspension of school funding guarantees required under Proposition 98, which was approved by voters in 1988. The Governor's Office said the funding would be restored in future years when the state's fiscal position brightened. But the Republican governor announced in January that his second budget wouldn't repay the money, despite growing revenues, because the state needed to fund other priorities such as transportation.

Source



GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS FALLING BEHIND IN AUSTRALIA

Government school students in Victoria are falling behind in the competition for university places. A study has found that as independent school students continue to achieve higher marks, those from state schools are being "squeezed out" of the university market. While fewer than 20 per cent of year 12 students went to independent schools in 2003, they received about a third of all university offers - up more than 4 percentage points from 2000, the study showed. And while government schools held 58.8 per cent of all year 12 enrolments, their students received just 43.9 per cent of university offers, down 3.1 percentage points from 2000. In the same period, the proportion of tertiary applicants from government schools who received university offers fell from 57 per cent to 46 per cent.

"In terms of access to university, the government school sector is slipping behind its vigorous independent school competitors," said the report, Unequal Access to University Places. The report was prepared by Daniel Edwards, Bob Birrell and T. Fred Smith at the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash University, and based on statewide figures on year 12 students applying for universities, TAFEs and private colleges. These results coincide with a big shift in school enrolments in the decade to 2003, with a 20 per cent rise in the number of year 12 students at independent schools, and a 9.5 per cent drop in the number at government schools. [I wonder why?]

But the numerical drift to private schools alone does not explain the dramatic decline in government schools' share of university offers, according to the researchers. In another alarming development, the researchers found a widening gap between different government schools, with those in inner city, eastern and southern areas of Melbourne [more affluent areas] increasing their academic advantage over those in other areas. Between 2000 and 2003, the proportion of government school tertiary applicants to gain a university offer dropped by 20 percentage points or more in western Melbourne, Melton-Wyndham and Hume City. [poor areas]

In the same period, the Catholic school sector recorded a slight decline in university offers. "The government school sector is no longer serving as a ladder of educational opportunity for aspiring students from low-socioeconomic areas," it said. The Federal Government's reduction in subsidised places at universities was partly blamed for the trend, combined with a growing number of students wanting to continue education after secondary school.

The authors called on the Victorian Government to fund "a significant number" of new equity-based university places. The report also recommended an increase in specialist academic school programs.

State Education Minister Lynne Kosky said some of the study's analysis was flawed because it used data that included students who had not specifically applied for university. Ms Kosky also criticised the report for focusing on university entrance as the key measure of success. "(The report) just belittles any other educational experience other than higher education and university," Ms Kosky said. "Secondary schools are there not only as a pathway to university but also a pathway to other educational experiences and employment . I can't remember the last time a doctor fixed the plumbing in my house." Ms Kosky also said that the percentage of government school students who applied specifically for university and received a university offer was similar to the figure for the independent sector.

Dr Birrell responded that the "great majority" of students who received a TAFE offer did not apply for university because they did not have the required score.

Opposition education spokesman Victor Perton said the report's findings were devastating, and called for Ms Kosky's resignation. "Under this Government, state schools are actually going backwards," he said.

The Australian Education Union said that for many students it was the cost of university education - not their marks - that discouraged them from applying for university places. The union's Victorian president, Mary Bluett, said that with the high level of HECS payments [tuition fees] , many young people were asking whether it was worth going to university at all. Victorian Association of State Secondary Principals president Andrew Blair said university was "not the holy grail" for all students. "The bottom line is the public sector schools need to be all things to all people," he said. "This is an attack on public education for the wrong reasons."

Source

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

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

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

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8 October, 2005

It had to happen: University Dumps Admissions Requirements

Post lifted from Mike Pechar

The University of Washington is scrapping the customary and traditional method of screening and evaluating students for admission. Gone are the minimum grade-point averages from high school as are minimum achievement scores on the SAT.

From The Seattle Times:

Instead, university staffers plan to read and review every one of the 16,000 annual freshmen applications to come up with a "holistic" assessment of each candidate. Besides academic performance, they will consider factors such as whether a student has overcome personal or social adversity, their leadership skills and their extracurricular interests.

Critics believe that the "holistic" assessment is being used to skirt the restrictions of Initiative 200 passed by voters in 1998. I-200 makes it illegal to use race as an admissions factor. The Supreme Court ruled in 2003 that racial fomulas could not be used for admissions, however, race could be considered if it was mixed in with other stuff. Consequently, the University of Washington has turned its admissions requirements into a stew where race could easily be the determining factor.

So, students, do not worry if you only have a 1.5 GPA and scored 650 on the SAT. Sure, it used to that an applicant had to have something like a grade-point average of 3.5 and a SAT score of 1420, but that's all changed. Forget the GPA and test scores, you now may be "holistically" qualified.

By obfuscating the admissions process, it appears that the University of Washington is ideologically devoted to giving race-based preferences despite what the voters and the Supreme Court have mandated.

In summary, the only objective criteria that must be met to be admitted to the University of Washington are respiration and a heartbeat. Everything else is subjective.



DANGEROUS NYC SCHOOLS ARE MADE THAT WAY BY THEIR ADMINISTRATORS

Schools are not about teaching and learning. They are really about maintaining a dizzying holding pattern, circling like a plane, waiting for the tarmac to be ready for a safe landing. That will not happen as long as there is little but chaos on the academic runway. These are the halls and classrooms where there is no official sanction to enforce fair standards of discipline. More than ever, feral kids prowl with cockiness and richly deserved contempt for the hamstrung "authorities." Under Klein "Children First" initiatives, anything goes. There is no provision for separating monsters from their mayhem. This failure of willpower negates all good intentions and instruction.

Let's cut to the chase. No student shedding your child's blood is likely to be proportionally punished. Attacks on life and limb are no big deal. That is not Klein's party line, which proclaims zero tolerance, but is his standard operating procedure. He has a real commitment to favorable publicity, but his restrictions on effective discipline are an incitement to anarchy. By "playing it safe" and not making the hard decisions of which he is a loquacious apostle, he is leaving your children in the line of fire as his hundreds of backscratchers take care not to get burned. His offer to grease principals with bonuses to stick out temporary duty in a war zone is another slimy gimmick. Principals get payoffs; teachers get challenges.

If a student jabs a knife to your child's neck, but doesn't break the skin, and the blade was less than four inches, you must make your own police report if you are not forgiving, because the school's action will be minimal. The penalty is likely to be the same as for throwing furniture, menacing, death threats, extortion, vandalism: next to nothing. There has been much publicity about teachers' having the power, under "Save Legislation" to remove major agitators from their classes. Surely part of a teacher's duties is management of errant kids. But even when they are a fatal hindrance to all teaching, they cannot be bounced . The paperwork is time-consuming and onerous, and administrators use the referrals more as scorecards to keep track of teachers who are making them work than to reign in the difficult students.

The knife-brandishing student will not be "suspended". He will be remanded for a few days to a cozy room within the school. This "Alternate Learning Site" is a holding pen where students are asked to sit all day and do work assigned them by their teachers. If they don't do it there is no way to force them. The number of days in the ALS allowed per year is restricted, so the authorities are forced to divvy out sentences very sparingly. Because of the DOE's budget, which exceeds that of most member countries of the United Nations, there may not be funding to keep them operating more than twice a week . Klein's rationale for the flimflam known as ALS is that we must not interrupt a student's education in order to punish him. Sounds laudable. The real reason is that he wants suspensions to go the way of rotary phones. The gullibility of the public is a pheromone to Klein. When the tabloids show that suspensions are down 95% and have become as rare as asteroids plummeting into supermarkets, they will praise Klein for his overall effectiveness and the chancellor will parlay that into a vindication of all he stands for. The bad news is that your innocent child may still be caught in the crossfire. Just pray that he doesn't make eye contact with the wrong child.

Regardless of the crime, even if your child were pushed down a flight of stairs, there will be no indelible record of it on the offender's "permanent record." He might be discreetly transferred to another school ( often a better one, to which he may have unsuccessfully applied before trouble found him), or to an "alternate school" for a brief and refreshing stay. This would be his worst-case scenario even if he took a sword with more than a four-inch blade to the throat of a teacher about whose grading he disagreed. If the assailant is in a special education class, and impulsive antisocial acts have been identified as part of his disability, then his actions are no impediment to his continuing state of innocence. Guilt or innocence: six of one, half a dozen of the other, so far as Klein is concerned. The Chancellor has issued a Discipline Code which lists specific types of offences, assigns each a number according to severity, and prescribes a range of elective or mandatory consequences accordingly. This sounds fair and rational, but there are loop holes big enough for Australia to pass through. There is so much ambiguity in diagnosis and elasticity in treatment, that whether the punishment will fit the crime is a crap shoot. Extenuating circumstances are often concocted and mitigating facts contrived to bargain a high crime down to a peccadillo, especially if the offending child belongs to a parent activist or fund raiser. Suspension numbers will be more fudged than a gallon of Ben and Jerry's chocolate.

Klein has showcased, under strobe-lit media cameras, his new "second chance" or "alternate schools". One of my students was sent there on temporary duty, having done something really brutal to a classmate. When he returned a few days later he was a hero to himself, more chipper than ever, having done some self-esteem exercises and needlepoint or something rather like it.

The Regional Operations Centers must approve disciplinary action taken, even if it is in pantomime, against serious lawbreakers. Even in emergency, they do not pick up telephone receivers. All transactions, vital and picayune are through electronic mail only. Principals get an average of forty pages of such drivel and drool at a time almost daily. The people in charge at these Centers, the spawn and yoke of Klein, are not educators and there is no dialogue possible with them. They are crucially placed in the lineup, but they haven't a clue how to hold a bat. They're proud of that, will never solicit or tolerate advice, and woe unto the educator or would buck them.

Source

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

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

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

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7 October, 2005

PUTTING THE KIDS FIRST? NOT TEACHERS OR THEIR LEFTIST ALLIES

When Hurricane Katrina left 372,000 without schools, President Bush responded with a plea to Congress to provide educational aid to every displaced child, regardless of where they found refuge — in public, private, or religious schools. Louisiana's Democratic senator Mary Landrieu and her Republican counterpart David Vitter immediately followed suit with an across-the-board relief bill.

But soon, groups like the National Education Association and the National School Boards Association expressed outrage. They strongly objected to public funds being channeled to private schools in order to accommodate displaced children. The handmaidens in Congress quickly followed suit, saying that now is not the time for a debate over vouchers. Senator Ted Kennedy proposed a bill that would provide aid only to public schools — and explicitly not private schools — that have taken in displaced children. Kennedy has been joined inexplicably by Wyoming's Republican senator Michael Enzi. Now it appears Kennedy and Enzi are backing off somewhat, but they still only want to allow aid to go to private-school students after being channeled through public schools. If it is not defeated, this measure will add yet another unnecessary layer of regulation to a relief effort that has already been strangled by red tape.

Unlike Kennedy, the hurricane did not discriminate between children attending public and private schools. Owing to the abysmal condition of New Orleans public schools, roughly one-third of the schoolchildren in the most ravaged parts of Louisiana already were attending private schools. Many of their families, like so many others, lost everything in the flood.

The scores of private and religious schools around the nation that have opened their doors to displaced schoolchildren deserve prompt and equal compensation. Some Catholic schools in Houston are reportedly operating double shifts to accommodate children from Louisiana and Mississippi. But while public schools that are extending a helping hand can expect reimbursement, private and religious schools may not be so fortunate — not, at least, if Kennedy and his fellow sponsors have their way.

The message is as perverse as it is blatantly discriminatory. A person who is drowning doesn't care at all if the person throwing a lifeline is wearing a clerical collar. Likewise, whether an entity extending assistance to victims of a natural catastrophe happens to be a neighboring government or the Salvation Army, or a religious school, the response should be the same: thanks, encouragement, and support.

Those who oppose individual choice in the use of federal school funds often cloak themselves in the rhetoric of separation of church and state. But the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2002 in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris that when such choices are entrusted to free individuals, they do not constitute the establishment of a religion. To the contrary, the Supreme Court has charted a course of non-discrimination against religious organizations, which the Kennedy plan blatantly violates.

It is not the Bush administration that has raised ideological issues in the context of disaster relief. Its policy is relief for all children, everywhere. Kennedy and his allies seek to substitute a different standard: aid for only those children who do not find relief from private and religious schools. The burden of justification falls upon those who support such discrimination.

In Kennedy's case, the explanation is simple: he is in the grip of teachers' unions, who militantly oppose the freedom of parents to choose to spend public funds in private schools. Even in the most dire of circumstances, he can't seem to shake his addiction to special-interest pressures. He's obsessing over where Katrina victims will go to school, while the victims themselves are busy worrying about whether they will get to school at all.

The situation is especially poignant for impoverished New Orleanian children, whose public schools were already devastated by corruption and mismanagement long before the hurricane arrived. Many low-income families had scraped together enough money to pay private school tuition, but many more were unable to do so. The conditions were so bad that earlier this year, the heavily Democratic Louisiana House of Representatives voted to establish a voucher plan for New Orleans schools (though the bill stalled in the state Senate).

Now, if there is a silver lining to this horrible tragedy, it is that the children displaced by Katrina might yet find a brighter educational future with the introduction of school choice. This is much less likely, however, if Kennedy has his way. Kennedy's own children spent precious little time in public schools growing up. It is a shame that the senator, so proficient in the art of noblesse oblige, would deny other families the opportunity to be able to say the same.

Source



Ideology blackens schooling research

Much education research is of poor quality and tainted by ideology, a visiting scholar has claimed. "Education is one of those rare fields where the research and the theory very quickly move into practice," Terry Moe, a visiting US academic told last week's Schooling for the 21st Century conference at the University of Sydney. Professor Moe, a Stanford University political scientist whose market-based research has inspired the "school choice" movement, said education was a field unlike any other social science. "If you were in political science and you proposed something like vouchers [enabling families to choose schools], there'd be a big theoretical discussion," he said. "In education, they're thinking, what is the impact on the system which we all really care about and are invested in? "Just something as simple as getting up in front of an audience and presenting your research [honestly] leads some people to get mad. "As a result, a lot of education research is, I think, of poor quality. A lot of it is mixed with ideology."

Professor Moe praised last week's Sydney conference as an attempt to bring together a range of views. "If this conference had occurred in the States and we had a bunch of Americans in the audience they'd have been throwing vegetables ... it wouldn't have been pretty." US teachers unions have vehemently opposed vouchers as contrary to equitable schooling. Professor Moe said school choice was most important for poor and struggling families since the wealthy had no problem financing their choice.

Last week's Sydney conference featured those who have shaped Australia's school systems (former Queensland education adviser Allan Luke); their critics (commentator Kevin Donnelly); and leading overseas reformers (former Blair government adviser Michael Barber). As the conference came to an end last Friday some common ground emerged on curriculum with an emphasis on less clutter and more rigour.

Professor Moe said he and other researchers - mostly outside education faculties - had banded together in the Koret Taskforce to provide an alternative centre of research. "My hope is that education will really develop as a social science and that we can have really honest exchanges," he said. "I've been in [Stanford's political science] department 24 years - I'm the chairman of the department - and basically I don't know anybody's ideology in the department. We do our work and our work doesn't really have anything to do with our own personal ideology.

"Well, in the education school that's not true ... they know where people stand and they know it when they hire people, and that's why they don't hire people like me. "If you do support markets, for what I consider to be truly legitimate theoretical and research-based reasons, [then] all I am is just a conservative ... I'm a right-wing nut who's dangerous. "This is not just the Stanford education school, this is a general problem, I think."

Source

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

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

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

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6 October, 2005

GRADE SCHOOL FAILINGS IN BRITAIN

"Thousands of children are starting secondary school unable to read or write properly". In California thousands of children are FINISHING secondary school unable to read or write properly!

Thousands of children are starting secondary school unable to read or write properly because of poor teaching, school inspectors have found. One in three primary school lessons are still no better than satisfactory despite the Government’s commitment to improve standards, Ofsted reported yesterday. Boys in particular have shown little improvement and they fall further behind girls in test results as they grow older.

The inspectors said “urgent” action is required to help pupils who start secondary education without reaching the levels of English skills expected of their age group. National test results show that about one in five 11-year-olds do not reach the standard expected of their age group in English. The inspectors found that schools which teach using traditional phonics “systematically and rapidly” from an early age, have the greatest success in helping children to learn to read and write.

Ofsted’s study of the state of English teaching over the past five years found that pupils did not know how to improve because the quality of teachers’ assessment was “consistently weak”. Miriam Rosen, Ofsted’s director of education, said: “We are concerned, particularly because it will interfere with their ability to access the rest of the curriculum.” Standards in English continued to rise over the five-year period that the report covered, she said. “However, they have yet to reach the Government’s targets.” The Ofsted report concluded: “There is an urgent need for schools to improve the literacy skills of pupils who enter year seven (the first year of secondary school) with attainment below Level 4 (the standard expected of 11-year-olds).” Despite significant improvements in teaching between 2000 and 2005, 30 per cent of all primary English lessons are “no better than satisfactory”, Ofsted said.

Jacqui Smith, the Schools Minister and a former teacher, said: “Let’s get this in context. When Ofsted say that 30 per cent of lessons are no better than satisfactory this does not mean that these lessons are failing — it means they are meeting the expected standard but that there is room for improvement.”

The inspectors findings on the success of phonics come just months ahead of a Government review into the way reading is taught in primary schools. It is expected to examine whether more traditional methods could be used to raise standards. Jim Rose, a former director of inspection at Ofsted, was commissioned to report in January whether blending the sounds and shapes of individual letters instead of recognising whole words, would help children learn to read more easily. Since the 1960s, the “whole language” method of learning has predominated in most English primary schools. The Government embarked on the study after a seven-year pilot of children in Clackmannanshire, Scotland, showed that by age 11, pupils who had been taught throughout primary school to read with synthetic phonics, were three years ahead of their peers. Nick Gibb, the shadow Schools minister welcomed the findings and called for all primary schools to employ the more traditional teaching method

Source



DOMESTIC SCIENCE CLASSES RETURN TO BRITISH SCHOOLS -- BUT MAINLY AS "FOOD CORRECTNESS" PROPAGANDA

Cookery classes will return to secondary schools as part of “healthy eating” proposals set out yesterday by Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary. Boys and girls aged 11 to 14 will learn how to prepare vegetables and cook basic dishes under revisions to the national curriculum. The restoration of domestic science was recommended by the Government’s School Meals Advisory Panel, which accepted that schools concentrated too much on teaching food theory rather than on kitchen skills.

Ms Kelly supported the panel’s report that all children should be taught food preparation and practical cooking skills in the context of healthy eating. Parents might also be told what food is permitted in packed lunches, which are a must at thousands of primary schools without kitchen facilities. Pupils may also be barred from leaving school grounds at lunchtimes to stop them buying fast food. The proposals, subject to consultation, come after Ms Kelly’s announcement to the Labour Party conference last week that junk food would be banned from canteens and school vending machines.

Practical cookery is not in the curriculum, which requires pupils only to study food technology in design and technology classes. A curriculum review would now emphasise cooking skills. The Department for Education and Skills said: “Alongside giving children better meals, we want to ensure that they learn about diet, nutrition, food safety and hygiene, practical food preparation and cooking. Preparing and cooking food is a key skill that will benefit them as they move into adulthood and independence.”

The panel has also identified a £266 million funding gap in the Government’s programme for improving school dinners. The Government promised £220 million, but tough new standards for school canteens, recommended by the panel and approved by Ms Kelly will cost £486 million to implement. Schools will have to observe food standards in September that require children to have at least two portions of fruit and vegetables a day for lunch, as well as easy access to fresh drinking water. Menus must include oily fish regularly, and no more than two deep-fried products a week

Source

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

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

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

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5 October, 2005

Schools as Catering Halls

From a very disgruntled NYC teacher who just wants to teach the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth

It is the month of the harvest moon and the first frost. Gold and red leaves will soon scrunch under our feet. But there is an acrid taste, a prickly touch, a reeking smell, a raucous cry, and very crisp cowardice borne by the wind. It is a new academic season. Time for the halls of scholarship to be confirmed anew as catering halls. How so?

On the eve of the past presidential election, Garden State teacher wasfired for posting, among a gallery of presidential portraits on her classroom's bulletin board, a photo of the current George Bush. Students' parents, partial to John Kerry, demanded he get equal billing. The teacher explained that she had not endorsed or censured either candidate. There had been no electioneering. The only reason that Bush was cheek to jowl with Jefferson and Lincoln was that they all held at one time the highest office in the land. The unappeased parent bee-lined to the principal who ordered the teacher to remove the offending picture or collect her personal effects and beat it. After much turbulence she was restored to work but transferred. The scowl of media spotlight spared the terminating rod.

Catering to parents and historical revisionists has become a primary duty of teachers not on a martyrdom track. Kowtowing has become the backbone of the educational process. Textbook publishers doctor history to treat their own bottom line ailments. Politicians who control school boards are themselves ruled by a wide range of pressure groups. The ancient and sacred nature of teaching has itself yielded. No longer do we chaperone the spirits of youth to the truth wherever it leads us. Instead we draft our students as pawns in a despicable chess of political litmus tests.

A few years ago, a public service "documentary" lauded the American Army's Black soldiers who liberated European extermination camps at the end of World War 2. The problem was it didn't happen that way. The credit was no distortion; it was fabrication. The army was deplorably segregated back then. No Black troops were positioned to have a chance to exercise the noble capability that they shared with the fighters who actually did the job. Not having accomplished what was beyond their control was neither their shame nor their achievement by proxy. The film's defenders viewed this revelation as petty and mean-spirited. They argued that relations between Blacks and Holocaust-minded Jews were warmed by the fable, so the creative license was a salutary example of the means justifying the ends.

If I tactfully exposed this whopper in class, what would happen if a parent or organized group cried racism out of sincere or other assumption? Should I be persecuted like the curator of the presidential portraits? If as an English teacher I need to illustrate the uneven literary quality of Nobel Prize for Literature winners, and Toni Morrison came naturally to mind as unworthy company of Beckett, Eliot, Hemingway, and Churchill, must I bite my tongue and cite a non-Black laureate, just to play it safe? When the social studies textbook shows a typical Nigerian kitchen looking like Billy Joel's, may a teacher sympathetically set the record straight? And what if he has a rightly muted kind word for the British Empire?

Are we not more than paid mouths? Must we agree with the assertions made commonly in texts and in the film "Motorcycle Diaries" that the Incas in sixteenth century Peru were in the midst of performing brain surgery when they were rudely interrupted by the Spaniards' gunpowder? We have been re-educated to recoil at Christopher Columbus the plunderer. And when did the major publishers decide that the Aztecs did not really rip out the still-beating hearts of children in sacrifice to virgin goddesses?

If the teacher implicates the drug culture of Colombia, being careful not to equate it with Colombian culture as a whole, should he fear the wrath of those who would call him, absurdly, anti-immigrant? Should reference to India's caste system, including such indignities as requiring its "untouchables" who, because of their low-born social class, must clean toilets with bare hands, be avoided because South Asian societies might complain?

During a discussion of current events, mandated as "enrichment", an astute student in a Queens, New York middle school linked the imminent American election to the global omen of terrorism. In the natural course of providing context and perspective, his teacher identified Israel as the only nation in the Middle East that shares America's democratic values and institutions. A local Imam was not amused. That discussion will never happen again. But shouldn't it?

Will we all now be required to present the flip side of terrorism? "Balanced" views of the Pearl Harbor attack are already fed like Fruit Loops to children. Dare we show the audacity to depict our own way of life with at least benign neutrality?

On Korean Thanksgiving Day, late September, my middle school students wore traditional native dresses and treated the staff to some lovely sweet rice. Linking their holiday to our classroom discourse, we compared notes about gratitude. I was astonished that not one child had ever been told about America's sacrifice, self-interested as it may been to a degree, to keep the whole Korean nation from a perpetual diet of tree bark soup, as in North Korea. Was my eye-opener inflammatory as charged?

In the judgment of the father of one of my students, I was obliged to excuse his child's failure to complete my assignment on world affairs on the grounds that according to their upbringing, adolescence was too soon to endanger a child with political notions. Should I have worked around it to keep the peace or stood on principle? Since he is a customer of education, as the Department of Education sees him, the father's bum steer could not be addressed safely.

Many students in New York schools are children of United Nations employees. The United Nations, of which criticism is taboo, has admitted to hiring laborers who are known terrorists in Gaza. It has also been implicated in the "oil for food" turpitude If this comes up in class, can we "run with it" or must we suppress, sanitize, or must we give the truth the slip? If a member of my class happens to be the daughter of a consul, may I get a ginger ale on the way to the principal's office? How do we raise consciousness if not under the sturdy roof of free inquiry?

The inhibitions provoked by pandering can be funny. A teacher of science cited Edwin Teale's classic about bees, The Golden Throng. A parent mistook it as "Thong." To make life simpler, the teacher now tells the kids that the book is called The Golden Swarm. But at the end of the day, truth wants no caterer.

Source



Teaching reform in Australia: It is time to change what, and how, our schools teach

"One of the most hypocritical aspects of Australian public life over the past 30 years has been the way politicians talk about education, without ever doing anything to improve it. At election after election candidates promise to spend more on schools to ensure existing standards are improved. And they cite selective statistics to demonstrate how students in their state are either the best, or worst, in the world, depending on whether they are in government or opposition. But they never address the values crisis that cripples public education, and risks reducing it to a second-rate system, shunned by all but the poor. And they never discuss why we are in this mess, with a system designed to serve circumstances that no longer exist. And we are stuck with the outcome of their inertia today. The philosophical basis of schooling still dates from the 1960s, when education was supposed to drive social reform. And the structure of senior secondary education reflects the assumptions of politicians in decades past who assumed there would never be enough jobs to go round and so used school to keep kids off the unemployment rolls.

All of this is ancient history now. But while the real world changed, education theory did not. The result is we are are cursed with an education system that would make old hippies happy. In Australia today, the education orthodoxy holds that schools should teach students to critically analyse information, which is code for courses that emphasise Australia's faults and failings, especially with regard to the environment and indigenous issues. And in terms of what kids learn, it does not matter if it is not much. What is important is for them to learn at their own pace, regardless of the skills they lack at the end of each school year. And we encourage far too many students to go on to Year 12. The final two school years were originally intended for an academically inclined minority. But today they are holding camps for enormous numbers of kids, many of whom would be happier learning a trade.

One result of this sorry situation is too much of the syllabus reflects what teachers were taught about their role as social reformers. Another is that students who would be better served by trade training are forced into studying abstract subjects, for which they are not suited. And in the process, the academic element of Year 12 is eroded to cater for "mixed ability" classes, an Orwellian euphemism if ever there was one. Fortunately solutions to this archaic assembly of old-fashioned political ideology and education theory are starting to emerge. Federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson has tapped into the community's deep disquiet with the quality and content of teaching and learning in Australian schools. His demands for plain-English report cards, and comparative assessments of core subjects between the states, are pushing them towards reform. Inevitably state ministers complain Dr Nelson is playing politics with education. But it is easy to imagine they are privately pleased with the way he is forcing reforms that may be unpopular with academics and union leaders, but will please parents and serve students.

The federal Government has also established the foundations for a long overdue return to the old system of streaming, where students could select the sort of high school that suited their interests and aspirations, with the creation of new technical colleges. That Kim Beazley supports the general approach of student choice is an excellent outcome. If this means that one day we will emulate Germany, where tradespeople are respected for their ability and the benefits they bring society, good. For too long the orthodoxy in Australian education has been that only a university education would do. We are paying the price for this silly snobbery now, with lawyers in plague proportions and shortages of tradespeople so severe they threaten our economic growth. And significant structural reform is also on the agenda, with talk of ways to encourage autonomy for individual public schools. While the syllabus in each state will always be set by central bureaucrats, the more decisions made at a local level the better. Of course all these ideas and initiatives will be howled down by advocates of the failed status quo, who always argue every reform is anti-teacher. Nonsense. There is nothing wrong with Australia's committed teachers. It is the prevailing philosophy of education that they are obliged to follow which is one of the core problems in Australian education. In a just society, schools give every student the education they need to make the most of their abilities. For too many our children Australia's schools do no such thing. It is time they did".

(The above is an editorial from "The Australian" newspaper of October 1st)

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

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

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

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4 October, 2005

MORE ON THE CALIFORNIA EDUCATIONAL MELTDOWN

This is a story of almost total educational failure and, even so, it does not take account of the 30% or more who drop out without taking ANY exam

Nearly 100,000 California 12th graders — or about 20% of this year's senior class — have failed the state's graduation exam, potentially jeopardizing their chances of earning diplomas, according to the most definitive report on the mandatory test, released Friday. Students in the class of 2006, the first group to face the graduation requirement, must pass both the English and math sections of the test by June. The exit exam — which has come under criticism by some educators, legislators and civil rights advocates — is geared to an eighth-grade level in math and to ninth- and 10th-grade levels in English.

But the report by the Virginia-based Human Resources Research Organization showed that tens of thousands of students, particularly those in special education and others who speak English as a second language, may fail the test by the end of their senior year despite remedial classes, after-school tutoring and other academic help. Teachers, according to the report, said that many students arrive unprepared and unmotivated for their high school courses and that their grades often reflect poor attendance and low parental involvement.

The group reviewed the test results as part of a report ordered by the Legislature when it instituted the exit exam several years ago. Among its findings: 63% of African Americans and 68% of Latinos in the class of 2006 have passed both parts of the exam. By comparison, 89% of Asians and 90% of whites have passed. The report recommended that the state keep the exam but consider several alternatives for students who can't pass. "Clearly, we need to have some options for these students," said Lauress L. Wise, the firm's president, in a telephone interview with reporters.

The state, for example, could allow seniors to submit portfolios of work [Done by someone else] that demonstrate mastery of English and math, the report's authors suggested. The report also proposed that schools allow students to spend an extra year in high school or earn diplomas by completing special summer school programs in lieu of the exam. Additionally, the state could establish alternate diplomas or graduation certificates for students who pass part of the exit exam, the group said.

But California's superintendent of public instruction, Jack O'Connell, said he opposes any change that would diminish the worth of a high school diploma. "It's important to keep one core principle front and center: awarding a student a diploma without the skills and knowledge to back it up does the student a disservice," said O'Connell, who added that his staff would study the options outlined in the report.

The exit exam was originally slated for students in the class of 2004. But disappointing passing rates prompted state education officials to push the requirement back two years. The state also shortened the test from three days to two. Students get several opportunities to pass the exam in high school, and they have to correctly answer only a little more than half of the questions to succeed.

More here



ILLITERATE AUSTRALIAN TEACHERS

It was not always so and it does not need to be so. It reflects the way the Leftist takeover of the education system has put propaganda before all else

Many teachers cannot spell and there are hundreds of examples to prove it, the Federal Government says. Education Minister Brendan Nelson has released examples of teachers' spelling and grammatical mistakes, in a push to overhaul English education standards. One example included a teacher spelling Qantas as Quantas. Dr Nelson said parents should be shocked. He blamed the shortcomings on the way Bachelor of Education students were taught at university. "Parents have every reason to be concerned because a significant number of children are being let down," he said.

But university lecturers have hit back, accusing Dr Nelson of being an ignorant trouble-maker. "Regarding the Qantas example, the teacher was right as far as the rules go (putting a U after a Q). Maybe the teacher had never flown Qantas before and didn't know how the company spelt its name," Flinders University primary school literacy and English lecturer Barbara Neilsen said. "I assure you some young teachers graduating today are brilliant and we are not helped by people blaming us, but helping us to do better."

Hundreds of examples were sent to Dr Nelson by parents from across the nation after he last month highlighted his concerns about teaching standards. One parent sent in a note written to her by an English teacher regarding the large number of uncorrected spelling mistakes in her son's exam. It said: "This task was an assessment task set to test comprehension skills, and spelling and grammar were irrelevant." [!!!]

Dr Nelson said one in five students left school with serious reading, writing and communication problems, which put them at a big disadvantage in the job market. The Federal Government inquiry would rank states according to their teacher training levels and the results would be made public, Dr Nelson said. "This will put pressure on the lower-ranked states to improve their performance and I'm hoping a national standard will be adopted," he said.

Source

The above article is from Sept. 25th. As a follow-up, on p. 53 of the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" of October 2nd., were printed many letters from readers about the issue. There was much support for the Minister's remarks and many comments about higher standards prevailing in the past. I reproduce two of the letters below:

"I was school secretary of three very large schools over 14 years, and during this period typed thousands of pages of work from hundreds of teachers' handwritten information. I was absolutely amazed (and sometimes horrified) at the countless spelling mistakes contained in the information given, and was just very thankful thatI had excellent spelling skills in order to ensure that the typed article was correct, especially as a considerable amount of the articles I typed were examination papers. On a few occasaions I even overheard teachers telling parents that it was the content that was important, not the grammatical or spelling content, in order for the student to pass that particular assignment or examination. I believe that our children do suffer because of this. Going back to good old spelling tests each Friday would be an effective way around the problem. I remember them well and they didn't have any far-reaching effects that caused me "great psychological damage""

"Why was I not surprised to read about students, including teachers, who have not been taught to spell properly? I am 58 years old and when I was at school we had it hammered into us every other day. I can remember even in my first grade where we had a copybook where we learnt to write properly between the given lines. I take pride in the fact that, today, I have quite nice handwriting and always have had, probably because of my being taught very well. As for spelling, I also take pride in the fact that I class myself as "up there" with the best. Also our tables were drummed into us and, still to this day, and until the day I die, will always be programmed in my memory bank. You could never beat the old-faswhioned system of the three Rs. There is absolutely no question about it, and this is what they must do and the sooner the better".

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

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

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

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3 October, 2005

Poverty of Mind and Spirit - The Solution

"In response to Evan Sayet's "Dead Man Walking" piece about the lack of ideas coming from the Democrat Party, Richard Becker writes:

"Does ANYONE know what the Dems plan to do to improve our schools?

I know what the Dems plan to do to improve our schools, and that is spending more on the schooling system that has passed for education in the decades since the infamous "Great Society" social(ist) spending that proclaimed it would improve decaying and crumbling cities, poor housing, POOR QUALITY EDUCATION, etc. Billions of taxpayer dollars spent to create the huge deficit and dependence on government as the alleged solution for everything (even Republicans seem to be afflicted with that), the problems not only remain but have gotten worse!

Spending more on schooling that passes for education is no solution, because education quality was better prior to the mid '60s when spending was only $484 per student K-12 in 1965 (U.S. News & World Report 9-1-'75 p44) and is now approaching $7,000 per student amid a clamor for more spending........to improve education!!!! RHB "

What Evan and Richard are saying is not so much that the Democrat Party has no ideas but that the underlying principles upon which they govern not only haven't worked but continue to debilitate and enslave many Americans. The Democrat Party didn't plan for so many things to go wrong. It just turned out that way. Let's look at those failed principles.

Collectivist Thought. The Great Depression was the culmination of a century of anti-business sentiment stemming from the unregulated freedom business enjoyed. From railroad barons, to oil monopolist to irresponsible stock market speculators there was always plenty of ammunition for Democrats to convince ordinary Americans that they were being oppressed. The crash of 1929 was that Party's "proof" that business was at its core "corrupt". The Party adopted Marx's collectivist thought to solve the problems of the day. They didn't. They resulted in 12 years of anti-business solutions that left 17% of Americans out of work on December 7, 1941 when World War II corrected that. Unfortunately, the United States suffers today from a hangover from that thought. Democrats don't solve problems; they generally just throw money at them. Their answer is never to face the issue of inefficiency but to solve it by redistributing money from the rich to the poor, a now failed policy that is the energizing principle of the "new" and "old" left in America. That idea has failed but the Democrats insist it hasn't.

Self-Esteem. A century of psychology has ushered in a collective guilt the Democrat Party and their elite in academia have used to perpetuate anti-business and anti-authority policies. By supporting the elimination of discipline in schools, 50% of the black population doesn't even get a high school education. Without discipline and structure the schools have decayed and the gap between the haves and have-nots has widened. Unfortunately, throwing money at the problem has only exacerbated it. Having been denied structure and discipline, it isn't a mystery why crime, dependency and misapplied concern have resulted in the poverty of mind and spirit of so many Americans. The failure to support American values and heritage in the name of "multiculturalism" has resulted in such confusion that many Americans are rebelling at the Democrat Party whose intent it appears is to replace secularism and patriotism with evolution and a masochistic psychoanalysis.

Short-term Prognosis. I could go on for pages describing how the Democrat Party's governing principles are unfair and haven't worked. But if you are breathing you already know that. That Party's failure to put forward a cohesive plan, at its core, involves the rejection of collectivism and the adoption of pro-business, privatization concepts as well as re-establishing a positive pro-American initiative involving discipline and structure.

At this juncture Democrats don't buy that. Hillary Clinton is their hope to continue their "hopeless" "village" "group" "collectivist" agenda. John Kerry presidential run was not the defeat they needed to change. They need a real whipping...."

More here



CALIFORNIA DOUBLESPEAK

Orwell would recognize it

State schools chief Jack O'Connell said Friday he will consider "additional options" that would give the 90,000 seniors who have yet to pass the California High School Exit Exam a shot at graduation in June. O'Connell said his decision does not waver from his long-standing belief that the state should not make special accommodations for students struggling to pass the exam, which is a graduation requirement this year for the first time. But his comments drew sharp criticism from the test's supporters, who said the superintendent was sending a mixed message to students, teachers and parents.

"We're staying the course, but does that mean we should preclude every possible option?" O'Connell said. "We're going to look at (other options) very carefully, but it's not a change of position one iota."

Jim Lanich, president of California Business for Education Excellence, called O'Connell's announcement a retreat that threatened efforts to hold students of all racial and economic backgrounds to the same academic expectations. "It's a sad day when the adults of the state will redraw targets before targeting the problem that kids are not being taught what they need to know," Lanich said.

O'Connell's comments followed the release Friday of a report by an independent consultant that said about 78 percent of the class of 2006 has passed the exam, which tests students on seventh-and eighth-grade math skills and ninth-and 10th-grade English skills. Students must pass both parts.

More here



Chancellor Klein's Dirty Kiss

More outrage from NYC. Reminder for the poor benighted folk who don't live in NYC: Chancellor Klein is in charge of the New York City public school system. He is the former Clinton-era Justice Department federal prosecutor in the Microsoft case. He is the first chancellor to have absolute and total control of the system through the Mayor, Bloomberg

Every day is a time to celebrate the contributions of teachers, says bleeding hypocrite Joel Klein, Chancellor of the New York City schools. Not long ago,on the pretext of it being National Teacher Day, he codified his venal acclaim in a letter that soiled every teacher's mailbox. It was just another masked insult dished out to teachers forced to endure hisabusive reign. This destroyer of education and morale sent a syrupy letter to teachers praising them for "opening the minds" of students and helping them to "prepare to become our City's next generation of citizens."

It prattles on how "every single teacher plays a critical role in our mission to put children first," and credits teachers who work "every day in our classrooms to inspire."What a guy!This kind of patronizing letter is like the turkey that factory workers used to get on Thanksgiving to distract them from the misery of horrible working conditions. Being told, in effect, to "have a nice day" as the knife is being twisted deep into your back at the most critical vertebrae is not much comfort, although it serves to throw the victim off his guard.

Nobody but nobody among classroom educators in the New York City public school system believes that Chancellor Klein is a man of decency or genuine vision. He has done more to ruin the school system than have all the combined educational leaders who have preceded him in this City since Hiroshima. And whatever good was preserved from the past or new evil avoided is by accident.

Chancellor Klein is at war with the folks to whom he is kissing up in his National Teacher day letter.

Source

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

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

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

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2 October, 2005

THE NOSE OF THE CAMEL

A new book by Douglas J. Slawson, The Department of Education Battle, 1918–1932, is a case study in federal government involvement. Slawson focuses on an especially active period of lobbying for and against a federal department of education, a period that ended with the forces of government expansion defeated (an unfortunately too-rare outcome). Of course, the advocates of a Cabinet-level department would eventually get their wish, when a separate U.S. Department of Education came into being almost 50 years later in 1979. (Federal funding and regulation were already long established by that point.)

Slawson’s book, published by The University of Notre Dame Press, highlights the role of Catholics in defeating the drive for a federal department of education. Protective of the school system they built at heavy cost, Catholics were sensitive to any move that appeared to threaten their schools’ existence. It was the 1920s after all, an era of anti-Catholic sentiment that manifested itself, among other places, in an Oregon law that mandated public-school attendance for elementary-age children. (The law was nullified by the courts, a ruling upheld by the Supreme Court in 1925.)

As Slawson points out, Catholics were not alone, however; in fact, they were “in the political mainstream.” President Coolidge in particular was concerned with shrinking government expenses, and the creation of another Cabinet-level department was hardly consonant with that goal. Lutherans, too, who boasted a large parochial school system of their own, lobbied against the establishment of a mechanism that could be used to standardize schooling and make life difficult for non-public education.

On the other side were a variety of public school proponents, the National Education Association among the more respectable of them. Already a powerful and astute lobbyist, the NEA, failing in the contemporary political climate to get the whole package of a federal department and federal funding for schools, settled on a piecemeal campaign, whereby a department would be achieved first. Funding and control would naturally follow.

But opponents were wise to the strategy. Jesuit Paul Blakely at America magazine opined that any federal involvement represented the nose of a camel poking into the education tent: “Soon the whole animal would be inside.” Catholics understood that the federal government had a valuable and vital role to play in American society, a role articulated and delineated in the Constitution. But education regulation was clearly intended by the Constitution to be a function of local and state governments. Catholics perceived that their self-interest and constitutional principles coincided and they made the most of it.

The push for bigger government is relentless, however, and the NEA and its allies eventually won their department. The latest installment of federal funding (and control), the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) has continued the trend. As one veteran educator put it, public school administrators are “pulling out their hair” trying to comply with the Act’s extensive reporting requirements, which mandate not only administration and tabulation of test scores for every student, but tracking of progress made by sub-groups such as African-Americans, to ensure that no group is being left behind.

The impetus behind NCLB -- discontent with the poor quality of public education in many parts of the country -- was justified. But the effort to address the problem, coming as it did from a national office incapable of taking into account local variations, became a bureaucratic nightmare. The NEA is now among the loudest critics of NCLB. But the act is the logical result of a federal department of education that the NEA lobbied strenuously for decades to create. The power of the leviathan appears seductive until it has passed out of one’s own control. Instead, and in retrospect, the uncompromising approach of the Catholic opposition 80 years ago appears to be validated. When next it is proposed that the federal government get involved in an area beyond what the Constitution provides, we should remember the warning about the nose of a camel

More here



Learning As A Martial Art

A thought-provoking perspective

Learning is all about motivation. Students will race around a track in sheets of rain and howling wind. In any chosen athletic contest or training they will wring every ounce of energy from their psyche and body. They will not wait to be driven but will drive themselves to collapse and be exhilarated by team loyalty and pride in their personal self-discipline. They will love and obey the slaphappy coach who makes Marine drill instructors seem like dishrags but bulldozes his students to victory over the limitations of others and of themselves. Why will these same kids despise the classroom teacher who insists they bring a pencil to school each day?

There are probably no martial artists on staff at Columbia University Teachers College, but many karate instructors know more how to motivate youth than do most experts from the academic educational industry. The "sensei"solidly teaches all his students what is needed to survive and prevail. He points out striking links between coping with life itself and managing one's affairs in the kickboxing or grappling ring. The combat is not necessarily literal. It's not about kicking, twisting limbs, strangling, dislocating joints or moving on your back or stomach.

The techniques they teache stand for more than the actions themselves. Students are learning more than a fighting skill. They are learning patience, how to follow directions, acceptance of pain, humility, confidence, and to outlet our built-up emotions. They are learning how to be accountable for what we do and not to blame others or make excuses for our laziness or other weaknesses. They are discovering that hard work equals success, and a mental discipline from which we learn the value of kindness to others. We will put these values into our lives. They will make us better workers, parents, and citizens." What has all this to do with academics?

Everything! Intellect is served by character and character is fueled by intellect. Students need them in order to confront difficult, unexpected, and sometimes maddening answers. Students need to be in control of their own inner resources and not have the chaos within them catered to and rationalized away. They must organize their projects. Just as they put socks, sweaters, and underwear into separate drawers, they must compartmentalize their chores and assignments, whether academic or otherwise.

The majority of school systems would never stomach, much less authorize their schools to hold students liable for their failed will power.Their students would never consent to be relieved of responsibility even if they were offered it. Kids who gut texts, set pails on fire, pull fire alarms, discharge extinguishers, spray graffiti on desks, and vandalize toilets in the public school that mollycoddles them, will within days of starting physical and moral training at an average martial arts school, volunteer for the privilege of wiping the sweat off his martial arts school mats.

They are fiercely loyal to their community and their teacher. They know he will make non-negotiable demands on his kids so that they will take responsibility for their destinies. They learn to deal with life's unfair and inevitable obstacles. They will bow to the black belt champion, but thumb their noses at the public school system that they realize is holding them back, even while it patronizes them. Teachers, the agents of inspiration, are like salmon swimming upstream in an inhospitable river.

In a kickboxing ring there is no such thing as not having done your homework. The fighter must be perfectly "on task" and in control of temper and temptation. He cannot plagiarize a battle plan. He must be able to adapt to the strategies of others. He must take the blows and not lose focus. He must learn to abide by rules made by others and master his rage even when a referee makes a mistake and his long hard work doesn't get the earned trophy. Classroom teachers are referees too. They may deduct too many points off a test.

Most people scoff at martial arts philosophy, because they associate it with quotes of corny wisdom, cloned action sequences, stock characters, and poor speech-to-mouth coordination. The truth is, that properly presented, it gives kids the core values that are absent from any approved syllabus in our public schools.

Many chief educational administrators in America have no credentials whatsoever as professional educators. They believe that any manager can manage any administrative unit, whether a hospital, jail, or school. That is debatable. Perhaps the qualifications of being an educator should be illustrated rather than defined. But definitely a teacher, in the deepest sense, can come from any walk of life. Many martial arts instructors are more in the tradition of Socrates than is your local school's Dean of Discipline. As our schools spasm in violent underachievement, the last refuge for a sound education may be a metaphorical ring of combat

Source

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

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

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

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1 October, 2005

MORE ON THE INFANTILE LEFTISM OF JONATHAN KOZOL

Like Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore, his only real function is to feed outrage among fellow Leftists -- using similar distortions

"Jonathan Kozol has a devoted following, and "The Shame of the Nation" will not disappoint his fans. It's vintage Kozol--a jeremiad. His core complaints are familiar: American public schools are segregated, and those that have few whites in them are financially starved. He adds only one new element: The standards, testing and accountability "juggernaut" has crushed the "humane and happy" education we once had.

The de jure segregation of the South in 1954, Mr. Kozol argues, was no different from the de facto separation of the races today. Urban children experience "virtual apartheid" and "the conditions of internment." Visiting schools in New York, Mr. Kozol "cannot discern the slightest hint that any vestige of the legal victory embodied in Brown v. Board of Education . . . has survived."

Principals in segregated schools "create an architecture of adaptive strategies" that include "a relentless emphasis on raising test scores," "scripted lesson plans," "heightened discipline" and other policies that emulate the military--a "command and absolute control" image that Mr. Kozol uses repeatedly. Describing a South Bronx fourth-grade classroom, he writes about the Cuban schools he once visited. In those schools, however, "the students were allowed to question me, and did so with charm and curiosity." What he saw of Cuban education "could not rival" that which he found in New York "in its totalitarian effectiveness."

"The Shame of the Nation" is basically an updated version of Mr. Kozol's 1991 book, "Savage Inequalities." That book reportedly sold 250,000 in hardcover alone, so one can understand the entrepreneurial logic of recycling its ideas. To be sure, Mr. Kozol has a seductive formula: Ignore most social scientists, listen to the children themselves and react with deep moral outrage to the tales of deprivation they tell. The most reliable evidence as to what actually goes on in schools, he writes, does not come from experts but from children, who are "pure witnesses." "You have all the things and we do not have all the things," a third-grader tells Mr. Kozol. She gets it: The principle of "simple justice" has been violated. Everyone should have the same "things."

And everyone can--at least with respect to education. "This nation can afford to give clean places and green spaces . . . to virtually every child in our public schools," Mr. Kozol claims. He proposes higher taxes, with the revenue "equitably distributed." But "equitable" actually means, by his formula, unequal funding--a great deal more money for urban youngsters than for those who are white and middle-class. (Actually, in Mr. Kozol's universe, white and middle-class are redundant adjectives. And academically successful Asians in big-city schools have been airbrushed out of the picture.)

Is he suggesting that, with more money to buy those clean places and green spaces, inner-city kids would catch up with their higher-performing peers? Mr. Kozol pays such scant attention to academic achievement that it's unclear. He is against longer school days, summer school for kids who need it, charter schools (and other forms of choice), merit pay and every promising avenue of school reform. He does, as an aside, acknowledge that kids should learn "essential skills," but his main concern is with schools that exude "warmth and playfulness and informality and cheerful camaraderie among the teachers and their children."

One hates to argue with religious conviction, but Mr. Kozol's faith-based writing has little grounding in actual evidence. The words "segregation" and "apartheid" run like a mantra through the book, as if repetition will somehow make them true. In fact, American schools are not segregated; their racial composition reflects the nation's changing demographics.

Typically about 30% of the classmates of both blacks and Hispanics are white, but in big-city school districts whites are in short supply. The Los Angeles Unified School District, for instance, is 71% Latino, while a mere 10% of its students are white. Whites constitute only 15% of students in New York City, 10% in Chicago and Houston, and so forth. Mr. Kozol may be the last moral man standing, but his nonstop sermonizing will not change the racial composition of the big-city schools that most black and Hispanic students attend.

Instead of undertaking an analysis that looks at the facts and grapples with the hard reality of dysfunctional families, disruptive kids, undereducated teachers, stifling union contracts and a host of other ills, Mr. Kozol talks dreamily of a new protest movement led by parents and teachers who have nothing to lose but their chains. As Lincoln once famously said about a book: "People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.""

Source



SOCIALIST GOVERNMENT REJECTS PARENT ROLE IN RUNNING SCHOOLS

We want CONTROL, they say, in typical socialist fashion (in the Australian State of New South Wales)

NSW Premier Morris Iemma has rejected a proposal for government schools to be run by councils of parents and teachers.

Australian Barry McGaw, who heads the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's education directorate, wants government schools to be run more like private schools. He told the Herald he believed public schools should remain free but school councils should be responsible for hiring staff, developing codes of conduct and buying resources.

Mr Iemma today said the Education Department should keep responsibility for maintaining standards in government schools. Families of students were given sufficient input into the running of schools through parent associations and school councils. "I wouldn't support handing complete control to these bodies," Mr Iemma told reporters. "We have a system in which, through our department, our regional offices, we have consistent standards across our state education system."

Mr Iemma also ruled out supporting the introduction of education vouchers, which would enable parents to purchase places for their children in either public or private schools. "I just am philosophically in support of the responsibility resting with government to provide the resources and programs to lift the standards in our schools," he said.

Source

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

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

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