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30 September, 2004

COMMUNIST EDUCATION

"The importance of education is given much attention in countries pulling out of economic, technological and cultural backwardness.

This was the case in the former socialist European countries after World War II. For a short period of time the illiterate population was transformed, schools were opened, and universities were established where the "cadres" learned the knowledge necessary to rebuild countries destroyed by the war, to apply themselves to build factories, roads, bridges, and hospitals. The educational system of the time pretended to provide all with equal possibilities for education. Official policy took measures targeted at the creation of a society in which the principle of ability at work in the education, would be highly respected, in order to develop a polyvalent socialist personality. The socialist countries had millions of graduates at high schools and universities, and the structure of the youth at the time was such that the major part consisted of recently-graduated young people, specialists who experienced social promotion through graduation.....

Two contradictory processes can be noticed in education during this period. On one side, efforts were made to democratize the studies of young people, to create the indispensable management staff. On the other side, a radical ideologization of the education system was established. Marxism and the materialistic view of the world were introduced, including glorification of the struggle between the classes. The selection and procedural criterias of the educational staff thus became political, and the schools and universities turned into arenas and battlefields of discrimination and fights.

This period saw the penetration and domination of politics in all areas of economic and social life. This policy prevailed in everything, so this socialization could not omit the field of education. In practice it was shown that the results achieved in the course of studies were more a consequence of the socio-political status of the parents, than of the personal abilities of the pupils and students. It is possible to conclude that education became the formal means for preserving social stratification and the reproduction of the social and political status quo.

This kind of education system weakened young people and national potentials and deprived the nations of former socialist countries of the most able individuals. Therefore it could not sustain the competition with capitalism, where competitive spirit and the personal abilities of individuals are placed in the first plan.....

The solution to the crisis in education lies in the separation of the school and State; the end of all government involvement in education. The best proof of this is the socialist utopian experience. The seeds are being sown for Libertarian educational reform where Communism once reigned."

More here



MONEY NOT THE ANSWER

Even if both Bush and Kerry think so:

"All the money the candidates are offering, of course, is meant to be a proxy for academic success. Unfortunately, that massive federal spending will produce educational excellence is about as likely as an impulsive child making good on his bribe. Let history be the guide. According to inflation-adjusted data from the National Center for Education Statistics, between 1965 and 2002, federal expenditures on education exploded from $25 billion to $108 billion, and inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending in America's public schools tripled. Nonetheless, according to the U.S. Department of Education's "No Child Left Behind: A Guide for Policymakers", since 1965 "test scores nationwide have stubbornly remained flat."

"Ah," but Bush would explain, "these results preceded the days of accountability: NCLB ensures the money will be put to good use by making states set performance standards and by demanding those standards be met." Unfortunately, reality suggests that NCLB is actually inducing states to lower their standards. Consider Michigan: It had relatively high performance standards prior to NCLB, but lowered them in 2002 when 1,500 of its schools were identified as "needing improvement" while Arkansas, whose students typically do much worse academically, had no schools on the list. And then there's Washington State, for which the "Seattle Post-Intelligencer" reports that "[t]he list of schools in the federal doghouse likely would be much longer had state officials not lowered the minimum scores students need to meet standards in math and reading...." So much for the promise of "accountability."

Sadly, Kerry presents no options that are better than NCLB. Although he has endorsed minor reforms like tying teacher pay to performance, Kerry's plan is basically the same old school yard deal: Offer billions of dollars to "fully fund" our education system--despite the fact that we already spend more per student than any other industrialized country--and hope the votes come in.

More here.



HOME-SCHOOLING IN BRITAIN

Sean Gabb has just written a big summary of the state of home-schooling in Britain. This excerpt from his summary of the legal situation may be of particular interest:

"As it currently stands - in September 2004 - the law does not require parents to register their children with any school; and, within the defined meaning of "suitable" they can provide their children with whatever education they please. Parents who wish to teach their children at home are not legally required:

*to seek permission from the Local Education Authority to educate "otherwise";
*to inform the Local Education Authority that they have children of school age;
*to have regular contact with the Local Education Authority;
*to have premises equipped to any specified standard;
*to have any teaching or other educational qualifications of their own;
*to cover any specific syllabus;
*to have any fixed timetable;
*to prepare lesson plans of any kind;
*to observe normal school hours or terms;
*to give formal lessons;
*to allow their children to mix with others.

Sections 437-443 of the Education Act 1996 oblige Local Education Authorities within England and Wales to take action if it appears that a child is not receiving a "suitable" education. If it established that a child is not receiving a "suitable" education, the Local Education Authority may serve a notice on parents requiring them to establish that such an education is being provided. However, in the case of R v Gwent County Council ex parte Perry (1985), the courts held that the Local Education Authority should give parents "a fair and reasonable opportunity to satisfy it that proper education is being provided, having first allowed a sufficient time to set in motion arrangements for home education". But failure eventually to comply with this notice may be followed by a school attendance order. This may be challenged in the courts, which will dismiss the notice if shown - on the balance of probabilities - that the child is indeed receiving an education that a reasonable person would consider to be "suitable".

This legal duty placed on Local Education Authorities applies only where children appear not to be receiving a "suitable" education. Where no evidence is available that they are not receiving such an education, they have no legal right to seek information from parents. This is not an absolute bar on making enquiries. In the case of Philips v Brown (1980), the courts held that the Local Education Authority is entitled to ask parents for information as a basis for making the decision as to whether the education they are providing is efficient. If the parent fails to provide information, it could be concluded that prima facie the parents are in breach of their duty.

But the Local Education Authority is not allowed to specify the nature and presentation of such information. Nor can they carry into their enquiry assumptions and expectations based on their experience of formal schooling".

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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.

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 September, 2004

The Leftist attacks on choice continue: "Arizona's pioneering school choice tax credits must withstand scrutiny of their constitutionality yet again -- only this time those passing judgment will be federal, not state, jurists. A 5-4 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court injected an element of uncertainty into the tax credit plan when it decided June 14 to allow an American Civil Liberties Union-sponsored challenge to go forward in federal district court. The decision has far-reaching significance because it extends federal judicial review over state tax matters usually reserved to the states."





EDUCATIONAL DOUBLE STANDARDS

"What is a puzzle to me, though, is how many teachers seem to have convictions they do not voice in the public arenas yet they spread diligently throughout the academic world. One example has to do with free will, another with morality. Indeed, in these areas they are quite often out and out duplicitous.

Consider that very many social, not to mention natural, scientists, including engineers, do not believe that any free will could exist in the world. The prominent academic opinion is that we are moved by various forces to behave as we do and there is no such thing as personal responsibility at all.

This view does trickle down into the public arena by way of such practical ideas as victimization and addiction-no one is responsible, we are all victims of circumstances, and there are no drunks, only alcoholics and alcoholism is supposed to be a disease, of course; so there is no fault-nor credit-anywhere.

But this isn't confined so narrowly among most academics-they tend to hold that there is not a thing over which individuals have any control, it's all que sera, sera -what will be, will be.

Now when it comes to, for example, the conduct of Enron executives or Martha Stewart, not to mention Senator John Kerry in Vietnam or President George W. Bush in the National Guard, this determinist view basically means they had no control over their actions. It just happened-kind of the way bad things can happen among plants and animals, with no one at fault. The same thing is true about PETA folks and environmentalists, who have lots of friends in the academy: they wag their moralistic fingers at the rest of us, yet many of them are convinced that no one can help what he or she does, it's all in the genes or dictated by evolutionary forces or whatever.

Yet no one says so in public. When Enron executives got caught, no academic with strong determinist views wrote anything for The Washington Post or The New York Times Op Ed page saying, "Leave them be, or give them therapy, they aren't responsible.".....

What does this silence about worldly matters tell our students, I wonder? That what teachers believe has no relevance at all to anything outside the Ivory Tower?

More here:



WHAT EMPLOYERS LOOK FOR

Excerpts from The American Educator:

"Researchers who analyze jobs and talk to employers find that while today’s typical job requires higher skills than in the past (when many jobs required only physical strength), the skills required for these jobs are strong high school-level skills--math, reading, and writing at a ninth-grade level (Murnane and Levy, 1996), not college-level skills. Similarly, new research on the skills needed for many good jobs (meaning those that pay enough to support a family and have the potential for advancement) are also high school-level skills, such as four years of English and mathematics through Algebra II (American Diploma Project, 2004). Unfortunately, over 40 percent of high-school seniors lack ninth-grade math skills and 60 percent lack ninth-grade reading skills (Murnane and Levy, 1996). So students do not need to go to college to get a good job, but they do need to master high school-level skills. Research shows that greater mastery of these skills in high school leads to higher earnings over time: For youth who get no college degree, a rise of one letter grade in their high school grade point average (from C to B) is associated with a 13 percent earnings gain at age 28! That’s almost as much as the pay differential associated with a bachelor’s degree, which is just over 14 percent more than students without a college degree (Miller, 1998; Rosenbaum, 2001). Solid high school skills prepare students for entry-level positions and keep the door to promotions open (Rosenbaum, 2001).

Employers report that for many jobs, non-academic skills (like timeliness, diligence, and social competence) are key (Shapiro and Iannozzi, 1999). Analyses of a national survey indicate that students’ educational attainment and earnings nine years after graduating from high school are significantly related to their non-cognitive behaviors in high school--sociability, discipline, leadership, homework time, and attendance--even after controlling for background characteristics and academic achievement (Rosenbaum, 2001). High schools can provide these skills just as well as colleges can.

The true lesson of the new labor market is this: For many of the skilled jobs in the new economy, what students really need is to acquire good work habits and solid high school-level skills. But, employers argue that they cannot trust that the high school diploma certifies knowledge of these high school-level skills. As a result, employers report using college degrees to signal that applicants possess high school skills. If, instead, the high schools provided trusted signals of high school competencies, the pressure to send all students to college could diminish. And let’s not forget that high schools can do a lot to help their non-college bound youth find productive jobs and lead fulfilling lives".



VALLICELLA ON REAL EDUCATION

Another post lifted from Bill Vallicella. A story and some reflections

"It reminded me of a graduate student I once had and with whom I became friends. He told me once that after he finished high school he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and get a job with the railroad. His mother, however, wanted something ‘better’ for her son. She wanted him to go to college, which he did, in the desultory fashion of many. He ended up declaring a major in psychology and graduating. After spending some time in a monastery, perhaps also at the instigation of his Irish mother, and still not knowing quite what to do with himself, he was accepted into an M.A. program in philosophy, which is where I met him. After goofing around for several more years, he took a job as a social worker, a job which did not suit him. Last I saw him he was in his mid-thirties and pounding nails.

His complaint to me was that, had he followed his natural bent, he would have had fifteen or so years of job seniority with the railroad, a good paycheck, and a house half paid for. Instead, he wasted years on studies for which he had no real inclination, and no real talent. He had no discernible interest in the life of the mind, and like most working class types could not take it seriously. If you are from the working class, you will know what I mean: ‘real’ work must involve grunting and sweating and schlepping heavy loads.

'Overeducation’ is perhaps not the right word for cases like this. Strictly speaking, one cannot be overeducated since there is and can be no end to true education. The word is from the Latin e-ducere, to draw out, and there can be no end to the process of actualizing the potential of a mind with an aptitude for learning. Perhaps the right word is ‘over-credentialed.’ It is clear that what most people want is not an education, but a credential that will gain them admittance to a certain social and/or economic status. 'Education’ and cognates are euphemisms."

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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.

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 September, 2004

FRANCE

"In a nationwide poll released on Friday by the TNS Sofres Group, 80 percent of parents of children from 10 to 16 surveyed said they were worried about their children's academic achievement. Only half that number said they were worried about their relationship with their children. In another poll released this week, almost half of parents of school-age children surveyed said that they would like to reinstate uniforms in public schools.

"I have heard a loud outcry in favor of a return to authority," FranOois Fillon, France's conservative minister of education, said in a recent interview with the newspaper Liberation. He added: "Life is hard. The educational system must prepare youth for this challenge. Examinations, inspections, are moments of truth."....

Last month, Mr. Fillon announced that his ministry would soon issue a directive to return schools to traditional learning techniques, including a much greater emphasis on reading of required texts, memorization and recitations, taking dictation and writing structured essays....

Mr. Fillon has also praised a new book entitled "And Your Children Know How to Neither Read Nor Count," by Marc Le Bris, a veteran teacher and principal, that demands a return to older methods of teaching. "Modern education serves nothing more than to justify the abandonment of the ambitions that we have for our children," Mr. Le Bris writes. "We have in front of us a true cultural catastrophe."....

More here



CONSERVATIVE AUSTRALIAN LEGISLATORS HAVE THEIR THINKING CAPS ON

"Senior Coalition MPs are pushing for radical education reforms including council control over school funding levels, the introduction of a voucher system and the return of the cane.

Just a day after National MP Kay Hull said parents who earned more than $100,000 should have to pay for their children's education in government schools, senior Coalition MPs were yesterday promoting additional policy ideas.

Parliamentary secretary to the Trade and Transport ministers, De-Anne Kelly, called for a system of school vouchers that would be valid at any public or private schools. It would represent an amount of money from the taxpayer and could be spent at the families school of choice whether it was general public, selective or private. Ms Kelly told The Weekend Australian that rather than the "class war" Mark Latham was pursuing, a voucher system would bridge the divide. "A voucher system related to your income. For instance we take more of low income families with the Family Tax Benefit A and B. They get more than somebody on a higher income, that's the same with these vouchers, that's what I would support," she said.

Western Sydney MP Jackie Kelly, who is Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister, has proposed local councils decide on the level of funding government schools should receive. In her newsletter published last month, she said that in order for schools to get the direct benefit of federal government funding for government schools. "I propose that any such further increase be directed on a per capita basis to Local Government Areas. Within each Local Government Area, committees should be established comprising councillors, school principals and representatives of P&C Associations." Jackie Kelly writes that these committees would direct the new money according to the "agreed priority of needs of schools in the local areas".

Labor leader Mark Latham yesterday seized on Ms Hull's comments accusing the Government of a plan to privatise government schools and introduce a user-pays system. "You got Kay Hull, a senior government MP, she's the head of the social affairs parliamentary committee ... what she wants for our society is to have fees in government schools," he said....

National MP Ian Causley, who holds the marginal NSW seat of Page, said that rather than focusing on fees and resources, the debate should be based on classroom discipline. Mr Causley told The Australian state school teachers should be given "more weapons" to discipline students, and the cane should be considered as a "last resort". "We've overreacted to the issues like child assault and I think that's part of the problem and I think most people would like to see a bit of discipline in schools and give teachers back their powers," he said. "When I went to school I got the cane. Maybe we should bring that back."

More here



"ACCELERATED" STUDENT MYTHS DEBUNKED

"Accelerating the best students: "Accelerating" helps them intellectually and socially, says "A Nation Deceived", a new report from the University of Iowa. The Des Moines Register reports:

A new University of Iowa report seeks to debunk myths that accelerated learning for gifted students is unfair, expensive for schools and causes students to be social outcasts, gifted-education experts said Monday.

"Time" recites the standard fears about children pushed too fast, but concedes there's evidence many very smart students are very bored:

For the smartest of these kids, those who quickly overpower schoolwork that flummoxes peers, skipping a grade isn't about showing off. Rather, according to a new report from the University of Iowa, it can mean the difference between staying in school and dropping out from sheer tedium. "If the work is not challenging for these high-ability kids, they will become invisible," says the lead author of the report, Iowa education professor Nicholas Colangelo. "We will lose them. We already are."

...In a 2000 study for Gifted Child Quarterly, Joseph Renzulli and Sunghee Park found that 5% of the 3,520 gifted students they followed dropped out after eighth grade. Astonishingly, that's almost as high as the 5.2% of nongifted kids who dropped out. Untold numbers of other highly intelligent kids stay in school but tune out."

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.

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 September, 2004

The long death of busing "Boston schools should adopt a plan that sends more children to elementary schools in their neighborhoods, the most drastic change proposed for the city's school assignment system in 30 years, the majority of a task force recommended yesterday. As several hundred parents and others packed the auditorium of English High School in Jamaica Plain last night, the 14-member panel of educators and parents delivered its long-awaited report to the Boston School Committee. The School Committee set up the task force in January to devise a new policy that would reflect Boston residents' views and also reduce busing costs. The panel members, whose report was greeted with a mix of boos and cheers at times, said they did not reach a consensus, but that two thirds supported doubling the number of elementary attendance zones to six to allow more neighborhood schools."



GWB'S "NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND" ACT

"The educrats have ample reason to be upset. Before NCLB, the public schools' failure to educate poor minority kids resulted in ever-increasing streams of federal money to local districts-more than $200 billion over the last four decades, disbursed with no questions asked. Now along comes Bush, requiring state and local districts to prove that the programs that federal dollars pay for have a solid scientific basis and actually work. Once public educators started trashing NCLB, Democrats suddenly decided that they hated it, too. Senator Kennedy now claims that the president "duped" him and that the act's funding amounted to a "tin cup budget," despite a big hike in federal education spending under Bush.

In announcing his candidacy, Bush promised that education reform would be his Number One domestic policy priority. His plan, soon named No Child Left Behind, rested on three basic reforms, which states wanting federal education money would have to accept. First came a Lyon-influenced reading initiative. "The findings of years of scientific research on reading are now available, and application of this research to the classroom is now possible for all schools in America," Bush noted.

Second would be annual testing in basic reading and math skills for all kids in grades three through eight, with the results-broken down by race, sex, English-language proficiency, and socioeconomic status-made public. States would devise their own tests, subject to federal oversight. Mandatory testing had been key to Bush's education reform success in Texas, where it worked to hold schools accountable......

From his gubernatorial days, Bush already had a good idea that the evidence was leading straight to phonics. Following Lyon's advice, he had pushed local districts in Texas to adopt phonics-based curricula and saw reading scores in the state shoot up, particularly for minority kids. The number of third-graders- 52,000- who failed the reading test at the start of the Bush governorship declined to 36,000 when he left for the White House and has since dropped to 28,000, now that all his reforms are up and running. Since then, the evidence has become irrefutable. After reviewing dozens of studies-some using magnetic resonance imaging to measure differences in brain function between strong and weak readers and among children taught to read by various methods- the National Reading Panel, commissioned by Congress, concluded in 2000 that effective reading programs, especially for kids living in poverty, required phonics-based instruction.

Within a week of taking office, the Bush administration devised a strategy for getting a $6 billion "Reading First" phonics initiative past the relevant House and Senate education committees. The administration was offering school systems a deal that went like this: "The federal government will give you lots more money than ever before for early reading programs. Nothing obligates you to take the money. But if you do take it, the programs you choose must teach children using phonics." Hardly a single legislator raised doubts about tying federal reading dollars to instructional approaches backed by a consensus of the nation's scientific experts....

You'd think that educators would welcome the scientific turn in federal reading policy. After all, the racial gap in school performance that liberals as well as conservatives decry as the greatest obstacle to equal opportunity in America first shows up as a wide gap in reading. While 40 percent of all American kids don't attain the "basic" reading level by fourth grade, the rate of reading failure for inner-city black and Hispanic children is a catastrophic 70 percent. If we now have hard evidence on what methods will best bring these struggling kids up to speed, why wouldn't educators support the government's efforts to promote those methods?

The short answer is ideology and money. The nation's leading teachers' colleges and professional teachers' organizations, such as the National Council of Teachers of English, hate phonics. Columbia University's Teachers College, to take one prominent example, doesn't have a single class in phonics instruction. In these precincts, "whole language" reading instruction, in which children ostensibly learn to read "naturally" by absorbing word clues from whole texts, is the politically correct pedagogy, even though its claims to success have no scientific backing. The educational establishment views President Bush, Reid Lyon, and all their works as part of a vast right-wing conspiracy to regiment America's children.

There's also tons of money at stake. If the idea of science-backed reading instruction takes hold in the nation's school districts, millions of dollars in fees currently paid to the ed schools for whole-language teacher training and curriculum development will vanish. Small wonder that Teachers College president Arthur Levine recently penned a furious op-ed denouncing NCLB's Reading First provision, after the Bush administration showed that it meant business and refused $39 million in funding for New York City's "balanced literacy" reading program (a euphemism for whole language) earlier this year".

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.

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 September, 2004

The retardation of America: "The imposition of compulsory schooling was a serious turning point in our nation's development. The idea that we should all surrender our children to government schools for training was pushed for reasons that should make today's liberals as angry as it does those of the religious right, who object because those schools are secular. The primary movers behind public education were the industrialists liberals so love to hate. Those industrialists wanted to create a manageable, docile, trained workforce, so they pushed the Prussian model ... efficient, lockstep, and controlled."



Testing the wrong policy on students: "Why are Washington bureaucrats so enamored with random student drug testing? The evidence thus far is clear: drug testing has a poor track record in reducing student drug use, particularly in comparison to other drug prevention and education programs. Its fiscal toll on local school budgets saps money that would be better spent on basic educational needs."



Leftists NEED to dominate education: "Why are so many 'pro-choicers' antichoice on schools? One good reason is that only by taking the education of their children out of the hands of conservative parents and delivering it to liberal, unionized teachers can liberals hope to maintain parity. It is the conversion of these right-leaning children that the nulliparous liberals require for any continuation in power". ["Nulliparous" refers to the fact that a lot of Leftists abort their babies and so have fewer children.]



BIG DEMAND FOR FREE CHILD-MINDING IN NEW YORK CITY

"Overcrowding at some of the city's largest public high schools has gotten worse this year, according to parents, principals and education labor leaders. City education officials had tried to get ahead of the problem by opening 18 regional enrollment centers in mid-August but were quickly overwhelmed by parents dissatisfied with the schools their children were assigned to attend, even after the Bloomberg administration opened up 53 new small schools.

Some of the worst crowding is at large, high-performing schools. At Benjamin N. Cardozo High School in Queens, there are 4,424 students, up from 3,920 last year; at James Madison High School in Brooklyn, there are 4,616 students, up from about 4,100. Cardozo's capacity is about 3,050 and Madison's is about 2,380. But some struggling schools are also suffering. At Sheepshead Bay High School in Brooklyn, designated one of the city's most dangerous schools last year, there are about 3,800 students, up from 3,600. "We're drowning," said Michael Herman, a social studies teacher who is the school union leader. Some classes for non-English-speaking students have up to 65 children, he said. "The problem is this: the Department of Ed. keeps sending kids to the school," he said. "It's creating chaos."

City education officials said they expected enrollment figures to decline by the time registers were audited at the end of next month. In many cases, students who have moved away or dropped out may still be counted on the rolls. But the officials conceded that some schools would have more students than last year. "In most cases, we will have final registers that are lower than today's," said Stephen Morello, a spokesman for the Education Department. "In some of these cases, we expect that they will have more students than they had last year."....

But parents continued to fret. Cindy Adams, whose son, Rob, is a junior at the Academy for American Studies in Queens, said officials had promised an enrollment of no more than 500. But the school now has 593. She said there were 44 children in her son's math class and 37 in his law and government class. "The first day of school my son said at lunch he could not even sit down," she 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.

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

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25 September, 2004

Surprise, surprise! "Ongoing news reports from across the country indicate incidents of corruption and mismanagement in the public schools occur frequently, often on a massive scale. Ignoring the scale of the problem not only costs taxpayers millions of dollars but also hinders school reform efforts, according to New York University law professor Lydia G. Segal. In her recent book, Battling Corruption in America's Public Schools (Northwestern University Press, 2003), Segal argues, 'one impediment to reform that no one is seriously studying in the debate over how to improve public schools is systematic fraud, waste, and abuse.'"



Free market closed to education: "Textbook 'selection' or 'adoption,' is decided by the individual states. In an open state, individual school districts are free to choose the textbooks they want to use. In a closed state, a state textbook committee chooses its textbooks and if a textbook is not approved, then state funds cannot be used to make a purchase. This creates a powerful competition among publishers to produce a 'politically correct,' 'adoptable' book which ends up dull, devoid of the context for most content, and low in quality. Although there are only 22 states with the closed model for text selection, it is these states which ultimately influence the types of books offered by the publishers and produced for sale to schools everywhere in our country."



Illiterate in L.A.

Vox Day has some pertinent comments about the disastrous level of illiteracy in Los Angeles. Beware of the sarcasm! Excerpts:

"The "Los Angeles Daily News" recently lamented the tremendous increase in "functional illiteracy" among the working population of Los Angeles County. In reporting the results of a recent study, it said:

In the Los Angeles region, 53 percent of workers ages 16 and older were deemed functionally illiterate, the study said ... It classified 3.8 million Los Angeles County residents as "low-literate," meaning they could not write a note explaining a billing error, use a bus schedule or locate an intersection on a street map.

While the article took note of the wasted "hundreds of millions of dollars spent in public schools over the past decade," it blamed the terrible results on an influx of non-English speaking immigrants and a 30 percent high-school dropout rate. But the dropout rate can't possibly explain the low level of literacy, because if the public school system was even remotely competent, the children would be reading adequately long before they ever reached high school....

It's a pity that the "Daily News" does not have access to studies tracking the reading ability of children who are schooled at home in Los Angeles County. It would be interesting to see how well those children read compared to these illiterate workers, particularly immigrant children taught at home, because as hard as it may be for the Daily News to imagine, people who speak other languages, even Spanish, have been known to be able to read. I can't confirm this, but I have even heard rumors that there are reputed to be one or two authors, such as the suspiciously foreign-sounding Arturo Perez Reverte, who actually write in Spanish, if you can believe anything so outlandish.....

One need only look at an elementary school's curriculum to realize that the bulk of a child's education necessarily comes from outside the school environment. It may come from parents, peers or the television, but very little of it comes from the free day-care centers that are the public schools".



SENIOR PROFESSORS AS COMPLACENT ARISTOCRATS

Margaret Soltan does not seem to think much of her academic colleagues. Excerpt from post of 14th:

"... They describe a cadre of senior professors willing themselves into a denial of reality profound enough to make Blanche Dubois look like Descartes. Blanche Dubois, though, had a sense of the tragic nature of life. Some of the professors evoked in these blogs look more like Amanda Wingfield, sure that any day now their graduate students will start receiving tenure-track gentleman callers. Still others look like Scarlet O'Hara: faced with graduate programs that haven't placed anyone in a respectable job in years, they say "Fiddledeedee. We'll think about that tomorrow." They are so busy thinking about the next job offer or administrative stint that will enable them to raise their salary and title demands at their home institution that they have not noticed the erosion of their own tenured ranks in American academia and the replacement of these ranks by huge numbers of untenurable and undercompensated instructors.

Tenured faculty, the aristocracy of the university, have been disgracefully complicit in the creation of an academic helot class to subsidize their own upper-middle-class salaries," writes Jack Miles, "but the helots are progressively replacing the aristocrats as the latter retire and are replaced by helots rather than by other aristocrats. What is being phased out, in short, is the very career which tenured faculty once enjoyed and to which new Ph.D.s still vainly aspire." Full professors are the aristocracy of the aristocrats, and that much more disgraceful.

This situation, this vast disparity between the restive bottom and the fatuous top of our profession, and the evolution of the professoriate away from a model based upon a calling and toward a model indistinguishable from market greed and vanity, has gradually become morally nauseating to me"

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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.

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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24 September, 2004

DO AS I DO NOT AS I SAY

By their actions, public school teachers give very persuasive advice about their schools

"Nationwide, public school teachers are almost twice as likely as other parents to choose private schools for their own children, the study by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute found. More than 1 in 5 public school teachers said their children attend private schools. In Washington (28 percent), Baltimore (35 percent) and 16 other major cities, the figure is more than 1 in 4. In some cities, nearly half of the children of public school teachers have abandoned public schools. In Philadelphia, 44 percent of the teachers put their children in private schools; in Cincinnati, 41 percent; Chicago, 39 percent; Rochester, N.Y., 38 percent. The same trends showed up in the San Francisco-Oakland area, where 34 percent of public school teachers chose private schools for their children; 33 percent in New York City and New Jersey suburbs; and 29 percent in Milwaukee and New Orleans.

Michael Pons, spokesman for the National Education Association, the 2.7-million-member public school union, declined a request for comment on the study's findings. The American Federation of Teachers also declined to comment.

Public school teachers told the Fordham Institute's surveyors that private and religious schools impose greater discipline, achieve higher academic achievement and offer overall a better atmosphere..... "Public education in many of our large cities is broken," the surveyors conclude. "The fix? Choice, in part, to be sure." Public school teachers in Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Chicago, Rochester, N.Y., and Baltimore registered the most dissatisfaction with the schools in which they teach.

"Teachers, it is reasonable to assume, care about education, are reasonably expert about it and possess quite a lot of information about the schools in which they teach. We can assume that no one knows the condition and quality of public schools better than teachers who work in them every day."

More here

As Peg Kaplan points out, teachers are voting on public schools in the most persuasive way possible -- voting with their feet. And, as the articles says, they are in a position to know what really happens in schools



WHAT USED TO BE: EDUCATIONAL DECLINE

Bill Vallicella is peeved that nobody can pronounce his name

"Perhaps I should be happy that I do not rejoice under the name of Znosko-Borovsky or Bonch-Osmolovsky. Nor do I stagger under such burdens as Witkiewicz, Brzozowski, or Rynasiewicz. The latter is the name of a philosopher I knew when he taught at Case Western Reserve. Alvin Plantinga once mentioned to me that he had been interviewed at Notre Dame, except that `rhinoceros' was all Plantinga could remember of his name.

Actually, none of these names is all that difficult if you sound them out. But apparently no one is taught phonics anymore. Damn those liberals! They've never met a standard they didn't want to erode. I am grateful to my long-dead mother for sending me to Catholic schools where I actually learned something. I learned things that no one seems to know any more, for example, grammar, Latin, geography, mathematics. The next time you are in a bar, ask the twenty-something `tender whether that Sam Adams you just ordered is a 12 oz or a pint. Now observe the blank expression on her face: she has no idea what a pint is, or that a pint is 16 oz, or that there are four quarts in a gallon, or 5, 280 feet in a mile, or 39.37 inches in a meter, or that light travels at 186, 282 miles/sec, or that a light-year is a measure of distance, not of time.

Even Joan Baez got this last one wrong in her otherwise excellent song, Diamonds and Rust, a tribute to her quondam lover, Bob Dylan. The irony is that Joanie's pappy was a somewhat distinguished professor of physics! In a high school physics class we watched a movie in which he gives a physics lecture.

I was up in 'Flag' (Flagstaff) a few years back to climb Mt. Humphreys, the highest point in Arizona at 12,643 ft. elevation, (an easy class 1 walk-up except for the thin air) and to take a gander at the moon through the Lowell Observatory telescope. While standing in line for my peek, I overheard a woman say something to her husband that betrayed her misconception that the moon glows by its own light. She was astonished to learn from her husband that moonlight is reflected sunlight. I was astonished at her astonishment. One wonders how she would account for the phases of the moon. What `epicycles' she would have to add to her `theory'!"

More here. (Via Bill's Comments).

Bill (Guglielmo?) might agree with my comments on the way that place-names are routinely mispronounced



HOW THE BUREAUCRATS HATE HOMESCHOOLERS

It's a loss of control. How awful!

"In a federally funded exercise to prepare emergency responders for a terrorist attack, a Michigan county concocted a scenario in which public-school children were threated by a fictitious radical group that believes everyone should be homeschooled. The made-up group was called Wackos Against Schools and Education. The exercise in Muskegon, Mich., yesterday simulated a situation in which a bomb on board a bus full of children knocks the vehicle on its side and fills the passenger compartment with smoke.

Dan Stout, director of Muskegon County Emergency Services, told WorldNetDaily the choice of the fictitious group certainly was not meant to offend homeschoolers. "I don't think there was any particular objective other than to just have a name," he said. A WND reader who saw a story about the exercise in the Muskegon Chronicle, however, said he was "outraged" at the characterization of the terrorists.

Stoudt said the general idea for the type of group came from the website of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, which suggests group names such as "Wackos Against Recreation" and other such such "causes.""

More here.



Prof. Bunyip's comment on the newish university where he teaches gave me a laugh but I think only Australian university people would understand it: "Sydney Orr University's start as the Workingman's Institute of Cobbling and Saddlery is largely forgotten these days, but a slight taint of humble origins lingers yet. You have your Sandstones, and below them, the Bricks, and humbler still, the Dumb-as-Rocks. Then there is our little oasis of the mind, which has its eye on Fibro and is pushing hard to make the grade." The oldest buildings in Australia's oldest universities are made of sandstone and Fibro is the now-obsolete asbestos-cement sheeting once used as siding in the cheapest buildings. "The sandstones" are Australia's nearest equivalent to America's "Ivy League". I have to confess that I did go to a "sandstone" -- two of them in fact. I also liked the good Prof's comment just below about "the cherished principle of the seventeen hour week". Academics do get it easy. A lot of the time I had only an eight-hour week. The good Prof. can't spell "Gorbals", though. Obviously not a Scot.

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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.

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23 September, 2004

EDUCATION AS A RELIGION

"Education has become a sort of public religion in this country with its own set of "truths." Those who question the accepted dogma are seen as heretics and face quick political oblivion. Decades of self serving promotion by those working in the education industry have programmed Americans to accept without question one of the most expensive and inefficient systems for passing on knowledge to new generations in the history of mankind.

This hollowed and sacred system guarantees twelve years of "free" public education to all. The majority of high school graduates forget almost everything they learn beyond the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, within ten years of graduating. The taxpayers are effectively asked to pay for twelve years of schooling to get six years of education. No one questions this since a high school diploma has come to signify an absolute good, with little regard for the actual improvement in the life of its holder. True many high school graduates also receive valuable vocational training, but this is denigrated in a society that sees any vocational training as the road to lower social class.

We send millions more young people to colleges and universities than there are actual jobs requiring the education they are to receive there. Young people are promised that a college education is the key to a good job. The truth is that the colleges and universities who promote this view do so to attract students and earn tuitions. They have no way of delivering on their promises. Four years of studying French Literature or Oriental Philosophy may be rewarding in terms of personal growth, but does not guarantee a lucrative career.

We accept the notion that the problems of public education are related to money. Yet there are many examples of people being educated for a fraction of what our schools cost. These same people often exceed the achievements of both public and private schooled students. We confuse education with schooling. Sitting in classrooms, taking notes, studying for tests, doing homework, and all the other school related activities are just one small part of how human beings acquire knowledge and mastery. Since these methods create lots of good paying jobs for teachers and administrators they are the methods sold to the public. Why don't more people question this model?....

A real discussion of education should start with a default position that the government has no role to play in it. From there a good logical analysis should be developed and the problems in a completely voluntary educational model identified. Addressing those problems with the minimal use of government should be the goal. Then will we see a real free market develop to offer competing ideas in educating. This will empower students and parents instead of strangle the taxpayers. Only then will education be both inexpensive and efficient."

More here:



Too Much Schooling? A British Comment

I heartily agree

"More than a century ago the tramlines were set: the more people there are at school, the better; and the more years they spend there, the better. This is especially true of children and young people; why, their proper place is in school. This conventional assumption has nothing to do with actual learning. It's just the right place for them to be. Once, they went in there at 5 and came out at fourteen. Nine years they stayed there; not enough. So the school-leaving age was raised to 15 and then in the sixties to 16. A while after this in the late seventies it was noticed that after 11 years in their proper place, 40 per cent of school children had no usable batch of skills, qualification or learning. Many were illiterate and innumerate.

Did anyone give a sceptical glance at the institution that had demanded so much of these children's time and so much public money? No. In government, nothing succeeds like failure. The problem was that the children and young people had not spent enough time in the institution. They were encouraged, cajoled and now, under Blair bribed to stay on. Not only to stay on but to go to university, or at least institutions which were renamed universities. While some politicians were trying to extend educational attendance at the 'university' end, others were tugging away at the nursery and kindergarten end. The ideal is now clear: children should enter the institution at three and leave at 21, in fact 22 allowing for the very necessary Australian-Thai holiday gap year. What was 9 years is now, for many, 19 years.

The precise numbers need to be spelt out. This institution, schooling, is now allowed and funded to monopolize young people's time for more than 4,000 days or 25,000 hours. Yet it takes a commercial organization only a dozen or so hours to teach someone to drive a car and a commercial language school will get you proficient in a foreign language in several weeks. The state's Little Pied Piper children leave after tens of thousands of hours in state schooling institutions inarticulate in their own language.

Set aside for the moment the arguments about just how little they learn in all those hours, weeks and years. What is never challenged is the assumption that school, or schools called universities, are the right places for children and youth. The assumption is that they should be there and nowhere else. The assumption is revealed in all its thoughtlessness in the literature of the anti-child labour lobby. Where should children not be? At work, of course. And why not? 'Why not, do you really want to push toddlers up chimneys again or have them rooting on rubbish tips or selling their bodies as they do in South America?' No, but then I don't want adults forced up chimneys either. Nor do I want them on rubbish tips or selling their bodies. That is nothing to do with children. It is about work no-one should have to do.

Once this nonsense is put aside, why should children not be at work? Because they will be exploited? Surely their parents would not let them be and nor would a regulatory government. So why not? It comes down to this. Children should not be at work because - wait for it - their proper place is at school. Where school is concerned all the worries of the anti-child labour lobby are thrown aside. They who are so worried about employers coercing and exploiting children don't care that schools have much more power to coerce and exploit children. They don't care that the schooling institutions can keep their charges working for no wage, in many cases, without any demonstrable educational benefit for years on end.... "

More here



AUSTRALIA'S CONSERVATIVE GOVERNMENT WARY OF THROWING MONEY DOWN A HOLE

One look at the "success" of the British and American policies would show why

"An OECD education analysis last week found that Australian public investment in education, at 4.4 per cent of GDP, was below the mean of OECD countries.

The deans of education, whose manifesto is aimed at influencing policy during the election campaign, said in Britain the national education budget had doubled in the past decade, as it had in the US since 1996. In Australia, federal spending on education as a percentage of total budget outlays has fallen from more than 9 per cent in 1974-75 to 6 per cent in 2002-03."

More here.



22 September, 2004

WHERE THE ANTI-PHONICS NONSENSE ALL STARTED

At Wundt's psychological laboratory in Germany around a century ago

Wundt, with his laboratory and machines, was certainly trying to better himself and win for his discipline a new kind of legitimacy. It was just for that reason that he attracted so many students, many of them Americans who came home to found schools of educational psychology and psychological testing and to impress upon our whole system of schooling the indelible mark of clinical practice. One of them was a certain James Cattell, who, while playing with some of Wundt's apparatus, made a remarkable and portentous discovery. Here, in brief, is the story, as told by Lance J. Klass in "The Leipzig Connection" (The Delphian Press, 1978), a useful little book on the influence of Wundt in the history of American educationism:

One series of experiments Cattell performed while at Leipzig examined the manner in which a person sees the words he is reading. By testing adults who knew how to read, Cattell "discovered" that individuals can recognize words without having to sound out the letters. From this, he reasoned that words are not read by compounding the letters, but are perceived as "total word pictures." He determined that little is gained by teaching the child his sounds and letters as the first step to being able to read. Since individuals could recognize words very rapidly, the way to teach children how to read was to show them words, and tell them what the words were. The result was the dropping of the phonic or alphabetic method of teaching reading, and its replacement by the sight-reading method in use throughout America.

The consequences of Cattell's "discovery" have surely been enormous, for they include not only the stupefaction of almost the whole of American culture but even the birth and colossal growth of a lucrative industry devoted first to assuring that children won't be able to read and then to selling an endless succession of "remedies" for that inability

..... our educationists prefer not to treat the multiplication table as something that just has to be learned. They rather think of multiplying as a desirable "student outcome," a "behavioral modification" of one who does not know how to multiply. This would be only a harmless playing with words if it weren't for the fact that not all students learn to multiply with equal ease. If we simply think of the multiplication table as a set of numbers that must be learned by brute force, we can demand more force of those who fail to learn. If we think of the ability to multiply as a "behavioral objective," an appropriate response to stimuli, then the student who doesn?t learn to multiply must drive us to seek other stimuli and perhaps, in stubborn cases, to decide that learning the multiplication table has only limited value for the student outcome of multiplication. From such a view, other follies may flow.

The folly at hand, the word-recognition teaching of reading, is the result of just such tormented thinking. It is perfectly true that people who can read do not stop to sound out letters. That, therefore, is an attribute of readers. So, to the mortally wundted, the path to reading requires the not sounding out of letters as a student outcome, and student behavior must be modified accordingly. Thus, the rare and pesky student who has learned the sounds of some letters must be discouraged

More here.



BRITAIN: DESTROYING EDUCATION BY LITIGATION

"I love my job as a head teacher. It is really satisfying to be responsible for young people and to guide them in realising their potential. But sadly my time is increasingly occupied by lawyers and I have to divert an ever growing proportion of my budget away from staff, books and equipment towards defending and insuring against legal actions.

Head teachers do, on occasion, have to exclude pupils. Parents are sometimes reluctant to believe that their child can do any wrong. In one case, a parent having chosen my school, which advertises discipline and strong sanctions, stated that discipline should not be imposed in any circumstances. He complained that there was nothing wrong with his son using school computers to download pornography, but that it was wrong for me to impose a temporary exclusion on his son for doing so. The parent brought in his solicitor, which, under our insurance policy, meant that we too had to seek and pay for legal advice.....

In two cases my decisions have been overruled by panels that had little understanding of current education. In the first case, a panel member asked me how many O-levels the pupil had gained and was very offensive when I could not answer because O-levels were abolished years before the pupil had even entered secondary education. Another panel member opined that students did no work in the lower sixth and thus bad behaviour was to be expected. Even if this had been true in the past, the current system of AS- and A2-levels requires dedication throughout the course, with public examinations at the end of the lower sixth year. Needless to say, the panel member had no knowledge of the current system.....

Risk assessment procedures and second-guessing by parents make it increasingly difficult to organise study visits at home and abroad. If, like many schools, we reduced the number of visits or stopped them completely, then the losers would be the pupils who benefit so greatly from these experiences. All these visits are voluntary and so, if parents are anxious, their children do not have to take part.

So far as organising trips is concerned, our increasingly risk-averse, bureaucratic and lawyer-plagued culture means that many children are already being deprived of opportunities. One local authority (not mine) issued a diktat stating that every visit had to be accompanied by a first-aider and that if a party was subdivided into groups then each section must have its own first-aider! Obviously a first-aider goes out on a geography or a biology field visit, but a visit to a London museum is very different, and even one first-aider is unnecessary because such institutions have good first aid facilities.....

We carry insurance, which is becoming increasingly expensive, and is now a serious drain on our budget. We cannot afford to do without it. However, our insurers are very helpful, and so far our students are still able to undertake a range of activities.

The Prime Minister said that his priority was `education, education, education'. Sadly, it seems that what he really meant was `litigation, litigation, litigation'. Is it any wonder that while universities have to abandon courses in physics and chemistry because of lack of demand, they are overwhelmed with applications from would-be lawyers?"

More here.



A good comment from Bill's Comments: "Wendy McElroy has an article in Fox News Opinion concerning the testing for mental health in the public schools. What she describes is scary. Not because of the current reality, but because of what it portends in the future. The most common technique the liberals and the left use today is, "It's for the children." Children's "rights" trump parental rights. The goal is to gain control over our children and through them in time over society. More and more, rulings in the courts are going against the parents and in favor of the state. Programs for children are not predicated on proper research but on feel-good, wishful-thinking ideas of so-called professional educators and developmental experts".



21 September, 2004

CREDENTIALISM LIVES! THE HIDEBOUND EDUCATION BUREAUCRACY

This story could be repeated in most countries of the developed world today

"It takes a peculiar type of institutionalised stupidity not to appreciate the value of Elizabeth Stone. Her treatment by the morbid education bureaucracy has opened a window into the real reasons why the school system is a war zone in this federal election.

This week, Stone is going to turn away from a successful career in law and commit to becoming a high school teacher. Why? Because she thinks it is the most important thing she can do. Until recently she had planned to teach in disadvantaged public schools with the greatest needs. They are desperately short of maths teachers so I was going to teach maths," she told me. Her ambition was to become the headmistress of a damaged public school and turn it around.

Laudable. But what does she bring to the table beyond idealism and altruism? A lot. She is a Rhodes scholar. She has a BA and LLB from the University of NSW, and a masters in law from Oxford University. At school she excelled at academics, sport and leadership. She is now a lecturer in law at UNSW, teaches classes of 30 to 40 students and, most importantly, ranks in the top 1 per cent of teacher performance surveys. She is 31, married with two young children, but willing to take the big salary cut required to become a teacher.

You couldn't write a better resume. Stone is the sort of person the public education system should be desperate to recruit. So how did the NSW Department of Education respond when she applied for a job?

Not qualified. Go away.

This, remember, is the same bureaucracy which for decades has averted its gaze from the excesses of the NSW Teachers' Federation as the union blocked, stymied and diluted every attempt to measure the effectiveness of teachers in the classroom and enable the removal of those who shouldn't be there.

This is the power alliance that has contributed to the exodus from the public system. One in five students was enrolled outside the public system 25 years ago, but now it's one in every three.

What exactly was wrong with Elizabeth Stone? She didn't have a diploma of education. The bureaucracy could not see beyond this fatal gap. It would not even consider allowing her to teach (and thus earn an income) while getting a Dip Ed in her spare time at her own cost. "All they did was put up barriers," she said.

Inevitably this story flows towards the private school system. She made inquiries and was immediately snapped up. Last week she was offered a contract by Barker College, which is near her home on the North Shore. "She is going to make an enormous contribution to our kids," Barker's headmaster, Dr Roderic Kefford, told me. "Why would Elizabeth not be the sort of teacher any school would want to grab?"

Private schools, unlike public schools, have the flexibility to offer a job to any applicant with high potential. They allow a Dip Ed to be acquired as part of professional development..... "

More here

I myself had a very similar experience over 30 years ago. I wanted to do High School teaching but had at the time "only" an M.A. -- no Diploma of Education. The New South Wales Department of Education gave me the heave-ho but a small regional Catholic school (at Merrylands) gave me a job teaching economics and geography. Although the school served a very working-class area, my students got outstanding results in their final High School examinations (the Higher School Certificate, which serves as the university entrance examination). Despite that outstanding track record as an experienced teacher, I am still to this day not regarded as "qualified" to teach in any government High School in Australia. Nothing has been learned in the last 30 years.



A TRUE LIBERAL EDUCATION IS NEEDED

An argument for a very different education from what we have today:

"Education is out of joint. It examines nature more than life, mathematics more than justice. It assumes we are placed here to watch the growth of plants or to marvel at the speed of the Internet, not to learn how to do good, and avoid evil, as Socrates understood. Man is elevated only to the extent of his morality and moral wisdom. That should be the North star of education.

The great business of the human mind is not external nature, but discovering a higher purpose between ashes to ashes and dust to dust. As unsurpassed philosopher Sam Johnson elaborated: "Whether we provide for action or conversation, whether we wish to be pleasing or useful, the first requisite is the religious and moral knowledge of right and wrong; the next is an acquaintance with the history of mankind, and with those examples which may be said to embody truth, and prove by events the reasonableness of opinions. Prudence and justice are virtues and excellencies of all times and of all places. ... Those authors, therefore, are to be read at schools that supply most axioms of prudence, most principles of moral truth, and most materials for conversation; and these purposes are best served by poets, orators, and historians."

Elementary school students need immersion in Aesop's Fables, La Fontaine's Fables, "Alice in Wonderland," and Greek mythology. Instead, they read insipid "award winning" books like "The Bee Tree" or "Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus." Young children need instruction in moral distinctions and matters of degree; in speaking and writing with exactness and brevity; and in landmark issues and events in American history, including slavery, the Revolutionary War, the Constitution, the Civil War and Pearl Harbor. At present, however, young children are taught nothing about expressive skills, nothing about moral reasoning and nothing about the pivotal happenings that have made the United States, warts and all, the greatest nation in the history of mankind.

Secondary school students need to master Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Dumas and Thoreau. The histories of Herodotus, Thucydides, Tacitus, Plutarch and Gibbon should be scrutinized.....

The United States could have avoided much of its current and past follies, both foreign and domestic, if its leaders and the public knew history and had acquired a fine sense of justice, prudence and moral judgment.... Without a keenly developed sense of morality and justice, there is nothing to distinguish mankind from beasts.

More here



HOW MULTICULTURALISM TRASHED A SCHOOL

In Australia, multiculturalism has come to mean an abandonment of all standards for right and wrong or good and bad.

I was reminded of being told by one teacher and the husband of another how Middle Eastern boys in an inner city school had treated the female staff with a gross lack of respect. These women had felt sexually harassed.

And I was reminded even more of Coburg's Moreland City College, which lost two thirds of its students in five years and is now being shut down as a lost cause. What no bureaucrat or politician will openly admit is the extraordinary reason for Moreland's death -- how a school that had planned to grow to 1200 students in fact shrank to just 250.

The answer, as I found when I visited two years ago, and spoke to parents, teachers and the principal, was one of those nasty secrets that most of us are too scared to mention for fear of being branded racist.

Moreland was a fashionably multicultural school, just like the school my colleague visited (let's call it School X), so that the increasing number of Middle Eastern children who went there were made to feel at home - their parents' old home, that is, and not their new Australian one.

Islamic preachers addressed assembly, Arabic and Turkish became the main foreign languages taught, Islamic headscarfs were common.... Worse, Moreland become known for its ethnic gangs - with Lebanese students notoriously smashing up three Yooralla buses that were kept at the school. To make a tough situation worse, its discipline and academic standards were left to slide, without any intervention by the Education Department until it was far too late.

By that time, other children - Anglo-Saxon, Greek and Italian - had been pulled out by their parents and sent to other schools, which meant that those left were overwhelmingly Muslim, and Australia must have seemed the "other".

No doubt, the students... got the usual teaching about Australia and its past - about our "genocide", our "stolen generations" and our "racism".... An education of the kind that had Melbourne University's Hellenic Society tell me: "A nation that created itself from the blood of its slaughtered and persecuted native inhabitants and the destruction of their culture has no right to demand further assimilation from its migrants."....

Have such students yet learned to call Australia home? How successful have we been in assimilating them, so that they share our most important values and feel as responsible for this wonderful land as do you?....

In fact, what worries me most is not even that a minority of Muslim immigrants from the Middle East, encouraged by too many of their "leaders", seem particularly intolerant and rejecting of Australia.

More worrying is that our institutions -- not least our schools -- don't seem to promote aggressively an Australia that the children of such immigrants would want to join. Or even give them all the skills to do so. It's not just that we like to madly imagine this country has an evil past. See how we trash our present, too.....

Is it smart to let poorer state schools, or whole suburbs at that, become dominated by a minority culture, and turn into ghettoes? Is multiculturalism in schools -- such as the teaching of the student's home language -- trapping immigrant students in their own closed culture, and should we try harder to make them fall in love with Australia's?

Are we too often teaching students to disrespect this country and its past, and to see Australia as ugly? Are we asserting our values and our core culture strongly enough? Or have we so lost confidence that teachers do not dare even to enforce basic rules of civilised behaviour? And again I ask: what do our bureaucrats do to pick up schools that are failing?

In the end, I suspect, we will discover that discipline, rigor, a little prudishness and an optimistic belief in Australia and a respect for its rituals were not so stupid, after all.

More here.



20 September, 2004

NEA IN BED WITH THE FAR LEFT

"Last February Secretary of Education Rod Paige used the inflammatory and inappropriate term "terrorist organization" to describe the National Education Association. Perhaps he should have called them a "far left group." It might have been only slightly less inflammatory, but it would have been far more accurate.

Last Wednesday the NEA hosted a conference call to launch a new coalition called "National Mobilization for Great Public Schools." It is motivated by the need to make education "a higher priority across this nation" because "we're failing to provide too many children with the basics," according to the coalition's website. The coalition plans to host over 3,000 "house parties" across the nation on September 22 to make educational issues a major election issue.

The other coalition members include some of the usual suspects: NAACP National Voter Fund, and the United States Hispanic Leadership Institute. However, the NEA is now working with groups much further on the left: MoveOn.org, ACORN, and Campaign for America's Future.

No description of MoveOn.org is necessary for regular readers of this site other than a reminder it was the organization sponsoring the political ad contest that included two ads comparing Bush to Hitler.

ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) was founded by George Wiley whose claim to fame during the 1960s was to instigate poor single women to engage in sit-ins at welfare offices to end "oppressive" welfare eligibility restrictions. According to writer Sol Stern, Wiley's aim was "to flood the welfare system with so many clients that it would burst, creating a crisis that, he believed, would force a radical restructuring of America's unjust capitalist economy." ACORN continues Wiley's proud tradition of confrontational tactics. Several years ago, ACORN members protested Baltimore's lack of service to poor neighborhoods by dumping garbage in front of city hall and conducting a profanity laced demonstration in front of the mayor's house. ACORN is the group most responsible for imposing living wage laws in many of America's cities, and it's currently conducting a sustainable development campaign that, by limiting the growth of the suburbs, would make it more difficult for people to flee the high-tax cities.

The other organization involved is Campaign for America's Future, whose co-director Robert Borosage was formerly president of the leftist Institute for Policy Studies. CAF hosted the Michael Moore speech during the Democratic Convention and has accepted about $300,000 in contributions from George Soros. During the conference call Borosage even unintentionally admitted that some of the members of this coalition were from the far left. In response to a question about how this coalition could contend that it was bipartisan, he let slip, "I think you'll see that by the time we finish this coalition very mainstream groups [will be] joining it, it's just the mainstream groups it takes longer to get through their process."

More here.



AUSTRALIAN LEFT PUTS TEACHERS UNIONS FIRST TOO

The schools policy just released by Mark Latham, Federal leader of Australia's opposition Labor Party, promises to cut grants to private schools while giving more money to government schools

"The reason Latham is keeping down the private schools -- and particularly the most successful -- is simple: The big Labor-supporting teaching unions hate this competition. But rather than demand real reforms that will make state schools better, the unions insist Labor make non-government schools more expensive. They want to price their private rivals out of the market.

For Latham to give in to this special pleading doesn't just restrict parents' choices, but makes no sense financially or academically.

It makes no sense financially because every student in a non-government school saves taxpayers money. Scotch College, for instance, gets just $3.5 million a year from governments, although it has as many students as Balwyn High, a state school that gets $19.8 million. On average, a private school student gets half the grants of a state school student. It gets better. Parents of children in non-government schools also pump more of their own cash into their child's education -- more than $4 billion a year -- than do parents of children in state schools. And that's on top of their taxes.

Nor does Latham's plan to slug many parents who choose private make sense academically. After all, students of both independent and Catholic schools do better, on average, in the VCE than do state students.

So private schools save taxpayers money and make us spend more on educating our young, with better results. That's a hell of a deal, and it's hard to believe Latham resents it......

So that's Latham's education policy -- punish the parents who spend the most on their children's schooling, punish the schools with the best results, punish the Christian denominations that best build wealth and punish the taxpayer".

More here.



ENTREPRENEURSHIP BEATS EDUCATION

Australia is less wealth oriented than the USA but even in Australia, business still beats education

"Go into any Year 12 class approaching its final exams and the tension is palpable. Why? Because if the students do not perform well, they will not get into university and therefore (so the theory goes) be consigned to low-paying jobs for the rest of their lives. This fear, albeit a bit dramatic, is not only coming from students but also is shared by their parents. In turn, it is passed on to politicians who try to prove which of them is better at achieving improved education outcomes.

However, as John Howard wants us to be a nation of entrepreneurs and Mark Latham is providing us with rungs of opportunity, the link between education and prosperity is not as clear as some think. In the BRW Young Rich list, published today, an examination of the richest people under 40, tertiary education does not correlate to wealth. Only 40 per cent of those on the list have university degrees. Instead, most pursued their entrepreneurial venture soon after leaving school.

Many of these rich young people argue that formal education delays one's ability to pursue dreams or blunts innovative thinking. The richest person on the list, John Ilhan (39), who made his $300 million fortune through his mobile phone company Crazy John's, speaks for many successful entrepreneurs when he says: "Without university you have the idea that one plus one could be three, and in business that is a good thing."

Students, parents and we as a society should take a less rigid approach to university studies. Young people should be allowed to pursue their interests - if this does not include studying at university, so be it. Tertiary education is not for everyone and it by no means determines how successful you will be in life and even how rich you can be.

Although it is considered that education should be done while young, the early years are also the best time to pursue entrepreneurial ambitions because young people have fewer obligations and greater optimism in their ability to succeed. With greater flexibility in education these days, pursuing studies later in life, if the entrepreneurial venture fails, can be a better option.

In the BRW Rich 200, which identifies Australia's richest people, most do not have degrees. In fact, of the top 10 richest people in Australia, only one (property developer Harry Triguboff) obtained tertiary qualifications. It might have been thought that entrepreneurs would gradually become better educated, as the broader population has, but the Young Rich list challenges this. Clearly, a university education is not related to entrepreneurial success....

If we as a society are encouraging people to go to university at the expense of pursuing their entrepreneurial activities, we will all be the worse off for it. What is more, who then will create the wealth? The ultimate irony is that university graduates will no doubt line up to work for those non-university graduates on the Young Rich list".

More here

A cynical comment from a reader: "There's no evidence that education has anything to do with being very rich. Kyle Minogue, Nicole Kidman, Elle McPherson were all on the rich Aussie women list. Like to know how many degrees those girls have. Reckon plastic surgery can pay better dividends then a degree, at least for some people.



19 September, 2004

CBS REFLECTS ACADEME

Prof. Wilfred McClay comments. Excerpts:

"It's been said, rightly, that in insisting upon the authenticity (or "accuracy") of the forged documents in its possession, CBS is sacrificing truth and reputation for self-protection. But even such a massively costly strategy is risky, since the self-protection will hold only so long as there is no independent way of verifying the documents' source. And now, with the emergence of Bill Burkett as the likely source, or conduit, for the very documents that formed the core of CBS News's latest attack on President Bush, CBS is in danger of having sacrificed all three.....

It is not just that CBS should have been more skeptical of Burkett, as a committed political activist who has a long and well-documented record of grievances against George Bush. It's something far worse. With the addition of Burkett to the picture, we come face to face with the dismaying fact that Dan Rather and his colleagues, who sit at the pinnacle of the American liberal establishment, have been willing to embrace the word, and the world-picture, of a political lunatic. Anyone who doubts this characterization of Burkett, who proudly claims, among other things, to have been a consultant for Fahrenheit 9/11, should consult Prestopundit, which is all over this aspect of the story, and provides link after link to writings by and about Burkett, including articles appearing earlier this year in the "New York Times" and "Boston Globe". Ace of Spades further confirms this picture of Burkett....

In one sense, it is simply the latest change to be rung on the oldest of moral temptations, a willingness to say that the end justifies the means. But, as those of us who work in the academy know, the problem goes much deeper, to a comprehensive picture of the world in which the most delusionary visions of political reality enjoy a special indulgence.

Which is where the comparison of Michael Moore Politics to pornography seems to me entirely apposite. Reasonable people can differ about whether or not pornography is always and everywhere a vice. But no one can doubt that when men become addicted to it.... it is a debasing, coarsening, and debilitating thing, which renders its consumer pathetic, disoriented, and sometimes even dangerous. It is death to all genuine relationships with other people in the real world.

So with political pornography. It is death to genuine political debate, which is why the academic world, the San Fernando Valley of political pornography, and the most ideologically uniform example of "diversity" that the world has ever known, is so utterly moribund as a source of fresh ideas about the direction of this country".

More here.



PRE-SCHOOLS NOT THE PROBLEM

"Education Department data show most American preschoolers enter school with the building blocks for achievement. A majority recognize numbers, letters and shapes. Nearly all are in good health, enthusiastic and creative, key precursors to achievement, says Olsen.

American youngsters are also competitive internationally: In England, France and Spain, 90 percent of 4-year-olds attend preschool, yet American children outperform their European peers in reading, math and science. Unfortunately, by 12th grade, American students drop to a "D" on the international scale. Preschool will not solve this, says Olsen.

Improving achievement requires changing the education system, giving parents muscle through charter schools, grants and tax credits. When parents have options, schools either deliver a quality education or risk losing students to better schools, says Olsen. Most studies report benefits from these programs"

More here.



EDUCATION HYPOCRITES

Only Leftist elites deserve the best. No vouchers to give the poor any choice, of course. This article is from a little while back but nothing has changed.

"As candidates for governor, Democrats Robert Casey Jr. and Ed Rendell promise to improve public schools and oppose providing state grants to students to attend the school of their choice. Yet, Casey's four daughters attend the same Scranton Catholic schools as their father did, and Rendell's son, who is now in college, had attended Quaker-run Penn Charter School in Philadelphia.

The two men's press secretaries offered similar explanations as to why both candidates decided not to put their child in public school. "It is a reflection of what he and his wife believe is the best choice for their children," said Karen Walsh, spokeswoman for Casey.....

Casey and Rendell want to increase the state's share of the cost of kindergarten through 12th grade from the current 35 percent to more than 50 percent, what it was 30 years ago. They both emphasize a focus on early childhood education. Casey's plan and Rendell's plan would provide for all-day kindergarten, funding for pre-school and enhanced school safety.

In contrast, Mike Fisher, the Republican candidate that one of these men will face in November, does not believe there is a need to increase state funding of education. Fisher's daughter is a recent law school graduate and his son is a Penn State graduate, but he had sent his children to public schools in the affluent Pittsburgh suburb of Upper St. Clair. Fisher supports the idea of school choice".

More here



18 September, 2004

THE USUAL PROPAGANDA

"No one disputes the value of a college diploma. Not only do college graduates earn $20,000 a year more than high school graduates, but they're more likely to find jobs in an increasingly demanding global economy

[And the people who are smart and hard-working enough to get degrees would almost always do miles better anyhow]

In fact, the continued success of the U.S. economy depends on ensuring that workers get the best possible education, corporate leaders and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan have warned.

That's why a report Wednesday that shows the country's commitment to higher education slipping is so disturbing. After growing since the 1970s, the percentage of recent high school graduates continuing their education has leveled off in the past decade to about a third, according to the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, a think tank.

Why? Because students can't afford the surging tuition costs, or colleges don't have the space. Both obstacles stem from state cutbacks in higher-education budgets to close gaping shortfalls in recent years.

While the savings may help balance the books for now, they will cost states dearly in the long run. An investment in higher education today produces a handsome return in taxes, as employers are drawn to the state to take advantage of a highly skilled workforce.

Yet states are ignoring the payoff....

[Odd that!]

More here.



USE TAX CREDITS RATHER THAN VOUCHERS

"The legal, regulatory, and political bunkers manned by soldiers from the Democratic coalition make school choice a slow and difficult battle. What little ground reformers gain is constantly under threat of being lost. The school choice movement should step around these obstacles by concentrating their efforts on a drive, in each state with an income tax, for Universal Tuition Tax Credits (UTTCs) that allow all parents a true choice in education.

Universal Tuition Tax Credits, rather than vouchers or charters, are the most promising mechanism for providing an escape from failing schools to poor children, expanding the education market, and improving public education. All that is required is a relatively simple and popular revision of state tax law -- combining, expanding, and spreading existing tax credits.

Personal use tuition tax credits allow taxpaying parents to reduce the state taxes they owe by the amount they pay in tuition to a private school -- an individual who owes $10,000 in taxes and spends $4,000 on tuition gets a $4,000 tax credit. They end up paying only $6,000 in state taxes. Tax deductions, on the other hand, only reduce the amount of taxable income, which means there is much less bang for each buck.

Donation tax credits provide the same kind of state tax credit to businesses and taxpayers that contribute to non-profit Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs). These SGOs pay tuition for children from low- and middle-income families -- ensuring that children from poor families that don't pay much in state taxes can attend private schools as well.

Universal Tuition Tax Credits combine personal use and donation tuition tax credits. Under this system, any taxpaying parent can get a state tax credit for her child's private school tuition, and any taxpaying individual or business can donate a portion of their state taxes to scholarships for poor children rather than send it to the state.

UTTCs tap a huge reservoir of private funds for school choice, cover a broad constituency, and thereby avoid much of the education establishment's arsenal.

More here.



PUBLIC SCHOOLS THAT HATE THE PUBLIC

"It's back-to-school time. Unfortunately, despite school report cards and mandates like No Child Left Behind, many public schools still treat parents like mushrooms: feed them guano and keep them in the dark.

This occurred to me when, like any good parent, I called the principal's office at my local public elementary school to check it out before sending my son. Alas, despite spending $20,000 per child, our school had trouble returning three phone messages left during normal business hours. On my fourth try I reached a live person, and had a brief conversation:

"Hi, I'm Bob Maranto. I'm a parent who lives in [your school's] attendance zone. My son will be old enough for kindergarten next fall. He's actually right on the edge, so he could go next fall or the following fall, and I was wondering if I could come visit the school sometime."

"We don't have any visiting this year," the administrator replied. "We're doing construction and a lot of things are going on."

"Could I watch a class in session?"

"No, even when there's no construction you could not watch a class."

"Well, could I meet my son's teacher?"

"No, the teachers are busy teaching all day and then they go home." .......

But some public schools do better. Last year I led an accreditation visit to an Arizona charter school, Tucson's Academy of Math and Science. I slipped away from the guided tour, roaming the parking lot as school let out to question parents about how school staff treated them. Thirteen of 14 parents said their school welcomed their input. As one put it, "if you complain about something, they let you act on it to fix the problem." Parents designed the dress code and sports program, and helped evaluate teachers. Half the parents had watched classes. As one lady assured me: "it's easy-- you just talk to Mrs. Shannon at the front desk, tell her which class you want to go watch, and she'll tell you which room it's in."

Why can't all public schools work like that?

After seven years of research, I'm convinced that Arizona public schools cater to parents because of school choice combined with heavy reliance on state funding rather than local property taxes. Unlike most states, Arizona has open enrollment across district lines as well as 500 charter schools--many started by teachers--so parents unhappy with one school can easily find another. In addition, state funding means that education dollars follow enrollment, so schools that alienate parents lose money--which in turn alarms school boards and makes principals unemployed.

More here



17 September, 2004

JIHAD AT DUKE UNIVERSITY

On October 15-17th, Duke University is scheduled to host the Fourth Annual Conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement. This year's event was originally slated for the West Coast (last year's was at Ohio State), but the organizers had to look elsewhere because of reports in Frontpage Magazine and elsewhere that chants of "Kill the Jews" were heard during the proceedings of the first conference at UC-Berkeley. The same chants were repeated at the University of Michigan conference the following year, where the guest of honor was Sami al-Arian, the U.S. head of the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Al-Arian won't be appearing at the Duke event because he is currently in federal lock-up. His group is responsible for the murder of more than 100 people inside Israel including some American citizens. The campaign Frontpage Magazine waged against the conference at Ohio State, the third conference site, undoubtedly contributed to making university administrators in California skittish about holding such an event again.

Duke was chosen because it is a private university and less beholden to the public than taxpayer-supported institutions. Duke also has a history of inviting terrorists to proselytize its students. Two years ago Duke invited Sami al-Arian to keynote an academic conference on "National Security and Civil Liberties." Al-Arian was invited as a civil liberties expert. Last year, Duke's African and African-American Studies Department invited Weatherman terrorist Laura Whitehorn who had set off a bomb in the Pentagon and served 14 years in federal penitentiary for her act. The Duke faculty presented Whitehorn to Duke students as a "revolutionary anti-imperialist who spent over fourteen years in federal prison as a political prisoner."

The Ohio State Solidarity conference presented one face to the outside world and another to those who attended its closed workshop sessions. The press conference before the event was a propaganda show as the organizers claimed to be hosting an academic meeting to discuss ways to bring a non-violent settlement to the Middle East. Once the press was gone, the interior workshops addressed to ways to conduct war against Israel and its supporters by promoting divestment, getting control of campus newspapers, joining a campaign to ruin the business of the Caterpillar Corporation (because the Israeli army uses these bulldozers to unearth terrorist tunnels), and other like concerns. Ways to counter negative press reporting of suicide bombings were also discussed - but never whether one should condemn them.

The Ohio Solidarity Conference used airport-style metal detectors to confiscate tape recorders and cameras, while the press was barred. The Duke Solidarity Conference will follow the same procedures.

More here


"AFFORDABILITY" PROPAGANDA

Just have a look at this piece of absurd propaganda: "A new, independent report card flunks America's colleges in a key subject for many students and parents: affordability. While noting progress in areas such as student preparation, the biennial study by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education drops the country to an "F" in affordability from the "D" it received in the nonprofit group's report two years ago". It is an "F" compared to what? Nobody is saying. It is an "F" compared to an imaginary idea dreamed up in some Leftist's head seems to be the answer. As far as I know, the USA tops the world for the percentage of its population that gets college qualifications. That seems to indicate a very high level of affordability to me.

And why should it be affordable? Are Cadillacs affordable? Not very. But a lot of American education is in the Cadillac class: Expensive but dubious value for money.



16 September, 2004

THE LATEST U.S. UNEMPLOYMENT STATISTICS

This table gives the latest U.S. unempoyment statistics in the rightmost column. Note that for those without a High School diploma the unemployment rate is 8.1% and that unemployment drops with each level of education so that those with a degree of some sort have an unemployment rate of only 2.7%.

The conventional interpretation of these statistics would be that education enhances your employability. What I think the results show, however, is quite the opposite. It shows that the amount of education you get under the present system makes remarkably little difference to your employability. If the current U.S. educational system was of much practical use, being without even a High School diploma should be a big handicap. Since 91.1% of those without such a diploma do in fact get a job, why even bother with High School, let alone a degree? Why not just start work six years earlier and acquire money instead of debts? Clearly, there are many more important factors than education in determining who gets a job. I am sure I don't need to name the factors concerned. The obvious retort to what I have just said is that college graduates get higher-paying jobs but, on Berg's figures, the total pay-difference is still negligible over a lifetime. Poorly paid graduates and well paid truck-drivers are, after all, hardly news.

Sorry to be so cynical.



KNOWLEDGE NO LONGER ESSENTIAL

I have just put online an article written over 30 years ago which might as well have been written yesterday. It offers a critique of the Leftist educational theories and practices that still plague our schools today. Excerpt:

l. Over the last few decades, wrong methods and the abandonment of scholarship as the main aim of education had destroyed the value of much of our schooling, and produced a crisis of 'non-education' in our schools.

2. The New Education, with its rejection of the basic disciplines in favour of sociologically 'relevant' topics on the one hand, and individual juvenile 'creativity' on the other hand, would deal the deathblow to education.

3. The New Education with its inherent tendency to place contentious social issues (and suggested solutions) before uneducated minds, had opened the way for indoctrination of our children and the consequent subversion of democracy.

4. That whatever we may think of 3, our present educational system, having abandoned syllabuses, inspection and examination, left our children entirely at the mercy of individual teachers who might or might not be worthy of their charge. This point is irrefutable, and alone would warrant action at government level.

Criticism of my article has mainly consisted, apart from personal attacks, of loose restatements of the case for the New Education emphasising its 'relevance' in our modern world. I am accused of being in an ivory tower because I believe that children should have a store of basic knowledge before they deal with 'relevant' subjects. Colleagues and I, and most parents and teachers, do not accept the theoretical case for the New Education, and are dismayed at the results of its practical application. In particular, we believe that the sense of frustration among so many of our school-children comes precisely from the failure of modern schooling to provide them with basic knowledge within recognised disciplines.

15 September, 2004

ALL PRETENCE OF ACADEMIC INTEGRITY NOW ABANDONED AT UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

"Until this moment, political indoctrination by faculty has been traditionally (and formally) regarded by the American Association of University Professors and all academic administrations as a violation of the educational mission of the university. Until this year, in fact, indoctrination was explicitly recognized by the UC administration as academically unacceptable. Thus rule APM 0-10 of UC Berkeley's Academic Personnel Manual, written by UC President Robert Gordon Sproul in 1934 stated quite clearly:

"The function of the university is to seek and to transmit knowledge and to train students in the processes whereby truth is to be made known. To convert, or to make converts, is alien and hostile to this dispassionate duty. Where it becomes necessary in performing this function of a university, to consider political, social, or sectarian movements, they are dissected and examined, not taught, and the conclusion left, with no tipping of the scales, to the logic of the facts..Essentially the freedom of a university is the freedom of competent persons in the classroom. In order to protect this freedom, the University assumed the right to prevent exploitation of its prestige by unqualified persons or by those who would use it as a platform for propaganda."

Unfortunately, these noble words have been honored more in the breach than in the observance for a long time in the UC system. But the mere fact of their existence was annoying to faculty ideologues at Berkeley. Consequently, at the behest of former UC president Richard Atkinson, they were summarily removed this year by a tiny minority of the UC community in a 43-3 vote of the faculty Senate, which took place on July 30. 2003. The academic freedom clause was replaced by another, which essentially said that professors can teach anything they want in the classroom. This is a momentous and ominous event in the life of American universities, and therefore the academic context in which it occurred needs to be understood.

Two incidents precipitated the change in UC policy on academic freedom. The first was the complaint of a student at UC Berkeley that her Middle Eastern studies lecturer had told students that the notorious Czarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was true. The Protocols describes a Jewish plot to control the world and was a document used by the Nazis to justify the extermination of Jews. The student's complaint was dismissed by university authorities. An official of the UC Academic Senate defended the professor's preposterous and bigoted statement as coming under the protection of "academic freedom".....

The second incident involved a required freshman English writing class conducted by instructor Snehal Shingavi. Shingavi is the head of the International Socialist Organization, a group that describes itself as "Leninist" and calls for violent revolution. He is also head of Students for Justice in Palestine. Shingavi organized an anti-American demonstration on September 11, 2001 after the World Trade Center attacks and has been arrested for leading illegal and violent demonstrations on campus. Shingavi's course was called "The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance," and was listed in the catalogue along with the warning "Conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections." This sentence led to public ridicule and outrage. It was removed from the catalogue by university officials, but the course itself was allowed to continue.

More here



CONFUSING ELITE SCHOOLS WITH ELITE PEOPLE

Australia has a tradition of heavy Federal subsidies for private schools. It's Australia's alternative to vouchers. Mark Latham, leader of Australia's major Leftist party, has just announced a policy of big reductions in funding for what he regards as "elite" schools. He overlooks the fact that many people on modest incomes choose such schools for their children. One such is a reader of this blog who writes:

"I am intensely angered at Latham's very divisive school 'funding'

My husband and I were on a very average income in the early 1980s, in fact I ran a small business for which I took no salary (my husband took the same as our lowest paid assistant) I worked four full evening shifts nursing, per week in all I was literally working 7am to 11.30 pm 7 days a week to give our children what we hoped was a better start at a Private school, as at that time we felt that they were not gaining the assistance they required at their State school. They had to attend as boarders as we were unable to get them into a school near home -- we had not booked them in at birth which was essential at that time.We did not send them to develop elevated ideas of their own worth but to develop into good citizens which they did.

I would never be able, under a Latham regime to have had this option even though EVERY cent -- that is EVERY cent -- I earned went into the school fees, my husband became Mum, we had no holidays apart from a couple of camping trips-NEVER not ever went out to dinner. We worked so hard for 25 years and now are 'self funded retirees' and still get no benefits from the goverment. We sold our home in Melbourne and moved to a cheaper one in the country to fund our retirement.

We have no complaints and would do the same again. We both come from the battling 'working class' and believe very much in people being encouraged to be self-reliant. We have private health cover -- we pay our Dr the full fee and get our rebate from medicare and think ourselves very fortunate.

However we have very wealthy aquaintances who sent their children to state schools, boast about not having private health care and enjoy a more lavish and self indulgent lifestyle because they spent nothing on their childrens education. Children at the 'Elite' State schools benefit and the aspirational 'battlers' who wish for a choice, the backbone of this country, are to be 'screwed' by this left wing spite-monger, bully and his petty motley crew.

Another thing: Many kids from rural Australia are boarders who have to attend such schools or move to rural towns and live alone to get further education".



14 September, 2004

CALIFORNIAN "LIBERALISM" AT WORK

"Fifty-three percent of Los Angeles area workers are functionally illiterate, according to a United Way report.

Continued immigration and a stubborn high school dropout rate have stymied efforts to improve literacy in Los Angeles County, where more than half the working-age population can't read a simple form, a report released Wednesday found.

Ten percent of poor readers take an adult literacy class, but half drop out within three weeks. That's what happened when my mother volunteered to teach reading to Mexican immigrants; most of those who signed up never came at all, even though the class was held at the restaurant where they worked".

Cribbed from the excellent Joanne Jacobs




Teachers in rush to UK high-pay jobs

By SHARRI MARKSON in London

THOUSANDS of top Australian teachers are being lured to work in British schools by offers more than double their existing salaries. A "Sunday Mail" investigation revealed British principals and recruitment agencies had headhunted about 3000 Australian teachers since January 2003. This comes at a time when teacher shortage is a serious problem affecting Australian schools.

British schools also claim to be experiencing a staff crisis. The dropout rate is high, with 55 per cent leaving five years after completing their training.

Schools in London are also offering incentives including free flights and accommodation. Starting salaries for teachers in the UK are between $60,000 and, $90,000, compared with an average $41,109 in Australia. In inner-London schools, one in four teachers is from Australia. Britain's National Union of Teachers said schools relied heavily on Australians' talent.

But Australian principals are fed up with their best teachers being poached. Secondary Schools Association vice-president Bernie Shepherd said Australia could not afford to continue losing teachers.

Queensland Teachers Union president Julie-Ann McCullough said the brain drain had been a problem for years. "I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing for some teachers to work overseas for a while - but it's important to get them back again." Ensuring attractive conditions in Australia would help retain staff and encourage others to return.

The background to the above report is amusing. British schools are so politically correct that most discipline is impossible. No wonder British teachers give up and move on to other jobs as soon as they can. And the Australians who go there mostly do so for a short while only also -- for a working holiday. But even then they need the enticement of comparatively huge salaries to put up with the mess that is British schools, London schools in particular.

The above report appeared on p. 19 of the Brisbane (Australia) "Sunday Mail" on Sept. 12th., 2004



13 September, 2004

EDUCATIONAL ADVANTAGES?

Gregg Easterbrook has a big article saying that students getting into an elite university like Harvard are not markedly better off than students who attend many relatively unprestigious universities. The graduates of elite colleges do have slightly higher lifetime earnings but not by much.

Brian Micklethwait and Michael Jennings have made a few comments about their own university experiences which seem broadly in line with that judgement. I myself am not in much of a position to comment. I went to three Australian universities but it was at a time when all Australian universities were publicly funded and so had very similar standards. Insofar as there was any status ranking among Australian universities at that time (in the '60s), the University of Sydney was probably Top Dog. I did my M.A. there but I cannot say that there was any clear difference between it and the other two universities that I attended. In recent years in Australia, however, all sorts of technical colleges and the like have been "converted" into universities so going to a long-established university does now have some cachet here. My son is certainly going to a "sandstone" university next year. The same one I went to for my B.A., in fact.

The passage in Easterbrook's article that interested me most was this: "Research does find an unmistakable advantage to getting a bachelor's degree. In 2002, according to Census Bureau figures, the mean income of college graduates was almost double that of those holding only high school diplomas."

That does at first sight run counter to the seminal findings of Ivar Berg (review of the first edition here) -- who found that tertiary education did NOT improve lifetime earnings. The contradiction is only superficial, however, as Berg used much more sophisticated econometric calculations which not only took into account the loss of income while studying (opportunity costs) but also applied realistic interest rates to that income.

And from what Easterbrook says, employers are now much more skeptical of educational prestige than they were when Berg did his original research. So the bottom line is much more radical than even Easterbrook imagines. Not only does it matter little what college you go to but it matters little if you go at all! And given that many university courses these days are more propaganda mills than sources of higher learning, the worth of the degrees concerned is likely to be of ever-diminishing importance. So unless you feel a strong avocation towards studying some particular subject, my advice would be that you are wasting your time getting a university education. Get into business instead!

In the Australian army (where I was once a sergeant) there is a saying that you should never ask your troops to do what you would not do yourself so I feel obliged to follow that piece of advice by noting that I personally went in both directions. I had both an academic career and a business one and did well in both. But it was my business career that enabled me to retire at age 39 now 22 years ago! Beat that! Learning how to become a successful capitalist is much the best lesson but only life can teach you that. I must also confess to some amusement at the fact that many years of study have given Michael Jennings a job as an equities analyst with a big banking firm. I didn't do five seconds of formal study in that subject or any related field but my share portfolio has increased in value by over 50% in the last 3 years. And I did it all in blue-chips. Beat that too!

Sorry to be such a smart-ass but it's relevant. Most formal education always has been useless. My son is going on only because, like me, he is a born adademic. We enjoy academic pursuits, whether they are useful or not.



12 September, 2004

A FEW SMALL WINS FOR ACADEMIC FREEDOM

Excerpt from "News from the Front" -- the newsletter of Students for Academic Freedom

San Francisco State University reversed the expulsion of student Tatiana Menaker, a Russian Jewish refugee, who had been expelled for five years after comments she made objecting to a Palestinian campus demonstration at which activists shouted "Hitler didn't finish the job." She was not granted a hearing in her own defense, but instead was immediately escorted off campus by three uniformed campus police officers. Students for Academic Freedom organized a "Tatiana Menaker Defense Committee" which succeeded in negotiating her immediate reinstatement as a student.

At Metro State (Denver) student George Culpepper was banned from the Political Science Association by its faculty advisor Oneida Meranto, along with all College Republicans. When he testified about the episode to a Senate hearing for the Academic Bill of Rights, Professor Meranto publicly attacked him in the Denver Post, claiming that his testimony was sour grapes because he was failing her class. In fact, Culpepper was earning a B+ in her course until he voluntarily dropped it because of her bias. In making this false statement to the press, Meranto violated the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA), which forbids teachers from discussing their students' grades and educational progress publicly. SAF took up Culpepper's defense, bringing widespread media attention and Meranto's resignation as faculty advisor to the student Political Science Association.

At Georgia Tech, Ruth Malharto, a public policy major was told by her public policy professor that she would fail her course hecause she went to a conservative conference in Washington. SAF notified the dean of diversity at Georgia Tech, congressman Jack Kingston and the office of Governor Sonny Perdue. All three intervened in behalf of the student who was allowed to withdraw from the course without penalty.

At Roger Williams University, located in Rhode Island, SAF helped to expose and document a clear-cut case of censorship. The president and administration of the school froze the funding of a conservative student publication, The Hawk's Right Eye, and publicly castigated the paper's editors for their viewpoints after the newspaper printed articles criticizing the lack of intellectual diversity among university-sponsored speakers this fall. Following a public outcry, the funding was unfrozen.

At Indiana University, Bloomington, Students for Academic Freedom launched an investigation into a Workplace Safety course which had been turned into a propaganda class against the United States and Israel and their efforts in the War On Terror. SAF students on campus spearheaded a movement joined by the Indiana Association of Scholars and faculty members on campus, to expose the misleading course description and ask the administration to make changes. The course has been completely revamped and the instructor reassigned.

At DePauw University in Indiana, Students for Academic Freedom supported College Republicans who were attacked by Director of Multicultural Affairs Jeanette Johnson-Licon because they had invited David Horowitz to speak on campus. After SAF helped to publicize her comments, both Johnson-Licon and the university administration made full apologies to the students and to David Horowitz. The DePauw College Republicans and SAF chapter are planning meetings with the campus administration at which they will encourage the University to adopt the Academic Bill of Rights.



11 September, 2004

US productivity soars in business, slumps in education: "Productivity in the U.S. economy soared an impressive 60 percent over the past three decades in terms of output per hour, but productivity in U.S. public schools fell by 42 percent over the same period in terms of reading achievement per dollar spent, according to Harvard University economist Caroline M. Hoxby."



BAPTIST HOME-SCHOOLERS

"A Christian woman in Texas has launched a home schooling organization for Southern Baptist families. Elizabeth Watkins says the organization is the answer to a prayer God put in her heart almost three years ago when she first began home schooling her daughters. After realizing there was little support for home schoolers in her denomination, she formed the Southern Baptist Church and Home Education Association.

The home-schooling mom feels more Christian parents need to thoughtfully consider home education as an alternative to government schools that are so often the automatic choice. And although the Southern Baptist Convention recently turned down a resolution that urged Baptists to pull their kids out of public schools, she believes the resolution was successful in some ways.

"What it did was it brought awareness to the fact that the Southern Baptist home-schooling community does not have a voice within the convention," Watkins says, "and it brought that attention to home-schooling families. So, I believe that God can use the debate to bring something good out of it, such as our association.".....

According to the group's founder, the Southern Baptist Church and Home Education Association has some ambitious and innovative networking ideas. For instance, the group hopes to establish a network for retired Christian educators, coaches, and musicians who are interested in providing tutoring services for home-schooling families. Also, Watkins says the association intends to serve as a liaison between Southern Baptist colleges and high school-age home schoolers.

More here



10 September, 2004

Rubbery standards in Germany too: "A German teacher ended up in the dock and was ordered to give a pupil higher marks after her parents complained their daughter should have been given better grades. The 10-year-old girl missed out on a grammar school place because her grades were not high enough, but after quizzing their daughter about her poor performance, the parents decided the teacher was to blame -- and took the case to court. The couple's legal team claimed that the questions posed in assignments were unfair because they were phrased in an ambiguous way, and demanded that the child be marked up and allowed to enter grammar school."



ACADEMIC TYRANNY

Even an honest Leftist fell foul of academic Stalinism

"I'm a PhD looking for a full time teaching job in a very difficult market. When I could not find a full-time job for fall, I began looking for adjunct positions. I got a call from a prestigious university. I was excited. I was interviewed by Prof. X, the head of the writing program. As I said in subsequent emails to him and to his associate, I was deeply and positively impressed with Prof. X's apparent dedication to teaching, which he combined with a fine mind. I had applied at several other schools. I turned down a part-time position that would have paid much more. I did this because I wanted to work with Prof. X. In the end, I turned down several other offers.

The sample assignments we were given struck me as directive, as forcing students to accept, as fact, theories. Further, these theories, combined with the articles -- one about people celebrating all over the world after seeing film footage of planes crashing into the World Trade Center on 9-11, one about the "threat" of McDonald's restaurants opening up worldwide, and one that commented on America's efforts to combat terrorism, seen as not being good efforts -- created an anti-American slant. For example, one sample assignment asked students to compare eating at McDonald's to genocide.

There was no "out" in this sample assignment. A student who did not regard eating at McDonald's as comparable to genocide would not have been able to answer the question, and would have failed. That student's grade depended on his or her ideological agreement with the professor who had prepared the assignment. I was told that my homework assignment was to create assignments like those I had been shown in class.

I struggled with this assignment. I finally composed a note to Prof. X outlining my difficulty with the assignment.... I asked for guidance with the problems I was having in order to carry out my assigned duties, duties I was looking forward to fulfilling.

On the second day of the orientation, I arrived, early, and, again, sat up front, ready to absorb what wisdom Prof. X had to offer. Prof. X entered the room, ignored the other trainees present, approached me, and asked me to accompany him outside. Prof. X didn't just walk me into the hall, he escorted me outside the building. Once we were outside, Prof. X. said to me, immediately, "I wonder if this is going to work. This is like a marriage. You have objections to what we do. Give your social security number to our secretary, and we will pay you for coming for the orientation."

Again, I am a relatively recent PhD seeking employment in a very tight market. I have several strikes against me. I come from a working class, immigrant background, and entered grad school late. Further, I had to deal with a catastrophic illness while a grad student. I'm not a shiny, young, ethnically mainstream PhD who has all the time in the world to find the right job. This job may have been my last chance, or something close to it. If nothing else, I really needed the money. I'm living in Section 8 housing.

This all occurred the week before school was to start. I had made clear, in phone calls and emails, that I had turned down other jobs for this job. Is it consistent with leftist values to take a job away from someone who needs one so badly, at a time when that person's ability to find other work is in doubt?

The other terrific irony in all this is that I am not a right-winger. For example, I have not just marched against every military action undertaken by the US in my lifetime (except Afghanistan), I have organized and spoken at actions against every US military action in my lifetime. I'm a radical feminist, radically and actively pro-gay rights; I don't just preach environmental ideals; I live environmental ideals. I could continue listing my bona fides as a certified Pinko for several pages. I come by this point of view from my family, which includes not a few Communists. My work has been published in a national publication that was reviewed by Publishers' Weekly as "leftist." "

More here.



9 September, 2004

NIHILISM IN ACADEME

A former Democrat and admirer of Zell Miller describes what she was taught as "literature" in an American university: "Senator Miller would have been outraged had he been in an English department where the very idea of "family" is questioned and attacked. He would have been shocked while listening to discussions of sadistic child pornography discussed with aplomb... He would have been shocked to see the family portrayed as an institution of evil and oppression, of patriarchy; to see motherhood presented as "territorialization" in women's studies.... He would have been shocked to read discussions by acclaimed scholars of performance studies of transgendered sex workers who assert power over men through pornographic performances.... He would have been shocked by the glib arguments of graduate students trained by the radicals who ask: why defend your particular family over the family of the enemy? Who is to say?"



NO SCHOOLING, NO DRIVING

A bit bureaucratic but it may be one of the few effective disciplinary measures left these days

"On the first day of school for many students, Gov. Tim Pawlenty moved to crack down on truancy Tuesday, announcing plans to require good school attendance as a condition for getting a driver's license. Pawlenty said he has told his commissioners of education and public safety, Alice Seagren and Michael Campion, to draft rules that would require students younger than 18 to submit a form certified by their schools proving they have a good attendance record when they apply for a driver's license.

The process will take some time, but the rules could take effect as soon as this spring, meaning attendance during the current school year would count, he said. "There's no question that there is a strong correlation between consistent and steady attendance in school and academic success," Pawlenty said. "Students who don't attend school regularly don't learn, and they don't ultimately succeed academically."

A similar proposal was one of Pawlenty's main education initiatives last session, but it stalled in the Legislature. He said his administration will use its rule-making authority to accomplish many of the same things. The governor and his commissioners called it a common-sense approach because there are few things as important to a teenager as driving".

More here



8 September, 2004

SHOULD SCHOOLS TEACH CREATIONISM?

British Prof. Christie Davies thinks that creationism is a lot of nonsense but still supports the idea of schools teaching it. Excerpt:

"Why then should we permit and encourage the formation of secondary schools in which the creationist alternative is taught either in addition to Darwinism or as a substitute for it? The reason is simple. Schools in which creationism is cherished are the kinds of faith schools that succeed in instilling decent moral principles in their pupils. Creationist schools are able to generate the kind of moral authority that will combat crime, teenage pregnancy and drug addiction in amoral inner city areas and they can do this without creating political or communal animosities. Parents who want their children to be protected from the problems associated with inner city seek out schools that condemn sin. They want schools that are judgmental and moralistic. Those schools which believe in the literal truth of the Book of Genesis are likely to provide this.

Parents do not care about the waxing and waning of trilobites or moths that turn black in Lancashire or the species of bottom feeding sea-urchin that became extinct when its anus slowly migrated round its perimeter until it coincided with its mouth. Such esoteric knowledge does not appeal to the parents of Govan or Splott, Bon-y-Maen or Chapeltown. They know that the wages of Darwin is sin and they dislike sin. Democracy as well as reason demands that we go back to the seven days of creation and the quelling of confusion to create order. The story of the flood and Noah's Ark has a moral dimension that Darwinism lacks, for it links changes in the natural world to the need to restore moral order at a time of social confusion.

Should creationist schools spring up all over Britain and their academically successful pupils obtain a qualification in creationist science rather than on an evolutionary syllabus, it will have no deleterious impact whatsoever on British technology and competitiveness. Only a few specialists need to assume in their work that the theory of evolution is true let alone have a detailed knowledge of it. What does it matter if a computer scientist or a mechanical engineer or an inorganic chemist believes in creationism? The United States is full of such people and it does not seem to have inhibited scientific progress, technical innovation or economic growth in that materially successful country....

No doubt I will be accused of cynically advocating the teaching of something whose truth I doubt in order to pursue social betterment, the treason of the Jesuit and the Benthamite. The critics forget that our entire educational system is based on this principle. Even as I write colleagues in schools and universities throughout Britain are teaching on a grand scale the lie that human nature in general and sex roles in particular are infinitely malleable, a doctrine based on Margaret Mead's grossly incompetant studies of Samoa. Margaret Mead's work has long since been discredited by later researchers and the author shown up as a na
More here



7 September, 2004

VOUCHERS: IT'S HAPPENING

"WASHINGTON - As the school year begins, more than 1,000 students are using a new voucher program to escape troubled public schools in the nation's capital.

Officials running the nation's first federally funded voucher program said Wednesday the response was overwhelming. Seventy-four percent of students who applied for vouchers and were determined to be eligible are enrolled in participating private and parochial schools, and more applications are under review. "We have 1,011 students that have been placed in 53 schools," said Sally Sachar, president of the Washington Scholarship Fund, the nonprofit group administering the program for the District of Columbia and the U.S. Department of Education.

In 17 days last spring, the scholarship fund received inquiries from the families of about 8,500 students. More than 1,800 children met program income requirements, under which a family of four could not earn more than $34,400 per year. "The fact that so many families applied for and accepted these scholarships shows the demand for quality educational options," said Mayor Anthony A. Williams, who spent much of last fall building bipartisan support for the $12.1 million program.

Voucher advocates hope the experiment in the capital city, an idea debated in Congress for years before its passage in 2004, will energize the school-choice movement nationwide...."

More here



PARENTS CAN'T TRUST LEFTIST TEACHERS

The major party of the Left in Australia -- the Labor Party -- has had enough political savvy to disown this action after the event but you can be sure that nothing would have been said or done without a big protest from parents. I gather that the play celebrates transvestism and transsexuality

"The Liberal Party has seized on the screenplay to the hit Australian movie The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert as evidence that Labor governments would not protect school values. The controversial play was withdrawn from Morayfield High School in Caboolture Shire on Friday after parents' complaints. Federal Member for Longman, Mal Brough, said that foul language, an incest scene and other "disgusting" behaviour in the play had no place in schools. "The Labor Party talks about schools maintaining values ... but the reality is they are doing altogether another thing when they are in charge of the system here in Queensland,' Mr Brough said.

State Education Minister Anna Bligh said the play had not been reviewed or approved by Education Queensland, and was not part of any syllabus. "It is not suitable for students and should not have been used as a study tool," she said. Federal Opposition education spokeswoman Jenny Macklin also said that if was not in the syllabus, it should not have been studied."

The above article appeared in the Brisbane "Courier Mail" on Sept., 7th., 2004



6 September, 2004

LOL. Stupid Leftist "educators": Prof. Richard Lynn had the following mocking letter (not online) in the "Times Higher Educational Supplement", 27 viii 2004: "So Cambridge University has developed a "thinking skills test" for students and found that it predicts performance in first year examinations (Public Agenda, 17 August). The university has apparently rediscovered the intelligence test, first constructed ninety-nine years ago, since when dozens if not hundreds of studies have found what Cambridge has now discovered. Brilliant".



AUSTRALIAN PARENTS DEMAND STANDARDS

More people should

"Parents have thrown their weight behind teachers in the battle between the State Government and Victoria Point State High School over penalties for drug use. The school's Parents and Citizens Association has written to the local Labor MP John English, expressing its disappointment with the Government's refusal to expel two students caught with marijuana on the school oval.

Victoria Point principal John Corbett had recommended the Year 10 boys be expelled - a recommendation rejected by Education Queensland district director, Jan D'Arcy. Victoria Point teachers will stop work at 1.45pm today to protest at Education Queensland's "soft stance on illegal drugs in schools".....

Queensland Teachers' Union president Julie-Ann McCullough said yesterday teachers had been let down by the department. "Education Minister Anna Bligh must immediately intervene in this case and instruct her department to back the school's decision to exclude the students," Ms McCullough said.

Education Department director-general Ken Smith said the boys had already been punished with one getting a 16-day suspension and the other 20 days and directed to undertake drug counselling. "The students do not have a history of misbehaviour, so it is absolutely unwarranted for the QTU to continue with this action," Mr Smith said.

Victoria Point teachers have demanded the school's behaviour-management plan, previously endorsed by Education Queensland, be implemented.

More here



5 September, 2004

BUT BUREAUCRAT SALARIES WILL NEVER BE CUT

Parents, coaches rail against "pay to play" fees: "There are new clothes and supplies to buy and piano lessons to schedule. And for many parents across the country, the first day of school also entails some 'hidden' costs. Faced with shrinking budgets, schools are charging for things parents once took for granted: playing football or field hockey, singing in the glee club, or, in at least one case, accepting membership in the National Honor Society. Charges for extracurricular activities, commonly called 'pay to play' fees, are not new, but as more and more schools rely on them, parents and other critics are railing against a system they say denies access to a free public education. Last month, Massachusetts Speaker of the House Thomas Finneran vowed to explore ways to put an end to fees collected in his state. According to a recent survey by the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, some three-quarters of districts here charge extracurricular fees."



HOME SCHOOLING POWER

Great stuff: "Babette Hankin of Croyden, PA, likes to show off her home-schooling program. Not only do her seven children stay occupied all day, but the five of school age seem to thrive in her regimented rotation covering earth science, reading, math, and even piano practice. Yet despite pride in the program, Mrs. Hankin is suing the Bristol Township School District for requiring a yearly review. At dispute is the age-old but not yet settled question of who owns the children, and who therefore should oversee their education -- the parents, the state, or God? ... Hankin's is one of two landmark cases pending in Pennsylvania courts. In each, home-schooling families are using a new religious freedom law to fight what they see as state interference. Twelve states have recently passed similar laws, putting a potentially powerful tool in the hands of those who educate the nation's 1.1 million home-schooled children."



4 September, 2004

A SANE LEFTIST

The major Leftist opposition party in Australia, led by Mark Latham, is remarkably responsible by Leftist standards. They mostly manage to keep their loony Leftists on a leash. Their latest schools policy is an example. A policy that stresses incentives for good teachers, promises to tackle discipline problems and guarantees a high level of Federal funding for non-government schools is probably about as good as can be expected from a Leftist party without totally alienating the Leftist teachers who form a big part of their base

MARK Latham has pledged that "the best" teachers will be paid around $70,000 a year to work in poorly performing schools, but warned the ALP had no plans to reverse the trend of parents choosing private schools.

Unveiling the first instalment of his election pitch on education, the Opposition Leader yesterday announced details of his plan to find 750 "great teachers" and pay them above current salary scales to teach in schools with low retention rates or literacy levels and areas of high unemployment, truancy and poverty.

Mr Latham pledged his $315 million plan would also tackle out-of-control kids and ensure that "better values" and discipline are taught.

Saying he had never wagged a day of school, Mr Latham said the ALP would find teachers who specialised in improving the results of vulnerable students and pay them extra money to teach.

"We are talking about schools with low retention rates and literacy levels, disadvantaged communities, high levels of poverty in surrounding districts and a high number of students with special learning needs," he said.

Mr Latham has pledged to guarantee overall spending on private schools but redistribute money within the sector and increase spending on public schools. However, he declined to say yesterday which private schools could face funding cuts in favour of low-fee independent and Catholic schools.

Asked if he wanted to reverse the switch to private schools, which teaches 30 per cent of students, Mr Latham said: "We don't have a target for changing the distribution between government and non-government. We have policies aimed at better schools in both sectors."

More here



WHO SAID TEACHERS LEAN LEFT?

"More than six of every seven delegates to the July 3-7 Representative Assembly of the National Education Association (NEA) supported the recommendation of U.S. Senator John Kerry (D-Massachusetts) for president of the United States. The 86.5 percent endorsement margin falls short of previous margins for Bill Clinton and Al Gore, but nevertheless constitutes a pretty firm alliance between NEA's most active members and the Democratic Party. Two weeks later, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) also approved a resolution endorsing Kerry for president at its July 14-17 convention." More here.



3 September, 2004

CLASS WAR IN AUSTRALIAN SCHOOLS

Leftists have still not accepted Australia's long tradition of Federal subsidies for non-government (mostly church-run) schools

"Thankfully, long gone are the days of the acrimonious debate over state aid. The overwhelming majority of Australians support the existence of both government and non-government schools and accept that parental choice in education is a democratic right.

Not so the Australian Education Union, the Australian Labor Party and the Australian Greens. All, to varying degrees, argue against non-government schools and seek to penalise those parents who send their children to independent schools. The union's 1998 curriculum policy argues: "that the resources of governments should be wholly devoted to the public systems which are open to all" (4.5).

As might be expected from a left-wing union, the belief is that education should be a state monopoly and parents choosing the non-government system should be made to pay more. Evidence of the union's continued antipathy to non-government schools is easy to find. The union is embarked on a campaign to destroy the Howard Government based on the (mistaken) premise that independent schools are over-funded (visit http://aeu-vic.labor.net.au/ campaigns/).

The Labor Party also is a critic of nongovernment schools and, while acknowledging their right to receive some government funding, argues that many receive too much money and that priority must be given to government schools. To quote Opposition Leader Mark Latham, when interviewed on ABC radio: "We'll be taking money off the overfunded schools..."

While many associate the Greens with koalas and the environment, the party's schools policy is far from soft and cuddly. If in a position of power after the next election, the Greens pledge to abolish the SES system of funding non-government schools and reintroduce the Labor-designed New Schools Policy. The New Schools Policy was introduced by Labor to bolster the ailing government school system by making it almost impossible to establish new non-government schools. The Greens also wish to abolish funding to the so-called wealthiest non-government schools, categories 1 and 2 under the old funding scheme, and to significantly reduce funding to category 3 schools.

The union, the ALP and the Greens also argue that the Howard Government fails to properly fund government schools. Ignored is that the overwhelming responsibility for funding the public system resides with state governments and that, over the past five to six years, such governments have drained schools of resources.

That such attacks on non-government schools are illogical and counterproductive is easy to prove. Every time a parent decides to send a child to a non-government school, more money is freed up for the government school system. With government schools, the average student government recurrent funding (2001-2002) is just under $9000.

On average, students attending nongovernment schools receive approximately $5000 in government recurrent funding - a saving to government of $4000 for each student. Not only are parents who make the choice saving governments money, their taxes also fund the government school system.

Based on research carried out by the Productivity Commission, it is estimated the financial sacrifice of non-government school parents amounts to a S4.2 billion annual saving to governments across Australia. Money that can be spent in other areas such as welfare and health. As demonstrated in 1962 in Goulburn, NSW, when the local Catholic authorities closed their system and 2200 additional students suddenly knocked on the door of their overcrowded public schools, the government system would collapse if not for the presence of non-government schools.....

Notwithstanding that non-government schools save governments billions of dollars, such schools have become a target of the Left in the federal election. Why is this so? One reason is because teacher unions define non-government schools as elitist and guilty of promoting a "competitive and culturally biased system of education". While the Berlin Wall may have collapsed, those running the union still believe in the class war and non-government schools are an easy target.....

Ignored is that parents are voting with their feet (32 per cent of students now attend non-government schools, up from 22 per cent in 1980)..."

(The above is excerpted from an article by Kevin Donnelly that appeared in the Brisbane "Courier Mail" on September 2nd., 2004)



Dangerous deficits: "If we continue to let kids get high school diplomas when they're functionally illiterate, and if colleges continue to pump out grads that can't communicate well or properly (to be fair, colleges are having a heck of a time giving remedial English classes to incoming freshman who are nowhere near high school graduate level), we're all going to lose something important. After all, it's the ability to communicate clearly that keeps us all informed of things large and small, from office parties to our medical care, and from funny stories to urgent warnings."



Even the elite of students produced by America's Left-dominated High Schools are clueless: "Since this is Emory, there are no re-enactments of "The Blackboard Jungle," and most in the class strive for an A, in their fashion. But the ignorance, laziness, sense of entitlement and lack of basic rhetorical skills are stunning. One student thinks that "books" and "novels" are the same. Another identifies the Granite State as "New Hamster." Few are familiar with the rules of language, many spell poorly and all are confused by tenses and apostrophes and complain bitterly when Prof. Allitt marks them down for grammatical errors."



And it's no wonder how ignorant the students are when you see how dumb the "educators" are: "The town of Hempstead, NY, has a message for Gwinnett County school administrators: Before you target a student wearing a Hempstead shirt, look at a map. Terrell Jones, a student in Gwinnett County's [GA] Grayson High School, was weeded out of a classroom by a school administrator because he wore a shirt that read: 'Hempstead, NY 516,' a reference to the Long Island town and its telephone area code. According to Jones' family, which moved from Hempstead to the Atlanta suburb, the school thought the shirt referred to marijuana. Jones wasn't allowed to return to class until he persuaded school officials to search the Internet for the town name. The town's Web site says the area may have been named for Hemel-Hempstead, England. Another theory cites the Dutch city of Heemstede, because settlers had come years earlier from the Netherlands."



Education has been dumbed down in England too: "Nearly 20 years ago I studied A-levels in English literature/language, history and sociology at a local FE college in the West Midlands. In recent years I've been teaching both A-level sociology, and government and politics, at a variety of inner London FE colleges. I'm also an A2 government and politics examiner for the examination board Edexcel. David Miliband blithely suggests it's 'a myth' that A-levels are getting easier, but from my experience it's the unavoidable and uncomfortable truth".



And it happens in Australia too: "Analyst and author Kevin Donnelly says Queensland has led Australia in dumbing down the curriculum for state schools. And he says students are being indoctrinated with left-wing ideology. "Queensland wrote the Study of Society and the Environment national curriculum and it was re-written at national level because people could not believe the new-age loony stuff in it," Dr Donnelly said. "Unfortunately, it's still used in Queensland." Dr Donnelly said: "I felt that Australia's approach to the curriculum, particularly in Queensland, was fundamentally flawed and obsolete and the result is that students have been put at risk because the curriculum has been dumbed down.".... Queensland's approach to the curriculum was "very politically correct", he said. "The SOSE curriculum promotes a left-wing view of things like multiculturalism . . . and peace studies. It's all about indoctrination...."



High School teacher Dave Huber has some very sarcastic comments on the latest "resolutions" of the NEA. "Illegality is good" seems to be part of their story. A great way to educate kids! How about if a few people "illegally" shot some NEA members? Would that be good too? Or should we encourage respect for the law after all? Lamebrains! If people only have to obey the laws they agree with, I foresee a lot of dead Leftist fanatics. They rely on other people being more decent and responsible than they are.



Amtrak? "A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad." - Theodore Roosevelt, Twenty-sixth US president (1858-1919)