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30 September, 2005

THE DECAYED AND CORRUPT NEW YORK SYSTEM

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

When all is said and done, nothing useful has been said or done unless criticism has given way to constructive suggestion. New York City’s public school system, once the jewel in America’s educational crown, has in recent years been hit hard by backfiring reforms, and is very much in want of healing. If there can be no gain without pain, then agony will at least be a beginning. Here is one prescription:

Meritocracy must be restored. The title of “principal” comes from “principal teacher.” Principals are now commonly appointed after having had no supervisory or teaching experience. They start at the top simply because a superintendent has ensconced them there by fiat. That superintendent often has no familiarity with the needs and character of the school, having hardly visited it, and may himself be scarcely more qualified than his protégé. Until Chancellor Klein’s regime, prospective supervisors submitted resumes that were screened by parents, teachers, and practicing supervisors who then formally interviewed the candidates.

There should be rigorous exams for supervisors as there were during the glory days of the New York City school system. These tests should be written and scored, in rank order, by a Board of Examiners that is entirely independent of the Department of Education. Identification of applicants should be coded to obviate any charge or risk of cronyism, nepotism, or ruses that substitute for merit.

When the school system was at its peak, it was mandated that applicants for assistant principal positions had taught for at least five years. An additional five years were required to rise from assistant principal to principal. People were hired in order by grade on promulgated lists. It was impossible to pass any test, even as a teacher, unless your speech was up to snuff, as a member of the Bureau of Speech could fail a candidate just for possession of an accent or a lisp. Perhaps it is as well that this is no longer the case.

Principals should have doctoral degrees in legitimate academic areas beyond theoretical education. They should be published and continue to publish throughout their careers.

Eligibility for leadership positions should strictly require legal certification without loopholes to accommodate aspirants with connections. People still in the midst of their schooling are being awarded leadership posts for which they are studying. A prominent superintendent in the Bronx was in fact hired while she was “going for her certification.”

If a qualification is vital to perform a job, there should be no monkey business to get around it. If it is not relevant, then it should be abandoned. Chancellor Klein himself was reportedly granted a “waiver” because he lacks both a State Certificate in Administration and Supervision and a New York City license

Quite apart from the potential impact on children of having their educational path paved by unfit authorities, consider the demoralizing effect on educators who see this abuse all around them perpetuated by the same people who rigidly demand that they meet all their expanding requisites in timely fashion.

A genuine meritocracy would make moot the debate over whether the schools should again be centralized as they were decades ago, because localized political machinations would be stanched and the duties of teaching and learning would take care of themselves.

Money is a food of meritocracy. Teachers are more likely to volunteer their time when they aren’t forced to watch the clock to get to their second and third jobs on time. But while holding out for what is materially due them, they will continue to be subsidized by that miracle called the psychic wage. But it is rapidly being spent.

Post lifted from Red Hog



DUMBING DOWN DEFEATED BY PUBLIC PROTEST IN AUSTRALIA

In the Australian State of Victoria. The VCE is the High School graduation exam

A controversial proposal requiring students to read only one book in year 12 English — labelled "English Lite" by its critics — has been abandoned by the authority responsible for the VCE. The about-face dumps a Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority proposal under which year 12 English students would have studied two texts instead of four, with one of those texts allowed to be a film. The changes, revealed by The Age, sparked heated community debate and were condemned by the State Opposition.

Last week Education Minister Lynne Kosky said she was not convinced by the authority's proposal, saying it had failed to make the case for changes to the VCE. The VCAA's acting chief executive, John Firth, said the authority had listened to the community and ensured that studying books remained central to VCE English. Mr Firth said English students would continue to study a minimum of four books or three books and a film in year 12. "Substantial consultation with teachers and the community indicates that central prescription of literary texts is valued because it ensures quality and common expectations for all students," Mr Firth said. The review of VCE English sought to improve the course, he said.

The changes, proposed in a VCAA draft discussion paper, would also have seen year 11 English students study two texts instead of three. The draft paper discusses a move away from written responses, with at least one oral assessment task. Books on the current VCE English list include Thomas Keneally's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and Graham Greene's The Quiet American. Films listed include Gattaca and Breaker Morant.

Opposition education spokesman Victor Perton said the backdown was a victory for the "decent teachers and parents" who thought it was obscene to have one book as part of year 12 English. "(The proposal) made Victoria a national laughing stock. There were editorials around the country," he said.

Tony Thompson, an English teacher at Princess Hill Secondary College and vocal critic of the changes, said the backdown came as a great relief because the proposal ripped the heart out of VCE English. The main problem with the changes, he said, was that literature would have become a secondary part of the English course. "An English course is as good as the books that are included on it," Mr Thompson said. "A lot of students have good memories of studying English and the part of the course that stays with people is studying and discussing a good text."

A spokesman for Ms Kosky said the minister welcomed the recognition of the importance of books in VCE English. The Victorian Association for the Teaching of English said while the number of texts had become a hot issue, it was important to question the balance and accessibility of VCE English. Association president Greg Houghton said more information was needed on the proposed new focus areas in the VCAA draft such as "sustainable futures" and "citizenship and globalisation".

Source

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

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

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

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29 September, 2005

Soak the Rich! (Colleges)

University and college faculties are overwhelmingly liberal in their politics. The faculties of Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley were large contributors to John Kerry’s Presidential campaign. The Berkeley faculty gave six times as much to Howard Dean as to George W. Bush. Campus liberalism is particularly pronounced at the most elite and wealthy institutions.

A core value of American liberals is the importance of redistributing wealth from the prosperous to others, through highly progressive taxes and transfer payments. Which leads to a question: If redistributing wealth is a good idea for workers, companies, individuals, and families, then intellectual consistency suggests it should be equally valid for institutions like colleges and universities. Right?

Why should students at Princeton, where economist Paul Krugman teaches when he is not thundering against the “well off ” on the New York Times editorial page, enjoy income from huge endowments, while students at poorer institutions have far fewer educational resources? How unfair! Worse, the extreme inequality of colleges is subsidized by the government. Gifts to rich schools are tax deductible for the donors. Universities and colleges pay no taxes on their capital gains, dividend, and interest income. This is an outrage against liberal principles! Remedial legislation is clearly needed!

These are no small matters. The disparities in college endowments are enormous. As of mid 2004, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton had average endowments of $14.9 billion, while three private institutions of similar size, George Washington University, Georgetown, and American University, averaged $543 million. That is a ratio of 27:1—about the same difference in income between a successful investment banker and a Wal-Mart clerk.

The numbers are even more striking in small liberal arts colleges. Grinnell, the richest of those that report data publicly, had an endowment of $1.2 million per student. Annual earnings of just 4 percent would produce more than $46,000 per student in yearly interest. Why does Grinnell charge tuition? Bates College had only $106,000 in endowment per student, less than one tenth of Grinnell’s. Gettysburg had $85,000 per student; Pitzer College $56,000; and Sarah Lawrence, only $38,000. That’s about 3 percent of Grinnell’s wealth.

It’s time for an egalitarian revolution. Liberal professors at Harvard, Princeton, Amherst, and Williams should follow the principles they proclaim and strongly support action to end campus disparities by redistributing educational wealth. Congress should pass, and President Bush should sign, a hefty and progressive tax on large per student endowments. The funds should be transferred to poorer schools. The same tax should apply to future gifts from alumni.

And why stop there? If redistribution is good, the same concept should apply within universities. Why should the law schools at George Washington and Georgetown live in splendor just because their alumni make more money than theology or economics or anthropology majors? The wealth of these law schools should be transferred to poorer departments. Particularly economics!

Professors at rich schools will splutter that such taxes will sharply reduce incentives for alumni to make gifts. Are we to believe that graduates of Yale are so narrow-minded and selfish that they only want to help Yalies? Surely Yale, Princeton, Williams, and Grinnell alums will give just as freely knowing that their gifts are helping students at poorer schools, particularly since they were taught primarily by liberal professors devoted to income redistribution.

Administrators at rich colleges will claim they raised their money through great effort, that it is unfair to take it away, and that this transfer would eliminate the incentive for poor schools to do a better job of fundraising. We won’t take those arguments any more seriously than liberals take the similar arguments conservatives make about income taxes and death taxes.

So when members of the classes of 1956 and 1981 gather next June at their 25th and 50th reunions in the tony precincts of New Haven, Cambridge, Princeton, and Williamstown, they should expect to see 35 to 40 percent of their gifts whisked away to poorer schools. That should improve their feelings of virtue. In fact, they should increase the size of their gifts to make up for the tax. That’s the least they owe us all.

Source



V.D. HANSON SINKS THE BOOT INTO AMERICA'S UNIVERSITY PRESIDENTS

Just some excerpts. In case "sinks the boot in" is a purely Australian idiom, it refers to a hefty kick in the nether regions of the anatomy

Over the past year, four university presidents have been in the news--from Harvard; the University of California, Santa Cruz; the University of Colorado; and the University of California, Berkeley. In each case, the curtains have briefly parted, allowing the public to glimpse the campus wizards working the levers behind the scenes, and confirming that something has gone terribly wrong at our best public and private universities.

Hypocrisy, faddishness, arrogance and intellectual cowardice are among the ailments of the American university today, and it is hard to say whether even a great president could save higher education from its now institutionalized vices. Amid the variety of scandals afflicting the campuses, the one constant is how the rhetoric of "diversity" trumps almost all other considerations--and how race and gender can be manipulated by either the college president or the faculty in ways that have nothing to do with educating America's youth, but everything to do with personal aggrandizement in an increasingly archaic and unexamined enclave.

At Harvard University, beleaguered President Lawrence Summers challenged notions of "diversity" and paid a steep price. He suggested--off the record, at a conference of the National Bureau of Economic Research--that factors other than institutional prejudice and cultural pressure might help explain the relative dearth of women faculty in the hard sciences at Harvard and other elite universities. If the intent of that mildly provocative, off-the-cuff exegesis was to jumpstart debate among serious thinkers, it proved a big mistake. Within seconds, one tough-minded feminist was reduced to bouts of nausea and swooning, and within hours many were calling for Mr. Summers to apologize, if not resign.....

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

But Chancellor Denton has her own shortcomings. They do not revolve around mere impromptu remarks, nor have they been trailed by public apologies and task forces. Yet in its own way her controversy goes to the heart of the same contemporary race-and-gender credo that governs the university, enjoying exemption from normal scrutiny and simple logic. Before her arrival, Ms. Denton arranged the creation of a special billet--ad hoc, unannounced and closed to all applicants but one: Ms. Denton's live-in girlfriend of seven years, Gretchen Kalonji. Most recognize this as the sort of personal accommodation--old-boy networking, really--that Ms. Denton presumably wishes to replace with affirmative action, thus ending backroom deals and crass nepotism.

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

Now we come to the third case: University of Colorado President Elizabeth Hoffman. She recently resigned, ostensibly following athletic scandals, but more likely as a result of the uproar over Ward Churchill. We remember him now as the strange professor who compared the 3,000 murdered in the Twin Towers and Pentagon to "Little Eichmanns," supposed cogs in the military-industrial wheel who deserved their fate. The public grudgingly accepted that Mr. Churchill's wartime praise for the 9/11 murderers ("combat teams" rightfully avenging America's murder of "500,000 Iraqi children") is protected free speech. But it could not quite fathom why Mr. Churchill was not summarily dismissed for other sins.

And they were legion. He had fabricated a Native American heritage, lying on affidavits about his ethnic identity to help make up for his lack of credentials and suspect work. Mr. Churchill had been promoted to full professor at a major research university without the requisite Ph.D. degree, enjoying apparent ethnic immunity from a series of old allegations involving theft of intellectual property, plagiarism and academic misrepresentation. Most people outside the university were amazed not so much that Mr. Churchill was not immediately terminated as that he had been hired and promoted in the first place. To them he seemed like a swerving drunk driver, who when pulled over is found to have a long rap sheet.....

So Mr. Churchill keeps on touring and speaking to audiences about American culpability for September 11, praising those who murder Americans and vowing hostility to the very idea of America. President Hoffman announced her resignation in March, and Mr. Churchill's lawyer now negotiates the promised buyout with her successor.

Finally, there is Robert J. Birgeneau, the new chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. Upon arriving in the Bay Area, he quickly vowed to solve the problems he had found. Surprisingly, these had nothing to do with a decline in academic standards, deterioration in the quality of Berkeley's key departments, or a state funding crisis. Instead, the chancellor complained that Berkeley has fewer Native American, Hispanic, and African-American students enrolled than it should--the campus was only 3% black, 9.5% Hispanic, and 0.4% Native American, in contrast with about 45% Asian-American and about 33% white. (The California population comprises 6.5% blacks, 33% Hispanics, 0.92% Native Americans, 11% Asian-Americans, and 45% whites.) Mr. Birgeneau is obsessed with racial diversity, as determined by percentages and quotas. But as we shall see, the numbers, under closer examination, may make him regret pandering to the diversity industry.

Chancellor Birgeneau blames the apparent statistical injustices on Proposition 209, the 1996 California ballot initiative that forbids the use of racial criteria in state hiring; it passed with the support of 55% of the electorate. In his view, however, democracy ought to defer to elite opinion; thus, to this Canadian academic the state's voters were obviously misguided: "I personally don't believe that most of the people who voted for 209 intended this consequence."

One can learn a lot about the pathologies of the contemporary university from what its presidents say--and don't say. A close look at the data suggests a different picture from the one implied by Mr. Birgeneau's gratuitous lamentations about the lack of diversity. Whites, for instance, are underenrolled at Berkeley: They amount to around 35% of undergraduates versus 45% of the state's population. Given this fact, why doesn't the Chancellor complain about the shortage of whites on campus?

He is oddly quiet, too, about the more explosive issue of the Asian-American presence. This group constitutes almost half the Berkeley student population, even though Asians make up only about 11% of California residents and 4% of the general U.S. population. Why doesn't Mr. Birgeneau admit that achieving his racial utopia would require deliberately reducing the enrollment of Asian-American students--presumably by discounting meritocratic criteria and test scores and instead emphasizing "community service" or other nebulous standards designed to circumvent Proposition 209? But because the new chancellor is obviously a sensitive sort, he cannot say what he apparently means: something like, "We have too many Asians, almost five times too many, and I am here to impose a quota on them and other suspect races." Instead, he worries about "underrepresentation" of some, while denying the logical corollary of "overrepresentation" of others. The same logic applies to gender, by the way. UC campuses enroll thousands more women than men, very much out of proportion to the general population, and yet Mr. Birgeneau does not decry the "overabundance" of women.....

We are quickly reaching the stage where the chancellor's pie graphs evoke the racial categories of the Old Confederacy, as he tries to ascertain whether Jason Martinez, one-fourth Hispanic, or Na Wilson, half Cambodian, should be counted as a minority.

For some two decades, I often watched entire departments of 50-something white male philosophy and English professors, themselves often hired ABD ("all but dissertation": a graduate student who hasn't finished his thesis) in the booming job markets of the 1960s--and who subsequently became mostly unpublished and undistinguished classroom teachers--take it upon themselves to hire only minorities and women, lecturing passed-over young white males about the need for diversity. These entrenched and often mediocre senior professors did everything for the cause except take early retirement, though many advised the perennially exploited part-time instructors to "move on" or "get a life." ...

The signs of erosion on our campuses are undeniable, whether we examine declining test scores, spiraling costs, or college graduates' ignorance of basic facts and ideas. In response, our academic leadership is not talking about a more competitive curriculum, higher standards of academic accomplishment, or the critical need freely to debate important issues. Instead, it remains obsessed with a racial, ideological, and sexual spoils system called "diversity." Even as the airline industry was deregulated in the 1970s, and Wall Street now has come under long-overdue scrutiny, it is time for Americans, if we are to ensure our privileged future, to re-examine our era's politicized university

More here

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

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

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

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28 September, 2005

Kozol's crusade

Post lifted from Powerline

In tomorrow's New York Times Book Review, Nathan Glazer reviews Jonathan Kozol's latest rewrite of the one-note books he has been writing on the subject of the public education of black and minority children since 1967: "Separate and unequal." Glazer notes that in his current book Kozol widens his focus from the inadequacy of the education of minority students to include the "presumed educational effects" of increasing de facto "resegregation" of the public schools.

Offhand, I can't remember ever reading a more devastating review of a serious book by a respectable leftist in the New York Times. On the basic question of how "desegregation" would improve the academic achievement of minority students, Glazer observes that there isn't much analysis of the questioin whether greater "integration" would make any difference:

Quoting The New York Times, Kozol notes that parent groups are asking school officials in New York City to exclude from their local schools "thousands of poor black and Hispanic students who travel long distances." The parents want more room for their own children so that they can attend schools in their own neighborhoods. Desegregation efforts, The Times notes, "produced lackluster academic results," and the schools "lost their distinct neighborhood character." One would think it would be important to consider whether the results were indeed lackluster, and whether retaining the neighborhood character of schools is a value. But for Kozol the overriding issue is integration. It is, after all, the promise of the 1954 Brown decision, and the difficulties - one might say the impossibility, in many large cities - of implementing desegregation do not moderate his insistence that we must place black children in schools with more whites. He does not go into great detail as to how this might now be done. Orfield and Kozol do point out that more is possible in small cities.

Neither does Kozol spend much time on the question of whether desegregation would have the positive educational effects he hopes for. In fact, it would be difficult for him to do so because he is skeptical about the tests we depend on to determine just what the educational effects of various interventions are.

What about the alleged effects of the financial disparity between urban and suburban per pupil expenditures? Glazer writes:

There has been research using the standard tests that questions whether greater expenditures on schools and students produce better educational results, but that research does not discourage Kozol. He expresses outrage at inequities in expenditure, pointing out that New York City in 2002-3 spent $11,627 on the education of each child, while Manhasset spent $22,311, Great Neck $19,705 and so on. There are comparable disparities in other metropolitan areas.

Hasn't government spending on public education in city schools increased? Doesn't it have some bearing on Kozol's argument? Glazer writes:

Expenditure per student in New York City has risen by two-thirds since 1991, when Kozol dealt with this issue in his book "Savage Inequalities," an increase considerably more than inflation, with no obvious educational effects. One can argue that regardless of specific measurable educational effects, the poor deserve whatever benefits - in class size, better-paid teachers, more supplies, larger playgrounds, cleaner restrooms - that an increase to the Manhasset level would make possible. But the litigation in many states now attacking these disparities, litigation reviewed by Kozol, is based not on the argument that the children in the big cities deserve to have as much spent on them as is spent in well-to-do suburbs, but on a different proposition - namely, that the expenditures of the big cities do not provide an "adequate" education, as prescribed in the state constitutions. "Adequacy," one assumes, will in time be judged by the same kind of tests we are using today.

In New York State the litigation has now resulted in a judicial requirement that school expenditure in New York City be increased by something like 40 percent. Clearly such an increase would make life pleasanter for teachers and students. There is no strong evidence it would do much for the test results. One suspects the "adequacy" argument will eventually wind up in the same black hole that now accommodates arguments for desegregation.

Glazer concludes with a reflection on considerations near the heart of Kozol's ideological enterprise:

TO be sure, the case for both integration and equality of expenditure is powerful. But the chief obstacle to achieving these goals does not seem to be the indifference of whites and the nonpoor to the education of nonwhites and the poor, although this is what one would conclude from Kozol's account. Rather, other values, which are not simply shields for racism, stand in the way: the value of the neighborhood school; the value of local control of education and, above all, the value of freedom from state imposition when it affects matters so personal as the future of one's children.

States could probably see to it that local school districts received uniform sums for the education of each child (with perhaps a supplement for those from difficult circumstances), but how could politicians prevent well-to-do or knowledgeable parents from adding more on their own, or from leaving the state system entirely? It is factors like these - which add up to nothing less than a commitment to individual freedom - that make it so difficult to achieve the obviously desirable goals of integration and equalization.

It is at least worth noting that Kozol opposes the liberation of minority children from the public schools via vouchers for the standard leftist reasons:

I am opposed to the use of public funds for private education. If we allow public funds to be used to support our relatively benign, morally grounded schools, we will have to allow those public funds to be used for any type of private school. Vouchers can also be used for a David Duke school or a right-wing militia school or a Louis Farrakhan school -- any type of ethnically or ideologically extremist school with a hateful and divisive agenda. This would rip apart the social fabric of already fragile cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, with their multiplicity ofethnic, political and ideological groups. It would be the last nail in the coffin of public education.

Many of those who argue for vouchers say that they simply want to use competition to improve public education. I don’t think it works that way, and I’ve been watching this for a long time. What tends to happen is that the families that are drawn off into private schools tend to be the more sophisticated, even among the poor. Or the more aggressive among the poor. Even when these schools are not consciously selective, they tend to be self-selective and drain off not only money from the public schools, but also strong parental activism. The private schools take away the very parents we need most as passionate PTA leaders. What happens to the children who are left behind?

For a bracing corrective to Kozol's "weepy Marxist" crusade, see Peter Wood's FrontPage review of Sol Stern's book on the imperative of school choice: "Exit ahead."



BRITISH SCHOOLS GIVE UP ON SCIENCE

The dumbing down of Britain continues apace

Pupils at GCSE are to be allowed to abandon learning traditional “hard” science, including the meaning of the periodic table, in favour of “soft” science such as the benefits of genetic engineering and healthy eating. The statutory requirement for pupils to learn a science subject will be watered down under a new curriculum introduced next year. There will be no compulsion to master the periodic table — the basis of chemistry — nor basic scientific laws that have informed the work of all the great scientists such as Newton and Einstein.

The changes, which the government believes will make science more “relevant” to the 21st century, have been attacked by scientists as a “dumbing down” of the subject. In June the government had to announce financial incentives to tackle a shortage of science teachers. Academics have estimated that a fifth of science lessons are taught by teachers who are not adequately qualified.

Most children now study for the double-award science GCSE, which embraces elements of biology, chemistry and physics. This GCSE will be scrapped and ministers have agreed that from next year all 14-year-olds will be required to learn about the general benefits and risks of contemporary scientific developments, in a new science GCSE. A harder science GCSE will also be introduced as an optional course.

One expert involved in devising the new system believes it will halve the number of state school pupils studying “hard” science. Independent schools and more talented pupils in the state sector are likely to shun the new papers in favour of the GCSEs in the individual science disciplines of physics, chemistry and biology. These will continue to require pupils to achieve an understanding of scientific principles. The new exams were devised after proposals by academics at King’s College London, who told ministers that science lessons were often “dull and boring” and required pupils to recall too many facts. Their report said: “Contemporary analyses of the labour market suggest that our future society will need a larger number of individuals with a broader understanding of science both for their work and to enable them to participate as citizens in a democratic society.”

However, Professor Colin Blakemore, chief executive of the Medical Research Council, warned that reducing the “hard” science taught in schools would create problems. “I can understand the government’s mot- ives,” he said. “There is a crisis of public confidence in science which is reducing the progress of policy on such issues as nuclear energy and stem cell research. But sixth-formers are already arriving at university without the depth of knowledge required.”

Others endorse the new approach. Results at North Chadderton upper school in Oldham — one of 80 schools piloting the new “softer” GCSE, named Twentyfirst Century Science — have improved. Martyn Overy, the head of science, said: “The proportion getting higher grades in science went up from 60% to 75%. The course kept their interest, had more project work and was more relevant.” As part of their course, the pupils studied what kind of food they needed to keep fit and healthy. Critics say it is only marginally more demanding than following the advice of Nigella Lawson, the television chef, who promotes the benefits of eating proper meals instead of snacking from the fridge.

Some science teachers are sceptical. Mo Afzal, head of science at the independent Warwick school, said: “These changes will widen the gap between independent and state schools. Even the GCSE that is designed for those going on to A-level science is not as comprehensive as the test it replaces.”

John Holman, director of the National Science Learning Centre at York University, who advised the government on the content of the new system, said: “The new exam is not dumbing down. The study of how science works is more of a challenge than rote learning

Source

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

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

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

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



27 September, 2005

AN ENCOURAGING LETTER FROM A CALIFORNIA TEACHER:

I put up a post recently about how useless teachers' colleges tend to be. One reader (a California teacher) responded by saying that not all of them are hopeless. What she says may be a useful guide to other Califonians who are brave enough to be thinking about taking up teaching there. And it sounds like Chapman University might be a good choice for any Southern Californian wishing to minimize the politically correct drivel that infests most university education today

"I feel I had to respond to this, because I am currently going through an education school in So. Cal. (US) to get my credential to teach mathematics. I'm currently in my first semester of a 4-semester program (with student teaching as the last semester) at Chapman University, in Orange County. I am also teaching world history and BASIC mathematics as a long term substitute at a continuation high school in L.A. county until the end of the school year.

As a bit of background: Chapman is a private university, with all the credential programs being held at night. A continuation H.S. is a school where all the students are placed when they don't work out in the regular high schools. (There are a number of behavioral problems, drug/alcohol abusers, and students who flunked out of the 'normal' high schools. I have several who are also under house arrest - wearing the anklets - and who are on 'independent study', because of pregnancies.)

Regarding the uselessness of teacher training... I feel that by and large there are a NUMBER of 'fluff' courses we are required to take, either by the school or by the state. I used to think all teacher courses fell into this category, but my mind was quickly changed when I found out I had gotten the substitute position 4 days before school started! My methods classes have been VERY helpful so far, and my teachers have been very good about working with me in regards to my homework, and in supporting me as a teacher. I now just as firmly believe there are some courses which really are necessary for a beginning teacher to have already taken. (Especially those covering classroom management, and plotting out lesson plans. Telling the kids to stop talking may work well for the younger students, but my kids'll just laugh at you.. or worse if they're having a bad day! As for trying to keep their attention long enough to get the basic information across... that's also a challenge! Especially on Fridays.)

I believe that my university would qualify as exemplary. It's one of the reasons I chose to attend it, even though it is quite a bit more expensive than several other local universities. It has a minimal number of 'fluff' courses, and the teachers are extremely supportive and knowledgeable. In addition, the whole staff has the children's best interest at heart - and they apply rational & critical thought to what is best, instead of just jumping on the 'for the children' bandwagon.

Amazingly enough, it's a school that I, as a conservative libertarian can feel comfortable in, and can express my beliefs in without worrying about getting stomped on for it. That in itself is unusual in my experience! I had a teacher ENCOURAGING us to have different views, instead of toeing the PC line, as it causes debate and understanding of all sides of the issues!"



UNIFORM TYRANNY AT AUSTRALIAN PRIVATE SCHOOLS

Are American private schools this bad?

Students are being clad in expensive school uniforms created by top Australian fashion designers that can lead to a bill of more than $1500 for parents. Even kindergarten pupils are being decked out in the fashionable outfits, designed by the likes of Jodie Boffa, Robert Burton and Jonathan Ward. Some parents say the prices are too high and dry clean-only instructions lead to a yearly cleaning bill of $700 for a school jacket alone.

One mother whose children needed the designer uniforms said she paid more than $1500 for one full winter and summer uniform set. She said one of the worst features of the uniform was the stipulation that it was dry clean-only. "Children are naturally grubby and to have dry clean-only fabrics is crazy," said the mother, who did not want to be named for fear of offending her child's North Shore school uniform committee. "It's not only the cost, but what dry cleaners will do the job on a Saturday ready for school again on Monday? "The number of elements that make up a full school uniform now is unbelievable and the cost phenomenal."

The uniform cost for a student at Loreto Kirribilli is $1275, not including sports uniform, and more than $830 is typically spent at St Andrew's Cathedral School in the city. NSW Parents and Citizens Association president Sharryn Brownlee said uniforms were big business for the designers and the schools. "Some schools make tens of thousands of dollars from school uniform contracts," Ms Brownlee said. "For the designers it is lucrative and is about stamping their brand name on a younger generation. Young people are very tuned in to fashion design. But the designers have to remember to be practical and sensible and remember the role of the uniform."

Mr Ward, a leading Sydney fashion designer who has dressed the likes of Elle Macpherson and Kylie Minogue, has just put the finishing touches to a new summer uniform for Meriden School at Strathfield. He said it was a refreshing and smart update. "Girls are a lot more developed at the age of 12 and 13 years now and need more room," Mr Ward said. "They are also more conscious about their figure types. They should like their uniform and not feel it is something their mother wore.

"Boys are a lot leaner and taller. The climate has also changed in the last 20 years." He said modern fabrics were being used that had plenty of stretch in them, allowing students to move freely.

Designer touches may be as simple as adding a coloured button to a white shirt or lining a blazer with striped material. Mr Ward said: "There is a sensitivity of detail. It is a mix of the classic with a slight edge." Meriden School principal Carolyn Blanden said: "It has taken us 12 months just to design the new dress, blazer and hat. "We went to great lengths to design something students would feel good wearing. The girls should go out into the world feeling they look nice."

More here



Local school, with the backing of parents and teachers alike, tries to keep its doors open, in the face of educrats trying to slam them shut: "The state education commissioner, faced with a defiant charter school that has refused an order to close, yesterday asked the attorney general what action the state can take to force the closing of the small Roxbury school. The Roxbury Charter High Public School was supposed to close last Friday, but opened its doors yesterday, ignoring state education officials who said the tiny, financially troubled high school could not stay open. Officially, a state education spokeswoman said, the students are truant because they are not in an approved school."

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

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

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

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26 September, 2005

THIS SOUNDS GOOD BUT THE DEVIL WILL BE IN THE DETAILS

As Virginia Tech takes steps to become a more diverse campus, administrators and faculty members refuse to allow political correctness stand in the way of their goals. “I think the whole discussion of political correctness is non-democratic. It carries with it so much baggage that it keeps people from saying what they think and we can’t fully explore the real issues,” said political science professor Karen Hult.

She said diversity issues are particularly important because Virginia Tech is a public land grant institute representing Virginia. As a land grant institute, Tech has always been responsible to the public of Virginia. This responsibility to the state is what now compels the administration to deal with diversity. It is a concern that the university is not characteristic of the same diverse population that lives in the state. “We need to make a public-funded university more like the state in which it is located. It’s a big concern, and a genuine concern. Being politically correct would not allow us to address it. When questions are raised in public, people tend to speak what other people want to hear instead of what they think. To be politically correct is to not talk about the problems,” said Hult.

Provost Mark McNamee sees the university’s situation as ideal for making changes. Instead of being stubborn about change or maintaining a traditional image, Tech’s loyalties lie in what it has always done, provide a service to Virginia. “It is not a limitation. It creates a community that includes all the fundamentals of a university. We have a good reputation in what we do and maintain a balance between cutting edge research and socially important issues. We currently want to make the education that Tech provides, more realistic of what people will experience in the real world,” he said.

McNamee said the administration expects faculty and students to talk about issues of controversial importance. It also puts a great deal of trust in students and professors to be professional. Creating a comfortable campus climate for all students is the goal of diversity and while political correctness should be avoided, common sense and courtesy should accompany any discussion. “I would hope that faculty members want to challenge students to think about things in a different way. A university is a great place to bring up any issue in full open discussion. We certainly don’t have any guidelines that would censor academic freedom but expect everyone on campus to uphold the principles of community,” McNamee said.

According to the online version of Virginia Tech’s diversity strategic plan, creating a diverse campus is about making fundamental changes, not using political correctness to fabricate fake diversity. Tech’s new harassment policy is a first step and shows that the goal of the university is to make the necessary changes. Focusing on political correctness instead of change would only create a public relations campaign that covers up the problems. The commitment to ignore political correctness and promote open dialogue will create a more diverse society within the university that continues to focus on quality education.

“I have never felt pressure by the administration to change what I teach. I think the quality would suffer if I simply replaced the classics with other songs just so every concert had recognizable diversity,” said Virginia Tech choral director Brian Gendron.

Source



ONLINE TUTORING FROM INDIA COMES TO AUSTRALIA

First it was call centres that outsourced to India. Now private tutoring for Australian students will be available over the internet, with Indian teachers answering questions about secondary science and mathematics. The online coaching college Growing Stars will launch in NSW in coming weeks. It will be the first Indian-run tutoring company to establish here, after its incursion into the US last year. Gautam Chattopadhyay, who has the Australian and New Zealand licence for Growing Stars, said tuition by qualified teachers in Cochin, southern India, would cost about $33 an hour. Face-to-face coaching by Australians costs between $20 and $70 an hour.

In the past two years, Growing Stars and other online tutoring companies employing Indian teachers have won market share in the US and Britain. Growing Stars, set up in California by an Indian-born software engineer and a venture capitalist, has 350 US students and 40 tutors in India. Dr Chattopadhyay expected a backlash to offshore tutoring in Australia, based on consumer resistance to Indian telemarketers. "My philosophy is if you come up with a product that delivers value, the backlash will eventually die," he said. "Electronic learning is going to be the next big thing."

His plan to establish Growing Stars for Australian students has alarmed the Australian Tutoring Association, which represents a quarter of the domestic businesses selling private tutoring. In NSW alone there are 500 registered businesses. Nationally, the sector has an estimated turnover of $1 billion a year. The association's public officer, Mohan Dhall, said Growing Stars and other tutoring "call centres" revealed a trend of "commercial principles subverting educational principles". "This takes the outsourcing of call centres to a new level," he said. "Education is not something that can be effectively delivered by people trained in different systems and living offshore, providing advice from remote locations."

Dr Chattopadhyay, a chemical engineer and laboratory manager at the University of NSW, said students in the "virtual classroom" would have lessons devised from the NSW syllabuses for year 7 to 10 maths and science and year 11 and 12 maths, physics and chemistry. The University of NSW has no association with Growing Stars, which Dr Chattopadhyay said he would operate through his private company. The students would log in to the Growing Stars website and be assigned lessons by Indian tutors, to whom they could talk on a voice-over internet link. Both student and tutor use a digital whiteboard to write on screen or draw lines and circles, for example.

Mr Dhall said the rate charged by Growing Stars was not a bargain. Australian online tutorial businesses charged "as little as $4.25 per hour". Dr Chattopadhyay said the university-trained Indian tutors were "much cheaper" than Australians. Growing Stars pays them $US230 a month, double the Indian rate for beginning teachers. To counter concerns about the Indian tutors' accents, they are given English language speech training before they go online with students, he said. A Growing Stars tutor, Savio D'Cruz, said the NSW secondary maths syllabus he will teach was "a little bit different" in content to US courses. "In America there is more direct application. In Australia, the topics are introduced in a much deeper way."

Source

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

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

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

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25 September, 2005

HOORAY! U.C. FUNDING BEING REDUCED

They just MIGHT get around to sacking all the propagandists and hiring some real teachers

UC administrators gave the long-term financial rundown to the system's governing Board of Regents at their meeting Wednesday, saying the need and demand for a UC education is going up at a time when state funding continues to decline. Since 1984, California has increased spending for prisons by 126 percent and boosted spending on K-12 education by 26 percent. But spending on higher education dropped 12 percent, said Bruce Darling, UC senior vice president for university affairs.

Early signs of trouble include a student-faculty ratio that has risen above the goal of 17.6:1 to roughly 19:1 and staff and faculty salaries that have fallen behind comparable institutions, said Larry Hershman, UC's budget director.

Meanwhile, student fees have increased sharply in recent years, now approaching $7,000 a year including various campus fees. However, UC is still cheaper than other major public institutions and increases in financial aid have kept percentages of low-income students high, Hershman said.

Some regents were frustrated by the presentation, saying they're familiar with UC's state funding slide and want to see more solutions. "Our plan, it appears, is that we whine a lot about the inability of the Legislature to fully fund," said Regent John Moores, who questioned whether UC's long-term strategy is "hoping that something magic is going to happen."

"We cannot rely on the state as we have in the past," said Darling. "We're going to face some very stark policy choices."

More here



USELESS TEACHER TRAINING INSTITUTIONS

Post lifted from the Barone blog. See the original for links

American society has many islands of excellence—and many islands of mediocrity. Some of them can be found on the same turf, the campuses of our hundreds of colleges and universities. Among the islands of excellence are the mathematics and physical and biological science departments—the best in the world. Among the islands of mediocrity, or worse, are the schools of education, the institutions through which most of our public school teachers go.

Don't just take my word for it. Take the word of Arthur Levine, dean of Columbia University's Teachers College since 1994 (he's retiring next July), and of Al Sanoff, a former colleague at U.S. News & World Report, who is now the project manager of Teachers College's Study of Schools of Education Project [PDF]. Here's an article that describes the gist of Levine's first report, on the preparation of principals and administrators, issued last March. Money quotes:

"Arthur Levine is president of Teachers College at Columbia University and author of the report. He says graduate education programs suffer from irrelevant and incoherent curriculum, low admissions requirements and academic standards, weak faculty, and little clinical instruction. In fact, Levine adds, many programs are doing little more than dishing out higher degrees to teachers who are trying to qualify for salary increases.

"According to Al Sanoff, the study's project manager, even at elite universities across the U.S., colleges of education need to improve significantly. While he and the other researchers were able to identify some strong graduate education programs around the country, he notes, none that they found in America could be described as exemplary."

"None that they found in America could be described as exemplary." That's dynamite. I haven't gone through the full report yet, but I plan to do so. I have long suspected that education schools do more harm than good, and I have been fortified in my suspicions by reading Rita Kramer's Ed School Follies: The Miseducation of America's Teachers, E. D. Hirsch Jr.'s The Schools We Need: And Why We Don't Have Them, and Diane Ravitch's Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform. When I have asked teachers of my acquaintance what they gained from education school courses, the most positive response I've gotten was, "It wasn't a total waste of time." But all this came from people outside the education school establishment. Arthur Levine is at the center of this establishment. Teachers College is ranked number four on U.S. News's survey of graduate schools of education, behind only Harvard, UCLA, and Stanford.

Do we need education schools at all? That is a question I've been asking for some years, and I'm going to look at the Teachers College reports with that in mind. The 1910 Flexner Commission, sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, called for closing most American medical schools and for organizing the rest along the lines of rigorous scientific principles. Over the following decade or so, its writer Abraham Flexner, financed generously by John D. Rockefeller, put its recommendations into practice, and American medical schools are clearly the best in the world. (See pages 491-93 of Ron Chernow's splendid Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. for a brief account.) Are Arthur Levine and Al Sanoff laying the groundwork for a similar restructuring of our schools of education?

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

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

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

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24 September, 2005

THE ARTICLE REPRODUCED BELOW IS UTTER RUBBISH

The lack of boys on campus just means that boys are wising up faster than girls to the uselessness of many degrees. And none too soon. Ivar Berg demonstrated the uselessness of most tertiary education 30 years ago -- and educational standards have certainly not risen since then. Unsurprisingly, the article also fails to mention race differences. It notes the large male population in jails as if it were a problem for all males when in fact it is mainly a problem for black males. The article is basically a sanctimonious attempt to scare young males back into college by way of gross misrepresentations of what a lack of college education generally leads to. Read Berg's book (now out in a 2003 edition) for the real facts of the matter

"Currently, 135 women receive bachelor's degrees for every 100 men. That gender imbalance will widen in the coming years, according to a new report by the U.S. Department of Education. This is ominous for every parent with a male child. The decline in college attendance means many will needlessly miss out on success in life. The loss of educated workers also means the country will be less able to compete economically. The social implications - women having a hard time finding equally educated mates - are already beginning to play out.

But the inequity has yet to provoke the kind of response that finally opened opportunities for women a generation ago. In fact, virtually no one is exploring the obvious questions: What has gone wrong? And what happens to all the boys who aren't in college? Some join the armed forces, but the size of the military has remained steady, at about 1.4 million, for the past decade. For the rest, the prospects appear dark:

The workforce. Thousands of young men find work as drywallers, painters and general laborers, but many have troubling landing jobs. The unemployment rate for young men ages 20-24 is 10.1%, twice the national rate. As for earnings, those who don't graduate from college are at a severe, lifelong financial disadvantage: Last year, men 25 and older with a college degree made an average of $47,000 a year, while those with a high school degree earned $30,000.

Prisons and jails. Nearly as many men are behind bars or on probation and parole (5 million) as are in college (7.3 million).

"Lost." Young people who aren't in school or the workforce are dubbed "non-engaged" by the annual Kids Count report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. But "lost" sounds just as accurate. About 3.8 million youth ages 18-24 belong to this group, roughly 15% of all people of that age. Though there are no gender breakdowns for this group, the pathways leading to this dead end - dropping out from high school, emerging from the juvenile justice system - are dominated by boys.

While demographers and economists have a pretty good idea where the boys end up, educators are largely clueless about the causes. Some say female teachers in elementary and middle schools, where male teachers are scarce, naturally enforce a girl-friendly environment that rewards students who can sit quietly - not a strong point for many boys, who earn poor grades and fall behind. Others argue that a smart-isn't-cool bias has seeped into boys of all racial and ethnic groups.

Solutions are just as uncertain. Hiring more male teachers would likely help, as would countering the anti-intellectual male code. But it's not that simple. Many boys leave middle school with pronounced shortcomings in verbal skills. Those lapses contribute to the low grade and high dropout rates. Surely, a problem that creates crime, increases unemployment and leads to hopelessness deserves attention. Where are the boys? Too often, going nowhere".

Source



SOCIALIST EDUCATION IDEAS NOT WORKING

Tony Blair's crusade to raise education standards was dealt a triple blow yesterday with figures showing soaring school truancy levels, a student drop-out rate of nearly 25 per cent and a surprise fall in state school entries to top universities. Truancy jumped by almost 10 per cent last year to its highest level, despite almost £1 billion in government spending since 1997 to tackle the problem. At the same time, figures from the Higher Education Funding Council indicated that more than 71,000 first-year students would fail to graduate, wasting around £500 million a year.

The proportion of candidates from state schools rejected by top universities also rose, as admissions tutors increased recruitment from fee-paying schools. The decline in state school entry to 16 of the 19 universities in the Russell Group reversed the trend in admissions for the first time since Gordon Brown, in 2000, attacked the “old school tie” at Oxford over its rejection of Laura Spence, a Tyneside comprehensive student with five A-grade A levels.

Universities are spending more than £300 million of government funding this year on “widening participation” initiatives to encourage applications from state schools. The setbacks for two of the Government’s key objectives raise troubling questions for ministers about the massive levels of public spending on programmes to cut truancy and attract more state school students into higher education.

David Cameron, the Shadow Education Secretary, said: “These figures are dreadful. The Government has spent nearly £1 billion on tackling truancy and it is getting worse.” Jacqui Smith, the School Standards Minister, announced a crackdown on the “stubborn minority” of 8,000 students at 146 schools who were responsible for a fifth of all truancy. Teachers will be required to identify the most persistent offenders and their parents will be threatened with jail if attendance does not improve. [Note the Leftist reliance on coercion. Coercion is about the only idea Leftists have]

Professor Michael Sterling, chairman of the Russell Group, said that there was no evidence of a “systematic approach to decrease state students” among admissions tutors. “It may be just one of those things. The best students happened to fall in a different area this time,” he said. Professor Sterling, the Vice-Chancellor of Birmingham University, suggested that a reluctance to admit extra students above the number for which the institutions received government funding may have contributed to the decline in state entrants.The rise in entrants from private schools was evidence that universities were choosing the most able, regardless of government pressure. “We must not deviate from taking the best. It would be indefensible to take students who were not as good simply to make that ratio ever increasing,” he said

Source



BIG INCREASE IN BRITISH SCHOOL TRUANCY

Most of the truants are probably only marginably educable anyway so truancy probably makes little difference to anything. For many truants, staying away is probably a rational decision. They can make more money by drug-dealing etc. that way

The number of children playing truant has risen by more than a third to 1.4 million since Labour took office, according to official figures published yesterday. The Department for Education and Skills revealed that more than 55,000 pupils skipped class every day in the past school year; a rise of 4,500 since 2003-04 and the biggest jump since the figures were first recorded in 1994.

In spite of the Government spending 1 billion pounds on initiatives tackling absenteeism since 1997, the annual number of pupils playing truant from school has soared by 43 per cent. Jacqui Smith, the Schools Minister, said that school attendance was higher than ever, with fewer children going sick or taking term-time holidays, but said that she was disappointed that a "stubborn minority" of teenagers were skipping school. "Schools are treating absenteeism more rigorously, challenging questionable reasons for absence and cracking down on unnecessary time out of school," she said.

But she added: "It is disappointing that a stubborn minority of pupils, estimated at 8,000 in just 4 per cent of secondary schools, remain determined to jeopardise their education and their futures." Officials at the Department for Education and Skills claim that these serial truants, who miss up to five weeks of class at a time, account for a fifth of all truancy figures. Ms Smith declared that 146 schools would now be forced to identify their most persistent truants and place the parents on a "fast track to attendance" scheme.

The parents would be assigned a truancy officer and receive support from social and youth services to help to tackle issues such as drugs, parenting skills or mental health problems. If there were no serious improvements within three months, the parents would face a court appearance, which normally results in a 2,500 pound fine or three months in prison. Since September last year, more than 18,000 parents have been placed on such schemes. The Government's new target comes after an initiative with the travel industry to allow parents discounts for making early holiday bookings, to cut term-time holidays.

Of the 1,381,458 truants, almost two thirds, or 793,628, are teenagers. As in previous years, the highest number of truants are in the North East and West, Yorkshire and Humberside, followed by London. While the percentage of truants from private schools was just 0.13 per cent, in city academies [charter schools] the average pupil absence was estimated to be 2.84 per cent, more than double that of state secondary schools, at 1.25 per cent. At the City Academy Bristol, Ray Priest, the principal, has presided over an 11 percentage point drop in truants from 15 to 4 per cent in two years.

He credits a liberal interpretation of the curriculum, a positive school atmosphere and an "attendance team" of three, which works with both the families and his 1,300 pupils. "They are the real key," he said, "because people need to be in the school and building relations with families and children

Source

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

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

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

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23 September, 2005

LUDICROUSLY LOW STANDARDS STILL TOO HIGH FOR MANY CALIFORNIA SCHOOLS

Gosh! A whole 23% of students have to be competent at the "3Rs"!

More California schools are now facing the consequences imposed by the federal No Child Left Behind education law. Nearly 200 schools across the state have been added to the list of schools failing to meet the benchmarks on test scores set by President Bush's signature education law, according to figures released Tuesday by the state Department of Education. That brings to 1,772 the number of California schools in "program improvement" - the process required by the law when test scores do not meet targets for two consecutive years.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell attributed the increase to the ratcheting up of performance standards under No Child Left Behind. Last year the law required that about 12 percent of students score proficient or better on math and language arts tests for a school to avoid program improvement. This year, the law requires about 23 percent hit that mark on the tests students took last spring. "The growth targets by the federal government have doubled," O'Connell said in a phone interview.

In the Sacramento region, 69 schools are in program improvement. They now face a series of interventions and sanctions spelled out by No Child Left Behind for each year a school does not meet the federal standard, known as "adequate yearly progress." At the first stage, schools must inform parents that they can send their children to a different school in the district. In Year 2, schools must offer students extra tutoring. By Year 4, the school must start planning a complete overhaul. The law's consequences apply only to schools that receive Title I money, the federal program that aids schools with large numbers of poor children. California has 5,887 Title I schools, and 30 percent of them are now in program improvement.

O'Connell said he expects the portion of Title I schools facing the law's consequences to rise each year as the federal performance target goes up. In 2007-2008, No Child Left Behind will require that about 34 percent of students test proficient. The increase continues until 2014, when 100 percent of students are supposed to be proficient in math and English.

More here



BRITISH UNIVERSITIES BIASED AGAINST THE POOR?

You would think so from the Leftist clamour but "A total of 86.8 per cent of entrants in 2003-04 came from state schools". Only when NO private school students get to university will the British Left be happy

Top universities are rejecting more students from state schools in favour of rivals from the fee-paying sector, new figures showed yesterday. Sixteen of the nineteen universities in the Russell Group took a smaller proportion of entrants from state schools last year despite government pressure on them to admit more. The figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency threw into reverse the trend towards greater admission of state school candidates by leading universities since Labour took office.

They emerged as ministers prepare a campaign to persuade teenagers not to be deterred from applying to university next year by the introduction of 3,000 pounds-a-year tuition fees.

The "performance indicators" from the agency showed that Oxford admitted 53.8 per cent of students from state schools in 2003-04, against 55.4 the year before. Admissions at Cambridge also fell from 57.6 per cent to 56.9 per cent. The proportion of state students admitted by Newcastle and Nottingham fell by more than 5 percentage points to 68.6 per cent and 67.4 per cent respectively. At Imperial College, London, and King's College London the drop was about 3 percentage points to 59.6 and 67.3 per cent. Only Birmingham, Bristol and Sheffield in the Russell Group increased their share of state students. However, there were declines at other leading universities, including Durham, Bath and York.

The drop in admissions came as new figures from the Higher Education Funding Council showed that almost a quarter of first year students fail to graduate from the university or college where they enrolled. The figure, which represents nearly 70,000 students, could be costing as much as 500 million pounds a year. Not included in the total are those students who leave before December 1 in their first term after the frantic rush through clearing.

The overall proportion of state candidates accepted at British universities fell for the first time since 2000, the year Gordon Brown attacked the influence of the "old school tie" at Oxford over its rejection of the Tyneside comprehensive student Laura Spence. A total of 86.8 per cent of entrants in 2003-04 came from state schools, compared with 87.2 per cent in 2002-03.

The Independent Schools Council welcomed the increased success of fee-paying students. Jonathan Shephard, its general secretary, said: "All the evidence is that universities are putting their academic reputations first and recruiting the best candidates, regardless of means and regardless of social background."

Officials at the Higher Education Funding Council for England sought to dismiss the findings as a "blip", but acknowledged that there were deep-rooted problems in persuading more state school students to aspire to university. John Rushforth, the funding council's director of widening participation, said: "We know that this is a problem that comes through in the schools. It comes through in some cases, research suggests, at a very early age in terms of aspiration, seven and eight-year-olds. "Any changes are going to take a long time. We are clear this is something we have to stick at and all of us - institutions, the funding council, government and other people - have to keep working hard."

Sir Peter Lampl, a government adviser on widening participation and chairman of the Sutton Trust, an educational charity, called the figures very disturbing. "It looks like a lot of the good work that has been done over the past few years is being reversed. This is a crucial issue because our research shows there are still 3,000 students from state schools who should be going to top universities and are not," he said. Sir Peter said controversy over new "benchmark" targets for state school admissions had "taken the spotlight off this issue". Previous benchmarks were based on A-level results, but the funding council now uses the points system adopted by the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (Ucas).

The benchmarks for state school entrants were previously based on A-level points, where an A grade was 120 points, a B 100 and so on down to 40 for an E. Students with three A grades were deemed to have 360 points. Under the new benchmarks, a wide range of qualifications attract points, creating a far bigger pool of students with 360. Hefce regards them all as theoretically eligible for entry to Oxbridge and other top universities, even though in practice they would not be considered.

Admissions tutors say that the targets are unattainable because they require candidates to have specific A-level grades rather than Ucas points totals. Oxford said that applications from state students had risen by nearly 40 per cent in the past five years. A spokesman said the university would continue to encourage more applicants, but added: "We will not be exercising any positive discrimination at selection stage."

The Independent Schools Council described the benchmarks as absurd. Mr Shephard said: "Compiling the benchmarks in this way has led to massive increases in the number of state sector pupils assumed to be qualified for entrance to a top university. The reality is somewhat different."

Bill Rammell, the Higher Education Minister, said individual universities were responsible for admissions. He added: "Do we want to see more young people from state schools going to higher education? Yes we do. "Widening participation in higher education is a shared responsibility, and the challenge is for universities and colleges to reach out to communities, attract new students and offer new opportunities for everyone with the ability to participate."

Source

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

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

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

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22 September, 2005

LEFTISTS STILL GETTING IN THE WAY OF THE BASICS

They basically don't give a damn whether poor kids learn the "3Rs" or not. It's getting the Leftist propaganda into them that matters

Two years ago, W.H. Keister Elementary School in Harrisonburg, Va., began to take the No Child Left Behind law very seriously. Intensive 120-minute reading classes were installed, along with more math. Physical education went from 150 to 90 minutes a week. Music time was cut in half. This was part of a national movement to make sure all children, particularly those from low-income families -- as were 50 percent of Keister students -- mastered reading and math skills essential to their lives and the rest of their educations.

But such parents as Todd Hedinger, whose son, Gabe, attended the school, reacted negatively, saying there was too much emphasis on a few core subjects. "The emphasis on instructional time pushes everything else out of the way," Hedinger said. Such concerns have been part of the continuing debate over No Child Left Behind. The time devoted to reading and math has increased. And in many places, the increase has brought results. Between 2002 and 2004, Keister Elementary's passing rate went from 81 to 92 percent on the state English test and from 86 to 90 percent on the math test.

But critics of the federal law say children need a more complete education. The Washington-based Center on Education Policy reported this year that 27 percent of school systems say they are spending less time on social studies, and nearly 25 percent say they are spending less time on science, art and music. "This tendency results in impoverishing the education of all students, but particularly the education of students who perform less well on the tests," said Robert G. Smith, Arlington County school superintendent, who said his schools have resisted the trend.

Many educators defend the focus on reading and math, as long as it is done properly. Lucretia Jackson, principal of Maury Elementary School in Alexandria, said that basic skills are very important and that many children need extra time to acquire them. Her school made significant test-score gains this year by scheduling after-school classes and enrichment activities three days each week. "They need to develop the quality of skills that will enable them to meet the needs of the future society," Jackson said.....

Barksdale said that among the activities teachers have told her they dropped because of test pressure were silent reading, book talks, science experiments, picnics, field trips, classroom skits and creative writing.

"The logic of the fundamental importance of reading and mathematics is universally accepted," said David P. Driscoll, Massachusetts state education commissioner. "However, the testing of those subjects leads people to spend more time out of fear. While some extra focus particularly around test-taking skills and the most common standards is appropriate, this pushing other subjects aside to concentrate on reading and math is not. A full, robust program whereby kids are actively engaged in their learning produces the best results."

At Keister Elementary, test scores are up not only in reading and math but in science and social studies, despite fears of a negative result. Hedinger congratulated the "dedicated, loving, smart and creative people" who teach at the school but said he still does not like the long reading classes and athletic and music cuts because they reduced his son's love of learning. "Is the meaning of education cramming as much knowledge in, to pass a standardized test, or is it meant to include something else -- creativity, reflection, synthesis, hypothesizing, daydreaming?" Hedinger asked. "What happens to all of that in the process?"

More here



Double standards at De Paul

Post lifted from Erin O'Connor

Last year, De Paul University suspended--and effectively terminated--adjunct professor Thomas Klocek for criticizing, and thereby offending, a group of pro-Palestinian students who were manning the Students for Justice in Palestine table at a student activities fair. Klocek stopped by the table, picked up some literature, and wound up in an argument with the students. Allegedly, one compared Israel's treatment of Palestinians to Hitler's treatment of Jews; Klocek parried by observing that while not all Muslims are terrorists, most terrorists are Muslims. The offended students filed a complaint against Klocek, and he was suspended from teaching without ever seeing the complaint or having a chance to face his accusers. FIRE defended Klocek against the school's open viewpoint discrimination; he has since sued DePaul for defamation. He has refused to apologize for his statements, and as a result remains suspended without pay.

But the problem here is not just that Klocek offended some students by criticizing their views. It's also that he offended them--and the school--by having the wrong views himself. You can be offensive at De Paul as long as your offensiveness is of the accepted sort. Hence the university's invitation to Ward Churchill to speak next month. Last spring, De Paul dean Susanne Dumbleton wrote a letter to the student paper explaining that Klocek had been punished because the school felt the need to protect students from the pain of having their views rejected: "The students' perspective was dishonored and their freedom demeaned. Individuals were deeply insulted. ... Our college acted immediately by removing the instructor from the classroom." Churchill's "little Eichmanns" comment has caused similar outrage across the country. And yet De Paul does not seem to feel the need to protect its sensitive students from the incendiary insults of a man who has made a career out of angry ideological agitprop. Indeed, the school is willing to pay liberally for the privilege of having Churchill come vent his spleen on campus. Churchill makes several thousand dollars per appearance. My guess is that his fee for a single speech amounts to a substantial portion of Klocek's meager adjunct salary. But then, De Paul clearly regards the one viewpoint as more valuable than the other.

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

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

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

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21 September, 2005

Learning sinks in a sea of claptrap

What do Education Minister Brendan Nelson and Don Watson, author of Death Sentence and Dictionary of Weasel Words, have in common? If you think it is their political affinity, you are wrong. The correct answer is that both have attacked the cliches and jargon that are drowning Australia's education system in a sea of claptrap. Nelson has been arguing against student reporting where levels of achievement are described by vacuous terms such as "beginning", "established" and "consolidated". Watson is reported as describing the Tasmanian education department's Essential Learnings pamphlet for parents as being full of buzz words such as "key element outcomes" and he tells parents: "There's absolutely no shame at all in saying you don't understand it."

Welcome to the world of edu-babble associated with Australia's adoption of what is called outcomes-based education. Even George Orwell would be surprised if he knew of the tortured language use that parents, teachers and students face.

Most parents will remember the time they went to school and, based on the belief that teachers taught and students learned, there were subjects such as English, history, geography, mathematics, science, art, physical education. Such is no longer the case. Teachers are now "facilitators" and "knowledge navigators". Children from prep to Year 12 are no longer students; instead they are described as "lifelong learners", "autonomous learners", "connected lifelong learners" and "self-directed and reflective thinkers".

In education departments across Australia, curriculum is no longer defined in terms of subjects such as mathematics, science and English. Instead, the priority is given to what are termed "essential learnings". A South Australian document describes essential learnings as: "Understandings, dispositions and capabilities which are developed through the learning areas and form an integral part of children's and students' learning from birth to Year 12 and beyond. They are resources which are drawn upon throughout life and enable people to productively engage with changing times as thoughtful, active, responsive and committed local, national and global citizens. Engaging with these concepts is crucial to enhancing the learning culture within and beyond schools/sites."

Education once focused on teaching students the content associated with particular subjects such as history or mathematics. The emphasis now is on teaching students to have politically correct "understandings and dispositions". The result? While many leave school culturally illiterate and unable to properly read, write and add up, at least they exhibit high self-esteem and are sympathetic towards the disadvantaged, the dispossessed, the environment and world peace.

The Northern Territory education department, in line with the psycho-babble reminiscent of the age of Aquarius, defines essential learnings as the "inner learner, creative learner, collaborative learner and constructive learner". Tasmania, not to be outdone, defines education in terms of "Thinking, communicating, personal futures, social responsibility and world futures".

The justification for overturning what many teachers see as a more sensible and practical approach to education is because, in case you haven't noticed, the world is changing. Phrases such as "rapidly changing world", "the world is rapidly changing", "meet the challenges of the future" and "meet the challenges of life in a complex, information-rich and constantly changing world" litter state and territory curriculum documents. The cliched nature of such phrases is cause for alarm. Repeating the mantra of change is also no substitute for acknowledging the truism that without knowledge of the past it is impossible to understand the present or to address the future.

Most parents probably expect that the curriculum is divided into year or grade levels, with students expected to learn what is taught and to show a minimum level of achievement each year. Given Australia's adoption of a developmental approach to learning, this is no longer the case. Not only does the curriculum, described in terms of standards or learning outcomes, equate to a number of year levels, but there are also few, if any, consequences for failure. To quote an SA document: "All children and students learn and progress in different ways and at different rates. Standards include specific outcomes and guide educators when tracking students to achieve a higher standard, rather than 'passing' or 'failing' at a particular point."

The NT Curriculum Framework also embraces a developmental approach: "Learning is a lifelong journey in which all learners develop at their own pace as they progress via many different pathways. Development patterns follow a broad continuum that builds on demonstrated knowledge and understandings." Although there is an element of truth in the observation that learning is a lifelong journey following different pathways, there is also the reality, especially in areas such as numeracy and literacy, that those students who have not mastered the basics at each year level are educationally at risk.

Source



Hasta la vista to literature in Australian schools

As noted in "Fahrenheit 451", one of the strategies oppressive governments use to maintain power is to destroy creativity and freedom by burning books. In a world where nobody reads, especially the classics, the culture becomes shallow and impoverished and people are easier to control. Of course, destroying books is something that only happens in Hitler's Nazi Germany or in Cambodia under Pol Pot. It could never happen in a civilised country such as Australia. Our education system ensures that students read great books, become culturally literate and sensitive to the moral and aesthetic value of good literature.

Wrong. Judged by the draft Victorian Year 11 and 12 English study design, those who should be the custodians of our literary tradition are happy to feed students a weak and insipid gruel guaranteed to make them culturally illiterate and in danger of being emotionally and morally adrift. Historically, one of the foundations of English teaching has been literature, defined as those novels, plays, poems and short stories that say something lasting and profound about the human experience and our relationship with what D.H. Lawrence terms the"circumambient universe at the living moment". In the new study design, the more traditional definition of literature is exploded to include: CD-ROMs, websites or blogs, computer games, hyperfiction and "multimodel texts which also make use of visual, auditory and digital features".

The result, the dialogue from an Arnie Schwarzenegger movie has the same value as a Shakespearean sonnet and students can spend their time watching films and giving oral reports instead of reading sustained works of fiction and having to write an essay inresponse. The situation is made worse in that, unlike the existing English study design, where students have to read at least four novels or equivalent works over the two years, in the new study design students only have to read one novel a year.

Compare the new Victorian English course, which has much in common with other English courses around Australia, with the course students have to complete when undertaking the increasingly popular and more rigorous International Baccalaureate. Not only does the IB language course place literature centre stage, there is no mention of song lyrics and videos, but students are expected to read 11 works over two years. A look at the IB English syllabus outline for Melbourne's Ivanhoe Grammar School shows works such as: Medea, Antigone, Othello, Macbeth, the Romantic poets, A Room of One's Own and The Virgin and theGypsy. Unlike the Victorian English study design, unashamedly the expectation is that students value their "literary heritage" and learn to read with discrimination and to "express ideas with clarity, coherence, precision and fluency".

Judged by the report recently released by academics at the Australian Defence Force Academy detailing the poor writing skills of many undergraduates, this is something students completing mainstream senior school English courses find difficult.

The flaws in the Victorian English study design are manifold. First, as has already been suggested, literature deals with human predicaments in a unique way. No amount of watching Neighbours, googling the internet or SMSing friends will teach about human nature as does studying Macbeth or Greek tragedies such as Oedipus Rex. Such plays reveal in an imaginatively compelling way the influence of elemental emotions such as greed, jealousy and ambition. Students also learn about the destructive influence of hubris and the fact that, being human, we are not always in control.

Information is not knowledge and understanding should not be confused with wisdom. One of the benefits of great literature is that it tells us something significant, lasting and profound about the human predicament. Especially among young children, as argued by the American psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, literature is also important in nurturing emotional and psychological wellbeing. Classic myths, fables and legends such as The Iliad and Beowulf address in an immediate and profound way many of the uncertainties and dilemmas faced in growing to maturity.

Literature, unlike the more general category of text, is also unique in the way language is used. Reading a computer manual asks for language tobe taken literally and the reader seeksinformation in its most straightforward guise. Reading literature, on the other hand, requires language to be read aesthetically, and when reading William Blake's poetry or the novels of David Malouf one encounters similes, metaphors and a musical quality in language impossible to find in an SMS message or most movie scripts.

The new study design is also seriously flawed in that one of the justifications in making English more entertaining, contemporary and relevant is the argument that not all students, especially working-class students and those from non-English-speaking backgrounds, are capable of reading theclassics. As we now live in the information age, where students spend much of their time communicating in internet chat-rooms and via SMS text, and where visual images are so pervasive, the written word is obsolete.

Ignored is that while some students, especially those labelled as disadvantaged, are denied our literary heritage, others are free to read widely and, as a result, are culturally enriched. Christopher Lasch, in The Culture of Narcissism, wrote of those who argue literature is not for all: "In the name of egalitarianism, they preserve the most insidious form of elitism, which in one guise or another holds the masses incapable of intellectual exertion."

One of the defining characteristics of the draft English study design is that everything is a worthwhile text for study. Not only is literature devalued, but there is also the belief that the function of reading is to analyse texts in terms of power relationships. Ignored is the aesthetic and moral value of literature and the basic human need to find some more profound meaning in life, the type of meaning that cannot be found in a hypertext document, a blog or a multi-model text.

As argued by S.L. Goldberg: "People are more likely than not to go on being interested in people, as much as they are in abstract theories and ideologies, or impersonal forces, or structural systems, or historical information, or even the play of signifiers. "So it is more likely than not, I'd say, that people will go on valuing those writings that they judge best help them to realise what the world is and what people are, and to live with both as realistically and as fully as they can."

Source

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

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

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

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20 September, 2005

A VERY SHORT STORY ABOUT LITERACY TEACHING

One of my friends has just retired from teaching at her local primary school. The school is a public one but is in an affluent area so there are few discipline problems. The teachers there are allowed considerable flexibility in how they teach and they have devised a system based primarily on phonetics that is very successful in rapidly teaching their grade-school kids how to read and write. I remember my friend proudly showing me a piece of work produced by a GRADE 1 student (aged about 6). It said: "I luv my ticha". The spelling wasn't very good -- it was phonetic -- but this was from a kid still in in GRADE 1. Lots of American High School graduates can do no better. In fact, from the emails I receive, I can assure you that even some American TEACHERS can't do much better. Does this or does this not show what a great sin much of the educational system commits against our children?

I hope that will leave readers thinking about what COULD be. And I think you will also now understand better why I do this blog.

As well as posting here, I also of course post on a number of other sites. One place where I have been posting a lot recently is Tongue Tied. Several of my posts there recently have been about educational matters so I am re-posting them below on the assumption that few readers of this blog also monitor Tongue Tied.



"Dual Immersion" Madness

American Leftists constantly express their anti-Americanism. Note for example this quote from the much-acclaimed Michael Moore about his fellow-Americans: "They are possibly the dumbest people on the planet... in thrall to conniving, thieving, smug pricks" . And there are few more reliably Left-leaning groups than America's teachers and educators (as we see here).

A logical corollary of being an America-hater is a hatred of America's language -- which is English. So the fact that there are now a lot of Spanish-speakers in America who need to learn English is used as an excuse to teach Spanish instead! And "dual immersion" is the fiercest form of that -- where not only Spanish kids but also Anglo kids are taught in Spanish! And it's happening. They're even trying to introduce it in Utah. Note the following report (excerpts):

"As the Washington County School District continues to explore the possibility of teaching both English and Spanish at a local elementary school, Principal Dale Porter met with Spanish-speaking parents Thursday evening at Dixie Downs Elementary to discuss the program. Called "dual immersion," the program would teach classes of evenly balanced English- and Spanish-speakers. Both language groups would learn the other language just as English is now taught in district elementary schools.... Those who live in Dixie Downs' boundaries will not be required to participate and may choose another school in the district to attend.... Porter explained how all students in the program learn a foreign language - either English or Spanish - and how both language populations benefit from each other. The languages are taught simultaneously by bilingual teachers."

Source

That report is from a few months back so here's an update from one of my readers:

"Dixie Downs elementary school has not yet been selected to be the "dual immersion" elementary school in town, because the district has not yet decided if it will try the experiment. But it began the school year with many new teachers. 100% of the teachers now speak both Spanish and English. Any teachers which did not have moved to a different school. 100% of teachers for some grades are teaching their own class for the first time. The principal has declared that he only hired the best teachers who applied (all the best teachers were bi-lingual?)

Imagine the school board's surprise recently when several parents, who don't want dual immersion, spoke at the school board meeting and asked why a common phrase, with a familiar rhythm and accompanying actions did not sound familiar when they visited the classrooms. If one listens to the rhythm and not the words one can almost hear..... "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America"...... However the children all recite it in SPANISH! Even the ones that can't trace any Spanish ancestry.

So the principal of the school is moving ahead as if the idea were already approved, which it probably will be unless some parents get very active. But it is a "poor" school (intellectuals would much rather experiment on other people's kids than on their own) -- 42% of the students are eligible for a free lunch (See here) -- so I guess the education authorities are banking on parental activism not happening. And, being poor, not many parents may be able to excercise the option of transferring to another school.

My prediction? Lots of kids subjected to such treatment will end up even more illiterate than they do now. If the schools cannot teach the "3Rs" in English properly, how the heck are they going to do it in Spanish?

But anyone who opposes the whole idea is "racist", of course.



The British Attack on "Extremism"

At first glance the news excerpt below seems reasonable:

"Extremist organisations are operating on university campuses across the country and pose a serious threat to national security, according to a new report. Yesterday the education secretary, Ruth Kelly, ordered vice-chancellors to clamp down on student extremists in the wake of the July terror attacks in London. But a report due to be published next week by Anthony Glees, the director of Brunel University's centre for intelligence and security studies, lists more than 30 institutions - including some of the most high-profile universities in the country - where "extremist and/or terror groups" have been detected. "This is a serious threat," Professor Glees told the Guardian. "We have discovered a number of universities where subversive activities are taking place, often without the knowledge of the university authorities." ... Among the universities named are Cambridge, where the BNP were detected; Oxford, where the report said animal rights extremists had been active; and the London School of Economics and Manchester University, which both had active Islamist extremist groups".

Source

But in fact there is absolutely NOTHING wrong with extremism. I am an extreme advocate of rationality and individual liberty and make absolutely no apology for that. It is advocacy of violence that should be monitored, not "extremism". Slipping in attacks on all "extremists" under the cover of preventing violence seems a very serious attack on civil liberties. And who is to define "extremism"? Will Brits soon all have to have the conformity of ants? In America, the New York Times regularly describes as "out of the mainstream" anybody they disagree with. It's not hard to envisage the ruling British Leftists doing much the same.



Figure This One

In universities and colleges, speech seems to be getting "correcter" by the day. It's no longer good enough to refer to shorties as "height challenged" or fatties as "width challenged" (or whatever) so we now have one term that seems to confer correct speech generally. The real buzz term now is "differently abled". Here is the Fort Valley State University announcing their correctness:

"The Differently Abled Services Center (DASC) is administratively a part of the Department of Student Affairs. The mission of the Differently Abled Services Center is to increase retention for students with learning disorders by ensuring equal treatment, opportunity, and access for persons with impairments and/or disorders. The center provides support services which assist students with learning disorders in the attainment of their academic as well as personal potential".

Source

First problem: Aren't we ALL "differently abled"? Don't we all have a different set of abilities? I am hopeless at catching balls. Does that make ME differently abled? If ever I am out Fort Valley way I am going to enjoy all those "services" they offer, I guess.

But here's the kicker: The page I got the above quote from was headed in large letters "Building the Fence". Isn't building fences what they are supposed NOT to be doing? Go figure.

Update

How come fatties are getting such a bum rap these days? They are not "differently abled" or whatever. They are "obese". Just another target of Leftist "tolerance", I guess (as distinct from real tolerance)



Both Free Speech and Academic Freedom Under Legal threat

Voltaire once said: "I disagree with you but I will defend to the death your right to say it". There are not many Voltaires around these days. An Australian university professor has recently come under fire for opposing the intake of refugees from Sudan into Australia. He made his comments initially in a newspaper but he has elaborated his views in a sufficiently sound way for them to be accepted for publication in an Australian academic law journal. Read on (excerpt):

"A lawyer for Australia's Sudanese community has threatened a Victorian university with legal action if it publishes an article by a controversial Sydney-based law professor. Called `Rethinking the White Australia Policy?, the 6,800-word article was written by Associate Professor Andrew Fraser, who's been banned from teaching at Sydney's Macquarie University after making racist remarks. The Canadian-born academic wrote a letter to his local suburban newspaper in July, claiming Australia was becoming a Third World colony by allowing non-white immigration.... Lawyer George Newhouse today warned Deakin University to scrap plans to publish Prof Fraser's contentious views in its next law journal. ``I am shocked that a university would even want to publish something along these lines,'' he said. ``I put the university on notice that if they repeat the racial vilification, a claim for compensation may be made against the university and the editors that publish or republish this poison.'' Mr Newhouse said he had already commenced proceedings on behalf of the Sudanese Darfurian community in the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission."

Source

The university that publishes the journal does not seem to be caving in to the threat so far but the whole thing is a good example of how only those things that accord with the official "line" can safely be said today. Stalin would approve.

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

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

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

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



19 September, 2005

A VERY INTERESTING CONTRAST IN THE CITY OF SYDNEY

A lot of parents don't want their kids taught by whining feminists and Leftists who can't teach anyway. When lots of parents are prepared to pay twice for their child's education -- once via their taxes and again to a private school -- it is a pretty emphatic example of voting with your feet against a failed system

Public education in Sydney's inner suburbs is dying, with low enrolments threatening the viability of a number of schools. Department of Education figures reveal that at least six public schools within a five-kilometre radius of the CBD catered to fewer than 100 students last year. And at three of the schools - Fort Street at Millers Point, Plunkett Street at Woolloomooloo and St Peters Public School - student numbers are hovering around, or have dropped below, 50.

The data, obtained from the State Government by the Port Jackson District Council of Parents and Citizens Associations through freedom of information laws, shows a detailed school-by-school pattern of decline in public education over the past 17 years, with the inner west and eastern suburbs recording the sharpest drop in enrolments. Student numbers at eight primary schools and two high schools in the east and inner west have halved in the past decade, while a further six primary and three secondary schools in the area have lost at least a third of students.

Over the same time, private schools in these areas have recorded strong growth. Enrolments in non-government schools in the inner west and inner south have grown by almost 18 per cent in the past seven years, while in the eastern suburbs private schools now have a 60 per cent share of the market.

Dr Cappie-Wood said recent figures showed the decline in NSW public school participation was slowing and in some areas stopping. A range of initiatives was slowing the decline further, he said. More than $100 million had been spent on upgrading schools in inner suburbs, including more than $4 million on Dulwich and Marrickville high schools since 2001. According to the figures supplied under FoI, student numbers in both primary schools and the secondary school in Marrickville halved between 1994 and 2004.

More here



OUTSOURCING TEACHING TO INDIA

I last posted on this back in June 21st. The following is something of an update:

"When engineering student Jeff Bowman needed help in calculus last year, a professor at the University of North Dakota suggested he get tutoring. Bowman, who lives in the Caribbean and takes courses online, found a tutor - in India. A working electrician, Bowman would log on to the Internet before work, around 3 a.m., and get one-on-one help from one of dozens of overseas tutors the university hired through a U.S. company called Smarthinking. "I kind of doubt that I would have been able to pass it (calculus) without help," says Bowman, 45. "When I want help, I don't care how I get it."

Soon, help like this could come to public school students. Thanks to President Bush's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, kids in struggling schools are eligible for free after-school tutoring in reading and math. In many schools, local teachers, non-profit groups and even churches are approved to provide it. So are for-profit companies. Many are investing in technology that allows students and tutors to communicate via special Internet chat rooms and Web-enabled telephone service. Several companies cautiously are considering the practice of "offshoring" a portion of their online tutoring to countries including India.

Despite some educators' worries that offshore tutors might not meet certification requirements, one U.S. company already has conducted a pilot program with Indian tutors. Indian firms are eager to offer - and in some cases expand - their services here. "This is a very good, upcoming field because there is a huge demand for teachers," says Basak Somit, manager of e-learning for Career Launcher, a New Delhi-based education firm. "The sort of queries which we are getting over here, it's tremendous."

Career Launcher piloted a tutoring program last year with eSylvan, a division of Baltimore-based Educate Inc., through Educate's retail operations. The sessions, staffed by five tutors, weren't part of NCLB; families paid privately. Somit says difficulties getting teacher certifications forced them to pull out of the pilot, but Career Launcher is developing its own program and hopes to launch sessions directly through schools this year.

Outsourcing long has been a contentious labor issue. U.S. teachers never have faced overseas competition, but a perfect storm of factors - better technology, rising numbers of struggling schools and millions of dollars in new federal aid - could change that, making "education process outsourcing" a reality. Indian tutors work, on average, for the equivalent of about $200 monthly, putting in six to eight hours a day, five to six days a week. That means they earn the equivalent of about a $1.40 an hour, compared with upward of $20 to $30 an hour for many U.S. tutors.

Public schools last year spent about $218 million on tutoring with an anticipated price tag of $500 million this year, says J. Mark Jackson, a senior analyst at Eduventures, a Boston market research company specializing in education. Outsourcing tutoring is "perfectly feasible," he says, but "politically it would be a disaster" for a for-profit company. "It's a very politically charged debate. The person who's not doing that work is the local teacher."

While workers in other professions suffer from outsourcing all the time, observers say it is unlikely that any community's public schools will be totally outsourced. So companies that want to peel off even a small portion of teachers' work must make the case for it locally, Jackson says. "You want the local community, where the teachers have such strong power in the political process, supporting what you want to do."

Liz Pape, CEO of Virtual High School, an online school that serves more than 6,000 students, says rural areas can benefit from online teaching. "If your child happens to be in a very rural, somewhat isolated area and is going to a high school where there are no teachers who can teach A.P. statistics, wouldn't you want your student to take a course in A.P. statistics from a teacher in Massachusetts?" she says.

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

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

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

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

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



18 September, 2005

SPOTTING MUSLIM EXTREMISTS IN BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

Maybe this will do some good

Muslim community leaders will be asked to help "identify and isolate" potential extremists on university campuses as students start their new term, the Guardian has learned. The move is among measures to be outlined today in a speech by the education secretary, Ruth Kelly, and comes amid concern that radical groups are using universities as recruiting grounds.

Yesterday the higher education minister, Bill Rammell, who has launched a nationwide programme of meetings with Muslim students and academics as part of the initiative, said the government was responding to issues raised by the Muslim community. "I am doing this because leaders of faith communities have approached me and expressed fears that their young people are being attracted to and converted to violent extremism," he said. "Community leaders say to us that they are worried about some students, a tiny, tiny minority, who are drawn to extremist ideas and this is about shifting the terms of debate."

In the aftermath of the London bombings in July, the Guardian revealed that the security services had barred more than 200 foreign scientists from studying at British universities on grounds of security. The National Union of Students has banned Hizb ut-Tahrir from campuses, accusing the group of "supporting terrorism and publishing material that incites racial hatred". The organisation denied the accusations.

Speaking ahead of Ms Kelly's speech, Mr Rammell said it was important to listen to the concerns of Muslim students but insisted the wider Islamic community had an obligation to help the authorities identify individuals or groups possibly posing a threat.

Last night Wakkas Khan, president of the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, welcomed Mr Rammell's comments, but said the initiatives must not infringe the rights of Muslim students. "I think the concern revolves around the level of involvement of the universities and outside bodies in Islamic societies and activities. "We would find it very difficult if university authorities began investigating Islamic societies and searching prayer rooms as a matter of course. Where it is absolutely necessary it is fine, but it must not become the norm."

Mr Rammell said the government was planning to review the student vetting scheme, which relies on universities to refer suspect students from Islamic countries applying to do science courses. He said the government was working with colleges to complete guidelines for vice chancellors - to be published in November - on how to tackle campus extremism. But he said the crucial point was to establish a dialogue between Muslim students, universities and the government.

Source



GOOD GOD! INFORMATION FOR PARENTS AT LAST

And in California at that!

Parents of public school students are finally getting a chance to see how their kids did on tests they took last spring. School districts across the state are sending out the one-page STAR Student Report to the homes of the state's estimated 6 million public school students. Educators see the reports, all of which should be mailed by the end of this month, as a road map to improving each student's performance.

The report offers an evaluation of each child's progress, measured primarily by scores on the California Standards Tests, which kids took as part of the Standardized Testing and Reporting program. The multicolored report, printed on both sides of a single sheet of paper, includes a bar graph indicating a child's score on each subject-related test taken - English language arts, math, science and history-social science - and where that score falls on the proficiency scale: far below basic, below basic, basic, proficiency and advanced. The state's goal is for all students to be proficient or advanced in all subjects.

On the back page, each subject is broken down, with the percent of questions answered correctly by a child compared to the percent correct of students statewide. The percentages listed by each subject area give parents and teachers a chance to tailor their efforts to help the child. Another part assigns a reading list number that can be matched with a list of books appropriate for the child's reading ability. The books can be found on the California Department of Education's Web site at star.cde.ca.gov. So, for instance, a middle school student whose reading list number is 9 would be pointed to such books as "All Creatures Great and Small," by James Herriot, and "Restless Spirit: The Life and Work of Dorothea Lange," by Elizabeth Partridge.

Officials at the state Department of Education say they worked with graphic designers, educators and parents to design something devoid of "educationalese" that would be easy to read for all parents. "We want to foster that conversation between the parent and the teacher. They're the two experts," said Rick Miller, director of communications for the Education Department. "This would provide specifics for the conversation." Miller said parents should use the report to talk with teachers and find out what can be done at home to complement the work done at school. "You can be a participating parent without ever stepping foot in the classroom," Miller said. "It's about working with your child at home."

The reports are available in English, though the department produces translation guides in Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese, Hmong, Korean and Tagalog. Those guides are sent out according to a family's home language.

Source

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

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

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

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17 September, 2005

Fifty Years Closer to Choice

In considering the role government plays in various areas of life in 1955, Milton Friedman cast his discerning eye on education and saw a Six Million Dollar Man. Government-controlled public education was already well on its way to becoming a total wreck. But Friedman, seeing what the G.I. Bill had done for soldiers returning from the recently concluded World War II, envisioned a way to rebuild it--better, stronger, faster. The result was an essay, "On the Role of Government in Education," which proposed a universal voucher system as a way to allow government to continue financing public education while separating it from its administration, establishing a true free-market arena in which choice would be equal for all, competition would be fierce, and only the best schools would survive. In 1962, the essay became a chapter in Friedman's historic book, Capitalism and Freedom. Fifty years after the essay was first written, Friedman's idea has become the ticket to a better education for some 36,000 students in a handful of voucher programs scattered nationwide.

To some education reformers, the numbers cited above read rather pessimistically: A half-century of thought, research, funding, and legislative struggle has given the nation only a half-dozen voucher programs, most operating at the city level. Another two generations of American schoolchildren, those reformers say, will be woefully undereducated before the nation can achieve true freedom of choice for all. And, if they're waiting for the pure, universal voucher system Friedman proposed in 1955, they could be right.

But others--including Friedman himself, recipient of the 1976 Nobel Prize for Economic Science, who is now 93--take a broader view. Though vouchers have been slow to gain a foothold--"distressingly slow," as Friedman wrote in his Nobel Laureate autobiography--the advent of new technologies is beginning to usher in some real free-market competition in the education arena. In addition to voucher programs operating in Milwaukee, Cleveland, Washington DC, Florida, and Utah, more than 3,000 charter schools are now educating about 1 million children across 40 states. Another 1 million students have foregone public education altogether in favor of homeschooling; many of them take advantage of distance-learning programs over the Internet.

In addition, in the sometimes-stressful atmosphere created by the stringent demands of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), for-profit companies are beginning to see vast opportunities, providing supplemental educational materials and tutoring to help schools and students achieve federally mandated goals.

The voucher program Friedman envisioned might have been slow in reaching even its infancy, but the time is ripe, he has said, for true choices to begin to emerge. "If I'm right," he told Education Next in 2000, "the voucher movement is going to expand and grow. There will be a brand new industry: the education industry, a private, for-profit, and non-profit education industry. It will introduce competition in a way that's never existed before. "The dam is breaking, and as it breaks, and I think it will, the water will rise more and more rapidly. I think choice is going to be here. I don't know when, it's been a long time coming, but it's starting to come.".....

In the next 50 years, Chubb thinks American education will come a lot closer to Friedman's vision, as the free-market atmosphere continues to evolve. It won't be long, Chubb said, until charter schools enroll 1 million children, and virtual schools complete with instructors are springing up online. "Even the way public schools work now is more market-oriented--they're much more accountable for results, they can be closed down, parents are being given more choice within systems," he explained. "I would share the skepticism of whether [universal] vouchers will be introduced," Chubb said, "but I think we're already seeing that more choices are being accepted, and in some places, they're quite dominant."

Charter schools provide about 25 percent of the public education in both Washington, DC and Dayton, Ohio. About 1,000 private providers are competing to tutor children in failing schools around the nation, "and that's done by vouchers, whether you call them that or not, because parents can go to any provider they want, public or private. Providers have flooded into that marketplace," Chubb said. Also, schools failing to meet NCLB's Adequate Yearly Progress requirements must restructure, and as a result, for-profit companies such as Edison Schools that can take them over are multiplying as the market grows. "If you look at the role of the market today versus where it was only a few years ago, that's an enormous change, and I think it's likely to continue," Chubb said.

More here



Public Choices

It's back-to-school time, and many of the adults trying to run American education have a lot to learn. They ought to start by memorizing a simple formula: increased federal funding leads to decreased educational flexibility, producing academic stagnation.

They definitely have not learned that lesson in Connecticut, where last month state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal launched the first-ever state lawsuit against the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), calling the Bush administration's enforcement of the law "rigid, arbitrary and capricious." Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell supports the suit and recently declared to a group of Connecticut teachers that rather than NCLB's strict rules, "we want the leeway to let our schools perform." Connecticut's problem is that it seems to want both more federal money and flexibility. "Our taxpayers are sagging under the crushing costs of local education," Rell commented the day the lawsuit was announced. "What we don't need is a new laundry list of things to do — with no new money to do them."

The day after Connecticut filed its suit the Center for American Progress (CAP), a progressive Washington, D.C., think tank, released a report in which it too decried schools' inflexibility but called for more federal funds. The report, from CAP's National Task Force on Public Education, starts off reasonably, arguing that a lot of our educational trouble can be attributed to the fact that "too much of our education system supports the status quo and a basic 'one size fits all approach.'" Unfortunately, it soon contradicts itself, intoning that "tragically, the commitment to uniformity in expectations and standards for what students should be taught is not reflected in the K-12 education system."

The result of this confused analysis is a proposal for the federal government to provide "leadership" and to spend at least $325 billion over ten years implementing numerous CAP-endorsed initiatives including universal pre-school and a "voluntary" national curriculum tied to expanded "national accountability measures."

What both the Connecticut lawsuit and the CAP report demonstrate is the inability of policymakers to grasp history and understand that more federal money inevitably means more rules, and that neither of those things helps America's schools. Keep in mind that it was only in the last few decades, with passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965, that the federal government became deeply involved in American education. Once it was in, though, its "investment" increased by leaps and bounds. According to the most recent inflation-adjusted data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the federal investment in education ballooned by nearly 400 percent between 1965 and 2003, and by more than 500 percent at the elementary and secondary level.

Federal meddling in education has grown with its funding. Over the last 40 years, despite the presence of a clause prohibiting federal control of education in almost all legislation passed in that time, as the federal government expended more money on the schools it heaped ever greater requirements onto the funds. Today its dictates are so extensive that Washington tells districts whether their teachers are qualified and their reading curriculum is acceptable, and requires schools to provide lessons on the Constitution every September 17, the anniversary of the signing of that once-respected document.

Despite this incredible growth in federal funding and "leadership," academic achievement has largely stagnated. The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress "Trends in Academic Progress" report reveals the sad truth. In 1971 seventeen-year-olds had an average score of 285 out of 500 points on the NAEP reading assessment. In 2004 the average wasn't a single point higher. Nine-year-olds' scores increased the most of any age group in reading, but their average only rose by slightly over 5 percent. Overall the improvements in math were higher, but were also nowhere near commensurate with federal spending increases.

What is critical for policymakers and voters to understand is that, contrary to Connecticut's complaint, the federal government does not simply force states to do as they're told. It buys compliance, attaching any and all requirements it wants schools to follow to the taxpayer money that states "voluntarily" accept. And, of course, the more money it supplies, the more rules and regulations it creates. States aren't going to be able to have it both ways. They can either take federal money and give up on flexibility, or they can demand flexibility by telling Washington to get out of the education business. What they can't do is the impossible: fixing our "one size fits all" schools by demanding ever more federal dollars.

Source

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

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

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

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16 September, 2005

CALIFORNIA: WHERE MORE MONEY CHASES FEWER PUPILS

And still does little good

"Flat, or even declining school enrollment, is the dirty little secret of the California education budget wars. While the Governor increased spending by over 6% this year, enrollment only increased by 0.4% comparing 2004/2005 vs. 2003/2004. Further, the California Department of Finance, which tracks and forecasts census data, now estimates school registration will grow at an annual rate of less than 0.4% through the year 2013.

Thus, just a 3.4% annual budget increase would cover both enrollment growth and inflation to maintain the current standard of school funding in California for at least the next 8 years. But that is just one of the many little secrets about school registration that the mainstream media simply refuses to report.

Did you know, for instance, that elementary school enrollment has declined in California for two consecutive years? Or, that total enrollment dropped in every coastal county but Santa Barbara when comparing 2004/2005 vs. 2003/2004? Or, that over 43% of all schoolchildren in the state are concentrated in Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego Counties but their elementary school registration has already declined for three consecutive years and is now below the level of 1999? That decline will continue because there are even fewer students in the first three grades to replace the children now in the 4th, 5th and 6th grades.

The San Francisco Bay area hasn’t fared much better with a year over year increase of just 387 students in that six county region. Apparently children are becoming as unaffordable as our housing prices.

Enrollment growth is now limited to Riverside and San Bernardino Counties plus the central valley from Bakersfield to Sacramento. This is an enormous turnaround from the last 10 years when the 5 Southern California Counties accounted for 69% of all registration increases in the state.

So, where did all the children go? The short answer is that we stopped making so many of them. Californians set a record when over 612,000 children were born in 1990 but the birthrate then plunged by 15% over the next 9 years. The California Department of Finance now estimates nearly a quarter century will have passed before we again reach the birthrate level of 1990. Further, the Department of Finance estimates school registration will grow a total of just 2.6% in the next eight years. That is miniscule compared to 1995 and 1996 when the single year increases were 2.4% and 2.7% respectively.

Recent news reports indicate dozens of California school districts are in financial trouble due to declining enrollment and thus lower reimbursement from the state treasury. They simply don’t seem to grasp the management concept of private businesses who reduce their staff when they have fewer customers.

Meanwhile the education lobby continues their scare tactics with the public as they release stories about teacher shortages even as they campaign for a Universal Preschool program requiring another 22,000 instructors. The program promises to save 10,000 dropouts per year at a taxpayer cost of $2 billion annually. Admirable, but that is $200,000 per dropout and saves only 7% of the kids who don’t make it to graduation each year.

The California Teachers Association clearly would like to return to the days when Governor Davis threw salary and benefits at them as they threw money into his campaigns. But, there was no impact on classrooms. Between 1998 and 2004, enrollment grew by 8.2%, the number of teachers grew by 8.1%, the number of administrators grew by 14% and the total number of non-teaching employees grew by 11.2%. The latter now account for 52.7% of all employees. During the Davis administration California’s teachers achieved an average base salary $11,000, or 22%, higher than the U.S. average.

So why haven’t you seen these facts before? Apparently no State Senator or Assemblyman who desires reelection is willing to confront the teacher’s lobby with the truth. Major newspapers presented with the facts simply call a couple of education lobbyists for background information who then tell them enrollment will soon start soaring again. What else would they say? Any lobbyist who spoke the truth would be blackballed from contract work in every district in the state. As for the Governor’s office, his advisors seem unaware of key school enrollment facts which clearly support his education agenda".

Source



Schooldays last the longest for Australian children

Australian children will spend more time in formal education than children in any other developed country, an international study says. An Australian child aged five in 2003 can expect to be in education for 21.1 years, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report released yesterday shows. That was the highest of its 30 members, followed by Britain and Sweden, where children are likely to be students for just more than 20 years. Australia's public schools also have some of the highest number of instruction hours for children aged seven to 14 - with 8000 hours of classroom learning over this period - trailing only Italy and the Netherlands.

The findings come in Education at a Glance 2005 — a snapshot of education trends around the world. The report says more people are studying longer and most young people - on average, 53 per cent - will take part in some tertiary education.

On average, a five-year-old in most OECD countries will take part in education for 16 to 21 years. Females are completing secondary and tertiary education at faster rates than males in most countries, but remain less engaged in maths and science.

Women still earn less than males with similar education achievements — from 60 to 80 per cent of what men earn. The report attributes this to differences in career choices and time spent in the workforce.

The number of foreign students is rising, up 11.5 per cent from the previous year to 2.1 million foreign students in 2003. Australia, France, Germany, Britain and the United States receive about 70 per cent of foreign students, many from China, Korea and Japan. Australia had the highest percentage of foreign students in tertiary education, at 19 per cent.

The big spenders on school education were Switzerland and the US, at more than $14,000 per student, with Australia below the average at about $9000.

Source

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

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

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

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15 September, 2005

"Postmodern" student assessments rejected

Australians love competitive sport and the idea of winners and losers. Australian parents also want to know how well their children are travelling against others at school and whether they have passed or failed.

Unfortunately, this is the very thing parents are denied. As noted by a federal report evaluating school reports and student assessment, titled Reporting on School and Student Achievement: "Parents understand how difficult it may be for teachers to convey bad news, but nevertheless they indicate that they want a fair and honest assessment, in plain language, of the progress of their children. "There is a lack of objective standards that parents can use to determine their children's attainment and rate of progress. Many parents specifically asked for information that would enable them to compare their children's progress with other students or with state, territory-wide or national standards."

Since the early 1990s, as a result of state and territory education systems adopting fads such as outcomes-based education, traditional forms of assessment have been replaced by what is called formative assessment. Teachers committed to formative assessment are against ranking students and using letter grades or percentages. It's assumed that failing is bad for self-esteem, that all students, given enough resources and time, will succeed and, as learning is personal, students cannot be compared.

Formative assessment also embraces a developmental approach to learning, based on the argument that "students develop and learn at different rates and in different ways" and "the rate of individual development and learning can vary enormously and students may achieve a particular standard at different age levels".

The result? Instead of pass or fail, student progress or lack of progress is clouded by suchpolitically correct terms as beginning, established, consolidating or emerging, solid, comprehensive. Instead of students facing regular examinations with consequences for failure, as do those students in stronger performing education systems overseas, students are automatically promoted from year to year, even though many have not mastered the basics.

While parents want an end to politically correct reports, the same cannot be said for those seeking to control our education system. The Australian Education Union, in addition to opposing statewide literacy and numeracy tests, is totally opposed to competitive, graded assessment, where students are ranked against one another or against set, year-level standards. Not only does the AEU argue that competitive assessment is socially unjust, as some groups in society tend to be better than others, the union also argues that collaboration is better than competition as everyone should be able to experience success.

Such is the influence of the postmodern on education that the Australian Council of Deans of Education, in New Learning: A Charter for Australian Education, also argues against testing students on the basis that some will pass and some will fail.

The deans argue that there are no absolutes, as knowledge is always tentative and shifting and, as a result, there are no right or wrong answers. Pass-fail and traditional approaches to learning are considered obsolete: "The essence of the old basics was encapsulated simply in the subject areas of the three Rs: reading, writing and arithmetic it was a kind of shopping list of things-to-be-known - through drilling the times tables, memorising spelling lists, learning the parts of speech and correct grammar. "There is no way that a curriculum based on factual content or straightforward right and wrong answers can anticipate the range of life alternatives any one student is likely to encounter across a lifetime."

The Australian Association for the Teaching of English is also opposed to the more traditional forms of assessment. In the jargon much loved by educrats, the AATE's policy, entitled Assessment and Reporting English, states: "The use of decontextualised, standardised tests for monitoring the performance of students and of schools is unhelpful. In the past such tests have been more frequently employed to attack good teaching than otherwise. Students have come to see the test as part of the curriculum because teachers feel compelled to teach to them."

The flaws and contradictions inherent in formative assessment are many. First, research tells us that before children can attempt higher order thinking, they have to master the basics, including times tables, mental arithmetic and knowing the structure of a sentence.

As noted by Jean Renoir, when he asked his father the secret of his success as an impressionist painter, success was based on years of hard, often repetitive work in the academy learning the basics of drawing and perspective. Creativity requires structure and discipline; it does not happen by accident. As such, there is nothing wrong with teachers teaching and then testing whether students have mastered what is required; teaching to the test can be beneficial.

Second, in the real world there are right and wrong answers and consequences for failure. The next time you fly, pray that the pilot knows the correct way to take off and land. While there is some truth in the proposition that learners construct their own understanding of the world, there are also objective facts related to the established disciplines of knowledge that teachers need to teach and students need to learn. The next time you drive across a bridge, hope that the engineers knew and respected the laws of physics and that their understanding was not at the "beginning" or "emerging" stage.

While there is an element of truth in the proposition that students learn in different ways and at different rates, there is also the reality that those children who fail to master the basics in the early years of primary school are destined to failure in later years. A related point is that not all students have the same level of ability or motivation to succeed. As a result of never being told they have failed, many students leave school with an inflated and unrealistic sense of their own ability and worth.

Third, formative assessment is very wasteful, time-consuming and overly bureaucratic. One only needs to see the hundreds of vague outcome statements that Australian primary teachers have to monitor and report against to understand their frustration and despair. Not only does formative assessment promote a checklist mentality that weakens the integrity of particular subjects by seeking to quantify everything, learning is reduced to what can be measured, but time and energy is diverted from the joy of teaching.

Finally, one of the most damaging myths associated with formative assessment is that it is impossible, as they do in overseas countries, to clearly define standards, either by ranking students one against the other or by setting objective levels of performance that measure student ability. The result? Not only do students in Japan, Singapore and The Netherlands regularly out-perform Australian students in international maths and science tests, but thousands of Australian students enter secondary schools illiterate and innumerate.

On the basis that there is no such thing as pass-fail and all students experience success, underperforming schools are also allowed to continue unchallenged.

To date, states and territories allow failing schools to continue unchecked and parents are kept in the dark about how schools compare. The Australian situation is unlike that in Britain and the US where underperforming schools are identified and given additional resources and expertise in order to improve.

During last year's federal election campaign, one of the policies the Howard Government put forward was a return to plain-English report cards. Instead of fuzzy, new-age reports, students would be graded A to E and placed in quartiles against other members of the class.

To date, NSW, Western Australia and Tasmania have agreed to both aspects of Education Minister Brendan Nelson's request for plain-English report cards. While Victoria and South Australia have recently agreed to implement A to E letter grades, parents will not automatically be given information about quartiles. The other states and territories have yet to respond.

The benefit of the more traditional federally inspired approach is that parents will be given a succinct and easy-to-understand measure of student performance. Better still, where individual students are ranked against classmates, parents will be in a position to more realistically judge their child's ability and, if needed, to help improve performance.

Source



ANOTHER BRITISH FAILURE

Surprise! "Head Start" has not worked in Britain either

The first major evaluation of the government's flagship 3 billion pound Sure Start programme for deprived preschool children and their families has revealed no overall improvement in the areas targeted by the initiative.

Although some Sure Start schemes were successful, an independent study by academics at Birkbeck College, London - due to be published by the government next month - revealed that Sure Start as a whole failed to boost youngsters' development, language and behaviour. It also showed children of teenage mothers did worse in Sure Start areas than elsewhere.

The findings, obtained by the Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee, represent only an early snapshot of the programme's effectiveness, and academics involved in the 20 million pound evaluation emphasise that they do not mean the scheme, which varies widely around the country, will not succeed in helping children in deprived areas in the long term.

However, the results represent a blow to a much-vaunted government programme that has cost 3.1 billion pounds since its launch in 2001 and is to be extended from the current total of 524 schemes to 3,500 Sure Start children's centres, one in every neighbourhood, by 2010.

Both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have made much of the expansion, which was heavily promoted in Labour's general election manifesto in May. The scheme, influenced by the Head Start programme in the United States, is targeted at children aged up to five and their families in deprived areas, and is intended to offer a range of joined-up early years services, including high quality childcare, parenting classes, training to help mothers into work, health advice and a variety of other programmes according to local demand.

More here

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

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

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

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14 September, 2005

AUSTRALIA A POPULAR EDUCATIONAL DESTINATION

The following article appeared in the Brisbane "Courier Mail" on Sept 8th, 2005 under the heading "Overseas Uni student levels reach world high". That Australia is an English-speaking country in close proximity to Asia is of course a major factor. Most overseas students in Australia are Asian, particularly from nearby Malaysia, where Chinese are discriminated against. ("HECS" are student fees)

Australian university classrooms have the highest proportion of international students in the world, according to a new report. The report, Education Without Borders, has revealed almost 18 per cent of students at Australian university are from overseas. According to the report, the number of international students in Australia jumped from about 12 per cent in 1998 while the average for all other countries remained largely stagnant.

However, the release of the report has coincided with new figures showing almost a third of HECS-paying Australian students are likely to never pay off their debt.

Written by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the report found education was Australia's fourth largest export. In 2003-04, education services reaped $5.9 billion for the Australian economy, from 13 per cent in 2002-03.

Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said the nation's education sector was booming because Australia was regarded as a safe and friendly destination with a reputation for quality tertiary services. "Whether people like it or not. English has become the language of international discourse, not national but international discourse, and the fact that Australia is an Anglophone country, the fact that students study in Australia in English is a significant advantage for Australia as well," he said.

However. Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd said the report ignored the fact that the rate of Australia's education exports growth was actually falling. Mr Rudd said the rate of growth in Australian education exports had halved under the Howard Government from 22.1 per cent to 10.2 per cent between 1996 and 2004. "Today's report does acknowledge that our universities have been losing ground in the highly competitive market for international students relative to other countries," he said. "If Australia can't compete in our own region, cash-starved Australian universities stand to lose millions of dollars in student fees which they are now dangerously dependent on following nine years of funding cuts."

The report shows international student numbers increased from 35,290 in 1994 to 151,798 in 2004. Chinese students dominated enrolments. The US remained the most popular destination for globe-trotting students with almost 600,000 international enrolments.



CHANGE COMING IN UNIVERSITIES?

The article from The Economist excerpted below notes that the huge numbers of students now going on to higher education is putting a big strain on the old system of university education. It then goes on to look at how universities might change in response:

Techno-utopians believe that higher education is ripe for revolution. The university, they say, is a hopelessly antiquated institution, wedded to outdated practices such as tenure and lectures, and incapable of serving a new world of mass audiences and just-in-time information. “Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics,” says Peter Drucker, a veteran management guru. “I consider the American research university of the past 40 years to be a failure.” Fortunately, in his view, help is on the way in the form of internet tuition and for-profit universities.

Cultural conservatives, on the other hand, believe that the best way forward is backward. The two ruling principles of modern higher-education policy—democracy and utility—are “degradations of the academic dogma”, to borrow a phrase from the late Robert Nisbet, another sociologist. They think it is foolish to waste higher education on people who would rather study “Seinfeld” than Socrates, and disingenuous to confuse the pursuit of truth with the pursuit of profit.

The conservative argument falls at the first hurdle: practicality. Higher education is rapidly going the way of secondary education: it is becoming a universal aspiration. The techno-utopian position is superficially more attractive. The internet will surely influence teaching, and for-profit companies are bound to shake up a moribund marketplace. But there are limits.

A few years ago a report by Coopers & Lybrand crowed that online education could eliminate the two biggest costs from higher education: “The first is the need for bricks and mortar; traditional campuses are not necessary. The second is full-time faculty. [Online] learning involves only a small number of professors, but has the potential to reach a huge market of students.” That is nonsense. The human touch is much more vital to higher education than is high technology. Education is not just about transmitting a body of facts, which the internet does pretty well. It is about learning to argue and reason, which is best done in a community of scholars.

This survey will argue that the most significant development in higher education is the emergence of a super-league of global universities. This is revolutionary in the sense that these institutions regard the whole world as their stage, but also evolutionary in that they are still wedded to the ideal of a community of scholars who combine teaching with research.

The problem for policymakers is how to create a system of higher education that balances the twin demands of excellence and mass access, that makes room for global elite universities while also catering for large numbers of average students, that exploits the opportunities provided by new technology while also recognising that education requires a human touch.

As it happens, we already possess a successful model of how to organise higher education: America's. That country has almost a monopoly on the world's best universities, but also provides access to higher education for the bulk of those who deserve it. The success of American higher education is not just a result of money (though that helps); it is the result of organisation. American universities are much less dependent on the state than are their competitors abroad. They derive their income from a wide variety of sources, from fee-paying students to nostalgic alumni, from hard-headed businessmen to generous philanthropists. And they come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, from Princeton and Yale to Kalamazoo community college.

This survey will offer two pieces of advice for countries that are trying to create successful higher-education systems, be they newcomers such as India and China or failed old hands such as Germany and Italy. First: diversify your sources of income. The bargain with the state has turned out to be a pact with the devil. Second: let a thousand academic flowers bloom. Universities, including for-profit ones, should have to compete for customers. A sophisticated economy needs a wide variety of universities pursuing a wide variety of missions. These two principles reinforce each other: the more that the state's role contracts, the more educational variety will flourish.



Public school daze: "Despite years of effort to improve American education, many students' schools will not provide them the basic skills needed to enter college or succeed in a career. Some states' public schools graduate as few as 55 percent of students. U.S. test scores versus other countries' decline the longer students are in school. Teachers complain of overwhelming bureaucracy and government mandates. Public school expenditures per student continue rising, even though higher expenditures don't produce better student performance. ... Clearly, our public school problems are not related to lack of money. But because the government has a near monopoly on education, and taxpayer support and student attendance are mandatory, the public school system is insulated from market forces and competition that might produce improvements."

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

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

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

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13 September, 2005

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IS NOW ILLEGAL ON CALFORNIA CAMPUSES AND IT SHOWS

James Marshall didn't expect it would be easy, being one of just a handful of black students at the University of California, Berkeley's, high-ranking business school. It wasn't. But his payoff came at graduation - job interviews with some of the country's most prestigious firms. "It's about getting that set of rules: OK, this is how you engage an employer; this is how you get this job," says Marshall.

This fall, preliminary figures put 129 new black freshmen at Berkeley out of a class of about 4,000, slightly higher than last year, but still an extreme minority. About 11 percent of the class will be Hispanic, well out of step with a state where Hispanics make up about 30 percent of the population and are projected to be the largest ethnic group by 2011.

For Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, it's a disturbing trend in diverse California. "There are very talented people out there, I believe, who for a whole variety of reasons end up not coming to Berkeley, or to another of the flagship campuses in the UC system," he says.

"Where are the leaders going to come from?" asks Christopher Edley, dean of UC Berkeley's Boalt law school, where just nine black students are expected in the incoming class of 268. "It's been such a short period of time in which our universities have begun producing minority graduates in substantial numbers that to let the door swing shut now would really be a calamity of historic proportions."

Birgeneau, who took over the top job at Berkeley last year, has been outspoken in his dismay at enrollment figures and the need to change them. He questions whether voters intended these kinds of consequences when they passed Proposition 209, the 1996 ballot measure banning consideration of race in public hiring, contracting and education.

But Ward Connerly, the former UC regent who chaired the Proposition 209 campaign, bristles at the idea that there's a problem with race-blind policies. "I just don't understand why certain people have gotten themselves all worked up about who gets to go to Berkeley and UCLA as if that's the only path to a successful life in California, because it is not and the evidence is abundant that it is not," he said. Connerly, founder of a management and land-use consulting firm, is a graduate of Sacramento State University, one of the 23 campuses in the California State University system, the state's other four-year university system and the nation's largest, with about 400,000 students. Black and Hispanic enrollment is higher at CSU - there, black students comprised about 8 percent of the freshman class last fall.

Still, CSU Chancellor Charles Reed says he'd like to see those numbers increase. "I go out and visit public schools and talk to people and I figured out just walking around that students, parents and, frankly, a lot of teachers in the public schools really don't know what it takes to go to college," says Reed, whose staff has blanketed schools and libraries with a "How to Get to College" poster spelling out requirements. "I ask kids sometimes, 'Do you want to be a millionaire?' Everybody wants to be a millionaire. I say, 'It's not all that hard. All you have to do is get a college degree. You'll earn a million dollars over your lifetime more than someone who didn't.'"

Even though blacks, Hispanics and American Indians are underrepresented at Berkeley, the school is far from all-white. The expected freshman class will be about 47 percent Asian-American (a huge category encompassing ethnicities from Samoa to India) and 31 percent white. "We should all be extraordinarily proud of the achievement of Asian-Americans," says Birgeneau, "and we need to learn how to propagate that to other groups." Sharon Browne, principal attorney for the Pacific Legal Foundation, which has defended Proposition 209, says race-blind policies are working. She counters that students now are admitted into universities where they can compete effectively and says the old system papered over public school inequality.

After Proposition 209, UC poured millions into outreach programs, partnering with high schools to help students prepare for college. "I'm seeing what's happening as a result of Proposition 209 as a positive improvement," says Browne. "It starts at the lower grades, but it has that cascading effect and eventually, when these students who are really being well-grounded in K-12 start applying to the UCs, I think we're going to see that, yes, race does not matter in California at all."

Looking at UC systemwide, admissions are up slightly for black students since 1997, with fewer black students going to Berkeley and UCLA and more going to newer branches of the 10-campus system. No single factor affects UC enrollment - for one thing fees have soared. At Boalt, for instance, Edley is looking into restructuring financial aid packages to offset hikes.

But one obstacle is "the absence of a community of learners who share their commitment to excellence, who look like them, who can encourage them not to give up when the going gets tough," says Winston Doby, UC's vice president for student affairs....

From an administrative point of view, Haas Acting Dean Richard Lyons says having so few black students shortchanges everyone - and puts Haas at a competitive disadvantage in a diverse marketplace. The school's doing what it can to change that, he says, but Proposition 209 is a constraint....."

More here



WHAT THE PEOPLE THINK ABOUT THE SCHOOLS

The following survey taken in Queensland shows that the people know that their public schools are not working and they know that lack of discipline is a large part of the problem. I am sure you would get similar results from such a survey almost anywhere in the Western world today. One result of the situation in Australia is that parents send 40% of their teenagers to private schools

Queensland's education system is facing a crisis of confidence among the public. While Premier Peter Beattie says the legacy of his leadership will be the establishment of a Smart State, an overwhelming majority of survey respondents believe schools are failing the basics. Only 17 per cent said they thought the Queensland school curriculum adequately taught the "3Rs" of reading, writing and arithmetic. Fewer than one in five (19 per cent) believe the curriculum adequately prepares school-leavers for work.

Education Minister Rod Welford defended the system, saying the state's students consistently achieved above national benchmarks in the 3Rs at Years 3, 5 and 7.

But small-business leader Ian Baldock shares readers' frustrations. "We see far too many young people who simply cannot add up," said Mr Baldock, executive director of the Queensland Retail Traders and Shopkeepers Association. "Our members find young people often have no idea of basic arithmetic . . . some of these kids cannot string a sentence together."

Les Gomes, owner of Professional Tutoring Service, said maths and English tuition were in high demand: "I think it's the class sizes that's made it very difficult for students to get that individual attention." .... Just over a third (36 per cent) rated the performance of teachers as good or excellent, while 32 per cent said it was average and 13 per cent thought it was poor or worse.

Queensland Teachers Union president Steve Ryan said criticism of the curriculum was probably based more on perception than reality: "We believe we are preparing students well for work. "While it's important that children can spell and add up, the reality is that they have things like spellcheck, which can have an impact, and the curriculum is much broader than just the 3Rs."

Comments on the survey forms suggest many readers believe teachers face a struggle to teach effectively while battling misbehaviour. More than half (55 per cent) of respondents would like to see corporal punishment, banned in 1992, reintroduced.

Source

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

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

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

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12 September, 2005

SCHOOLS WANT US ALL TO BECOME LIKE ANTS

Leftists are still true to old Hegel. Only groups matter. And Hegel was the inspiration of Marx and Engels. So it's Communist thinking in U.S. schools. What do you expect from Leftist teachers produced by Leftist colleges? None of those pesky individual differences here, thank you very much. All kids are equal too

"Why is the concept of individual rights so important? The Declaration of Independence, America's founding document, states: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights..." These words affirm that our Founding Fathers saw rights as bestowed not by governments, but by God; not to groups, but to individuals.

The Declaration continues: "That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men." In other words, our Founders saw the role of government as that of protecting the rights of individuals.

However, by the mid-1990s, it was being postulated that America had become a nation where the rights of individuals have been superceded by the rights of groups. Evidence in support of this point can be seen in the observation by social commentator Jessica Gavora that the American Civil Liberties Union has switched its focus from the defense of individual rights to group rights.

This trend can be seen all across the country, in ways large and small - a blight that is nibbling away at individual rights. Consider, for example, that the goal of promoting group identity over individual identity appears regularly in educational literature. A National Middle School Association conference promoted cooperative learning as an "essential" classroom practice because, through this practice, "competition is directed away from individual performance and toward a group identity." Education professor Paul George of the University of Florida stated that for students, group membership "must be the focus of identification."

The preeminence of the group over the individual was seen recently in a report on the services for gifted students in one suburban school district. Teachers objected to allowing their gifted students to leave class for enrichment activities because these children "often provide a needed spark" for the rest of the students. This comports with the views of social activist Mara Sapon-Shevin who claims that "a child who is academically advanced could in fact be valued for this difference if that child's performance were helpful to the entire group."

In other words, in some school districts, allowing an individual to have their intellectual needs met is trumped by the perceived needs of the group. In this case, high ability students are expected to sacrifice the opportunity to develop their own talents and abilities in order to serve the needs of the group - needs that should be addressed not by students, but by the teacher. In a larger sense, this has evolved into the movement to eliminate the recognition of individual merit. As a result, in some schools spelling bees, science fairs, even the honor of valedictorian are being eliminated, often with the justification that individual recognition might harm the self esteem of others.

Consider the concept of merit pay for teachers. Doesn't it make sense to reward an individual whose classroom skills produce remarkable student achievement? The idea of rewarding excellence makes sense in the rest of the economy, but many educators blanch at the idea. They view the acknowledgement that some teachers may be better than others as unfair or demoralizing to the group, so they lobby for pay to be based on longevity and coursework as opposed to merit, thus keeping the members of their group happy. ....

Even prospective presidential candidates have made their views known on this topic. It is reported that when a woman complained to Hillary Clinton that she did not want to be forced into a health care plan that she didn't choose, Hillary replied: "It's time to put the common good, the national interest, ahead of individuals."

One of the fundamental principles that drove the founding of this nation, the acknowledgement and protection of individual rights, is now giving way to devaluing individual rights in favor of collectivist group rights. The Kelo decision merely mirrors the growth of this phenomenon within the culture at large. So come September, when your child arrives at school with the special pens, pencils and notebooks he spent hours carefully selecting, don't be surprised if they are dumped into a common bin for collective classroom use. This is but one more step in the long march toward eroding the rights of individuals to support the perceived good of the group".

More here



AUSTRALIAN LEFTISTS ARE DUMBING DOWN EDUCATION TOO

To graduate from High School in English in the Left-governed Australian State of Victoria, students will soon have to read only ONE book!(VCE stands for Victorian Certificate of Education)

Students would have to read only one book in year 12 English under contentious proposals that have been branded a dumbing down of the VCE compulsory subject. Under the system - dubbed by one critic as "English Lite" and deplored by the State Opposition - students would have to study only two texts instead of three in year 11, and two instead of four in year 12. One of the texts could be a film. The final VCE English exam would also change, with students having to answer only one question on a text instead of two.

Replacing the texts would be a new area of study called "creating and presenting", where students have to produce work for an adult audience, and may read texts for their research. In year 12, they would choose from such themes as "sustainable futures", and "citizenship and globalisation". There would be a shift away from written responses in work assessed during the year, with at least one oral assessment task. There would be a greater emphasis on new technology.

The controversial changes are proposed in a draft paper published by the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority. If approved, the changes will be part of VCE English in 2007. VCAA acting chief executive John Firth said the proposals were an attempt to "rebalance" VCE English. "We certainly haven't taken the texts out of the VCE, and it's still a compulsory part of this proposal as well," he said. "There's been a demand for quite some time that we need to find ways of developing students' capacity to communicate and write, especially in a range of different contexts for a range of different purposes." Mr Firth said that to bring something into VCE English, "you've got to create a bit of space. You just can't keep adding and adding." He said students who wanted to specialise in literature could still take literature as a subject, which counts as their compulsory English.

The proposals have already created heated debate. Tony Thompson, an English teacher at Princes Hill Secondary College, described the proposed changes as "English Lite". "It's a dumbing down, there's no question," Mr Thompson said. He said that in NSW, even students taking English as a second language had to read three texts.

Opposition education spokesman Victor Perton said education standards were falling "rapidly" in Victoria. "We are going to be the dumb white trash of Asia if we don't get our act into gear," he said. Mr Perton said the expectations on spelling and grammar in Victorian schools was less than other countries demanded of their students learning English as a second language. "There is a growing fear among parents and employers that kids leaving school with their VCE are not guaranteed to be able to read, and certainly can't write, can't spell and don't have grammar," he said.

Mr Firth said the early response from teachers had been positive. "We certainly don't see it at all as English Lite," he said.

More here



A RECENT DRUG-DEALER OK TO TEACH?

No. This is not in NYC or Los Angeles. This is in my quiet home town of Brisbane, Australia. Note this excerpt:

"The teacher, 43, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, was threatened with disciplinary action for "failing" to tell the Board of Teacher Registration of her "criminal history". She was told the board had the right to conduct a criminal history check "in order to assess a teacher's good character for the purpose of continuing teacher registration". Assistant Director Debra Cunningham informed Mrs W that the board had discovered she was convicted in the Inala Magistrates Court in April on serious charges - possession of dangerous drugs and producing dangerous drugs, for which she was fined $1000. "The board has considered this history and has decided no disciplinary action is warranted," Ms Cunningham wrote.

So the education authorities DISCOVER that she is a recent drug dealer and decide she is still OK to teach! The twist in the story is that it was all a case of mistaken identity and it was somebody else with a similar name who was the drug-dealer but the fact that the education authorities thought a drug-dealer was fine as a teacher is the amazing bit. Standards? What standards? Leftists are the same everywhere: "There is no such thing as right and wrong" to them. But would YOU like your kids to be in the care and supervision of a drug-dealer?

More here

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

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

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

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11 September, 2005

EDUCATION UNBOUND

I owe this post to Rafe Champion

Australian Ross Farrell has an "Education Unbound" website, dedicated to freeing education from the bonds of ideology and bureaucracy. See here

Ross has a paper (not online) in the current edition of Policy, from the Centre for Independent Studies, reporting on the rise of the modern "edupreneurs", providers of private education.

He has drawn on research in the Third World by Ross Tooley, describing a world of small, independent private schools thriving where some would least expect to find them - in the world's poorest countries such as: Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, India, and China. For the past two years, Tooley and a team of researchers have studied these innovative schools around the world.

Their findings are reported in a paper in the US magazine Education Next and in a report on the site of the E G West Centre. It is apparent from the references cited in these reports that there is a wealth of research on private education that is not even a distant rumour to the uninformed and doctrinaire protagonists of public education.

The successes of private education will not come as a surprise to those who are familiar with Ed West's historical research on the extent of private education before the "for profit" sector was sabotaged by the political entrepreneurs in the public system. So the private sector remained only as the preserve for the very rich and the members of religious communities who could subsidise their schools or recruit essentially unpaid staff.

Ross Tooley is the director of the E G West Centre, based in Newcastle, England, and dedicated to choice, competition and entrepreneurship in education. The site has information on the research program for the centre, including international studies on the prevalence and effectiveness of private education.

There is also a page on the life and scholarship of the late E G West.

The full text of West's book on historical research and the failure of government in education is on line here. Some excerpts from it:

"On my calculations (West, 1978), in 1880, when national compulsion was enacted [in Britain], over 95 per cent of fi fteen-year-olds were literate. This should be compared to the fact that over a century later 40 per cent of 21-year-olds in the UK admit to diffi culties with writing and spelling (Central Statistical Offi ce, 1995: 58)."

In New York: "By this time [1836]the superintendents were expressing complete satisfaction with the provision of schooling. On the quantity of it the report of 1836 asserted: 'Under any view of the subject, it is reasonable to believe, that in the Common Schools, private schools and academies, the number of children actually receiving instruction is equal to the whole number between five and sixteen years of age.' The fact that education could continue to be universal without being free and compulsory seems to have been readily acknowledged. Where there were scholars who had poor parents, the trustees had authority to release them from the payment of fees entirely, and this was done 'at the close of term, in such a manner as to divest the transaction of all the circumstances calculated to wound the feelings of scholars'."

On literacy in the US: "Richman (1994) quotes data showing that from 1650 to 1795 American male literacy climbed from 60 to 90 per cent. Between 1800 and 1840 literacy in the North rose from 75 per cent to between 91 and 97 per cent. In the South the rate grew from about 55 per cent to 81 per cent. Richman also quotes evidence indicating that literacy in Massachusetts was 98 per cent on the eve of legislated compulsion and is about 91 per cent today."

Virtual Classrooms Abound on Internet

"Just as online college and graduate programs have broadened the range of options in higher education, virtual charter schools and online classes are gaining popularity among the K-12 set.

To the delight of homeschooling parents and others wanting a different kind of education for their children than what is found in the local public school, entrepreneurs are flooding the Internet marketplace to offer everything from individual courses to entire schools. Improving technology is providing more opportunities for interactive features on Web sites, such as live chats, videos, and downloads.

Virtual K-12 education began to develop over the past five years as a way to support homeschool students. First, books and materials were made available for purchase and mail order, followed by programs that facilitated learning, and then video-linked instructors.

"The ability to create a 'classroom of one,' where each student has a focused learning experience with their teacher, is truly within reach," said Dan Cookson, CEO of TrueNorthLogic, a company serving 850,000 students, teachers, and administrators nationwide.

Accommodating Interests, Schedules

Supplemental programs and tools--often targeted toward students who rely on their parents and/or online schools for the majority of their education--are also being used in traditional classrooms.

Programs can be used to supplement the main lesson plan, providing children with another means to learn. Some parents of children in traditional schools use online education programs at home to enrich their children's education, give them remedial work, or assist them with unique situations such as a disability or unusual extracurricular or athletic training schedules.

In a climate where test scores rule, programs such as those available through InteractiveMathTutor.com provide distance-learning opportunities for students in alternative programs and traditional students requiring special assistance to hone their math skills for class work and standardized tests. According to its Web site, InteractiveMathTutor.com strives to enhance the experience of learning for online students by providing around-the-clock access to personalized tutoring, with "a daily and direct communication line to receiving quality, highly effective help in a timely manner."

Critics of online education point out the absence of live teachers and social interaction. But Cookson said students are separated from their teachers "only by distance, not by the level of attention or involvement. The online environment can be a student-centric model that increases communication capacity among teachers, students, parents, and administrators."

Improving Socialization

Steve Peha, president of Teaching That Makes Sense, Inc., a 10-year-old company that offers Web-based content management systems to school districts as well as online tutorials for writers and other supplemental services, notes some potential pitfalls. "There's no question that online learning resources are beneficial. The question is under what circumstances," Peha explained. "While online learning may soon replace in-school learning, the results will be very different. Access to information will be better. And the cost will be lower. But the quality of the final result may not be what we want for our children or for our country."

Learning is an inherently social process, Peha said, so when kids learn something in an online setting, the best "supplemental" activity is interacting with people in a different context, where they can put their new learning to use. After working with students in both online and classroom settings, Peha says, "the greatest success comes from the student's own initiative." As a result, he concludes, the ideal situation combines online and classroom learning.

More here

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

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

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

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10 September, 2005

BRITAIN AGAIN MAKES A MOCKERY OF ITS HIGH SCHOOL DIPLOMAS

Teenagers needed marks of only 47% to score a top A* grade in a GCSE paper this year, exam chiefs confirmed. Pupils taking one maths paper worth 25% of the total exam grade were required to get a mark of [only] 16% for a C grade.

The Times Educational Supplement reported that marks of only 45% or less were needed to get a grade C on more than 100 GCSE papers set by the AQA exam board. And a mark of 47% on an AQA business studies paper would get a student the top possible grade of A*.

But exam chiefs defended the standard of the papers. Exam board Edexcel confirmed that students needed 16% on one higher tier maths paper, which was worth a quarter of the overall marks, to get a grade C on that paper. But spokeswoman for the board insisted that standards were just as tough as in previous years. "Students have to perform consistently across all stages to gain the grade," she said. "Edexcel's chief examiners and accountable officer are confident that the grade boundaries set this year are commensurate with boundaries from past years. "To gain the maths GCSE students have to sit seven tests and submit one piece of coursework."

Source



IN BRITAIN PREDICTIONS ARE TO MATTER MORE THAN RESULTS!

More socialist madness: You can help a kid get into a good universirty by predicting that he will do badly in his final High School examinations! Unbelievable but true

The top universities are being pressed to operate a new admission system that would favour poorer students from state schools. Youngsters at inner-city comprehensives who do better at A level than their teachers predict would have a second chance to impress admissions tutors.

The move forms part of proposals for an overhaul of the university applications system set out by the Government today. Bill Rammell, the Higher Education Minister, told The Times that it would make admissions fairer. “The research-intensive universities could hold back a proportion of their places if they want to get the best students,” he said. “The evidence is that there are some very good students from the poorest backgrounds that they currently don’t get because they overperform, based on their predicted grades.”

The proposal is certain to revive accusations that the Government is mounting a renewed attempt at social engineering to push elite universities to alter their intakes. Teenagers at independent and grammar schools predicted to get top grades in their exams would be competing for fewer places if admissions tutors held back a proportion of offers for youngsters who may not even have applied at that stage.

Rejected students would be eligible to reapply if they achieved their grades but universities would be far more likely at that stage to favour candidates from poorer backgrounds who had confounded their teachers’ predictions. Admissions tutors use application forms that contain predictions of candidates’ likely A-level grades. Mr Rammell said that just 45 per cent of grade predictions were accurate and the system was least fair to the poorest students. “It is clear that predicted grades are not giving the most accurate information on which to base university admissions,” Mr Rammell said. “The evidence is that it is the poorest students in terms of background whose performance is most at variance with their predicted grades.”

Oversubscribed universities in the Russell Group expect candidates to have very high grades, so students with lower predicted grades are usually rejected, if they apply at all. By the time youngsters discover their actual grades, the best universities are already full. Their schools also encourage them to play safe and apply to less prestigious universities to avoid having to seek places in clearing.

A consultation document by the Department for Education and Skills on proposed changes to university applications for 2008-09 highlights research by the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service. It concluded that schools accurately predicted grades for 51 per cent of pupils in the highest social class, but for only 39 per cent of the poorest youngsters. If accepted, the changes would pave the way either to a full or partial switch to a so-called post-qualification application system by 2010-11

Source

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

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

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

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9 September, 2005

DESTROYING FAMILIES THAT WORK

No more of that fuddy-duddy nonsense about a father teaching his sons his trade

Talk with Jude Doty from Yakima, Washington for a few minutes and you know that he is a man passionate about teaching his children. He wants to teach them about work and about biblical values, both of which they won’t learn in the government school system. Did I mention that God has blessed him and his wife, Angela, with seven children? And they consider their children too valuable to turn over to a government teacher all day. In addition, Jude is an asset to his community in Washington, fulfilling the American dream of independent businessman: He made a living through Doty House Moving. He wanted to teach his children his trade by allowing them to work beside him. Thanks to the Washington Department of Labor and Industry (L&I), his teaching the value of work to his children has ended.

You can read a more detailed version of Jude and Angela’s story on his Web site, but the basic plot is that Jude and Angela want to teach their children to be responsible, independent thinkers and doers. You can already figure out that with this recipe, their children are going to have a hard time finding a job in the planned global economy, not a place for independent folks. The more immediate problem, according to the L&I, is that their desire to teach responsibility is not certified, and furthermore, they are not certified; the Dotys, wonderful as they may be, are not at all a part of the socialistic school-to-work agenda of the government schools. Washington has a real problem with this lack of certification, this lack of state approval for Doty as a teacher of his own children. As the government schools scream their “Parent as Teacher” programs to the gullible masses, parents do not qualify to teach their children. Doty’s Web site states:

“Our state law requires homeschoolers to teach occupational education, but if I have my son run after a hammer or help as a ‘spotter’ while moving a house down the road at 5-mph, with police, overhead linemen, flaggers and pilot cars diverting the traffic, and not in the presence of other children, but with his father supervising, they call that ‘employment’ and an ‘unreasonable risk,’ claiming homeschool vocational training is not “bona fide’.”

If you’ve read John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education, you know that compulsory government schooling is all about dumbing down our citizens so that our children will fit easily into the giant planned economy puzzle. In case you still think that school exists to help your child succeed as an independent thinker, worker, and self-sufficient leader, take a look at these words from Gatto’s book, available free online: “[S]chool was engineered to serve a concealed command economy and a deliberately re-stratified social order. It wasn’t made for the benefit of kids and families as those individuals and institutions would define their own needs. School is the first impression children get of organized society; like most first impressions, it is the lasting one. Life according to school is dull and stupid, only consumption promises relief: Coke, Big Macs, fashion jeans, that’s where real meaning is found, that is the classroom’s lesson, however indirectly delivered.” .....

While the Dotys were trying to help their children to grow up with the thinking and working abilities of a George Washington or a Ben Franklin, both of whom were homeschooled, the Washington government had a different plan: “Governor Christine Gregoire, formerly as Attorney General, acknowledged that a parent could train a child in ‘work-place skills and experience’ like the schools, but unlike the schools and other nonprofit businesses such as Habitat for Humanities, her office claimed the parents cannot receive ‘an appreciable benefit from the student’s work,’ without it being ‘employment,’ and that running after a hammer was “an appreciable benefit.’ The [Attorney General’s] office will prosecute the parents if ‘the activities are more than just a learning experience or a parent teaching skills to a child, but a situation where the minor is contributing to the profit of the particular enterprise’.”

The Department of L&I defined crime in a strange and unusual way for the Doty family, stating that Jude failed to make his children full employees of his business, refusing to pay workers’ compensation and such for them. Never mind that Jude Doty took a stand and said that his children were his children, not his employees; when the department looked at the Doty family, they decided to change how they looked at family employment. Jude told me earlier this week that this new vision of the Department of L&I goes against previous decisions: “All the case and statutory law I have found defends the right of the parents to work with their children.”

If you own a business and think you’re immune from such treatment, think again. If your child brings in mail regarding that business from the mailbox to your office, you could be forced to stop that child from bringing in the mail or lose your child. If that sounds too strange to be true, take a look at the Doty family’s Web site; that scenario happened to a developer’s family in Yakima and the child had to stop bringing in mail and packages. There was an especially tragic ending to this developer’s family’s story—after being forced to stop work, his child began running with the wrong crowd and died. And if you think the Dotys’ case is some aberrance that would never happen to anyone else, Jude told me this week that he “recently heard of three other homeschooling pastors and contractors that got cited for working with their sons.” After realizing how easy it is for the government to punish families that work, it’s easy to agree with Jude that “the risk to youth that are denied work opportunities is far worse than any work.”

Throughout January of 2003, Doty was “watched around 30 hours a week by [Washington Department of Labor and Industry] inspectors.” One month later, he “received fines of $34,000 for ‘employing’ two of his children, then 11 and almost 14.” According to the state of Washington, this caring father subjected his children “to an ‘unreasonable risk,’ primarily working on [his] own property.” Things escalated from there, with Doty refusing to acquiesce to the bullying of the L&I and the L&I continuing to cite and fine him for allowing his children to work, including my personal favorite, one for $1,000 per day for “no parent/school authorization.” Say what?!? The Department of Labor and Industry deemed Jude Doty a “repeat offender” and “felon,” saying that his use of children as employees was unfair to other companies and promising to “level the playing field,” the department placed a lien on his properties and seized everything from his family van to his bank account. Mission accomplished: field leveled. But does anyone actually believe that these fines were about leveling the field?

And lest we forget, I must stress that this whole ordeal is in the best interest of the children. How else could you explain the wonderful appearance of one of my own personal favorite government agencies, Child Protective Services? Jude writes the following account on his site: “On January 31st, CPS agents, working with L & I, tried to abject my son, Zach, while he was with me in the L & I building. Next, L & I got a Court Order to keep my children off all work sites, off all equipment, and less than ten feet off the ground and it ‘directed . . . all persons in active concert . . . to remove’ my boys from any work site or equipment! Remember, I owned the work site! Can you imagine that a neighbor or police can now forcibly remove your children from your family business and private property because they worked with their dad?”

Much more here



Self-Education: Lost Crown Jewel of Learning

As I taught myself for the last two years of High School, back in the 1960s, I identify strongly with the article excerpted below. I ended up with a Ph.D. and a list of academic publications as long as your arm so we are not only talking about the distant past here:

Who is this youngster?

He started school at age seven and returned home in tears after three months. His teacher had called him “addled.” His mother took over, reading with him. A science book was a favorite. At twelve he persuaded his mother to let him apply for the post of newsboy on the Port Huron-to-Detroit train (which left at 7 a.m. and returned at 9:30 p.m. with a five-hour layover in Detroit for library time). He sold fruits and produce from Port Huron in Detroit and evening papers on his return trip. At age fifteen he bought a printing press and started a train-oriented newspaper. His total formal classroom instruction was three or four months. His productivity as an adult: 1000 patents.

The boy’s name.......Thomas Edison (from my notes on Edison: The Man Who Made The Future by Ronald W. Clark, 1977, pp. 9-15.) Imagine young Edison’s fate had he – and his mother – tried something like that under today’s benevolent regime of child-labor sanctions and compulsory schooling.

American children are over-programmed. They spend radically more hours sitting in classrooms during their young lives than did children just two or three generations earlier. Their bodies and minds were not made for this. To what degree they are over-programmed – and to what effect – is suggested by considering two extremes in scheduling the young.

The Japanese are tops in programming the young: 240-day school year, hours of daily homework, juku (cram schools) after regular school two or three times per week, high stakes tests for admission to middle and high schools, "Examination Hell" for university admission.

What sort of young person emerges? Vapid. Wondrously immature. Washed-out. So contends professor Jane Barnes Mack-Cozzo, twelve-year veteran of Japanese university teaching ("If You Think We Have Problems..." The American Enterprise, September, 2002). Once admitted to university, "virtually all learning and study cease." Many students do not even attend class. Those that do "exhibit behavior befitting youngsters half their age...." Their "childishness...endemic in the society as a whole (Douglas MacArthur called Japan a 'nation of 12-year-olds') is reinforced perhaps because the rest of these students' lives is so asphyxiatingly programmed."

At the other extreme: Abraham Lincoln recalled attending "some schools, so called" but for less than a year altogether. "Still, somehow I could read, write, and cipher to the Rule of Three; but that was all." In an 1860 autobiography, writing in the third person, Lincoln declared: "He was never in a college or Academy [high school] as a student and never inside of a college or academy building till since he had a law- licence."

In 1997 Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Lincoln biographer David Herbert Donald delivered an address to the Lincoln Fellowship of Pennsylvania, “Education Defective: Abraham Lincoln's Preparation for Greatness.” “Education Defective” is a remarkable 3,000-word account of what we know of Lincoln’s education. It deserves careful study. Selected excerpts:

We need to remind ourselves that in the 1820's and 1830's a school term usually ran only two or three months, especially in the Western states. Lincoln's ‘agregate’ of one year's total attendance, then, really meant five or six years of schooling, so that it is fair to say that he had the equivalent of a sixth-grade education--considerably above the national average at that time..... [This education] gave him a sufficient mastery of the basic tools of language. Dilworth's Spelling-Book...provided an introduction to grammar and spelling...the final sections included prose and verse selections....Other readers, like The Kentucky Preceptor, expanded and reinforced what he learned form Dilworth's.

These books encouraged young Lincoln's love for reading, and he read everything he could get his hands on. There were not many books on the Indiana frontier, and he pored over The Pilgrim's Progress and Aesop's Fables, until he virtually memorized them. Quotations from both showed up repeatedly in his presidential writings. He was fascinated by history, and learned lessons in patriotism from Parson Mason Weems's Life of George Washington.

From William Scott's Lessons in Elocution he gained basic rules for public speaking, and the selections in this book were probably his introduction to Shakespeare. He memorized from Scott's Elocution set pieces like King Claudius's soliloquy on his murder of Hamlet's father....

What kind of writer did this narrow, self-directed education produce? The Gettysburg Address

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

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

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

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8 September, 2005

DESPERATE BRITISH SOCIALISTS GOING PRIVATE

Parents' groups will receive public money to run their own schools under plans being drawn up by Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary. Ms Kelly told local government leaders yesterday that she intended to end their dominance of state education by inviting other groups to open and run schools. A White Paper this autumn will include radical proposals to replace failing schools with ones run by parents, companies or charities.

Ms Kelly also made clear that 1,000 schools considered to be "coasting" would face pressure to respond to demands for better standards.

Her proposals indicated an important extension of private sector involvement in state education, despite growing hostility from teachers' unions towards plans to open 200 academies by 2010. Academies are sponsored and controlled by businesses and other private organisations, but funded by the Government.

Ms Kelly told a Local Government Association conference in London that she planned to expand parental choice. "We need to harness all the energy and skill we can in the provision of state education so that we can raise standards for every pupil," she said. "I am interested in seeing how we can work with a variety of potential not-for-profit organisations - educational charities, faith and parents' groups, perhaps mutual organisations - in order to drive the next phase of reform."

The role of councils would be as "the commissioner rather than the provider" of education, supporting parents in relations with schools. "Councils don't add value through micro-managing heads, employing the teachers or owning the bricks and the land that schools sit on," she said. "But they can add significant value through the new commissioning role. This will see councils with a single-minded focus on listening and responding to the views of parents and pupils."

The proposals are in line with Labour's manifesto, which promised parents more power. It said: "Where new educational providers can help boost standards and opportunities in a locality, we will welcome them subject to parental demand, fair funding and fair admissions."

Ms Kelly said that coasting schools were doing too little to improve. She confirmed that she would halve the time for failing schools to improve to 12 months. Those judged to have made inadequate progress would be closed or replaced. "We cannot ask children to be patient while their school gets a second, third or fourth chance to improve," she said.

Ms Kelly's radical proposals indicate Tony Blair's determination to accelerate the pace of education reform in his final term and could end 60 years of local government control of education, which has seen the growth of town hall empires resistant to reform. The aim is to transfer power from bureaucrats to parents, to force schools to respond more rapidly, and to overturn the Labour orthodoxy that councils should control education.

David Bell, the head of Ofsted, backed the plan. But unions accused Ms Kelly of seeking to speed up school closures to meet the target for opening academies. Steve Sinnott, the general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: "The suspicion remains that there is a secret agenda to achieve the Government's target on academies."

Source



Teaching of Creationism Is Endorsed in New Survey

An excellent argument for school choice, it seems to me

In a finding that is likely to intensify the debate over what to teach students about the origins of life, a poll released yesterday found that nearly two-thirds of Americans say that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in public schools. The poll found that 42 percent of respondents held strict creationist views, agreeing that "living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time."

In contrast, 48 percent said they believed that humans had evolved over time. But of those, 18 percent said that evolution was "guided by a supreme being," and 26 percent said that evolution occurred through natural selection. In all, 64 percent said they were open to the idea of teaching creationism in addition to evolution, while 38 percent favored replacing evolution with creationism.

The poll was conducted July 7-17 by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. The questions about evolution were asked of 2,000 people. The margin of error was 2.5 percentage points.

John C. Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum, said he was surprised to see that teaching both evolution and creationism was favored not only by conservative Christians, but also by majorities of secular respondents, liberal Democrats and those who accept the theory of natural selection. Mr. Green called it a reflection of "American pragmatism." "It's like they're saying, 'Some people see it this way, some see it that way, so just teach it all and let the kids figure it out.' It seems like a nice compromise, but it infuriates both the creationists and the scientists," said Mr. Green, who is also a professor at the University of Akron in Ohio.

Eugenie C. Scott, the director of the National Center for Science Education and a prominent defender of evolution, said the findings were not surprising because "Americans react very positively to the fairness or equal time kind of argument." "In fact, it's the strongest thing that creationists have got going for them because their science is dismal," Ms. Scott said. "But they do have American culture on their side."

This year, the National Center for Science Education has tracked 70 new controversies over evolution in 26 states, some in school districts, others in the state legislatures. President Bush joined the debate on Aug. 2, telling reporters that both evolution and the theory of intelligent design should be taught in schools "so people can understand what the debate is about." Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican leader, took the same position a few weeks later.

Intelligent design, a descendant of creationism, is the belief that life is so intricate that only a supreme being could have designed it.

The poll showed 41 percent of respondents wanted parents to have the primary say over how evolution is taught, compared with 28 percent who said teachers and scientists should decide and 21 percent who said school boards should. Asked whether they believed creationism should be taught instead of evolution, 38 percent were in favor, and 49 percent were opposed. More of those who believe in creationism said they were "very certain" of their views (63 percent), compared with those who believe in evolution (32 percent).

More here

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

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

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

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7 September, 2005

A REVEALING BRITISH MATH TEST

A leading university has scrapped a maths test that it set new undergraduates for more than 15 years because scores fell so low that it became meaningless. First-year electronics students at York University have taken the 50-question multiple-choice exam since the 1980s to assess their ability.

But the results have proved illuminating in other ways. Over the years performance in the maths test has fallen as the number with top A-level grades has soared. Analysis of the results found that between 1991 and 1998 the average score in the York University maths test of a student with an A grade fell from 70 to 60 per cent, while B-grade students' scores slipped from 62 to 40 per cent.

In the past few years average marks have plummeted so far - to an all time low of 21 out of 50 - that Prof Ken Todd, the head of electronics, abandoned the test. "The scores were so bad we had to discontinue it," he said. "They were not really telling us anything, except that today's students could not do what first-years could do 20 years ago - particularly in algebra and the manipulation of powers and logarithms."

His findings mirror general concerns about the maths curriculum and teaching in secondary schools. David Cameron, the shadow education secretary, said: "This illustrates yet another example of how the Government has failed to get it right." Ministers acknowledged a problem in 2002 and ordered an inquiry, led by Prof Adrian Smith, the principal of Queen Mary College, in London. In his report, published last year, Prof Smith said there was a "crisis-level" shortfall of 3,400 maths teachers in secondary schools. The highest maths qualification of more than a third of those teaching the subject was A-level. Perhaps as a consequence, maths has gone from the largest A-level subject entry to third place, with 49,000 now taking it compared with 80,000 in 1989.

Prof Smith also identified worrying problems within the curriculum, saying: "Employers and higher education say that people come to university with a grade A at A-level and can't do the basic maths that you expect them to do at the beginning of the course." He condemned the government's reforms, which split A-levels into AS-levels and A2s, as a "complete disaster for mathematics". Pupils dropped maths, perceived as a hard subject, for courses in which it was easier to gain good grades. Some of those who stuck with the subject avoided tougher maths units, which meant that students started university with different levels of expertise.

Prof Todd, who has introduced a computerised test based on the A-level curriculum, said: "We need 3,000 specialist maths teachers in schools but I don't know how that is going to happen when university departments struggle to fill places."

Source



MUSLIM PROBLEMS IN AUSTRALIA TOO

Or more precisely, gutless authorities letting the problems get out of hand. Post lifted from Mark Richardson

Ten years ago Moreland City College in the Melbourne suburb of Coburg had an enrolment of over 1000 students. Last year numbers had fallen to 270 and the school was closed.

Why? It seems that multiculturalism didn't work in this Coburg school. A group of highly disruptive students gave the school a bad reputation from which it never recovered. And there is now evidence that these disruptive students were Lebanese Muslims who hated Australia and wanted to replace it with an Islamic state.

A former teacher, Chris Doig, tried to raise the alarm when some of his students danced with joy after the September 11 attacks. His concerns were ignored by authorities. Mr Doig said of these Lebanese students that "Some of the disruptive ones would say that Australia was degenerate and our legal system would be replaced by Shariah law in the not too distant future."

He also said of the disgruntled students that "Some of these were so disruptive and even violent that staff and other students abandoned the school when they could."

Nor is Mr Doig a lone voice. Two other teachers have supported his claims. One of these says that the disruptive students used to boast that Australia would become a majority Islamic country in 50 years. "They would do this by converting the infidel and by out-breeding the rest of the community."

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

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

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

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6 September, 2005

AFTER YEARS OF B.S. EDUCATION, LOTS OF AUSTRALIAN KIDS WANT NO MORE OF IT

And a down-to-earth government is encouraging kids to consider high-paying trades rather than university

A shrinking proportion Year 12 students is heading to the nation's universities and TAFE colleges, despite warnings of a looming skills crisis. New figures provided by the Department of Education and Training reveal that the percentage of young Australians who complete Year 12 and go straight to university has fallen 20 per cent since the Howard Government was elected.

And while more university and TAFE places are available to students, the proportion of Year 12 leavers going to TAFE has also dropped by 11 per cent since 1996. Opposition education spokeswoman Jenny Macklin seized on the figures yesterday as new evidence that the Howard Government was "driving Australia down the low-skill, low-growth road". "If we want higher living standards and increased productivity, the proportion of young Australians finishing school and going on to university or TAFE should be increasing - not dropping," Ms Macklin said.

John Howard has urged students to consider leaving school before Year 12 if they can get a job or apprenticeship. Federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson has warned that the high drop-out rate among university students suggests many should think twice before choosing higher education over vocational training. A spokesman for Dr Nelson said the number of university places had gone up, despite a reduction in the number of Year 12 students going straight from school to university. "Labor's selective quoting of statistics leaves them blind to the simple fact that a surging employment market has provided young Australians with opportunities they couldn't get when Labor was last in government," he said.

"Youth unemployment is at a 15-year low, there's been a 166 per cent increase in the number of people in training, and university participation among 20-year-olds continues to climb, now almost 30 per cent compared to 23 per cent in 1996."

More here



NO TEACHERS FOR MANY BRITISH SCHOOLS

If this were a business, they would be sued out of existence. Though I wouldn't mind betting that lots of "Moms 'n Dads" would be better teachers than the products of today's "postmodernist" teacher-training colleges

They were once described as the "Mums' Army", helping out in schools, having few qualifications beyond GCSEs, and paid less than check-out girls. From this week, however, thousands of classroom assistants will be standing in for qualified teachers in a move that has caused a furious row in the profession. Under legislation that came in to force this month, teachers in the 22,000 primary and secondary schools in England and Wales are guaranteed 10 per cent of their time away from pupils to plan lessons.

But head teachers say that they have not been given enough money to employ more teachers to fill the gaps in the timetable left by this "non-contact" time. Instead, an ever-expanding workforce of classroom assistants, which has grown by 80,000 since 1997 to 153,000, will provide cover and give pre-prepared lessons. Those with relevant experience and GCSE mathematics and English can apply to be "high-level teaching assistants", increasing their salary from between £8,000 and £12,000 a year to £19,000. The qualification can be earned in only three days and equips assistants to take whole classes, rather than help only individual pupils or small groups.

Chris Keates, the general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters, Union of Women Teachers, said: "The legal entitlement to non-contact time is a very important development. Even in secondary schools where teachers have had some time away from pupils, it was never guaranteed and was often eroded."

But the National Union of Teachers says that assistants are not adequate substitutes for teachers. And the National Association of Head Teachers, which initially signed up to the deal, now says that it will erode academic and behavioural standards. Neil Foden, the headmaster of Friars School in Bangor, has spent £40,000 employing two supply teachers to provide cover rather than use unqualified assistants. "Under the new entitlement, pupils could be spending a marked percentage of their timetable not being properly taught and effectively being baby-sat," he said. "A supply teacher might not be as effective as a subject specialist but they are a hell of a lot better than a classroom assistant. The consequences of not having qualified teachers in front of classrooms is the drip, drip of pupils missing lessons here and there. It all adds up and has an effect on behaviour."

Even some classroom assistants fear that standards will suffer. Theresa McGuinness, 41, a high-level teaching assistant, said some schools were trying to provide cover "on the cheap". She said: "Some teaching assistants will be asked to do things that they don't want to do and are not qualified to do. Rather than having high-level teaching assistants, local authorities are splitting contracts and employing classroom assistants for 25 hours' normal work and 10 hours' whole-class work." Mrs McGuinness, who works in a school in North Yorkshire, said that parents had been kept in the dark about the changes. She said: "The Government has been neglectful in explaining to parents what will happen in case you have them asking 'How can she take a whole class, she only usually sticks things on walls?' There are lots of areas where people who have not got the qualifications will be thrown in at the deep end. "I have heard that in one local authority in the South, dinner ladies are being told they will have to look after kids for an extra half an hour. If this is done on the cheap it will not be me, or the dinner lady, who suffers the most, it will be the children."

Rather than attempt to stick to the normal timetable, some schools have opted to run "enrichment" activities, drafting in sports coaches, artists and even members of the Women's Institute to supervise children. In other schools, classes will be amalgamated or pupils will be looked after by "cover supervisors". At Holy Trinity Church of England Primary, in Halifax, West Yorkshire, 400 pupils will have an hourly music session in the hall every Friday with just one teacher.

Maureen Skevington, a deputy head at Harton Junior School, in South Shields, Tyne and Wear, said: "In many schools the budget restraints are such that there will be doubling up of classes and people brought in for activities like PE who are not properly qualified to assess what level the children are at. It is not a development that parents have asked for or would wish for."

Source

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

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

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

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5 September, 2005

EVEN VOCATIONAL JOBS NEED ACADEMIC SKILLS

A basic element of the problem is the "schooling" that has passed for education in the decades since the mid '60s that has resulted in a lack of thinking and reasoning ability. A problem that parallels the infamous "Great society" of the "Johnsonomics" era that created the growing dependence on government for everything. It is analogous to succeeding generations of farm cats, as I know from experience growing up on a farm in Minnesota; when table scraps are thrown out the back door, that is seens as sustenance to the point that cats would become dependent on it to the extent of losing their natural proclivity for hunting as a means of independently providing for themselves. If the table scraps are not forthcoming, and the cats become hungry, they began howling at the door and many would not know what to do if mice were scurrying around.

As part of my education reform efforts, I have developed the following phrase that illustrates my point regarding the lack of thinking and reasoning ability and an academic data base required:

The mind cannot function with out a strong academic base. The human mind is basically an organic computer of potentially infinite capacity. Unless it is loaded with quality academic "software" to create an "operating system" for thinking and reasoning ability, and establish an academic data base of facts and knowledge on which to draw when arriving at a conclusion based on data input from the senses, it cannot function any better than an electronic computer lacking proper software. If academic information is not downloaded, and installed via drilling in the facts and knowledge, it cannot be effectively applied. The computer industry axiom GIGO (garbage in=garbage out) applies. This is true whether the individual is attending college, a vocational school, technical school, entering the workforce, or just getting along in life after high school graduation.

As a former high school Industrial Education teacher ('66-'72), I tried to teach the concepts of industry as a prevocational and exploration program rather than a "shop" class to placate the malconents and "dummies" in a high school daycare situation. The objective was the introduction of students to potential career options other than college that required the identical academic high school education regarded as needed only by students in college preparation programs. A vocational and technical education to gain the requisite skills and knowledge, applied in the workforce, has always required an academic high school education. That was true of becoming a machinist in the manually operated machine tool days of manufacturing, and is of even greater importance since the early '70s when computer "high tech" was applied to operate machine tools via a computer operating electronic devices replacing manual controls of the past.

Source



Report Cards that no Longer Mean Anything

This report is from New Zealand but it could be from lots of places. Schools now often try not to tell parents how well their kids are doing at school because it will hurt the self-esteem of those who don't do well, or some such. So end of term and end of year reports tell parents that every kid is "satisfactory" or some such. That lazy kids need their self-esteem hurt a bit is not admitted. It has got to the point where parents have no idea what a report card means any more. But the conservatives in New Zealand have had enough. They are pledging to bring back report cards that mean something. Excerpt:

"National Party Leader Don Brash today announced that National will introduce 'Plain English Reporting' in schools so that parents know how well their children are doing in the classroom and can get help if necessary. ''Parents have the right to know if their child is reading, writing and using numbers at the expected standard or if they are falling behind. But too often they are served up with politically correct reports that give them no clear idea of their child's progress," says Dr Brash.

Source

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

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

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

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3 September, 2005

SOME INTERESTING FACTS AND FIGURES ABOUT U.S. SCHOOLS

From the CSM. The conclusions I see: There are more teachers per pupil than ever but whites have still left the public schools in droves

September: It's a time for memorizing locker combinations, cracking open new textbooks, attending parent/ teacher conferences, and generally getting back into the swing of another academic year. It's also a time to step back and look at overarching educational trends, as the Associated Press recently did in compiling some notable comparisons using statistics drawn from national averages and percentages at public schools across the US. A sampling:

Student/teacher ratio
1960: 25.8 to 1
1980: 18.7 to 1
2002: 16.1 to 1

Teacher pay
1995: $36,675
2000: $41,807
2005: $47,750

Enrollment by school level
Elementary: 439
Middle: 617
High school: 760

Racial/ethnic distribution
1973
White: 78.1%
Minority: 21.9%

2003
White: 58.3%
Minority: 41.7%

Kindergarten enrollment (full-day)
1973: 20%
2003: 65%



TEACHERS GETTING DUMBER IN AUSTRALIA TOO

The age and academic prowess of students entering teaching courses has been questioned by the authority charged with policing the profession. Queensland's Board of Teacher Registration has called for an investigation into requirements to enter teaching courses and the quality of educators produced. The concerns of the independent statutory board were raised in its submission to a federal parliamentary inquiry into teacher training throughout Australia. ...

The board said it was aware of criticisms of universities for not setting a high enough benchmark for entry to teacher courses. "We believe there is a need for research in this area, looking specifically at whether there are links between specific requirements for entry to teacher education programs and the quality of teachers prepared within those programs, both upon graduation and over time," it said. The board singled out tertiary entrance scores as one area the research needed to focus on.

In its inquiry submission, the State Government voiced similar concerns, saying minimum academic standards may be needed rather than simply filling university quotas. Additional criteria for selecting students for teaching courses should also be considered, the Government said. In March, The Courier-Mail revealed that entry levels to some teaching courses had dropped to allow in the lowest third of high school graduates. One examples was Central Queensland University's primary and secondary teaching degrees where an OP17 was required, in a band scale where an OP1 was the highest and OP25 the lowest.

The issues raised by the board are similar to those mentioned by Federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson. In February, Dr Nelson denounced some teaching schools as "quasi-sociology departments".

More here

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

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

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

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2 September, 2005

Vouchers hit the burbs "For years, school choice seemed stalled on a freeway at the edge of town. Urban voucher programs in Cleveland and Milwaukee were successful. But only the involvement of middle-class suburbs will trigger the market revolution that reformers seek, and the suburbs presented an unassailable front. Statewide ballot measures in favor of vouchers lost big in California and Michigan in 2000. Proposals to expand education tax credits in Minnesota and Arizona died, and Ohio's permanent 'pilot' program remained strictly limited to the City of Cleveland. ... This year school choice got a jumpstart. With Ohio leading the way, reformers are finally taking choice to the suburbs. Governor Bob Taft signed a budget this summer authorizing 14,000 new school vouchers. This more than triples the size of Ohio's voucher student cadre, currently 5,675 Clevelanders in grades K-10. But numbers don't capture the importance of the Ohio legislation. The new program matters because it takes choice statewide."



Hooray for the student right : l "During the 1980s, Ronald Reagan ushered in a new era of American conservatism that few can forget. But I don't remember one thing about it. Honestly, the first president who actually meant anything to me, besides being a fact in a book, was Bill Clinton. Like most of today's college students who were born during the Reagan administration, I grew up with the liberalism of the 1990s. So it only makes sense that those liberal values and ideas are considered 'normal' for most of my generation. Indeed, there was a time when any twentysomething outside the realm of the left was considered an oddity and was ostracized for her political stance, particularly here in the Northeast. Consequently young conservatives tended to hide their opinions and go along, albeit silently, with the liberal stampede of their peers. But with the rightward political tone of the country, many young conservatives finally feel safe to come out of the closet."



1 September, 2005

TOTAL BRITISH NUTTINESS

You can use the f-word in class (but only five times)

A secondary school is to allow pupils to swear at teachers - as long as they don't do so more than five times in a lesson. A running tally of how many times the f-word has been used will be kept on the board. If a class goes over the limit, they will be 'spoken' to at the end of the lesson. The astonishing policy, which the school says will improve the behaviour of pupils, was condemned by parents' groups and MPs yesterday. They warned it would backfire. Parents were advised of the plan, which comes into effect when term starts next week, in a letter from the Weavers School in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire.

Assistant headmaster Richard White said the policy was aimed at 15 and 16-year-olds in two classes which are considered troublesome. "Within each lesson the teacher will initially tolerate (although not condone) the use of the f-word (or derivatives) five times and these will be tallied on the board so all students can see the running score," he wrote in the letter "Over this number the class will be spoken to by the teacher at the end of the lesson."

Parents called the rule 'wholly irresponsible and ludicrous'. "This appears to be a misguided attempt to speak to kids on their own level," said the father of one pupil. Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said: "In these sort of situations teachers should be setting clear principles of 'do and don't'. "They should not be compromising in an apparent attempt to please the pupils. This will send out completely the wrong message. "Youngsters will play up to this and ensure they use their five goes, demeaning the authority of the teacher."

Tory MP Ann Widdecombe said the policy was based on 'Alice in Wonderland reasoning'. "What next?" she asked. "Do we allow people to speed five times or burgle five times? You don't improve something by allowing it, you improve something by discouraging it."

The 1,130-pupil school, which was criticised as 'not effective' by Ofsted inspectors last November, also plans to send 'praise postcards' to the parents of children who do not swear and who turn up on time for lessons. Headmaster Alan Large said he had received no complaints about the policy. "The reality is that the fword is part of these young adults' everyday language," he said. "As a temporary policy we are giving them a bit of leeway, but want them to think about the way they talk and how they might do better."

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AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITIES HELP MAKE UP FOR BRITISH INADEQUACIES

Australian students used to go to Britain to study but after years of Tony Blair's socialism, it is getting to be the other way around

Universities in Australia and New Zealand are to offer thousands of pounds of scholarships to British students who have failed to gain a place in clearing and wish to study abroad, The Times has learnt. Prompted by reports that up to 60,000 school-leavers may fail to gain a university place in Britain this year because of the rush to avoid 3,000 pound top-up fees, seven universities from Queensland to Canterbury have pledged financial assistance. Annual undergraduate fees usually range between 4,100 pounds and 5,400 pounds. But with a lower cost of living, academics say that it is now academically and financially worthwhile for British students to study in the southern hemisphere.

"Tuition fees are the biggest change British universities have had in years," Chris Madden, pro-Vice Chancellor of Griffith University in Queensland. "Before they were importers, but now with tuition fees, and given the exchange rates, the cost of studying here is not much more than staying at home." Griffith University, which has 30,000 students of which 7,000 are international, is offering a full scholarship for tuition fees, which is open to all except medical students.

Gemma Shaw, 21, from Ipswich has just returned from a six-month exchange in psychology at Griffith. She is about to enter her final year at Oxford Brookes and said that in spite of the cost of flights, living next to Surfers' Paradise was cheaper than Oxford and there was a far stronger sense of service to students in Queensland. She said: "I had an amazing apartment on the beach and we all paid 45 pounds a week each, compared to my tiny room in Oxford for 80 pounds." She travelled around the country over the holidays and worked as a waitress twice a week during the term to pay her way.

Last year about 1,400 British students chose to study in New Zealand and Australia. Many were attracted to courses, such as dentistry, veterinary science and physiotherapy, that are oversubscribed at home. Exchange students pay no more than they would to their own university, but those studying abroad pay a year's fees upfront in order to qualify for a place and a student visa.

Australia introduced university tuition fees in 1973, but now Macquarie University, Curtin University of Technology, Tasmania University, Newcastle University, James Cook and the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, are all offering scholarships to lure British students. Macquarie, Newcastle and Tasmania are all ranked in the Shanghai Jiao Tang top 500 of world universities.

Sarah McCulloch, 36, moved with her husband and three children to Tasmania to take a degree in education. The qualification is identical to that in England. "International students come a week before term starts, so that they can show you around, take you on day trips and to barbecues, so that no one feels left out," she said. "They make a real effort for you to get to know the Australian way of life here and it goes on all year."

The academic year in the southern hemisphere starts in February and is divided into two semesters, the first running until late June and the second from late July until November. Each scholarship is based on academic merit and applications must be made by late October. For help, students should consult the Study Options website (www.studyoptions.com), a free advice service.

Applicants must be British citizens over 18, holding A levels or the International Baccalaureate. The cost of accomodation, travel and living expenses must all be met by the student. There is no loan available for international students, however, so many will have to look for support from parents, or elsewhere.

More here

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

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

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