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30 September, 2007

Corrupted U.S. college admissions processes

Ability downgraded -- mainly to enable racial discrimination

On a beautiful fall day last week, I found myself on the main quadrangle of the University of Chicago, walking with the school's admissions director, Theodore O'Neill, when a freshman girl approached us. "How's it going?" Mr. O'Neill inquired of her orientation week. "This place is Mecca," she answered.

Mr. O'Neill decides who gets to go on this pilgrimage, and there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of high-school seniors who would kill for the opportunity I have today--to spend an uninterrupted hour talking with him. These eager boys and girls might try to enthrall Mr. O'Neill with their knowledge of the faculty's research, their love of community service, their expansive vocabulary, their passion for wind instruments or veterinary medicine or juggling. Anything that might make them stand out.

When Mr. O'Neill joined the admissions staff here in 1981, things were different: The acceptance rate for undergraduates was 70%. Today, it's about half that (even though the freshman class has doubled to 1,300). A quarter-century ago, the freshmen who ended up at the University of Chicago were mostly just smart kids who graduated from decent high schools, a sizable chunk in rural Midwestern towns.

Now it's a different ballgame. This fall, Mr. O'Neill will sort through several thousand applications, trying to find the perfect freshman class. What has made it so much harder for students to get into top colleges? And what is this cutthroat competition doing to kids?

To begin with, there was a baby boomlet around 1990, the year many of today's high-school seniors were born. Also, despite skyrocketing tuition, more parents can afford to send their kids to college, and higher education is more important for gaining secure employment.

Mr. O'Neill says that "students today have a better sense of what it takes to make themselves look like good candidates." They take as many AP classes as they can, prepare for the SATs, polish their essays, etc. And many parents pay tutors and coaches to help with this effort. But he tells me it is an "open question" whether the university's applicants are actually of a higher quality than those of 25 years ago. How many areas of American life are there today in which people work harder and spend more money only to see the same results they did decades before?

Well, that's not quite true, according to Mr. O'Neill, who proudly points to what he thinks is one of the biggest improvements to the University of Chicago in the past few decades--diversity. The school used to be about two-thirds male and overwhelmingly white. Now the gender ratio is about even, and 7% of the student body is black, 9% is Hispanic and 1% is Native American.

How has this happened? For one thing, Mr. O'Neill tells me, he has de-emphasized the SATs in the admissions process. They're used as "corroborating evidence" for what his staff learns from teacher recommendations, high-school records and essays. Ultimately, Mr. O'Neill believes that "there are some things that are more important than test scores."

A few months ago, black presidential hopeful Barack Obama, a former U of C lecturer, told George Stephanopoulos that he didn't think his daughters should be treated differently in the college admissions process from any other "advantaged" kids. But Mr. O'Neill disagrees. He would give the Obama girls "a break" anyway: "Those children, for all their privileges, will have interesting things to say about American society based on what I'm assuming their experiences are."

On Tuesday, Mr. O'Neill participated in a meeting of the Education Conservancy, which is "committed to improving college admission processes for students, colleges and high schools." Hosted by Yale University, the meeting consisted of 100 college administrators discussing how to get "beyond rankings." College "ranksters"--as Conservancy president Lloyd Thacker refers to U.S. News and similar surveyors--can be blamed, he argues, for much of the crazy atmosphere surrounding college admissions.

At a news conference after the meeting, some of the administrators complained that rankings didn't provide enough data or tried to quantify things that aren't quantifiable. What was needed were more "descriptive" measures of colleges. (Mr. O'Neill expressed the same sentiment when I spoke to him.) The group is trying to develop a system in which high-school students would be asked to evaluate their own "learning styles," and then a Web site would "match" them with colleges providing the right sort of learning environment.

Leave aside the silliness of asking a high-school student for this level of self-knowledge or the fact that most colleges sound the same when describing themselves. The real problem is that such a system would add another fuzzy element to the admissions process. As it is, colleges already discount so many of the concrete measures. In addition to ignoring test scores (when it's convenient), admissions officers have a hard time keeping track of which high schools are rigorous and which are not. The U of C has freshmen matriculating from 900 different high schools this year. What does an "A" mean at any of them? "We don't know," Mr. O'Neill replies. What about the essays? More and more kids pay coaches to compose them. The U of C has picked some odd topics to get around this--"Write an essay somehow inspired by super-huge mustard" or "Use the power of string to explain the biggest or the smallest phenomenon"--but coaches can get creative, too.

I suspect that what bothers kids most about the process is not the cutthroat competition they face, but the arbitrary nature of the whole thing. You struggle to give schools what they want. But ultimately folks like Mr. O'Neill may simply ignore your grades or your test scores, focusing instead on whether you've had the right "experiences" or have the right skin color to be admitted to the sacred city.

Source




Britain: Number of failing schools jumps 18 per cent in a year

The number of all schools judged to be failing rose by 18 per cent between the summer terms last year and this after changes to the inspection regime. Government figures show that 246 schools were in "special measures" by the end of last term, up from 208 at the end of the previous year. The rise was sharpest for primary schools, with 181 in special measures, up from 137 last year. The increase reflects the introduction of an inspection regime that has allowed many more schools to be inspected, to tougher new standards.Ofsted, the schools inspectorate, said that 2.7 per cent of the 6,100 schools inspected had been in special measures, compared with 2.2 per cent of the 8,300 schools inspected this year.

Lord Adonis, the Schools Minister, said schools in special measures must improve within one year or face closure, but emphasised that fewer schools were failing now than ten years ago. Separate figures showed that hundreds of primary schools were unable to appoint permanent head teachers this year. A government analysis found 520 nursery and primary schools had filled head teacher posts on a temporary basis.

Meanwhile, plans for job-related diplomas to run alongside A levels suffered a setback yesterday when nearly half of the country's leading independent schools said that they would not introduce them. The new specialist diplomas, for 14 to 19-year-olds, have been heralded by the Government as the most important education reform in 40 years. Starting from next September, they will combine practical work experience with academic study.

Ministers and officials have emphasised that the diplomas' credibility rests heavily on their acceptance by employers, universities and parents. But a survey of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference group of independent schools yesterday revealed that only two members were considering them seriously.Private schools have been deterred by widespread concerns that the diplomas will not be ready in time and by flaws in their development.

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29 September, 2007

Hitler would be proud

Univ. of California: 'No Jews Allowed'

A U.S. State Department-funded University of California program which provides business training for residents of the Middle East specifically excluded Israeli Jews - until Jewish journalists protested.

The University of California has now altered the program's eligibility requirement that initially barred Israeli Jews. The turnaround in policy also may have saved the State Department, whose Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) finances the program, from having to provide an embarrassing explanation. MEPI also selects the participants.

Jerusalem-based marketing specialist and businesswoman Miriam Schwab uncovered the bias last week when she checked into applying to the university's San Diego branch Beyster Institute program for Middle East Entrepreneur Training (MEET). She discovered that the program was open to citizens of "Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Israel (limited to Israeli Arab citizens), Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, West Bank/Gaza and Yemen."

The Beyster Institute, which manages the program, offers three 10-day seminars, each one with 20 eligible participants. The program includes professional coaching and offers opportunities to make new contacts and "to help promising leaders realize their aspirations to build successful [businesses]... The participation of women is highly encouraged."

The Canadian-born Schwab, who moved to Israel 10 years ago, said she was interested in the program because she employs two women in her Illuminea company in Jerusalem. "This program sounded really interesting until I got to the part about eligibility for application," she wrote on an e-mail list. The MEET program ostensibly "does not discriminate on the basis of sex, race, color, age, religion, national origin, or handicap."

In response to an IsraelNationalNews.com question for confirmation of the restriction in Israel, program manager Mona Yousry verified, "It is only for Arab Israelis." A subsequent question as to why Israeli Jews are not eligible for the program elicited the following reply from the Institute's Director of Entrepreneurial Programs, Rob Fuller: "I'm sorry for the unfortunate misunderstanding about eligibility for the new MEET program. To be clear, for the programs for which we are now recruiting to be held in 2008, ALL Israeli citizens are eligible to participate. Sorry for any confusion we may have inadvertently caused."

Israeli Jews originally were excluded despite the program's stated advantage as "an important cultural exchange." Fuller did not explain the initial "confusion" in barring Israeli Jews. The programs are to be held in Jordan, Egypt and Morocco, all of which have relations with Israel.

Following the e-mail complaints to Beyster, the US Embassy of Yemen online document which announces the program was down for more than a day until the words "limited to Israeli Arab citizens" were deleted. The US official who made the online edit, however, reposted the story in "track changes" format so that the document displays in the left margin, at the time of this writing, the words: "Deleted: Limited to Israeli Arab citizens."

Source




Australian teachers: No taxation without representation

Another sign of dimwittedness from this Leftist government. At least George III had the excuse of insanity

WESTERN Australia's chronic teacher shortage could worsen as thousands of teachers face the sack if they refuse to pay a $70 registration fee. Teachers have been told by the Education Department that they have until October 26 to pay membership fees to the WA College of Teaching, their professional standards body, or face deregistration and termination of contracts. The issue sparked alarm yesterday with the Opposition predicting chaos in schools as students were preparing for their TEE exams.

It is understood that about 3000 teachers, including 1600 of the state's 33,000 classroom teachers, have refused to pay their fees because they are angry over a lack of teacher representatives on the WACOT board. They say promised elections to put 10 teachers on to the board have not been held three years after the body was established. The Education Department wrote to them on Wednesday warning they would be dismissed if they failed to comply. It also told principals to prepare contingency plans to deal with any deregistrations.

Opposition education spokesman Peter Collier said the approach was extraordinary at a time of a severe teacher shortage when the Government was desperate to recruit more teachers. "What you've got potentially are 1600 teachers who are not going to be in our classrooms in a month's time," he said. "That is hundreds of classrooms across the length and breadth of the state potentially without teachers in six weeks' time, three days before the commencement of the tertiary entrance exams."

The issue caused uproar in state parliament yesterday, with Education Minister Mark McGowan rejecting the claims of looming chaos. Teachers would pay, he said. "Do you actually think that anyone would give up their job over what is, in effect, a $50 (after tax deductions) fee," he said. "There will be very few, if any, teachers that don't pay. "A $50 fee is, in effect, a half-a-morning's pay for a teacher."

State School Teachers Union president Mike Keely told The Australian the comments were provocative and Mr McGowan might be surprised at the result. "This is a sledgehammer approach to people you want to keep," he said. "That dismissive approach is the last thing teachers need to hear from the Government."

Source




Are you sustainability literate?

British universities must now teach students how to live a 'sustainable life'. It sounds nice, until you notice the implications for academic freedom

The three `Rs' are making a comeback in our universities. But far from meaning `reading, writing and arithmetic', they now stand for `reducing, reusing and recycling'. In place of old-fashioned literacy, we have a new goal for education: sustainability literacy. The term was first coined by the environmental consultancy Forum for the Future, an organisation that has worked extensively with the higher education sector in recent years in exploring the implications of sustainable development. They suggest that a sustainability literate person is someone who understands the need for sustainable development, has the abilities to act in favour of it, and can recognise others' decisions and actions that favour it (1).

Leading advocates of sustainability literacy are vague about content, preferring to accentuate the need for people to be `aware' of the agenda and act on it in all aspects of their lives. The influential Centre for Sustainable Futures at Plymouth University, for example, aims for students to `leave with the values and skills and knowledge to drive the sustainability agenda forward in their personal and professional lives'. The vice-chancellor of Bradford University hopes that sustainability literacy will bring about `pro-sustainability behavioural change' amongst students (2).

Sustainability literacy as policy

Though the demand for environmental education began in the early 1990s (3), the process has gathered pace in recent years. Most notably, in 2003 the Department for Education and Skills launched the Sustainable Development Action Plan. Objective one from the plan states that: `all learners will develop the skills, knowledge and value base to be active citizens in creating a more sustainable society' (4).

In 2005, the government-sponsored lecturers' body, the Higher Education Academy (HEA), commissioned research on `embedding education for sustainable development in higher education' (5). The HEA seeks to `assist institutions and subject communities in their development of curricula and pedagogy to equip students with the skills and knowledge to live and work sustainably' (6). Sustainability literacy is now identified as a `core competency' for graduates by government.

A quick look at the `learning outcomes' often quoted for sustainability literacy confirms an emphasis on changing moral attitudes and behaviour rather than improving education. These outcomes comprise: increased caring about the future of society and intergenerational equality; empowerment of students and a heightened belief that they can make a difference; and increased personal willingness to participate in solving societal and environmental problems. Elsewhere, discussions on promoting sustainability literacy feature references to `raising awareness', `changing value bases' and even `winning hearts and minds'. As such, the promotion of sustainability literacy calls into question the character of education on offer in the modern university. Should universities see it as their aim to bring about `behavioural change' through `changing value bases'? Shouldn't students, based on their exposure to ideas, decide such things for themselves?

Sustainability literacy moves seamlessly from `awareness' to prescribing action. For example, the HEA subject centre for history, classics and archaeology expresses a view central to sustainability literacy, that `education about sustainable development should go hand in hand with education for sustainable development'. (7)

Leaving aside what sustainable development has to do with classics, why not simply educate rather than advocate? The overt promotion of sustainability (whatever it might be taken to mean) as the holy grail will only discourage students from raising doubts and differences of opinion because sustainability will be seen as the official line of the university.

The need for a new pedagogy?

Sustainability literacy is often presented as a necessary compensation for the deficiencies of existing disciplines that may not be equipped or may not have moved to address environmental critiques of economic growth (8). The disciplines are argued to be `too narrow' to cope with the broad character of the environmental crisis.

The 1992 United Nations Summit on Environment and Development (the Rio Earth Summit) is widely regarded as the moment when sustainable development become orthodoxy. But well before this point, many disciplines had developed schools of thought that sought to engage with the perception and reality of environmental problems.

For example, within economics, most often criticised for its `narrow' approach to resource use, `ecological economics' was pioneered in the 1970s, as a way to factor the environment into economic calculations. The concept of `natural capital' enabled nature to acquire a value through its non-use, rather than through its consumption in the process of development. Prior to that, the concept of `externalities', and the role of the state in dealing with these, provided a way to examine the environmental impacts of economic activity.

In fact, the growth of concern with the environment has run parallel to a growing set of associated ideas and theories in sociology, geography, management and elsewhere. The triple bottom line of `economy, environment and culture' is already in evidence, across the board, in higher education.

It is therefore disingenuous to say the university, via its curriculum, is a supporter of a narrow outlook. Collegiality and open debate have ensured that the disciplines adapt to, and influence, changing times. It is important that universities remain places where we can argue the toss over issues such as nuclear power, GM food, anti-globalisation protests, the merits of cheap flights, and even the efficacy of sustainable development itself, with neither side requiring the official backing of their institution or of self-appointed guardians of the curriculum.

What of the naysayers?

Advocates of sustainability literacy often argue that those who disagree are naysayers who need to be shown the error of their ways (as opposed to people with ideas to be argued against). One discussion document from the University of Hertfordshire refers (not untypically) to the need for `carrots and sticks' to get backsliders into line (9).

Apart from the patronising tone, this could have implications for academic freedom. `Carrots and sticks' are `bribes and threats' to think the right way and do the right thing. Is that healthy for a university? What about those dissenting voices, that minority of academics (and students) who feel, and are prepared to argue, that the concept of sustainability is problematic, or who feel it represents a backward step rather than progress? What about respected academics who see `consumerism' (frequently cited as a key area for behavioural change by advocates of sustainability literacy) as a good thing, or who do not think that industrial carbon emissions are a significant factor in climate change?

With regard to rural development in the developing world, a subject I have published on myself, I often find myself in the camp of the `backsliders'. In the rural developing world, `sustainable development' often means very little development at all. Perhaps I should attend a workshop to `self-review' my `core standards', a process that has been openly argued for in one University's documentation on developing sustainable literacy.

A new etiquette

One university, as part of launching a drive for sustainability literacy, organised a `sustainable lunch', with food that was local, fairly traded and organic. This small example is typical of the understated but clear agenda of sustainability literacy - small-scale and organic food, especially when sold at farmers markets, are good, whilst genetically modified food and supermarkets are bad. Academics can, and frequently do, take sides on such issues, which is a healthy situation to be in. Yet the etiquette of sustainability literacy marks out some positions as running counter to an educational and social imperative that all universities are to uphold.

It is certainly true that there is a strong consensus around some things that tend to be considered `sustainable development'. For example, the belief that human emissions of greenhouse gases are leading to climate change is widely held, along with the assumption that the proper response is to reduce such emissions. Equally, there are other aspects of sustainability literacy that invite considerable contestation, such as localism, organic agriculture and challenging consumerism.

But even if a position is considered received wisdom for 99 per cent of academics, there are strong reasons to object to universities taking a moral stance on the views and behaviour that graduates should adopt. Universities should teach. They will reflect the prevailing body of knowledge, and they should aim to encourage students to question received wisdoms and orthodoxies. They should trust undergraduates to act and live as they choose, based upon what they have gleaned of the world through their studies and beyond.

And this is where I think that anyone - from the deepest green to the biggest champion of acquisitive growth - should be against the drive for sustainability literacy. Ideas, agendas and moral imperatives should stand or fall through an open ended, rigorous enquiry. The university is the institution that can ensure this takes place. Yet it is clear that for those promoting sustainability literacy, the agenda is about universities, as public institutions, taking a clear position on the political issue of development. Once that is enshrined in the public pronouncements or private articles of a university, then the university has diminished its commitment to open-ended academic enquiry. That bodes no good either for those who take the environmental crisis to be immanent, or for those who suspect that the planet is robust; the majority who accept that global warming is a product of human industry, or those who doubt this wisdom.

Finally, it is worthy of note that the rise of environmental education, most recently in the form of sustainability literacy, seems to parallel a decline in scientific literacy. It is far more likely to be scientists, experts in their respective fields, who produce solutions to environmental problems. A promotion of scientific literacy would be a far more worthy aim for today's academics than moralising about how we should live our lives.

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28 September, 2007

Soviet tactics in Vancouver, Canada

While the Vancouver School Board is exporting schools and diplomas to the children of the elite in China's Communist Party, Vancouver residents say it is importing tactics of political repression used by China's Communist Party. The result is an international boycott of Vancouver School Board secondary school diplomas. The boycott was launched in 2004 by individuals who have since formed the ad hoc group, Canadians Opposing Political Psychiatry. The DTES Enquirer has learned that Vancouver School Board trustees and administrators, including Principals and Vice Principals, were sent written notification of the boycott but concealed it from the public.

Leaders of private sector organizations around the world "are being asked not to recognize these diplomas", according to a Feb. 13, 2004 notice entitled, "International Boycott of Diplomas Issued by the Vancouver School Board", received by the VSB. The boycott stemmed from evidence that the VSB was using police intimidation and political psychiatry to deter legitimate citizen complaints. Pursuing a complaint against the Vancouver School Board can earn the complainant a visit from Vancouver's notorious "Car 87", a police car in which an armed constable and psychiatric nurse ride. They arrive at a complainant's home, according to official forms that they complete during the visit, to perform an assessment for "apprehension" to a mental hospital.

A "Car 87" notation appears for life adjacent to that individual's name on the police computer system -- even if they are cleared. But here's the catch: even when you're cleared, you're never really cleared. The wording on the form reveals that an individual is simply not a candidate for apprehension "at this time".

The boycott was ultimately triggered by a case in which the VSB administrators targeted a woman for a Car 87 assessment based on a letter she had written to the VSB. The woman had stated in the polite Oct. 12, 2002 letter that she intended to campaign during the School Board election, then just weeks away, about VSB "duplicity" in the handling of bullying complaints. This letter was the sole "evidence" submitted to Car 87 staff to justify the Car 87 visit. In the official Car 87 psychiatric report, though, nurse Don Getz entered as the sole reason for the Car 87, the fact that the woman had made "freedom of information requests". The woman's Oct. 12, 2002 did include a freedom of information request.

A taped telephone call with Vancouver Police School Liaison, Sergeant Gary Lester, after the Car 87 visit reveals a lack of evidence to support the visit. Lester told the woman that he had emphasized to the VSB that there was "nothing untoward" about her Oct. 12, 2002 letter. He also confirmed during the call that no evidence other than the letter had been used to justify the visit.

According to Car 87 policy, visits are to be restricted to individuals at "imminent" risk of killing themselves or others. Jan Fisher, head of Client Relations at the Vancouver Health Authority, confirmed during a taped telephone conversation that this was in fact the policy.

There is no doubt that the Vancouver School Board was aware of the boycott ultimately triggered by this case. A Freedom of Information request to the VSB resulted in the release of a copy of the notice entitled "International Boycott of Diplomas Issued by the Vancouver School Board" bearing the stamp, "RECEIVED Feb. 23, 2004 HUMAN RESOURCES". The VSB also released other documents pertaining to the boycott bearing "RECEIVED" stamps with dates in 2004. Further, a copy of the notice of the boycott was hand-delivered to the Vancouver School Board headquarters at Broadway and Granville in March 2004, at which time proof of receipt was provided by a receptionist who signed a photocopy of the notice and signed her name on it.

The VSB has never formally responded to the boycott. An internal memo, though, does reveal a somewhat flippant response from a VSB administrator, "Wendy", in a handwritten memo to another VSB administrator, Sue Arthur, dated Feb. 27, 2004: "Sue - put your "Legal Counsel" hat on for this . . . . Take care & happy Friday!"

Source




Another response to Britain's dumbed-down high school examinations

A new alternative to the A level will enable universities and employers better to identify the brightest students by replacing the grade A with three different achievement bands. The Pre-U examination, being developed by Cambridge University amid concern over the suitability of A levels for preparing students for university, will award nine grades or bands, four more than the A to E grades offered by A levels. The Pre-U has already won backing from private schools such as Eton, Rugby and Winchester, which confirmed yesterday that they would introduce it from September next year.

But schools were told yesterday that many universities would not accept the qualification unless it was widely adopted in state schools as well. Michael Whitby, pro vice-chancellor of Warwick University, speaking on behalf of the Russell Group of 20 elite universities and 1994 Group of 19 universities, said that the Pre-U must not be allowed to entrench the considerable advantage that private schools already held over university admissions. "If the Pre-U were to be confined to an elite of private schools, then there would be issues for admission tutors in many universities," he told a conference of head teachers.

Professor Whitby suggested that private schools should work with local state schools, particularly disadvantaged ones, to help them to introduce the Pre-U. "If [the Pre-U] doesn't get spread [to state schools] then we will continue to focus on the A-level A grade and A*," he said. "It is therefore incumbent on CIE [Cambridge International Examinations] and on the Etons of this world to go the extra mile and the extra two miles to bring local state schools on board," he said.

Professor Whitby's comments reflect concerns of some head teachers, who have given warning that the schools system in England is at risk of drifting into "educational apartheid", with different examination systems for pupils in state and independent schools. Kevin Stannard, of CIE, which is developing the new qualification, agreed that the Pre-U could not be justified if it were only available in private schools, adding there was strong interest in it in the state sector.

The Pre-U will involve a return to final exams after two years of study, rather than the bite-sized modules of A levels, which can be endlessly retaken. The Pre-U diploma will be worth the equivalent of 4« A levels and will involve study of three subjects. Students will also have to complete an independent research report and a global perspectives project. Pupils will be able to substitute A-level subjects for two of their three Pre-U subject certificates. Alternatively, any of the 26 Pre-U subjects can be taken separately in much the same way as A Levels.

Pre-U candidates will be expected to put in 400 hours of learning for each subject, 10 per cent more than is expected of pupils for A levels. The extra study time is made possible because pupils will not have to prepare for AS exams half way through their sixth-form studies, as the PreU will be examined at the end of the course in June. Pupils will be awarded one of nine grades: D1 (Distinction 1), D2, D3, M1 (Merit 1), M2, M3, P1 (Pass 1), P2, P3.

Dr Stannard said he expected that only a small minority would gain the top D1 mark, which will be higher even than the new A* grade being introduced in 2010 for A-level candidates who score more than 90 per cent. Details of the new qualification were released yesterday as the Government confirmed that regulation of the exam system in England is to be put in the hands of an independent watchdog to counter criticism that GCSEs and A levels are getting easier. The new body will be split from the existing Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, has announced.

Source




New vision for Australian schools 'just drivel'

A FORMER senior Labor policy adviser has attacked the vision for school education unveiled by state and territory governments, describing it as "dangerous drivel" and a "retrograde step that will dumb down school curriculum across Australia". Ken Wiltshire, professor of public policy at the University of Queensland and the architect of the Queensland curriculum under the Goss government, told The Australian that the Future of Schooling report showed Labor education policy was still driven by the teachers' unions.

Professor Wiltshire seized on the idea in the report, released this week, that "the judgment of teachers is paramount", with external state exams and national tests supplementing the teachers' assessment. "External assessment should be what drives the whole national school curriculum. School-based assessment is subsidiary," he said. "This is an enormous step backwards. This is a really retrograde step that will dumb down the whole curriculum across Australia to the lowest common denominator, and the worst school will become the standard. "If this document gets through, the eight state education ministers are the greatest dunces in Australia."

Professor Wiltshire said the argument for school-based assessment was driven by teachers' unions and meant the teachers decided what would be examined and assessed, with no external checks or comparison of standards. "It's teachers' unions driving this to prevent any checks or controls on teachers and to prevent parents having appropriate measures of accountability and performance standards for the reporting of their kids," he said.

The Future of Schooling report was released on Tuesday by Victorian Premier John Brumby and commissioned by the Council for the Australian Federation from a steering committee chaired by the secretary of the Victorian education department, Peter Dawkins. The report was a final version revised after consultation with a range of organisations, with very few changes.

But the statement on public reporting of student assessment did change, with the draft version saying: "The external assessments of all students in state and national testing programs provide this kind of information (to understand personal development of students)." The final version states: "The judgment of teachers is paramount, but external assessments of all students in state and national testing programs must supplement this information."

Professor Dawkins said that to interpret this sentence as a movement away from state and national testing programs was wrong, and that they remained a critical part of the assessment and reporting process. Rather, the idea of a teacher's judgment being paramount was to reflect that teachers are trained to interpret test results and relate this to a child's development, and that they are the primary communicators with parents about their child's performance. "State and national testing programs are an important part, but not all the information that a teacher uses to determine a child's developmental needs," he said. "The judgment of teachers should always be crucial in reporting to parents. "During the consultation period, we received feedback that this is important. However, this is not intended to detract from the important role of external assessment."

Professor Wiltshire said the explanation was "gobbledegook and designed to prevent proper accountability". "Parents want to see external assessment - they're not interested in school-based assessment," he said. "They don't want to know whether the teacher likes their child, or how they rank in class. They want to know how their child is shaping up and keeping pace with the national curriculum."

Source





27 September, 2007

Teacher: I was fired, said Bible isn't literal

Why did he have to proclaim his personal religious views as fact in a Western Civ course? Are atheist views privileged? I have taught many courses on many things over the years (at both secondary and tertiary level) and have never felt any need to denigrate Christian beliefs, even though I am an atheist. He must be a bitter man

A community college instructor in Red Oak claims he was fired after he told his students that the biblical story of Adam and Eve should not be literally interpreted. Steve Bitterman, 60, said officials at Southwestern Community College sided with a handful of students who threatened legal action over his remarks in a western civilization class Tuesday. He said he was fired Thursday. "I'm just a little bit shocked myself that a college in good standing would back up students who insist that people who have been through college and have a master's degree, a couple actually, have to teach that there were such things as talking snakes or lose their job," Bitterman said.

Sarah Smith, director of the school's Red Oak campus, declined to comment Friday on Bitterman's employment status. The school's president, Barbara Crittenden, said Bitterman taught one course at Southwest. She would not comment, however, on his claim that he was fired over the Bible reference, saying it was a personnel issue. "I can assure you that the college understands our employees' free-speech rights," she said. "There was no action taken that violated the First Amendment."

Bitterman, who taught part time at Southwestern and Omaha's Metropolitan Community College, said he uses the Old Testament in his western civilization course and always teaches it from an academic standpoint. Bitterman's Tuesday course was telecast to students in Osceola over the Iowa Communications Network. A few students in the Osceola classroom, he said, thought the lesson was "denigrating their religion." "I put the Hebrew religion on the same plane as any other religion. Their god wasn't given any more credibility than any other god," Bitterman said. "I told them it was an extremely meaningful story, but you had to see it in a poetic, metaphoric or symbolic sense, that if you took it literally, that you were going to miss a whole lot of meaning there."

Bitterman said he called the story of Adam and Eve a "fairy tale" in a conversation with a student after the class and was told the students had threatened to see an attorney. He declined to identify any of the students in the class. "I just thought there was such a thing as academic freedom here," he said. "From my point of view, what they're doing is essentially teaching their students very well to function in the eighth century."

Hector Avalos, an atheist religion professor at Iowa State University, said Bitterman's free-speech rights were violated if he was fired simply because he took an academic approach to a Bible story. "I don't know the circumstances, but if he's teaching something about the Bible and says it is a myth, he shouldn't be fired for that because most academic scholars do believe this is a myth, the story of Adam and Eve," Avalos said. "So it'd be no different than saying the world was not created in six days in science class. "You don't fire professors for giving you a scientific answer."

Bitterman said Linda Wild, vice president of academic affairs at Southwest, fired him over the telephone. Wild did not return telephone or e-mail messages Friday. Bitterman said that he can think of no other reason college officials would fire him and that Smith, the director of the campus, has previously sat in on his classes and complimented his work. "As a taxpayer, I'd like to know if a tax-supported public institution of higher learning has given veto power over what can and cannot be said in its classrooms to a fundamentalist religious group," he said. "If it has ... then the taxpaying public of Iowa has a right to know. What's next? Whales talk French at the bottom of the sea?"

Source




Unemployment Training (The Ideology of Non-Work Learned in Urban Schools)

For many urban youth in poverty moving from school to work is about as likely as having a career in the NBA.While urban schools struggle and fail at teaching basic skills they are extremely effective at teaching skills which predispose youth to fail in the world of work.The urban school environment spreads a dangerous contagion in the form of behaviors and beliefs which form an ideology.This ideology "works" for youngsters by getting them through urban middle and secondary schools.But the very ideology that helps youth slip and slide through school becomes the source of their subsequent failure.It is an ideology that is easily learned, readily implemented, rewarded by teachers and principals, and supporting by school policies.It is an ideology which schools promulgate because it is easier to accede to the students' street values than it is to shape them into more gentle human beings.The latter requires a great deal of persistent effort not unlike a dike working against an unyielding sea.It is much easier for urban schools to lower their expectations and simply survive with youth than it is to try to change them.

The ideology of unemployment insures that those infected with it will be unable to enter or remain in the world of work without serious in-depth unlearning and retraining.Urban youth are not simply ill prepared for work but systematically and carefully trained to be quitters, failures, and the discouraged workers who no longer even seek employment.What this means is that it is counterproductive to help urban schools do better at what they now do since they are a basic cause of their graduates living out lives of hopelessness and desperation.

The dropout problem among urban youth--as catastrophic as it is--is less detrimental than this active training for unemployment.We need be more concerned for "successful" youth who graduate since it is they who have been most seriously infected.They have been exposed longest, practiced the anti-work behaviors for the longest period, and been rewarded most.In effect, the urban schools create a pool of youth much larger than the number of dropouts who we have labeled as "successful" but who have been more carefully schooled for failure.

The fact that this ideology is not a formal part of the stated curriculum but caught in school does not make urban schools any less accountable for its transmission.These anti-work learnings are inhaled as youth participate in and interact with school policies, administrators, teachers, safety aides, and the entire school staff.Community and religious watchdog groups who seek to control the values taught in schools focus on prayer and sex education.They are oblivious to the actual values caught in schools.Following is a brief description of the beliefs and behaviors which comprise this unemployment ideology.

Nowness.(What is the unit of school learning time?)In urban schools learning is offered in disconnected jolts.The work of the day is unconnected with the work of preceding days or subsequent ones.Life in urban schools is comprised of specific periods and discrete days each of which is forced to stand entirely on its own.If homework is not done, or books not taken home (behaviors which are universal for males and almost so for females by the completion of the upper elementary grades), everything students are taught must be compressed into isolated periods of "stand alone" days.Teachers and principals, as well as students, survive one day at a time.

By focusing on what can be learned in one period or in one activity educators claim to "meet the needs of students" who are frequently absent and would always be playing catch-up.(In some urban schools there is 100% turnover between September and June in some classes.)Another rationale for this disjointed curriculum is the number of pull out and special programs which legitimize youngsters missing classes.But the most common reason offered for teaching "Nowness" is the claim that students seldom remember anything they have been taught before.The introduction of any new concept or skill inevitably requires an extensive review of everything that might have preceded the concept.For example, an eighth grade teacher tries to give a lesson on election results.S/he quickly discovers that most of the class cannot explain the difference between the city, county, state, or federal levels of government.The teacher can either back up and spend the period trying to teach these distinctions or offer the lesson to the few who might understand it.Some youth have learned to play dumb in order to keep teachers from ever offering their planned lessons.In most cases, however, students are genuinely ignorant of the most elementary concepts teachers must assume they know in order to offer the required curriculum.

Nowness is the operating norm of the urban school.A successful period or activity is one in which students are expected to prepare nothing and to follow up in no way. In the absence of connections with what students have already been taught (several times) and should already know, and with little certainty that the students will remember today's lesson tomorrow, much of what goes on in urban classrooms resembles daytime television; brief, jejune activities which may generate a superficial passing interest but which require no real involvement.One can tune in to a program such as Jeopardy any day without falling behind.There are always new words so that viewers need not remember the previous day's words.And best of all, the rules are quickly given anew each day.The person who tunes in for the first time knows as much as the person who has been watching every day.Anyone can show up and play the game.

Teachers promulgate Nowness because, like their students, they are trying to simply get through each day with the least hassle.But there is no way to learn any ideas of any consequence or develop skills to any level of proficiency if Nowness controls the conditions of learning.Education is a process of building connections and this process is hard work, hard work for students and even harder work for teachers.By "going with the flow," teachers and schools support the students' misconception that the unit of time in which anything can be taught and learned is something less than one hour.

Showing Up.(What is the minimum standard of satisfactory work?)"The Deal" in urban schools refers to a tacit working agreement between students and teachers. The student does not disrupt the class.In return, the teacher ignores his/her doing nothing.Simply attending is thus transformed from passive existence into a virtue.Being there is all that matters.Work is not expected, merely the absence of negative behavior.Teachers purchase this peace with a passing grade of D- to answer the student who says, "If I never showed up I would get an F.I showed up.I deserve better."By passing students for just being there, school policies and teacher behaviors systematically teach youth that existence is an action.In effect, that if you do nothing bad you deserve something.While attendance is a necessary condition for learning, it is not a sufficient condition.By rewarding inaction, uninvolvement and a detached presence, urban schools promulgate the dangerous myth that the minimum standard for "doing" satisfactory work is showing up.

Make Me.(Who is accountable for what students learn?)Urban schools are conducted as authoritarian institutions.Principals are not replaced because their students are not learning but because the building is out of control.The need for safety from the surrounding neighborhood as well as the need to create an internally safe environment are, of course, understandable and desirable.Unfortunately, this perceived need for authoritarianism also controls the conditions of offering the curriculum and the learning environment of the school.Urban youth believe that the principals, teachers, and staff run everything; that school is essentially "their deal not ours."They see endless rules, a prescribed curriculum, and the pedagogy of poverty (Haberman, 1991).This directive pedagogy supports the students' perception that it is not only the teacher's job but his/her responsibility to see to it that they learn.Students describe good teachers as the ones "that made me learn."

Urban schools reinforce the student perception that teachers bear final responsibility for what they learn.By allowing passive witnesses, the schools support these student perceptions that all relationships are (indeed rewarding) students for being essentially authoritarian rather than mutual.As youth see the world, they are compelled to go to school while teachers are paid to be there.Therefore, it is the job of the teacher to make them learn.Every school policy and instructional decision which is made without involving students--and this is almost all of them--spreads the virus that principals and teachers rather than students must be the constituency held accountable for learning.In a very real sense students are being logical.In an authoritarian, top-down system with no voice for those at the bottom, why should those "being done to" be held accountable?

Excuses.(How often can you be late or absent and still be passing?)Of all the unemployment values urban schools teach, they teach this one best!Students believe that they can be late or absent as much as they want provided they have a good excuse, someone's permission, or a written note.What is taught or what is missed is of little or no consequence.What matters is the quality of one's excuse.And if one has valid excuses, there is no limit to the number of "excused" latenesses or absences a student may have and still be "passing."The value says, "if it's not your fault you are absent, then it's as good as being there." And "being there" passes.

In a recent survey urban middle school students were asked the questions, "How many times can you be late (or absent) in a month and hold a regular job?"Over half the students responded you could be late as often as you had a good excuse.Almost half responded you could be absent any time you had a good excuse.

In discussing these responses with urban youth, none has ever suggested that students have the responsibility of making up for missed work--or even finding out what was missed.If the issue of missed work is raised, students seem only able to respond with the validity of their excuse.It is beyond the realm of their consideration to deal with the issue of the missed work itself.If reviewing missed work is raised as a direct question (i.e., "How do you learn what you missed?"), students respond, "Review is what teachers do."

Non-Cooperation.(Should you have to work with people you don't like?)Urban youth typically respond to differences with their peers by threatening or using force.Any body language or verbal interaction is brief and merely an initial preface to the escalation process.The value students bring to school is one of "might makes right."Indeed, "might is the only determinant of right."Schools seek to teach nonviolent options, peer mediation, and even engage in negative reinforcements as a consequence of overtly aggressive behavior.But in spite of the large number of suspensions, expulsions, and other authoritarian school responses, most of the day-to-day behavior of students is not dealt with by teachers and principals in terms of detention or suspension.The overwhelming response of the school to students' inability to get along with each other is to separate potential combatants.If this were not done, the urban schools would resemble the floor of the Roman Coliseum.Efforts of urban teachers to use cooperative learning in urban schools require heroic, consistent efforts to contravene the street values students bring to school.It is easier and more common for principals, teachers, and safety aides to simply separate students than it is to teach them to get along.

Students come to expect segregation from rivals as a prevention to the problem of fighting.They do not practice peaceful coexistence or improved communication as an alternative to violence.This is because they have been taught the street values of power and control and the school has done nothing to disprove the efficacy of these values in their daily lives.Teachers and principals can't be there when students need them in the everyday situations they encounter outside of schools.Students (and their parents) believe therefore that they must learn to take care of their own "business."The problem is that, in school, where educators do control the environment there is no systematic training regarding alternatives to violence.The easy way out is for educators to pretend that violent behavior is irreversible in urban youth and the simplest strategy is the best one:separate potential combatants.

The effect of implementing this strategy--consistently for 13 years--is to solidly reinforce in youngsters the ideology of noncooperation; that is, you should never have to work with anyone you don't like or can't get along with.

Much more here




Expensive pre-schools

If you're like many new parents, nothing's too good for your little genius, including $30,440 for preschool so your 4-year-old can occupy a few hours each day playing with blocks and finger painting in an organized setting. Think that's a typo? Think again. That is the price of admission to the preschool program at New York's Ethical Culture Fieldston School. Other private schools in aren't much better. Bank Street, also in New York, will set you back $27,450; pre-K at Washington's Sidwell Friends runs $26,790. Compared to that, The Center for Early Education in Los Angeles, with its $15,400 tuition, seems like a bargain.

Forbes.com hunted down the most expensive preschools in the biggest urban areas across the country using local school guidebooks, Web sites and experts to compare tuitions and programs. There is no central database that tracks tuition trends, not even locally, says Deborah Ashe, director of admissions in the lower school at New York's Trevor Day School, where preschool tuition is $24,200. And there are a lot of variables. Some schools that are preschool-only programs have comparably lower tuitions than preschools affiliated with elementary schools, and some schools get funding from the government.

Tuitions have been rising at an 8% clip across the board, according to some experts. That's more than the annual tuition increase at Ivy League colleges. But there is something to be said for the hefty premiums, according to Victoria Goldman, author of preschool guidebooks for New York and Los Angeles and mom of two New York private school kids. "You get what you pay for," she says.

Mostly what she means is facilities. The elite Episcopal School on Manhattan's Upper East Side, for example, which costs $14,500 a year, is housed in an elegant seven-story townhouse. Seven years ago, Boston's nearly 100-year-old Tenacre School (pre-K tuition is $16,000-plus) built a new gymnasium, library and multimedia center.

Washington, D.C.'s Sidwell Friends School gutted a few buildings and built a new "green" middle school. "Many of the older schools are antiquated and in constant need of upkeeping," says Georgia Irvin, author of a schools guidebook for the D.C. metropolitan area.

But paying the tuition is easy compared with getting in. Entrance to an exclusive private preschool is a painful right of passage for thousands of upscale New York moms every year, kicking off with a mad rush of speed dialing early in the morning the day after Labor Day to secure applications before schools run out of them. The way the game works, at least for many top private nursery schools: You call to get the application, rush it back to the school and wait anxiously for word you will be granted a tour and your child will be invited to an on-site pseudo-interview the schools call a "play-date." Some schools dispense with the play-date and just meet with families individually. Some ask for essays. Some just want to know where you live and work. (Presumably much information about your potential as a big donor can be gleaned from your address and employer).

Then there is the bone-chilling, mind-bending wait during which you agonize over your kid's performance during the play date and handicap her chances vs. the others (including that kid who went fishing in the classroom fish tank). While the process starts in September, it doesn't end until early March, when the notifications are mailed.

After conquering the application process and winning a coveted spot, no small feat in itself, the reality hits hard. Preschool, for most just a few hours a day in the mornings, can cost more than studying for an engineering degree at Michigan, and much more at some very selective schools. Of course, the lure for many is the program itself. At the 92nd Street Y, a school that gained a fair amount of notoriety for its role in the Wall Street research scandal a few years back, kids are engaged in an archeology "dig" and sculpture projects, among other things. At New York's Horace Mann, where educating a 4-year-old sets you back $26,880, kids are taught reading and computer readiness. At Chicago City Day School, tuition $17,000-plus, instruction in foreign languages, drama, music and science begins in the junior kindergarten.

Many parents view private preschool as a necessary step in the even more stressful process of securing a place in a private grade school, the process for which has been chronicled recently in the documentary "Getting In" on the TLC cable channel. In truth, the other thing pushing parents to send kids to preschool is the cold reality that kindergarten has become the new first grade, with parents pushing academic learning earlier with the fear that their kids will fall behind if they don't meet major milestones like reading well before what is considered normal. That makes preschool the new kindergarten. And that's a whole other story.

Source





26 September, 2007

Britain: `Detention, detention, detention'

Parenting orders, on-the-spot fines... the Brownites are planning to use the education system to police mums and dads as much as educate kids

Last week, the UK government announced extra powers that will give schools and local authorities even greater leeway to punish parents for the misbehaviour of their children. Such powers are likely to reinforce today's trend to infantilise teenagers while increasing divisions between schools and parents.

Under the regulations, parents of teenagers expelled or suspended from school face prosecution and a possible œ1,000 fine if they fail to keep their kids indoors during the day. Headteachers will also have the power to go to court to obtain parenting orders - which place obligations on parents backed by the threat of prosection - rather than involving the local authority. Ed Balls, the UK schools secretary, said: `Schools can only do so much in isolation. Parents have to be responsible for instilling right and wrong, too. Our measures help to create a more united front against poor behaviour.' Other measures include banning suspended or expelled children from public places during school hours in an attempt to stop them from getting into trouble or treating their punishment as a holiday (1).

Former UK prime minister Tony Blair famously once said that New Labour's key principles were `education, education, education'. Judging by the obsession with controlling kids (and their parents), the party's key focus today is `detention, detention, detention'. As the number of children expelled from schools has actually fallen in recent years, it would seem that the government is overstating the extent of unruly behaviour in British schools.

The new punishing measures have little to do with raising educational standards; rather they're a transparent attempt to point the finger of blame at apparently `uncouth' parents. As Balls put it: `I want heads to engage with parents, including using parenting contracts at an early stage so that schools and parents are able to work together to prevent bad behaviour from escalating.' (2) Forget about dropping the kids off to school and then going to work - it seems the government wants parents to go back to the classroom as well.

New Labour's crude and ill-judged authoritarianism is objectionable. And in any event, these new powers won't improve classroom behaviour. The government seems to be implying that working-class parents have failed to discipline their children properly, thus giving rise to disruptive behaviour in the classroom. Thus, the authorities need to instill a sense of right and wrong in both children and parents. In truth, the dynamics of school life are such that children do not necessarily act in the same way in the classroom as they do at home. A child might be well-behaved and respectful at home but start to play up and be disruptive in the company of other kids.

The old teacher cliche `you wouldn't do that at home, would you?' was based on the observation that children are more likely to play around at school. It was therefore the job of teachers to socialise children into behaving maturely with others. Schools are society in microcosm, where children learn how to interact with others in a public environment based on universal standards. How can children be equipped with the norms required for adulthood if they are packed off to mum and dad when they are disruptive? Disruptive children need to be integrated into schooling far more if they're to learn how to behave in such an environment, not simply be sent home and kept off the streets, too.

Far from Ed Balls and headteachers `getting tough' with poorly behaved schoolchildren and their parents, the latest proposals smack of wanting secondary-school kids to remain at the level of toddlers - forever in the custody of their parents.

Even when schools do attempt to socialise children these days, the emphasis is on cushioning them from the temptations of the big, bad outside world. In recent years, that has meant keeping kids away from such dens of iniquity as the local chippie or burger joint. Education chiefs in Denbighshire, North Wales, for instance, are locking the school gates at lunchtime in order to force children to eat healthy dinners. As with the lunchbox inspectors, and letters to parents advising them to feed their children `properly', it surely won't be long before parents are issued with fixed penalty notices (ie, `on-the-spot' fines) for failing to feed their children five fruit-and-veg per day.

The education system these days spends as much time policing parents as educating children. Under the new rules, parents who allow their children to be in a public place without justification within five days of being excluded from school will be fined œ50. And if parents do not pay within 42 days, they face prosecution and a possible 1,000 pound fine. Should parents be criminalised for the failures of schools and teachers to do their job properly - that is, to integrate problematic children and shape their behaviour in an institutional environment?

In the past, schools would liaise with parents regarding their children's poor or disruptive behaviour by calling mum and dad in for an informal chat with the headteacher. Underpinning these meetings was a sense of adult solidarity regarding the joint responsibility of parents and teachers towards children. Now, the government is so far removed from ordinary parents that it doesn't know how to appeal to such basic, everyday solidarities. Instead, the fixed penalty notice is hastily drafted in to fill the gap where shared beliefs and ideas should be. New Labour is deeply bereft of any moral framework through which it can provide British society with guidance and purpose. And the authorities seem to believe that ordinary people are incapable of responding to civic ideas of right and wrong anyway. As the British public is often seen to be `crassly materialistic', and only concerned with what's in their wallets, the fixed penalty notice is probably seen as the best solution: money, the `only language these people understand'.

The latest figures on expelled children hardly point to a massive crisis in schooling. Instead, the introduction of fines for parents who don't babysit their expelled children shows how the government wants parents, as much as schoolchildren, to conform to behavoural diktat. Rather than offering a vision of the Good Society, New Labour believes that financial punishments are the panacea to make everyone into a model citizen. In truth, all it really shows is that, when it comes to devising decent educational policies, New Labour is a few pence short of a pound.

Source




South Australian Certificate of Education becoming too easy

There are always plenty of excuses for dumbing down when Leftists are in charge

The new high school certificate will worsen the skills crisis by discouraging the study of maths and science subjects at Year 12 level, teachers say. Associations of maths and science teachers say the new format, which applies from 2011, will encourage students to drop one of either physics, chemistry, mathematical studies or specialist maths. It requires students to complete 60 study units, the equivalent of three full-year subjects and universities are yet to announce whether their entry requirements, now five Year 12 subjects, will change.

But teachers say the new certificate's focus on raising the number of students who finish school and pressure to get the best score for university entry will mean more students drop out of harder maths and science subjects and opt for "easier" studies. SA Science Teachers Association past president and president-elect of the Australian Science Teachers Association Peter Turnbull said the new high school certificate was "flying in the face" of efforts to combat the state's skills shortages. "We have a view that this is going to have an impact on the uptake of the sciences. It is a major concern for us," he said.

Course counsellors already discouraged students from difficult subjects to maximise their Year 12 score, Mr Turnbull said. "The evidence we're getting is that when kids are choosing subjects, there is often a fairly hard lobby to avoid the hard things," he said.

SA Chamber of Mines and Energy chief executive Jason Kuchel agreed easy subjects were increasingly offered to students as replacements for key subjects. "I am concerned we are continually providing more and more softer choices to students, which is encouraging them away from some of the four subjects required for engineering," he said. People with strong backgrounds in the maths and sciences are needed to address the state's skill shortages in professions such as engineering, geology, surveying and aviation.

Mathematical Association of SA vice president Carol Moule predicts specialist maths will be hardest hit under the new certificate - with universities already teaching these subjects - calculus, geometry and complex numbers - in bridging courses. About 1100 Year 12s studied specialist maths last year. Maths studies attracted about 3160 enrolments, chemistry 2200, and physics enrolments were below 2000, according to the Senior Secondary Assessment Board of SA.

Designers of the new qualification deliberately simplified the number of subjects required, reducing it to 200 points or 20 semester-long subjects, rather than the existing 22. Mrs Moule said the new SACE was designed to increase retention rates. "It is simply about encouraging kids to stay on and do Year 12 and get a certificate," she said. "I really care about the more able ones keeping up their study of the maths and sciences."

Education Minister Jane Lomax-Smith said SACE would prepare more young people for "skilled careers, further education and citizenship". "Science and maths will continue to be key subject offerings provided under a future SACE," she said. Future SACE office director Wendy Engliss said students will be able to choose either Year 11 or Year 12 subjects in addition to the compulsory requirements at each year level. "This gives scope to students to choose more full-time stage two subjects, including more maths and science, if this best suits their pathways," she said.

No limit on the number of Year 12 subjects was proposed for the new certificate and a requirement for an arts subject would also be dropped. Ms Engliss said requirement to study an in-depth project at Year 12 level would be another opportunity for students to study maths or science.

Association of Independents Schools SA executive director Garry Le Duff said university requirements needed to be resolved "in the very near future", but he believed the new SACE was flexible enough for students to do a combination of maths and science subjects.

Source





25 September, 2007

More on the OTHER Columbia U Controversy

The Ahmadinejad visit needs no comment from here. But below is an excerpt from "Some Professional Observations on the Controversy about Nadia Abu El-Haj’s First Book" By Alan F. Segal . Should an intellectual incompetent get tenure? -- in other words

Let me address only two of the issues that have been raised in this discussion: the notion that everyone who opposes Professor Nadia Abu El-Haj is a rightist engaging in a witch-hunt and the equally difficult notion that the central issue about professor Nadia Abu El-Haj’s book on Israeli archaeology is her knowledge of modern Hebrew, one important issue from each side of the Internet discussion.

The issue is not only whether professor Abu El-Haj speaks Hebrew well enough to interview, or reads it well enough to understand scholarly arguments, assimilate them, and generalize about the value of Israeli archaeology. Literary skills are plainly much more advanced and important in this case than speaking skills. Perhaps she has read the newspapers in Hebrew, even though there are perfectly good English Web sites for all the newspapers she quotes, or spoken Hebrew to Israeli archaeologists, who regularly speak English to the volunteers in any case. She does make some simple mistakes in Hebrew at several important places in her book, especially in the chapters on Hebrew place names, but also including one that affects her conclusions about Israelis secularizing ancient concepts. Contrary to her opinion, “bayyit” does mean “temple” in ancient Hebrew: “the Hebrew terms secularizing in their effect insofar as the word ‘temple’ is absent” (p. 132). In any case, in her dissertation, on which the book is based, she states that most of her interviews were conducted in English or Arabic.

A parallel issue is her inability to deal with written sources: A book about Israeli archaeology, however abstract or sophisticated its theory may allegedly be, must be about archaeology done by Israelis, and must involve reading many books and articles in Israeli journals of archaeology but, according to Lisa Wedeen,chair of the political science department at the University of Chicago and scholar of the modern Middle East, there are too few Hebrew archaeological articles or books in her bibliography. There are few enough to wonder about the basis for her judgments about Israeli archaeology. I realize that there are other important issues in the book but this deficit must certainly be a crucial one.

In support of her thesis, professor Abu El-Haj presents Israeli archaeology as monolithic. She is either unaware, or simply does not tell her readers how fractious Israeli scholarship is, in general, or how impossible it is to come to any positive opinion or consensus about what Israelis think on any subject, ancient or modern. When she cites an Israeli archaeologist, she rarely cites any opponents but they are never lacking in Israeli journal literature. Also, one of her most trusted sources is an American writer on archaeology—a good writer, I think—but neither an archaeologist nor an Israeli and, hence, of limited use to her argument. She should disclose this, as she repeatedly relies on him in reaching her conclusions but does not alert her readers to the limitations of using him as a source. Perhaps she is unaware that he is an American science writer, a popularizer (an important skill for reaching non professional audiences), and not a practicing archaeologist? But she should be mindful and make the reader aware of his predilection for some scholars and against others, not merely accept his judgments without comment.

But the most important issue is how she handles evidence in general, and this concern manifests itself in several areas. One locus of her failure is the anonymity of her sources. A Barnard anthropologist in the religion department, roughly a decade ago, was turned down for tenure, in large part because of arguments from the anthropology department: She protected the identity of her major informant with a false name, even though she produced the “anonymous” person (who lectured at the college and answered all the questions of the search committee). At the time, the anthropology department was quite intransigent on this point. Now they are equally intransigent on the other side. A revolution in scholarly methodology? Let us not raise the implication of bias, only inconsistency. But I know for a fact that some very effective lobbyists for professor Abu El-Haj, associated with Barnard’s anthropology department, did not even read her book until after the Barnard consideration was over.

A statement supported by one, anonymous, oral report is an unsupported statement, and several of such statements are crucial to professor Abu El-Haj’s conclusions: that Israelis deliberately mislabel Christian sites as Jewish and tear down churches (p. 233, among others); that they use bull-dozers to level sites and wipe out evidence of Palestinian habitation (pp. 148, 153, 157). No respectable journalist would publish on the basis of one anonymous report and, if these were actually supportable, they would not have escaped notice for long in field reports or archaeological discussions, which can be quite vituperative in Israel. Israeli archaeologists have no fear of criticizing each other and are extremely talented writers, being literate in several languages. It’s hard to believe any secret that could be bandied about to a hostile stranger reporter would avoid disclosure somewhere in their very argumentative journals and books.

Her most outrageous charge—that bulldozers are being used in contemporary archaeology (p. 148)—has been proven false by the field reports and the testimony of David Usshishkin, the person in charge of the Jezreel dig during the time in question and a very well known archaeologist with an impeccable reputation. What was used was a power arm, a much smaller and more refined instrument, perfectly acceptable in salvage digs as this sector was. (Incidentally, there was no Arab evidence at all in the sector in question.)

The chair of the anthropology department at Barnard (whose father, apparently, was once a bulldozer-using archaeologist) assured me that the difference between a power arm and a bulldozer is trivial. I do not think the difference trivial today, if it ever was. There is a huge difference between a giant leveling blade and a manipulatable, very small, power digging instrument but it is professor Abu El-Haj who emphasizes the importance of the use of bulldozers (p. 148-9). A great deal of the argument of the book depends on the charge being right as rain. But it is false, even misleading. The field reports bear out the Israeli archaeologist, not her. And if this is so in this extremely important case, should we not suspect that there are other egregious mistakes in her other single-sourced, anonymous, oral reporting—especially as the anonymous charges do not appear in the dissertation, the document which was vetted by a distinguished and responsible committee at Duke?

A larger and more pervasive issue concerns her inability to make judgments in biblical history. Her claims have been characterized by supporters in Spectator as follows: “Professor Abu El-Haj’s disputed book made the argument that the state of Israel, like many other modern states, seeks legitimacy from ancient history at a damaging cost.” This statement severely understates the claims of the book but it is a more accurate description of her dissertation, upon which the book was based. For the book, her further claims are that the production of Israeli archaeological knowledge is uniquely fanciful, more than other national archaeological schools, due to their colonial settler mentality, and that Israeli archaeologists perforce uniquely produce far more themselves than the evidence allows because they are citizens of this colonial settler state. This is announced at the very beginning of the book and is hard to miss: “the colonial dimension of Jewish settlement in Palestine cannot be sidelined if one is to understand the significance and consequences of archaeological practice...” (p. 4). I am only quoting a small portion of her discussion there, which goes on for some pages with further arguments about the added and uniquely colonial nature of Israeli archaeology, among other things.

Most pointedly, professor Abu El-Haj feels that there was no good evidence of Israelite occupation of the area before Israeli archaeologists did their work. She characterizes Israeli archaeologists as disguising myth as history: “the mythical character of the biblical narratives is effaced” (p. 127), as an example or “a tale best understood as the modern nation’s origin myth was transported into the realm of history” (p. 104) as another. She ignores the possibility that the archaeologists may have been trying in good faith to ascertain what was historical, given their data and historical context. As she makes these claims she footnotes specific scholars from a particular school of biblical scholarship—“the biblical minimalists” (e.g., see reference to Thomas Thompson on p. 127). A person unfamiliar with biblical scholarship might miss the import of these references but the implication is clear. Professor Abu El-Haj has necessarily made some radical assumptions about what biblical history actually tells us.

When it comes to what can actually be known about Israelite occupation of the land, professor Abu El-Haj makes almost exclusive use of these biblical minimalists, no more than a handful of scholars really, out of the thousands at work in the world. Many of my colleagues at Barnard seem to believe that the biblical minimalism controversy describes fundamentalists on one side with rational discourse about the Bible on the other. Nothing could be further from the truth. Biblical minimalism concerns the nature of the evidence for Israelite presence in Canaan during First Temple times (ca. 950-587 B.C.E.). Being a biblical minimalist is not a crime; but the school is often consciously infused with modern Middle Eastern politics in ways that are hard to ignore.

Nevertheless, biblical scholars regularly read them, accept some small part of what they claim, and reject most other parts. Their questions, if not their answers, are always interesting. Professor Abu El-Haj frequently uses their most extreme conclusions about archaeology uncritically as proof that Israelis tell us more than the archaeological record shows. None of the minimalist scholars she relies upon for this purpose is actually a working archaeologist or an Israeli, though there are Israeli minimalist archaeologists, who mostly disagree with her.

But how could professor Abu El-Haj possibly make a decision about the claims of biblical scholars or archaeologists in the First Temple period? To make an independent, informed judgment, she would need to know not modern Hebrew conversation, but ancient Hebrew literature, and for the First Temple Period, which is her particular target, also Aramaic, Ugaritic (a significant Canaanite language), certainly all the many and significant North West Semitic epigraphy (inscriptions) relevant to this period, comparative Semitic grammar and syntax, comparative literary studies in Akkadian and Egyptian, and biblical stylistics. These credentials are in no way unusual for graduate students in Bible, and many of them also study far more exotic languages—like Akkadian, Egyptian, Hittite or Sumerian—as well as develop an understanding of ancient Near Eastern culture and history. There are literally hundreds of inscriptions from the First Temple period, together giving much interesting and debated evidence of an ethnicity called Israel who worship a divinity called YHWH. The most important and longest of these inscriptions were discovered in the 19th and early 20th century, considerably before there was any country called Israel or any significant Israeli archaeology.

In fact, one major and effective argument against the biblical minimalists is that they cannot adequately explain away this inscriptional evidence. She herself never engages the basic issues concerning the Merneptah Stela, the Moabite Stela, the Siloam Inscription, the Tel Dan Inscription, the evidence from seals and bullae or any of the important inscriptional finds but they speak strongly against her conclusions about ancient Israel. She has only disputed one ethnic identifier for Israel—collared rim pottery—but ignored several others: theophoric names, evidence of circumcision, the presence or absence of pig bones, stone jars and later, immersion pools, depictions of ritually important plants, depictions of ritual objects or the Temple or biblical scenes like the sacrifice of Isaac. As a result, she believes that Israel was not an historical presence in the land but a myth. Biblical minimalists normally stop disputing this at the beginning of the Second Temple period but she often appears to push it further, even to the time of Jesus.

Professor Abu El-Haj makes major judgments about the Jewish character of Jerusalem in New Testament times, including that Herodian Jerusalem was not a Jewish city, a most extreme opinion (p. 175-176). She also says that Jerusalem was not a Jewish city after the destruction of the Jewish state because Jews were in the minority during much of its recent history. Would she then consider that the old city of Jerusalem is not now an Arab city because Arabs are now a minority there? These are not casual observations but critical ones, logically necessary to her analysis of the errors of Israeli archaeological museums. By rights, to come to these conclusions she should also be familiar with ancient classical historians, Syriac and Greek, Josephus, Philo, and New Testament scholarship, to say nothing about early rabbinic literature and possibly Latin language and literature. Other than the odd quotation from Josephus, there is little evidence of this either. Without engaging these bodies of knowledge she has no grounds for siding with a bare logical possibility about the events which produced “The Burnt House,” for example, against the consensus of international, not just Israeli, scholarship (p. 145).

Without many of these tools, she could not make a judgment about even a footnote or a textual reading in a biblical minimalist article, to say nothing of one of their many conflicting histories of biblical times, Old Testament or New. She merely takes only those statements which most agree with her own tenuous contentions, and that is something that no Bible scholar, no anthropologist, and no archaeologist should ever do.

Source




NYC schools hiding violence

The truth is too frightening to admit

The city's public high schools are underreporting violent and disruptive incidents, an audit released yesterday claims. City Comptroller William Thompson Jr. said nearly 21 percent of school incidents - including 14 percent of those considered "serious" - were not properly reported during the 2004-05 school year. "The flawed reporting makes it difficult for parents, the public and government officials to honestly assess whether a school is safe," said Thompson.

In the 10 high schools whose data were reviewed, school administrators failed to enter 414 of 1,996 incidents into an online reporting system, the audit found. Additionally, 174 of the 1,247 "serious" incidents, which are relayed to the state in order to determine which schools should be labeled "persistently dangerous," were not reported. These included reports of a rape in November 2004 at Boys and Girls HS in Brooklyn, a stabbing in January 2005 at Clinton HS in The Bronx, and the assault of a security officer in September 2004 in August Martin HS in Queens.

Thompson said much of the failure resulted from administrators working under vague directives for classifying incidents, and he called on the Department of Education to exercise more oversight, provide additional training, and take action against schools that don't follow the reporting mandates. "The guidelines need to be cleaned up and more supervision by the DOE is appropriate," agreed principals-union president Ernest Logan. "The principals at these schools are certainly not intentionally underreporting incidents."

DOE officials called the audit "imprecise" and "misleading" because the schools weren't selected at random and because the audit defined "serious" incidents differently than the NYPD or the state do. "The comptroller's methodology wouldn't make it to first base with a researcher worth their salt," said DOE spokeswoman Dina Paul Parks. But United Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten countered that the audit "confirms a practice educators and the UFT have complained about for years: the failure to report all school incidents."

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Tax credits versus vouchers

With the height of summer past us, school is just around the corner. And unfortunately, too many kids across the country will return to schools that just aren't doing the job; whether it's imparting reading, writing, arithmetic, or morality, the current educational models do not suffice.

Parents ought to have more liberty to make decisions about their children's educations, but even the best efforts of the school-choice movement have achieved only spotty success over the years. Before the next cycle begins, school-choice supporters should consider the fundamentals with an eye toward the most promising avenues for giving parents the freedom to choose their child's school.

So, which of the two options for real school-choice reform are more popular: vouchers or education tax credits? Surveys generally demonstrate that tax credits command five to ten percent more support than do vouchers. A large academic poll recently conducted for the magazine Education Next and the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University illustrated the remarkable wide support for tax credits. Even current and former public school employees support education tax credits by a margin of nearly two to one; 50 percent said they supported tax credits, while only 28-percent opposed them. Public school employees oppose vouchers by a thin two-point margin.

Vouchers are essentially checks that the state sends parents to use at schools of their choosing. Tax credits reduce the amount a taxpayer owes the government for each dollar he spends on his child's education or scholarships for children who need them. If a business owed the state $4,000 in taxes and donated $2,000 for scholarships, for instance, it would pay just $2,000 in taxes – and it would get to choose the organization that received its donation. Similar benefits can also be applied to individuals for donations, and for their own child's education expenses. Three states have personal use tax credits, and five states have donation credits. The biggest programs in Pennsylvania and Florida save millions of dollars and help thousands of children afford good independent schools.

Both vouchers and tax credits fund school choice, but there are big differences between them. Only tax credits let taxpayers control their own money — they get to spend it directly on a child's education or donate it to a scholarship fund. In a voucher program, taxpayers send their money to the government and it decides how to spend the funds.

The Education Next/Harvard survey showed, in fact, that tax credits were more popular with the general public, with 53-percent supporting them, compared to the 45-percent supporting vouchers. Moreover, there is much more opposition to vouchers, with 34-percent opposing them and only 25-percent opposing credits. That gives tax credits a 28-point margin of support over opposition compared to an 11-point margin for vouchers.

Some say tax credits are more popular because teachers' unions have spent so much time and money attacking vouchers, but this poll didn't even use the word "voucher." Instead, it referred only to "government funds" in the question. It's clear that tax credits are much more popular and less objectionable to the general public, and even to public-school employees, than vouchers. And the word "voucher" has little to do with that.

One possible reason for the popularity of tax credits is that tax benefits are a common and popular policy vehicle, and most Americans have had good experiences with them. For instance, the HOPE Scholarship tax credit, which gives taxpayers credits on a portion of college expenses, child tax credits, and home mortgage deductions are widely recognized, popular tax breaks among middle-class voters; these kinds of policies often get over 70 or 80-percent support.

Some critics have lamented the proliferation of special interest tax credits and deductions, but these are proliferating for a reason. Tax credits are a popular and relatively easy way to provide benefits for particular kinds of activities. Credits for education expenses have the same advantages, and unlike most other tax benefits, are amply justified improvements on a tax-funded government education monopoly.

Education tax credits command the popular support necessary to significantly expand school choice. We need to refocus our energies on what works and help politicians to see that the public wants school choice through tax credits.

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24 September, 2007

Judicial denial of sex differences!

Implications for discrimination regulations generally? Given the 1st Amendment protections (which forbid religious discrimination but not sex discrimination), implications for religious groups are unlikely -- even if the decision is upheld by SCOTUS

Public colleges' anti-bias policies have been taking a beating in the courts in recent years. Various federal courts have said that the policies can't be used to deny recognition to Christian student groups - even if those groups explicitly discriminate against those who are gay or who don't share the faith of the organizations. Many lawyers who advise colleges, even some who deplore these rulings, have urged colleges to recognize that the force of their anti-bias policies has been severely weakened. Students' First Amendment rights of freedom of religion and expression will end up trumping strong anti-bias principles, or so the emerging conventional wisdom has gone.

But an unusual decision from a federal appeals court on Thursday is challenging that conventional wisdom. The decision upheld the right of a public college - the College of Staten Island, of the City University of New York - to deny recognition to a fraternity because it doesn't let women become members. In ruling as it did, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found that the college's anti-bias rules served an important state function - and a function that was more important than the limits faced by a fraternity not being recognized. In a statement that some educators view as long overdue from the courts, the Second Circuit said that a public college "has a substantial interest in making sure that its resources are available to all its students."

Further, and this is important because many college anti-bias policies go beyond federal requirements, the court said that it didn't matter that federal law has exceptions for fraternities and sororities from gender bias claims. "The state's interest in prohibiting sex discrimination is no less compelling because federal anti-discrimination statutes exempt fraternities," the court said.

Some legal experts view last week's ruling as a blip - a result perhaps of unusual circumstances in the case, or a trio of judges who happened to see the issue in a different way. An appeal is almost certain. But rulings by federal appeals courts become law in their regions and precedents that can be cited everywhere. And some lawyers, especially those trying to defend college anti-bias laws, say that the decision could be significant.

In the new ruling, "the court is saying there's no question but that the government has a substantial interest in eradicating discrimination and it recognizes that non-discrimination policies that condition funding interfere [with students' rights] only to a limited degree, and that's exactly the issue in our case," said Ethan P. Schulman, a lawyer for the University of California Hastings College of Law.

A federal judge ruled last year that Hastings was within its rights to deny recognition to the campus chapter of the Christian Legal Society, which barred from the group students who engage in "unrepentant homosexual conduct." Based on other rulings, the Christian group has appealed, but Schulman said that the Second Circuit's finding showed that colleges should not abandon tough anti-bias policies (as many have, when faced with similar legal challenges). "Ultimately it may well be that the U.S. Supreme Court is going to have to decide these issues," Schulman said. "But right now I think it's a mistake for colleges and universities to assume that they should abandon strongly held policies of non-discrimination."

Other lawyers had a range of predictions on what will happen as a result of the Second Circuit ruling. Some anticipate a quick reversal. Others see a new front in the culture wars, with anti-Greek educators seizing on the ruling to attack fraternities - and lawmakers rushing to protect the Greek system. Others say that non-Greek, single sex organizations on public campuses - think about a cappella singing groups - could find themselves under scrutiny. And others think that the fight over Christian groups that discriminate against those who don't share their beliefs is about to get much more intense.

With so much potentially at stake, there is some irony about the origins of the case at a CUNY campus. CUNY colleges generally don't house students, and Greek systems, to the extent they exist at all, are small and off campus. The lawsuit challenging CUNY's anti-bias rules was filed by a new branch of Alpha Epsilon Pi, which was seeking recognition as an official student organization at the College of Staten Island. Such status would, among other things, allow the group to receive funds, publicize and hold events on campus, obtain a campus mailbox. The fraternity's members said that their organization didn't permit the inclusion of women, and that adding women would alter the nature of the group. Fraternity leaders testified that havine women as members might lead to romance and "inevitable jealousies." Even lesbians could be problematic, the fraternity said, because having a female member is "an issue itself."

The fraternity sued CUNY, arguing that its rejection of the chapter on grounds of sex discrimination violated its right to "associative freedom" under the First Amendment. That argument carried the day at the district court level, which issued an injunction against enforcement of the anti-bias rule.

But the appeals court found that the fraternity was claiming associative rights (which offer some protection to groups with common beliefs and interests) while opening many of its events to non-members. In essence, the appeals court found that the fraternity members couldn't claim to be selective about who they hang out with, while boasting about how open an organization they have created. Further, the court noted that the fraternity was free to meet off campus with its own money - and that the college had legitimate reason to enforce its anti-bias rules.

In just about every way, this take differed from the analysis applied by a federal appeals court last year in a case over the right of the Christian Legal Society to be recognized at Southern Illinois University. In that case, an appeals court found that the society's right to religious freedom and free expression were violated by a university ban on support for groups that discriminated against gay people. "CLS's beliefs about sexual morality are among its defining values; forcing it to accept as members those who engage in or approve of homosexual conduct would cause the group as it currently identifies itself to cease to exist," says that decision. "What interest does SIU have in forcing CLS to accept members whose activities violate its creed other than eradicating or neutralizing particular beliefs contained in that creed?"

Given that differing analysis - and the longstanding tradition of single-sex fraternities and sororities - what does the latest decision mean? Timothy M. Burke, a lawyer who wrote a brief for the court on behalf of the North American Interfraternity Conference, called the decision "surprising and frankly disappointing." He said he hoped that the fraternity in Staten Island would win on appeal, perhaps by stressing its Jewish roots to win some of the protection courts have granted to Christian fraternities. But Burke acknowledged that most fraternities and sororities couldn't make a religious claim. And that's why he's worried. "There has not been a huge clamor out there to change a system that's been in place for well over 150 years," he said. Further, the fact that fraternities and sororities were specifically exempted from federal gender bias laws shows that there is a broad consensus that their single-sex status shouldn't be challenged, he said.

Attacking fraternities at public universities is especially unfair, Burke said, in light of the 1972 Supreme Court decision in Healy v. James that upheld the right of Students for a Democratic Society to be recognized as an official group at public campuses. "It's a simple argument," he said. "If the SDS has to be recognized, then organizations like Chi Omega and Sigma Pi ought to have that right."

David French, senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, said that the Staten Island decision was decided incorrectly and that he was "moderately concerned" about it. French's group has been a major player in challenging the enforcement of public colleges' anti-bias policies against religious groups. Because the groups he is representing make an argument beyond associative rights, going to religious expression, French said he didn't see a legal threat. But he said that "perverse incentives" were created by the court. That is because the judges faulted the fraternity for wanting protection while also conducting many activities with a broad group of students. "That reasoning struck me as problematic for groups that want to identify themselves somewhere in between" having an exclusive mission and complying with all anti-bias rules. "The Second Circuit took that middle ground away," he said. And for any group that is traditionally all male or all female, such as singing groups or athletic programs, that could invite scrutiny, French said.

Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, said that he believed the appeals court erred by underestimating the impact of being denied official recognition as a student group. A more realistic assessment of those burdens, he said, might have led to a different conclusion. Lukianoff predicted considerable fallout from the decision, even though he thinks it is faulty. "At its worst, it provides a blueprint for public colleges to refuse to recognize any fraternity or sorority, which I think a lot of universities would love the opportunity to do," he said. "I think this opens the door to a lot of future controversy." And if there is such a move, he said, "there will be a predictable backlash" from lawmakers who will try to protect Greeks. In the near term, Lukianoff said that fraternities "are in a more precarious position."

Schulman, the lawyer for Hastings, said he thinks part of the reason the Second Circuit's ruling will matter is that other courts are starting to advance similar arguments. He cited a ruling last month by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that upheld the right of a Washington State high school that rejected a religious group's quest for recognition. The court - in a case being appealed -- ruled that the group was appropriately rejected under the school district's anti-bias policies because of religious limits on who could vote or hold office.

Groups that want organizations at public universities to be able to discriminate against gay people or non-Christians have been trying to argue that the issue was settled by the Southern Illinois case or a few other cases, Schulman said. While he acknowledged that some court decisions have gone that way, he said that the two recent appeals courts rulings were equally significant. "I think the issues posed by these cases are still very much in play," he said. "It's too early for either side to declare or predict victory."

Lawrence White, formerly general counsel at Georgetown University and a lawyer in the counsel's office at the University of Virginia, and now a consultant to colleges on legal issues, agreed. White thinks that many public colleges avoid the kind of legal dispute that is going on at CUNY by creating a specific exemption for fraternities and sororities to anti-bias policies.

The real impact of the decision may be in giving public colleges and universities the ability to enforce anti-bias policies against religious groups that discriminate against gay students or others, he said. "This decision breathes life into the notion that anti-discrimination standards are standards that we should all adhere too, and that universities can define those broadly," he said. By declaring that anti-bias policies "serve an important institutional interest," he said, "this decision does provide a lever."

Sheldon E. Steinbach, a lawyer in the higher education practice at the Washington firm Dow Lohnes, said that whatever one thinks of the latest decision, it may complicate life for colleges and their lawyers. "What American society in general expects from courts is uniformity and consistency," but this "revolutionary" decision takes an unexpected approach on a ragne of issues, and one that is not consistent with other rulings, he said. "This winds up being a very interesting case."

Source




Collapse of basic education in Scotland -- despite the traditional Scottish love of education

Tens of thousands of children are failing to master the basics of numeracy and literacy in primary and secondary schools, an audit of standards has revealed. Data obtained by The Sunday Times shows that levels of attainment among pupils finishing primary school and about to embark on Standard Grade courses fell in about half of local authorities last year.

The picture of chronic failure has angered parents and politicians, who claim that successive administrations have mishandled education policy. Murdo Fraser, deputy leader of the Scottish Tories, described the findings as “shocking”. He called for head teachers to be given greater power to run schools and restore standards. Glasgow and Inverclyde are among the worst performing areas, as is Fife.

In more than half of Glasgow’s secondary schools, most S2 pupils fail to reach basic standards in writing, while in one in three of its schools more than half of its S2 pupils do not achieve required levels in reading. In Aberdeen, a majority of primary seven pupils failed to reach the Scottish government’s recommended level D standard in writing in nearly 40% of schools. In east Ayrshire the figure is nearly a third. Primary school standards fell in at least one subject (reading, writing or maths) in 11 out of 22 education authorities that provided figures for the past two years and 9 out of 22 at S2 level. In a third of Fife schools, most S2 pupils failed to reach level E standard in maths. Many education authorities, however, improved in some subjects. Glasgow’s secondary schools saw noticeable improvements, especially in maths, as did the Highlands and Falkirk.

The analysis of standards uses data obtained under freedom of information legislation. The SNP administration, like the previous Lib/Lab coalition, opposes the publication of national league tables. Equivalent data for England is readily available. It confirms fears that the transition from primary to secondary school damages the prospects of thousands of pupils, with an attainment gap between children aged 12 and 14. In 3% of Glasgow primary schools, 50% of children (or more) fail to meet reading standards. At secondary level this rises to 30%. The disparity in results is not just within schools in the same council area but within different skills in the same classroom. Most Aberdeenshire S2 pupils achieved level E reading standard, but in 47% of the authority’s secondaries less than half of pupils reached the required grade in writing, compared to 35% the previous year. Writing skills are a particular weakness across Scotland. In half of Inverclyde secondary schools the majority failed to meet the required standard.

Notable success stories include Stirling, where the number of schools with half (or more) of S2 pupils failing in writing fell from 43% to 29%. Similar improvements were made in reading attainment.

Nonetheless, Fraser described the statistics as dismal. “Far too many youngsters are being failed by the system. The Scottish government has yet to recognise the seriousness of the problem or come up with anything to tackle it. Teaching methods need to be looked at and school heads need more control in their own environment.”

Victor Topping, of the NAS-UWT teaching union, suggested too many inexperienced probationer teachers had taken the place of experienced staff. He called for a greater focus on teaching children the three Rs. “For children who are struggling, the curriculum is too cluttered,” said Topping. “If children are in difficulty with maths and English skills, is there any point in trying to do other subjects with them?”

Tina Woolnough, chairman of the education campaign group Parents in Partnership, accused ministers of underfunding additional learning support for struggling pupils. She spoke of the human story of lost children behind the statistics. “We should know what their home life is like, what their diet is like and if they are getting adequate sleep and living normal routines,” she said. “Childcare is probably lacking for a hard core of failing families and we are not making any headway. Often schools don’t have the resources to tackle these problems, they only have resources for the extreme cases. The rest have to muddle on through.”

The Scottish government said it was focusing on early intervention in schools, including smaller class sizes, to drive up standards. [A pity that smaller classes do NOT improve standards. But how can we expect the Scottish exceutive to know what has been known elsewhere for decades?]

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23 September, 2007

Harvard Crimson defends Larry Summers

Post below lifted from Belmont Club. See the original for links

Academia's rough handling of Larry Summers stands in stark contrast to the deferential, even fearful treatment accorded to Ward LeRoy Churchill, who even after being shown to be third-rate fraud continued to be defended on the grounds of "academic freedom". At a time when the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted 218-185 to express a "lack of confidence", following his remarks about the difference in scientific aptitude among the geners, a survey by the Crimson showed the students in support of Summers by a margin of nearly 3 to 1. Today the Crimson denounced Summer's "disinvitation" to a University of California dinner meeting of the Regents at the behest of Maureen Stanton, a professor in the Department of Evolution and Ecology, as "a disgrace". Stanton had claimed that "inviting a keynote speaker who has come to symbolize gender and racial prejudice in academia conveys the wrong message to the university community and to the people of California." The Crimson wrote:

the quashing of Summers’ speech points to a troubling trend in academia. Increasingly, the unrestricted marketplace of ideas that must form the heart of any university worth the name is being poisoned by a perverse pressure to conform truth to political agenda and stifle any speaker who espouses uncomfortable or invonveneint opinions. In the present case, the culprits are academics who fashion themselves as progressives eager for social justice and tolerance, but the other side of the political spectrum is no less guilty in others. This situation is alarming and dangerous. If academic freedom cannot exist in the university, our society is in trouble.

What is truly remarkable about the persecution of Larry Summers is that he cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be seen as a conservative. His liberal credentials are impeccable. Summers served in the Clinton cabinet. He publicly identifies himself as a Democrat. Summers served with the UN. To be sure Summers sometimes flirted with heresy, being among others things a proponent of free trade and globalization. But surely he was entitled to think those thoughts being an academic economist, one good enough to a have serious shot at a Nobel Prize nomination -- before his downfall. Apparently not, in common with all theocrats there is nothing the academic left hates more than the Fallen Angel. Men like Summers, who should have modeled the brightest of chains for the Left, but who instead perversely chose to think their own thoughts deserve only the deepest pits of hell. Better the pious parrot like Ward Leroy Churchill than the critical thinker, even one belonging to their own church like Larry Summers.

But the Crimson editorial staff gets it right when they say that inquisitors themselves stand condemned. Whatever they may style themselves, by their actions and small-mindedness they have shown themselves unworthy to stand in judgment of anything.

Maureen Stanton and company represent the worst of academia. The side that politicizes its classrooms and refuses to hear, or let others hear ideas that they find distasteful or uncomfortable, no matter their merit. We hope the UC realizes the gravity of its error and makes amends by inviting Summers back. We know he’s worth listening to, even if one disagrees with him.

A "Truther" in academe

Anything is better than believing that GWB might be acting reasonably

Conspiracy theories have become commonplace in the American social landscape. Many have heard about the "second shooter" in Dallas in Nov. 1963 or about the "fake" Apollo moon landing of 1969. However, there is a powerful and growing movement of people who question the official version of events of Sept. 11, 2001.

One of the many critical voices is Lynn Margulis, geosciences professor at UMass. She recently made local news when she published a statement on www.PatriotsQuestion911.com, decrying the government's involvement in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. "The 9/11 tragedy is the most successful and most perverse publicity stunt in the history of public relations," wrote Margulis in her statement on www.PatriotsQuestion911.com. "I suggest that those of us aware and concerned demand that the glaringly erroneous official account of 9/11 be dismissed as a fraud and a new thorough and impartial investigation be undertaken," she added. She later added that the "false-flag operation" was used to justify the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as "unprecedented assaults on research, education and civil liberties."

Margulis explained that she came to her conclusions after conducting her own research and after reading "The New Pearl Harbor" and "The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions," by David Ray Griffin, an author and retired theology professor at University of Dayton. The World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, she said, were planned with excruciating detail by a large network of operatives. Margulis also likened the attacks to other events in history such as the sinking of the USS Maine in 1898 and the Reichstag fire, both of which helped spark the Spanish-American War and the rise of the Nazi Party, respectively. Conspiracy theorists often cite these events as being orchestrated by governmental powers.

Sept. 11 conspiracy theorists come from a wide variety of backgrounds. On the www.PatriotsQuestion911.com Web site, hundreds of people from military, law enforcement, entertainment, medical and media environments cite their disbelief in the traditional theory of the attacks. Other Web sites such as www.911Truth.org and www.ny911truth.org have sprung up on the Internet and have attracted people to their cause. Northampton even has its own group, Valley Truth 9/11, in which local residents discuss their conspiracy views.

The 9/11 Truth Movement is composed of several loosely-organized groups which focus on gathering evidence and research to prove that members of the United States government had ties to the Sept. 11 attacks.

Beyond her role as a Sept. 11 doubter, Margulis has had a successful career in geosciences. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983 and in 1998, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. announced it would archive her papers there permanently. She taught at Boston University for 22 years before moving to UMass. Margulis has written over 130 scientific papers and books and has done extensive research on evolution, especially pertaining to the theory of symbiogenesis. Throughout her career, she has been awarded the National Medal of Science, the nation's highest honor for scientific achievement, as well as the Procter Prize from Sigma Xi, the scientific research society of which she was president from 2005-06.

Source




Ignorance of Islam

Universities are derelict in their duty of making students into knowledgeable citizens

By Travis Kavulla

I was in Cambridge, Mass., in February of last year when I heard the latest from Iraq: The al-Askari Mosque, the so-called "Golden Mosque" of Samarra, had been nearly leveled in a devastating explosion.

That night, I attended a regular, rather casual seminar on the works of Cantabrigian authors, led by a prodigious member of Harvard's Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department. The professor arrived late to class, and was not in the mood to talk about T. S. Eliot when he did. "Do any of you know what the Golden Mosque is?" he asked. Blank stares followed, punctuated only by the eager nodding of my roommate, whose passion is the Middle East.

Smart though they allegedly are, few Harvard undergraduates had heard of the mosque, or knew that it is one of Shi'a Islam's most holy sites. "This war is something completely different than it was yesterday," said my professor. "The violence this is going to unleash will make the last few months look positively tranquil."

His warnings were prescient. Despite increased security restrictions, the number of bodies dumped on streets, in rivers, and in shallow graves soared. The spring and summer of 2006 saw the bloodiest months for Iraqi civilians since the war began.

The vicious escalation was an entirely and immediately predictable outcome of the Golden Mosque's bombing. Indeed, only the most cursory bits of knowledge about Islam and its sects were necessary to deduce the gravity of the crime and the reprisals it would inspire. But how many students had even this basic knowledge?

The answer is a sad one, especially for a university such as Harvard, which routinely trumpets its "international" character and insists its students are "generally educated": instructed not to be pre-packaged professionals, but to obtain a broad education that, supposedly, helps one understand our "global society."

I spoke with as many of my classmates as I could on the day of the bombing. It was, to them, a pedestrian event: one bombing in a troubled place where bombings are mundane. My professor came to class unnerved, saddened by the violence to come; but in the student body, a tranquility that bespoke blissful ignorance reigned. In the weeks after, I gently quizzed my friends and acquaintances. Did they know:

* The major theological differences between Sunnis and Shiites?

* The countries in the region with Sunni majorities?

* Those with Shiite majorities?

* Some of the main pilgrimage sites in the Muslim world?

* Whether al Qaeda was Sunni or Shiite? (This same question was posed last year to Silvestre Reyes, the Texas Democrat who now heads the House Intelligence Committee; he answered incorrectly).

The results were informal, but militated grandly enough toward a conclusion of ignorance to be disappointing. It is all the more disappointing because we really do live in that much-prophesied global, interconnected world: What happens to a mosque, especially one in Iraq, may well impact us or our cause. For as long a time as that is true, understanding cultures outside our own will be one of the foremost intellectual necessities.

This sounds flaky in the extreme to a good many conservatives. Their suspicion is well-placed - a true understanding of another culture is very different from the "understanding" fostered in higher education. To "understand" is rarely about obtaining specific knowledge about a foreign culture through patient study; usually, to "understand" is to indulge in self-guilt about our own society.

One week at Harvard, not so long ago, there were no fewer than five panels bemoaning American "militarization," "imperialism," and supposed human-rights abuses. As it happened, this was the same week when riots exploded across the globe in response to the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten's publication of several cartoons depicting Mohammad. But a student would have tried in vain to find a panel addressing the question that obviously needed to be asked: Why was the Muslim world burning over a few cartoons, printed in an obscure source? (It was not until The Harvard Salient republished four of the cartoons that a debate was ignited - albeit, even then, it mostly concerned The Salient's alleged insensitivity in republishing them.)

Outside the realm of extracurricular panels, there is the question of coursework. Or, rather, there's not the question, at least for most students. Add Islam and Muslim society to the long list of subjects, from Shakespeare to American history, which Ivy Leaguers from Yale to Princeton to Harvard can avoid ever encountering in their academic careers. Despite a pretense toward "internationalism," this new pedagogy manifests itself only in small bits. In Harvard's latest curricular review, it is claimed to be a "serious commitment" to our "global society" that the university requires its students to take one year of a foreign language. Not enough to have a conversation or read a newspaper, mind you, but perhaps graduates will be able to order falafel at their nearest Lebanese restaurant.

Islam and the Middle East have a surprisingly low profile in most universities' core curricula. Columbia's still-comprehensive if recently diminished Great Books program devotes the most attention to the subject. At Harvard, meanwhile, students must fulfill a "Foreign Cultures" requirement by choosing from a small but schizoid list of courses.

Incredibly, in the 2007-08 academic year, none of the offerings in "Foreign Cultures" concerns Islam or the Middle East. Two irregularly offered courses do. One is "Gendered Communities: Women, Islam, and Nationalism in the Middle East and North Africa," taught by the chairman of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Department. The other, "Understanding Islam and Contemporary Muslim Societies," seems comprehensive, but hardly lives up to its grand name, as it trails off in pursuit of the professor's own passion: Sufi mysticism in India and Africa. Doubtless this is a topic worthy of study, but it has little to do with why, in this decade, a student would sign himself up for a course called "Understanding Islam."

Those who do venture into academic coursework on Islam are unlikely to find any class that will give them a simple reprise of Islam's theology, history, and cultural geography; missing are the basic facts that could answer questions pertinent to the modern world, like those above. It has been an oft-repeated criticism of higher education that schools have stopped teaching facts per se, touting instead overarching theories that organize facts in a manner convenient to theorists' work. In Middle Eastern or African or Latin American Studies, a student rarely will be held accountable for definitional knowledge - you don't need to know why Shiite Iranians call their religious leaders "ayatollahs," or even when Mohammad lived, but you had better understand how the emergence of Islam reshaped gender structures in Arab society. There is a good case to be made for knowing all of that, but without the bare facts of people, places, and the dates they intersected, a critical analysis of the same is useless.

Nevertheless, in a college course on Islam, you are more likely to be assigned Edward Said's historiography, as the theory and method of writing history is known, than an actual history textbook. Learning this way is like wearing jeans with a button and a zipper, but no denim: quite impossible.

Despite all the pretense about "understanding" other cultures, or "respecting" or "being sensitive to" them, few universities have taken measures beyond the platitudinous. A real sensitivity for other cultures entails discerning their differences, perhaps even more than finding common ground. What is not respectful of Islam is to assume that those of its adherents whose theology brooks no separation of civil and religious authority would be motivated by the same incentives that motivate us in the West. A person who truly respects Islam should be able to understand the signs sent by Mahmoud Ahmedinejad's millennial behavior, and appreciate that he is perfectly serious in his belief that the twelfth Imam, reputedly hidden for more than a millennium, will be reappearing soon to redeem the world for Islam.

Learning the fundamentals of world religions once was, and still should be, a cornerstone of a liberal education, for reasons that both a century ago and today are perfectly obvious. Much of this knowledge seems pedantic or arcane, especially in a realm like American higher education where Islamic unction no longer has a Christian analog and is consequently incomprehensible to mostly agnostic, or at least not fanatically committed, scholars and students.

But it is not too much to ask that anyone who graduates from a prestigious American university in our time should have at least a functional knowledge of Islam and the Muslim world. This is the least effortful and most practical thing we can ask of American universities. If such a simple calling cannot be fulfilled, then American higher education will have further endangered its reputation as a useful institution.

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22 September, 2007

Yale "principles" dissolve in money

Though "posturing" would be a better word than "principles"

Yale Law School will end its policy of not working with military recruiters following a court ruling this week that jeopardized about $300 million in federal funding, school officials said Wednesday.

Yale and other universities had objected to the Pentagon's "don't ask, don't tell" policy that allows gay men and women to serve in the military only if they keep their sexual orientation to themselves. Yale Law School had refused to assist military recruiters because the Pentagon wouldn't sign a nondiscrimination pledge.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Yale on Monday, rejecting its argument that its right to academic freedom was infringed by federal law that says universities must give the military the same access as other job recruiters or forfeit federal money.

"The fact is we have been forced under enormous pressure to acquiescence in a policy that we believe is deeply offensive and harmful to our students," said Robert Burt, a Yale law professor who was lead plaintiff in the case.

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School cheating scandal divides N.H. town: Criminal charges too harsh, some say

It would be a most destructive precedent if these kids were let off without significant penalty

Academics is serious business in this well-to-do town, where life revolves around Dartmouth College. Ivy League credentials rank alongside Subaru wagons and restored farmhouses as status symbols, and high school students are expected to excel and land acceptances to prestigious universities.

So, as final exams loomed and pressure built last June at Hanover High School, some students hatched a scheme for acing the tests: One evening after school was out, a group of students entered the school building, authorities say. While some stood sentry in hallways, others entered a classroom and used stolen keys to break into a teacher's filing cabinet and steal exams for advanced math honors, advanced math, Algebra II, and calculus. Five days later, another group stole chemistry finals. In total, some 50 students are suspected of participating in the thefts, either helping to plan them or receiving answers from stolen exams.

Rather than issuing suspensions or grade demotions, school officials notified police. And after a seven-week investigation, the police prosecutor handling the case brought criminal charges against nine students. Last week, the prosecutor notified the nine students' parents that if they chose to take the cases to trial, he could raise misdemeanor charges to felonies, which carry possible prison terms of 3 1/2 to seven years.

Parents of the accused are furious and frantically trying to reduce charges to violations that carry no criminal penalties, penalties they say could harm their children's chances of attending college or securing employment. The scandal has divided the community, with some residents laying blame squarely on the nine accused students - dubbed "the Notorious Nine" - while others have questioned whether the intense competitiveness of 750-student Hanover High forced students into positions of having to cheat.

Some have also questioned the motives of police, suggesting they are using the incident to show that children of privilege - the parents of the accused include a physician, a business school professor, a hospital president, and a columnist at a local newspaper - are not above the law.

Christopher O'Connor, the prosecutor, said in a telephone interview that he is treating the students as he would anyone who had committed a crime of similar magnitude. Although 17-year-olds are treated as adults in criminal cases in New Hampshire, he said he had opted to charge them with Class B misdemeanors, which carry maximum penalties of $1,200 fines, rather than Class A, which carry possible prison terms. "What I look at from my office . . . is whether someone should be held accountable for their actions and whether charges are consistent with the charges of other kids their ages," O'Connor said.

Nancy Gray, the Grafton County attorney who would handle the cases if O'Connor chooses to upgrade them to felonies, said the crimes the students allegedly committed are serious and deserve serious consequences.

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Public schooling's divisive effect

Public schooling, we are told, is the linchpin of American unity and democracy. "If common schools go, then we are no longer America," writes Paul D. Houston, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. "The original critical mission of the common schools was . . . to be places where the ideals of civic virtue were passed down to the next generation. They were to prepare citizens for our democracy. They were to be places where the children of our democracy would learn to live together."

In a similar vein, Benjamin R. Barber, author of the best-selling Jihad vs. McWorld, asserts that public schools are "the very foundation of our democratic civic culture . . . institutions where we learn what it means to be a public and start down the road toward common national and civic identity. They are the forges of our citizenship and the bedrock of our democracy."

These are, without a doubt, very powerful images, and their widespread acceptance long has undergirded Americans' assumption that government-run schools always have been, and always will be, essential to the nation's unity, but "powerful" and "accurate" are far from synonymous. Consider: In the 1840s, disputes over the Bible's place in Philadelphia's public schools sparked rioting that inflicted millions of dollars in damage and killed or injured hundreds of people. In 1925, the Scopes "monkey trial" captured the nation's attention as the legality of teaching evolution in public schools was fought first in a Tennessee courtroom and, then, to accommodate the thousands of people who showed up for the spectacle, on the lawn outside the courthouse. In the mid 1970s, court-ordered busing of children in Boston precipitated constant brawling in the schools and unrest in the streets. Finally, tensions were so high in Miami last year over the removal of books from school libraries that one school board member reported that his colleagues feared that they "might find a bomb under their automobiles."

These and many, many incidents like them reveal deep cracks in the "unity and democracy" argument for public schooling. Moreover, history points to other American institutions as being much more important to the nation's harmony, freedom, and prosperity than government- run schooling. Overall, it has been the nation's commitment to limited government and individual liberty-not public schools' ability to indoctrinate children into some civic religion, or to mold them into "proper" Americans- that has been the key to U.S. success.

Decisions debated literally every day in public schools thrust Americans into political conflict, whether over district budgets, dress codes, the amount of time children spend in art classes, or countless other matters. To see this, most people need do little more than read about school board meetings in their local newspapers. Although schools and districts may confront their own, specific issues, the conflicts those issues produce are driven by the same dynamic: All taxpayers must support the public schools, but only those able to summon sufficient political power can determine what the schools will teach and how they will be run. Because of that, political fighting is inherent to the system.

All public school conflicts have the potential to inflict social pain, but the most wrenching are those that pit people's fundamental values- values that cannot be proven right or wrong, and that deserve equal respect by government- against each other. Whereas most conflicts have unique immediate causes, there are several common refrains that arise time and again.

Below are the general categories of these recent school battles. None, clearly, garnered more national attention than the wrestling matches over intelligent design, with 18 states reporting some debate over it and conflicts in Kansas and Pennsylvania grabbing headlines across the country. Other controversies were almost as widespread, including clashes over students' right to protest government policies without facing punishment from governmental entities (i.e., public schools) and tussles over "abstinence only" sex education. Simply put, forcing diverse people to support monolithic government school systems inevitably causes political and social conflict. What follows are some of the major national flash points:

* Conflicts over the inclusion of intelligent design theory in science classes actually were just the most recent skirmishes in the seemingly endless evolution-creationism struggle, a battle that pits people who want only evolution taught in biology classes against those who want children to learn about perceived flaws in Darwin's Theory of Evolution or alternative explanations-often religious-for the origins of life.

There were two major intelligent design battlegrounds: Dover, Pa., and the entire state of Kansas. In Dover, a school district policy requiring biology students to hear a disclaimer stating that Darwinian evolution is a theory, not a fact, and directing students to the intelligent design book, Of Pandas and People, eventually ended up in a Federal court. There, the policy was declared unconstitutional. The damage, however, already had been done. As ABC News reported a few months after the school board approved the disclaimer, the people of Dover were deeply torn over the school board's actions, and it was not uncommon for townspeople to refuse even to speak to those in their community who came down on the opposite side of the issue.

Kansas, for its part, continued a long-running roller coaster ride that has seen the state board of education change its stance on evolution several times in recent years. In August 2005, the board voted to include greater questioning of evolution in state science standards, returning to a policy akin to one it enacted in 1999, but reversed two years later. This appears to have been followed by yet another reversal: In August 2006, the evolution-skeptic majority on the board was eliminated in primary elections, likely switching the board back to a pro-evolution majority.

Although the focus was on Dover and Kansas, intelligent design provoked conflict nationwide. Pres. George W. Bush even weighed in on the controversy, asserting that "both sides ought to be properly taught . . . so people can understand what the debate is about." In all, at least 18 school districts, school boards, or state legislatures debated how evolution should be handled in public schools.

* The fundamental conflict in freedom-of-expression battles is between students' rights to say or wear what they want, and other students' ability to obtain the education to which they are entitled (and for which taxpayers have paid) without disruption or feeling threatened. In these cases, the Federal constitutional prohibition against government choosing what expression is acceptable collides head-on with the schools' obligation to provide children with the education that they are entitled to. Included under this heading are such common grounds for dispute as dress codes, administrator oversight of student journalism, and simple student speech.

By far the biggest cause of free expression fights was the series of immigration protests that swept the nation. Numerous schools and districts struggled with how to discipline students who skipped school to attend rallies, and many others faced challenges maintaining peace on school grounds as students took sides in the highly flammable debate.

A situation that illuminated the quandary school administrators found themselves in last year occurred at Fallbrook (Calif.) High School, where student Malia Fontana had an incident report placed in her file after a school security officer saw an American flag in her back pocket. The district had prohibited students from displaying flags on the heels of a violent student demonstration at the nearby Oceanside school district, in which pupils threw milk cartons and other objects at police, who then responded with pepper spray.

School officials believed that various flags had become powerful-and dangerous-symbols in immigration-related tensions and banned their display to help maintain order. The ACLU, however, threatened to sue the Fallbrook district on grounds that it had violated Fontana's civil rights.

All told, a minimum of 20 states experienced freedom of expression controversies.

* From the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to The Catcher in the Rye, fights over what books should or should not be in school libraries or taught in classes have been a permanent feature of public schooling. The basic problem is this: Government neither has the right to censor speech nor to compel people to support the speech of others, yet public schooling does both. Whenever a school district buys a book with public funds, it forces every district taxpayer to support the speech contained in it, and whenever it removes a book from a library, it condemns that speech.

Nowhere did book banning prove more divisive than in the Miami-Dade school district. There, the school board ordered the removal -from bookshelves district-wide-of Vamos a Cuba, a book charged with portraying Fidel Castro's country in far too rosy a light, as well as all the other volumes in the 24-book collection to which it belonged. The removal did not occur, though, until tempers in Miami had reached feverish levels.

Ethnically diverse Miami, however, was not the only site of book banning conflict. Relatively homogeneous Carroll County, Md., also was beset by a censorship controversy when, at the request of some district parents, Superintendent Charles I. Ecker pulled The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things from school shelves. The award-winning book depicted such things as self-mutilation and date rape that the aggrieved parents thought inappropriate for children. After a great outcry from members of the community who wanted the book restored, Ecker consented to returning the book to high school shelves while maintaining the ban in middle schools. Still, at least one student intends to fight on for a complete ban. "I'm not going to accept a [committee's] decision that is stacked against the values of Carroll County," said 17-year-old Joel Ready.

Book-banning battles were not as prevalent as evolution or expression fights, but they still were common, occurring in at least eight states-and those were just the ones for which we found major media stories. According to the American Library Association, however, book fights probably were much more common than that. In 2004, for instance, ALA Executive Director Beverly Becker said her group received reports of 547 book challenges, and she estimated that to be only onequarter of the likely number.

* Perhaps nothing-not even creationism- has produced as much anger as the portrayal of different races, ethnicities, and cultures in America's schools. What groups should be included in history textbooks? What aspects of their histories? How does a school handle disputed "facts" about different groups? Questions such as these have produced a geyser of vitriol, as states and school districts try to decide what every student under their authority will learn-or not learn-about the myriad groups that make up our society.

California's Hindu uprising

California was the site of perhaps the most fierce dispute, as Hindus expressed great discontent with history books currently approved by the state that they say egregiously misrepresent Hinduism-and, as a result, Indian history- by focusing on the caste system and oppression of women. Those are common smears, they claim, dating back to British rule over India. Many historians, though, have disagreed with their complaints, arguing that right-wing Hindus are trying to whitewash history. Hindu reaction to the dispute has been intense. According to Glee Johnson, president of the state school board, the board received over 1,500 letters and e-mails from the Hindu community in a single week. "To many people, it gets very emotional," Johnson explains. "This is not just about academics, but is tied in to people's view of themselves and their history."

For the year, fires over the inclusion and treatment of different cultures, races, and ethnic groups in school curricula and textbooks burned in at least 11 states.

* Forced segregation by race has been a blot on American society since the nation's earliest days. However, government-mandated integration also has been problematic, often robbing people of control over their own lives in order to atone for past discrimination. At issue in disputes between segregation and freedom often is whether different racial groups, genders, or ethnicities should be allowed to go to schools and classes intended to serve them specifically or whether integration is of overriding importance.

Integration versus self-determination became a very high-profile issue in Nebraska when the state's only black state senator amended education legislation so that it split Omaha's school district along racial lines. "Several years ago, I began discussing in my community the possibility of carving our area out of Omaha Public Schools and establishing a district over which we would have control," Sen. Ernie Chambers said during the debate on the floor of the legislature. "My intent is not to have an exclusionary system, but [one] we, meaning black people, whose children make up the vast majority of the student population, would control." Despite Chambers' intent to give Omaha's African-Americans control over their own schools, many black leaders in Nebraska disagreed with his efforts. "This is a disaster," declared Ben Gray, cochairman of the African-American Achievement Council.

Struggles between integration and self-determination were limited to only about five states but, where they occurred, passions ran high.

* Parents who wanted their children to receive no sex education in schools or just abstinence education were in regular fights with parents who wanted their offspring to be provided more comprehensive sex education. From upper- middle class Montgomery County, Md., to the Kyrene Elementary School District in Tempe, Ariz., the determination of what children should be taught about sex created significant political tension. At a minimum, 13 states saw controversies over this issue.

* The treatment of homosexuals personally, and homosexuality in principle, repeatedly led to clashes between parents and students who opposed homosexuality on moral grounds and those who wanted all students to learn about- and to tolerate-it. Public schooling's mission to unite diverse people came into direct conflict with varying moral and ethical values. In Lexington, Mass., conflict broke out when a teacher read the book King & King to secondgrade students. The book is about a prince who falls in love with another prince, marries him, and at the end it shows the two kissing.

"My son is only seven years old," Robin Wirthlin told the Boston Globe. "By presenting this kind of issue at such a young age, they're trying to indoctrinate our children. They're intentionally presenting this as a norm, and it's not a value that our family supports." Lexington Superintendent Paul Ash countered that the schools' obligation is to be inclusive and expose students to all types of lifestyles. "Lexington is committed to teaching children about the world they live in and, in Massachusetts, samesex marriage is legal." Moreover, Ash laid bare the heart of the public schooling problem: "We couldn't run a public school system if every parent who feels some topic is objectionable to them for moral or religious reasons decides their child should be removed."

In Utah, the homosexuality debate was a little different from Lexington's, but had the same roots. There, a state legislator tried to ban Gay-Straight Alliance clubs, while club defenders argued that they are entitled to equal protection and, hence, to have their organizations in schools just like any other group. Conservatives like Utah Eagle Forum Pres. Gayle Ruzicka argued, however, that "most of the districts don't want the clubs."

At least eight states suffered disputes over homosexuality's treatment in the public schools.

* Though overlapping several of the other categories, the treatment of religion itself in public education brought Americans into regular conflict. Whether it was dealing with prayer in public school districts, accommodating the holidays of all faiths, giving equal access to religious student groups, or teaching about the Bible, the friction between religious freedom and compelled support of religion in public schools was constant.

By our count, 17 states experienced some sort of religious conflict instigated by public schooling.

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21 September, 2007

Uneducated students

Students don't know much about history, and colleges aren't adding enough to their civic literacy, says a report out today. The study from the non-profit Intercollegiate Studies Institute shows that less than half of college seniors knew that Yorktown was the battle that ended the American Revolution or that NATO was formed to resist Soviet expansion. Overall, freshmen averaged 50.4% on a wide-ranging civic literacy test; seniors averaged 54.2%, both failing scores if translated to grades.

"One of the things our research demonstrates conclusively is that an increase in what we call civic knowledge almost invariably leads to a use of that knowledge in a beneficial way," says Josiah Bunting, chairman of ISI's National Civic Literacy Board. "This is useful knowledge we are talking about."

Failing Our Students, Failing America: Holding Colleges Accountable for Teaching America's History and Institutions analyzes scores of a test given to 14,419 freshmen and seniors at 50 U.S. colleges last fall on American history, government, international relations and market economy. Freshman and senior scores at the schools, 25 selective and 25 randomly chosen, were compared to gauge civic learning. The report generally echoes the results of a similar study done last fall by the ISI, which promotes civics in higher education. This year:

* Average scores for the 25 selective colleges - chosen for type, geographic location and U.S. News & World Report ranking - were much higher than the 25 randomly selected schools for both freshmen (56.6% vs. 43.7%) and seniors (59.4% vs. 48.4%), but the elite schools didn't add as much civic knowledge between the freshman and senior years. At elite schools, the seniors averaged 2.8 points higher than the freshmen vs. 4.7 points for the randomly selected schools.

* Harvard seniors had the highest average at 69.6%, 5.97 points higher than its freshmen but still a D+. A Harvard senior posted the only perfect score.

* In general, the better a college's U.S. News & World Report ranking, the less its civic literacy gain. Yale, with the highest-scoring freshmen (68.94%), along with Princeton, Duke and Cornell, were among eight schools with freshmen outscoring seniors.

* The average senior had taken four college courses in history, economics or political science and scored 3.8 points higher than the average freshman, a civic knowledge gain of about one point per course.

* Raw scores did not correlate to voting or civic participation, but the more seniors outscored their school's freshman average, the more likely they were to vote and be involved in civic activities.

"Several of the colleges at the lower end of our survey are some of the most prestigious in the country, with average tuition, room and board somewhere north of $40,000 a year," Bunting says. "These are the schools, although their stated mission is to help prepare active citizens, that are the most derelict in their responsibility." While freshmen at elite colleges tended to score higher to start with, there is not much of a "ceiling effect" in which gains get harder to make closer to the top, as their scores are still not that high, says Kenneth Dautrich of the University of Connecticut's Department of Public Policy, which administered the study.

Still, "in many cases, these students are coming from high schools where the subject matter has already been covered," notes Tony Pals of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. "It would be a waste of their tuition dollars to sit through the courses again."

To William Galston, Brookings Institution senior fellow of governance studies, the distinctions between schools aren't as clear as the general decline in the civic mission of high schools and colleges. More students are getting more formal education than students 50 years ago, he says, but today's students have fewer civics requirements as the value of higher education is more often defined in economic terms. "Less is being expected of secondary and post-secondary education in the way of civic education, and because less is expected, less is achieved," he says.

No one would argue that college students know enough about history or the world, but a civics test may not be the best measure of civic engagement, says Debra Humphreys of the Association of American Colleges & Universities, which promotes liberal education. Other studies have shown that college students are much more likely to vote and be civically engaged than non-students, she adds. Says Humphreys: "It would be wrong to conclude from this study that the leadership of these selective schools is not committed to educating their students about these subjects."

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Teacher Asks Kids: Renounce Citizenship

One often hears that government schools in totalitarian nations brainwash their children to love the government. People in free nations decry that as oppressing the free will of innocent children, and rightly so. In American schools, however, just the opposite is true as with the case of an anti-American teacher in a public school in Chico, California who hates this country so much that he sent a letter home to his student's parents urging them to renounce their citizenship in the U.S. as he announced he was so doing.

Since the troubling work of the so-called progressives led by John Dewey that has resulted in the near destruction of our institutes of higher learning, American schools have been steadily undermining this country. For a long time, at least, it was isolated mostly in the Universities safely removed from our youngest and most vulnerable students. Now, this pernicious and self-loathing force is commonly seen in even our elementary and high schools all too often. Supposed "teachers" who so hate the United States, its culture, history and ideals that they are willing to cast aside any pretense of teaching and are going straight for political indoctrination of their own hate filled ideology appear everywhere you turn.

This is the case of yet another American hater, another Ward Churchillesque propagandist infesting an American public school, one paid for by public funds, who is advocating the destruction of the United States by teaching things antithetical to our nation.

"Teacher" Mike Brooks is teaching his 14-year-old, middle school children that the U.S. tortures people and that it is better to be a member of "the global community" than to be an American. He is so filled with hate against the U.S.A. that he even sent a letter home to his student's parents asking them to renounce their citizenship in the U.S.

Worse than this, the school's principal is so mindless that she is sticking up for this enemy to our country by saying she is sure Brooks "has no political agenda to advance." Clearly he does with his advocacy that his students turn against their own country.

Parent Michael Hill of Chico tells reporters, "The lesson being taught in class was that the U.S. kidnaps innocent people and takes them to Cuba, where they are kept indefinitely and tortured." Hill went on to say that his daughter, "broke into tears when she talked about Brooks mentioning illegal wiretaps and other surveillance directed against innocent people."

The letter this propagandist for unAmerican ideologies sent out re-imagined the Declaration of Independence in "modern language" and ended with the teacher's postscript renouncing his citizenship in the U.S. "After careful consideration of the facts of our current situation, I have decided to announce to everyone that I am no longer a citizen of the United States, but a free and independent member of the global community," it read. Then he insisted that parents sign this letter so that his children may return it to his classroom. Many of the children felt pressured into having their parents sign it, though this purported teacher claims he meant only to start a "discussion."

I would suggest to the Chico, California schools system that they allow this "independent member of the global community" to go find a job in a Madrassa somewhere where his hate-America ideology will be welcomed with open arms and where he will not have his truly wasted salary paid for by the tax payers of the country he so hates.

This story can be added to another recent and outrageous one from Sampson County, North Carolina. There a local High School banned the U.S. flag from being displayed on articles of clothing. In true, mindless "zero tolerance" style, the U.S. flag was banned along with that of any other nation because too many Mexican kids were wearing Mexican flag items to school.

Not only are schools anti-American, but they are filled with gutless and stupid administrators, as well. Here the U.S. flag was banned so that administrators who "didn't want to be forced to pick and choose which flags should be permissible," could get away from having to make a decision.

That one would have been easy for a true American. Ban ALL but the U.S. flag. This IS America, after all. Fortunately, the ban was later rescinded but the only thing that changed the minds of the weak spined administrators in North Carolina was the monumentally bad publicity the story raised for them. If no one had reported on this one, the ban would still be in place and our own children would not be able to show their love for the flag of the very country in which they live.

Sadly, stories like this are not isolated and few. They happen every day throughout the country. Our government schools are failures through and through and should be dismantled. Instead of places of learning, they have become dens of the unAmerican left skulking around and undermining the very nature of these United States by teaching our children to hate their country. Parents should make themselves very aware of the indoctrination being foisted upon our children and stories like this sound a clarion call for change.

Vouchers are a start, but the elimination of the teacher's unions is about the only thing that will begin to fix this problem. Add to that the elimination of Federal funding and a return to local control and we may yet refashion our schools into places to which we would no longer be afraid to send our children.

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Hypocrisy thriving in academe

By Dan Walters

Southern California political, media and legal circles have been in a dither over the selection of liberal law professor Erwin Chemerinsky as dean of UC Irvine's new law school, his de-selection after protests by conservative groups and his re-selection on Monday. Setting aside the demonstrable fact that California needs another public law school like it needs another drought, it has been an unseemly situation at best, raising all sorts of questions about academic freedom.

Conservatives complained that Chemerinsky's initial hiring by UC Irvine Chancellor Michael Drake was an affront, citing his years of legal and political activism on the left. Even Ronald George, chief justice of the state Supreme Court, became entangled in the uproar, with anti-Chemerinsky forces citing George's pointed criticism of his treatise on death penalty law. Conservative Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich, who had clashed with Chemerinsky in the past, sent an e-mail to Drake that, his spokesman said, "expressed his dismay with the choice for the dean of the law school and suggested that this was the wrong decision and it should be changed."

Drake then canceled the appointment but insisted -- to wide disbelief -- that it had nothing to do with the backlash. "His exact words were, 'You've proven too politically controversial for this to work,' " Chemerinsky told the New York Times. Predictably, there was a counter-backlash of pro-Chemerinsky sentiment. Hundreds of UC Irvine professors and students signed an open letter to Drake last Friday demanding a reversal of the decision. "You have failed to defend the integrity of the university, its recruitment process and the sanctity of academic freedom," the letter said. Chemerinsky fed the furor himself with an article in the Los Angeles Times, saying, "The whole point of academic freedom is that professors -- and yes, even deans -- should be able to speak out on important issues."

As the counter-pressure mounted Friday, Drake met with Chemerinsky. On Monday, they jointly announced that Chemerinsky will come to Irvine after all. "Our new law school will be founded on the bedrock principle of academic freedom," said their joint statement. "The chancellor reiterated his lifelong, unqualified commitment to academic freedom, which extends to every faculty member, including deans and other senior administrators."

A victory for academic freedom? Seemingly so, but it would appear that among UC faculty members the principle should be applied only to those on the political left, judging by what was happening simultaneously a few hundred miles to the north at another University of California campus.

Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard University, had been invited by UC Regent Richard Blum (husband of U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein) to address a private Board of Regents dinner at UC Davis. When faculty members objected, Summers was disinvited. Summers, former secretary of the treasury, resigned from Harvard last year after a lengthy clash with its faculty over his remarks about the suitability of women for careers in engineering and other technical fields. Summers said his remarks were misinterpreted and apologized, but was forced out of the presidency anyway.

"I was appalled and stunned that someone like Summers would even be invited to speak to the regents," Professor Maureen Stanton, an organizer of the protest, told the San Francisco Chronicle. The hypocrisy is self-evident. Liberal UC faculty members believe in academic freedom for liberals, but someone deemed to be politically incorrect should be barred from even speaking to a private dinner. And in both cases, those running the university ran for cover.

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20 September, 2007

Tenure for an academic fraud?

Ward Churchill again? Details on the writings of the hate-filled liar concerned here

Another controversy involving Mideast politics has erupted on the Columbia University campus, this time over whether to grant tenure to an anthropology professor of Palestinian descent. Critics of Barnard College professor Nadia Abu El-Haj are trying to block Columbia from granting her tenure, while supporters worry that the controversy over her scholarship represent an attempt to stifle academic freedom.

Abu El-Haj, an assistant professor of anthropology, has been teaching at Barnard, Columbia's women's college, since 2002. Her book, "Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society," looks at the importance of archaeology in forming Israel's national identity. The 2001 book discusses how archaeological discoveries have been used to defend Israel's territorial claims and contributed to the idea of Israel as the ancient home of the Jewish people. She argues that Israel has used archaeology to justify its existence in the region, sometimes at the expense of the Palestinians. The book has garnered both praise and criticism, with opponents challenging her conclusions and her research. The dispute has also spilled onto the Internet.

A Barnard alumnus Paula Stern, who lives in a Jewish settlement on the West Bank, starting an online petition against granting Abu El-Haj tenure, or a permanent position on the faculty. The petition says her "claim to scholarly recognition is based on a single, profoundly flawed book" that fails to meet the university's standards of scholarship.

Her supporters have an online petition too which claims that the attacks against Abu El-Haj "are part of an orchestrated witch-hunt... against politically unpopular ideas" and expresses the suspicion that "something like simple ethnic prejudice is at issue here."

The outside protests against Abu El-Haj's tenure are "just preposterous," said Laurie Brand, director of the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California and the chairwoman of the committee on academic freedom for the Middle Eastern Studies Association. She said tenure decisions should be based on the opinions of other experts in the field, and that opposition to Abu El-Haj was coming from critics trying to silence her. "You don't shut somebody down because of, as a result of honest inquiry, they've come up with conclusions you don't like," she said.

Barnard religion professor Alan Segal said he is against granting tenure to Abu El-Haj based on her work, which he has read. He called the public petitions for and against her tenure "silly," but added that they were unlikely to have any effect on the tenure decision. "I don't believe it's affected the process in any way," he said, adding that the Barnard faculty, by and large, supports Abu El-Haj. Barnard officials said Abu El-Haj was not available for interviews. Columbia officials were not available for comment.

This is not the first time that Mideast politics have roiled the Columbia campus. A few years ago, the school had to deal with accusations from pro-Israel Jewish students that they were being intimidated by professors of Middle Eastern studies. A university report found no evidence to support the accusation, but it did criticize one professor of modern Arab politics and history, Joseph Massad, who is of Palestinian descent, for inappropriately getting angry at a student in his classroom.

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The Hidden Impact Of Political Correctness on education

"Dangerous" information is suppressed to avoid trouble

It's easy to think of Universities as a circus for wacky professors; their semi-monthly comparisons of Bush to Hitler or indictments of inherent American racism are hard to miss. Universities' deviations from traditional education are far more serious than a few zany radicals, though. Something far more significant overshadows this ranting, namely how PC invisibly sanitizes instruction to avoid "offending" certain easy-to-anger students. This is the dog that does not bark - "safe lecturing" to use the STD vocabulary - and seldom recognized since it concerns what is not taught, and as such deprives students of a genuine education.

Let me offer some observations from my 35-year academic career but these undoubtedly apply more generally. Some facts.

First, today's students, especially in lecture courses, display rather desultory academic habits. Many arrive late, leave early, doze off, regularly skip classes, eat, drink or listen to iPods, gossip and otherwise ignore the dispensed pearls of wisdom. Even stellar teachers cast pearls. Dreary test results confirm that lectures are disregarded and assignments go unread. Sad to say, many African-American students who should be expending extra efforts to surmount academic deficiencies are particularly guilty though expressing this plain-to-see reality is verboten.

Haphazard attentiveness means that professors can never be sure how one's utterances or even the readings are deciphered. In fact, empirical research shows that less able students are particularly prone to garbling - "some people loved Hitler" becomes "the professor loves Hitler." Alas, little can be done about this mishmash learning save, perhaps, returning to the ancient days when teachers terrified students by randomly demanding instant verbal summaries. Even repeating facts three times and saying that this will be on the exam usually fails to impress denizens of la la land.

Students will thus mistakenly "hear" things they might find objectionable, but, and this is critical, not all enjoy protectors to transform imagined classroom slights into public outrages. The ROTC cadet "learning" that America only fights exploitive imperialistic wars suffers in isolated silence; an African-American student who mangles "blacks disproportionately commit more violent crimes" into "blacks are criminals" can demand that the university itself plus sundry student-based organization rectify this "offense." (Similar helpers exist for women and gays.)

No matter how trivial the alleged wrongdoing, no matter how obvious the misunderstanding, true or not, crimes against racial sensibilities requires action. This is the raison d'etre for these injustice monitors and justifies salaries. To compound matters, certified victims have diplomatic immunity and can never be punished for false accusations or foolish hyper-sensitivity. No calculating administrator can ignore an anonymous letter about some off-hand comment, a joke or wrong terminology (colored people versus people of color), even "demeaning" laughs or facial expressions.

Teaching in any field that might conceivably touch on racial/ethnic/sexual sensibilities thus requires navigating minefields that can never, never be charted. The most obsequious aside or failure to include certain authors on the reading list can insult some sensitive soul whose classroom inattention and limited intellectual background guarantees outrage. Professors now become prisoners to protected students, many of whom are the least academically capable, and soon realize that a few incidents can bring star-chamber proceedings and, ultimately, a ruined career. No university wants professors with reputations for trouble, as decided by those with a well-deserved reputation for making trouble.

What can be done? One option to embrace the PC party line at every opportunity since those who object (i.e., conservatives, Christian fundamentalists) stoically forbear this nonsense and lack the supporting indignation infrastructure. But, for those disinclined to fake it, the only viable option is to avoid anything that might be mangled into offensiveness. Purging the course is hardly fool-proof, but it is relatively undemanding, almost morally painless and students rarely notice the difference.

Let me offer a first-hand example. I once taught the basic American government lecture course and Constitution lecture covered the three-fifths compromise - the Article I, Section 2 provision that counted "other persons" (i.e., slaves and untaxed Indians - blacks are never mentioned by name ) as three-fifths of a person for purposes of House representation. I explained that Southerners wanted to treat slaves as a whole person since this would sharply boost their representation while abolitionist New Englanders proposed counting slaves as zero. Unfortunately, this three-fifths provision has now been interpreted by some black activists (including an African American colleague who stated her misinformed opinion in a public law school lecture) as "proof" of America's racist origins. Black students have probably encountered this historical mistruth elsewhere (Jesse Jackson once endorsed it) and it does appear superficially plausible.

Rather than risk being accused of covering up racism or telling lies, I dropped the topic altogether. I similarly removed all discussion of slavery so students thus never learned that the while the Constitution did not outlaw slavery, it did permit a ban on importing slaves after 1808 and this was, indeed, done - which, in turn, made those slaves already in America exceedingly costly and thus at times too valuable to risk at dangerous labor (I further skipped how the ever-plentiful Irish were instead hired for life-threatening jobs).

And, as one might become carried away in a long-delayed spring cleaning, out went most references to crime (no small accomplishment in a course covering the Supreme Court), the dubious legal use of racial gerrymandering to insure black election victories, the possible downside of affirmative action and anything else that might remotely prove an ideological fire hazard. And this clean up did not end with race-related issues.

My experience is probably typical and thus the fear of giving "offense" consigns thousands of graduates to incomplete educations. Sort of like proper Victorian sex education. A vicious cycle is created - "safe lectures" beget boredom and this only encourages yet more sleeping and more garbling.

This censoring can also have more tragic consequences for those oblivious to awaiting minefields. I had a distinguished colleague - Stuart Nagel - whose tale is worth telling. He taught public policy and one day explained that black businesses in Kenya were uncompetitive against Indian-run enterprises since blacks where too generous in granting credit to friends and family. He had been invited by the government of Kenya to study the situation and suggested better business training for black Kenyans. The topic was indisputably part of the course and thus totally protected by AAUP academic speech guidelines. Stuart was also extremely liberal on all racial issues.

Nevertheless, to condense a long story, an anonymous letter from irritated black students complained of Nagel's "racism" and included the preposterous change of "workplace violence." After a protracted and bungled internal university investigation, two federal trials (I testified at one), he was stripped of his teaching responsibilities and coerced into retirement.

Interestingly, having been charged as "racist," his departmental colleagues, save two conservatives, abandoned him. A few years later, partially as a result of this emotionally and financially draining incident ($100,000 out-of-pocket for legal fees), he committed suicide.

I can only speculate that he believed that years spent being a "good liberal" (including service in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division) would insulate him from being denounced as a "racist." Nor would he have anticipated that the university would spend the hundreds of thousands in legal fees to punish a famous tenured faculty member who "offended" two students. Nagel's sad saga undoubtedly provided useful lessons to many others: "stupidity can really be dangerous, even in a university. Better keep quiet.

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Australian education pattern different

Leftist State governments fail to teach the basics

AUSTRALIAN school students spend half the time learning reading, writing, maths and science that their counterparts in other industrialised nations do. Australian curriculums devote the least amount of time of the 30 leading industrialised nations to teaching core subjects for 9- to 11-year-olds and for 12- to 14-year-olds, says the OECD report on education released last night. Education at a Glance 2007 says Australia is the only member of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development to decrease public investment in tertiary education, by 4 per cent, compared with an average 49 per cent increase in the 29 other nations.

While public spending on education at all levels is below the OECD average, the level of private spending at the school and university level is among the highest.

The report also notes the lack of financial incentive for experienced teachers, with 31 per cent of wage rises in the past decade going to beginners and only 3per cent to those with more than 15 years on the job. Education Minister Julie Bishop and Opposition education spokesman Stephen Smith said the core subjects of reading, writing, maths and science were vital and the OECD results reflected why it was necessary to introduce a rigorous national curriculum in such subjects. Ms Bishop said the report echoed recent concerns made by the Australian Primary School Principals Association that the curriculum was too cluttered and that core skills were suffering as a result. Mr Smith said the core subjects were at the heart of a quality education and fundamental to other learning.

But association president Leonie Trimper disputed the figures, saying Australian primary schools spent about 30 per cent of the week on reading and writing and 20 per cent on maths. The OECD reports that the intended instruction time for the compulsory curriculum in Australia is 13 per cent in reading, writing and literature for primary school students compared with 23 per cent in the OECD, and 9 per cent for 12- to 14-year-olds, compared with 15 per cent. Maths accounts for 9 per cent of instruction time in primary schools compared with the OECD average of 16 per cent, and 9 per cent in high schools, compared with the average of 13 per cent. Primary school science accounts for 2 per cent and a foreign language 1 per cent of teaching time compared with the averages of 8 per cent and 7 per cent respectively.

The report notes that Australia has a much lower proportion, 41 per cent compared with the OECD average of 92 per cent, of compulsory core curriculum, or the minimum required time devoted to core subjects common to all students. The majority of the compulsory Australian curriculum is flexible, allowing schools or students to choose where to spend the rest of their time. "This indicator captures intended instruction time ... it does not show the actual number of hours of instruction received by students," the report says. "It nevertheless provides an indication of how much formal instruction time is considered necessary in order for students to achieve the desired educational goals."

In assessing education funding, the report says that based on 2005 figures, public funding of all levels of education in Australia is 4.3 per cent of GDP, compared with an OECD average of 5 per cent while private spending is 1.6 per cent of GDP, more than double the OECD average of 0.7 per cent, and the third-highest level behind the US and Korea.

Public funding of tertiary education institutions fell by 4 per cent compared with an average increase in the OECD of 49 per cent. Half of all tertiary spending is now from private funds.

Mr Smith said the investment Australia made in education compared with other countries was the crucial factor. "The report finds that there has been a significant decline in public investment across all levels of education in Australia under the Howard Government," he said.

Ms Bishop said the OECD's analysis was flawed, and was based on a different definition of tertiary institution than used in Australia. Ms Bishop also said it failed to include large public funding increases since 2004, including the $5 billion Higher Education Endowment Fund. However, she said the report provided further support for the Government's push to introduce performance-based pay for teachers. "The lack of incentive and career prospects is one reason why 40 per cent of teaching graduates do not go into teaching and 25 per cent of new teachers leave the profession within five years," she said"

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19 September, 2007

DC Area Schools' Success Obscures Lingering Racial SAT Gap

And linger it will

SAT scores at the Washington region's top high schools show an achievement gap between blacks and the rest of the student population -- a gap that is often masked by the overall performance of the schools. White students in the spring graduating class of Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda -- the top performer in Montgomery County -- averaged 1893 out of a possible 2400 points on the SAT. The 13 black students tested averaged 1578, more than 300 points lower.

At Yorktown, Arlington County's leader, white students averaged 1804 on the SAT; black students averaged 1470. Black students at Severna Park High, the top performer in Anne Arundel County, averaged 1336, while white students' average was 1646. Despite the gap, black students in the Class of 2007 scored well at some of the region's most prestigious high schools; at a few, black students topped the overall national average, 1511, on the best-known college entrance test. Solid scores on the SAT or the rival ACT are all but essential to students aspiring to competitive universities.

But none of the 47 regular high schools in Montgomery and Fairfax counties, the largest school systems in Maryland and Virginia, yielded a black student SAT average this year that met or beat the average for all students in those counties. The racial achievement gap at affluent schools goes mostly unnoticed by parents, who seldom look beyond the high overall SAT averages. But it vexes black parents, who make the same sacrifices as their neighbors to buy homes in high-performing school districts and have the same aspirations for their children.

"I wanted my children to be in the school where the most people were focused toward higher education," said Pam Spearman, whose son is a junior at Severna Park High. But Spearman said she and other black parents in the Annapolis area suburb have come to recognize "that our kids have issues at school because achievement is not necessarily expected of them by fellow students -- black and white."

Nationwide, white students averaged 1579 on the SAT in 2007; blacks averaged 1287. The gap, 292 points, has scarcely changed in the past 10 years: It has increased by two points each on the reading and math sections, which were joined last year by a new writing assessment. The disparity has endured for decades and is perhaps the classic example of the racial achievement gap in public education. Critics have cited it as evidence of subtle racial bias in standardized testing.

Across the country, black parents have formed groups and set up Web sites to tackle the achievement gap. There are blogs offering advice on how to navigate school systems. Parents hold group study sessions to help prepare their children for the rigor of college-prep classes. Last year, parents of black Severna Park students, who number about 80, formed a group called Falcon Flight. Through meetings with administrators, culturally motivated field trips and career-minded events, Spearman said, the parents hope to "help kids see the connection between their lives, their futures and their education." It's a connection most parents in affluent bedroom communities take for granted.

Teachers, parents and scholars cite several factors in the persistent gap separating blacks' and, to a lesser extent, Hispanics' scores from whites' and Asians' scores on the SAT. [But the elephant in the bedroom -- IQ -- must not be mentioned, of course] Black students tend to arrive at elite high schools inadequately prepared for the SAT, according to directors of the College Board, which administers the test. And even in affluent communities, they don't take as rigorous courses as their white and Asian classmates; the wealthiest black students are no more likely to take calculus in high school, for example, than the poorest whites and Asians, a deficiency that points to a historic lack of access to the classes.

"There are differences in preparation that will take years to erase," said Wayne Camara, the College Board's vice president for research. In Montgomery, for instance, 65 percent of all white 2006 graduates took at least one Advanced Placement exam. The corresponding figure for blacks: 27 percent.....

The disparity between blacks' and whites' SAT scores is larger now than it was 10 years ago [proving that the politically correct theories about what causes it and how to cope with it are WRONG] in Montgomery and Fairfax, although it has shrunk recently in Fairfax. The gap approaches 400 points in Montgomery and 300 points in Fairfax. Test participation, an equally prized goal, has risen in both counties over that time. In both counties, students of all races have scored above state and national averages for their racial categories.....

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There are some good reasons to skip university study

Study hard so that you can get into university: this is the message continually fed to students in years 11 and 12 at school. So let's see what people entering university have to look forward to. For starters, today's uni students must put up with higher fees. Those whose mum and dad can't foot the bill will most likely remain in the red for years to come. And don't forget the costs of commuting, textbooks and ever-increasing living expenses.

In a society obsessed with making money, this so-called "invaluable education" doesn't exactly put you ahead in the race. It's going to be three or four years, in some cases longer, before you finish your degree. With so many options available to young people today this can feel like a lifetime. Don't forget this is the MTV generation - brought up in a fast-paced world of convenience - with supposedly shorter attention spans and lower boredom thresholds.

It's no wonder students feel they're not getting places fast enough. Universities are going to insist this length of time is necessary in order to gather adequate levels of knowledge - it has nothing to do with profiting from annual fees.

The material being taught in these institutions shouldn't escape mention either. Students might pay more attention if they could see how the information they're being given is relevant to the direction they want to take. I know I had a ball meticulously studying the ins and outs of micro-economics for an exam, which was clearly necessary for a sport studies degree. That's not what I signed up for. I really should have read the fine print first. Perhaps some questioning directed at the body in charge of writing university curriculums is needed.

The good news is, if you can stick to your course long enough you'll make friends who can collect your lecture notes while you hang out at the nearest uni bar. When it comes down to it, the degree is the main incentive for those at uni. To receive that piece of paper which will get you a terse "very good" during your job interview with a company that was most likely established by someone who had no tertiary education. The bad news is, if it's a worthwhile job, your shiny new resume will get thrown into the pile with those of 15 university graduates who are all in the same position as you.

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Australia: Teacher failures spell student trouble

Who will teach the teachers?

Young teenagers could be forgiven for misspelling words such as subterranean and miscellaneous, but what about the nation's primary school teachers? A spelling test of about 40 Victorian teachers, conducted in April this year, provides no grounds for confidence. Not one of the teachers could correctly spell all 11 words, ranging in difficulty from substitute to adolescence. The test was set at the level expected of 14-year-olds but the average score among the 39 teachers was just seven correctly spelled words.

Five teachers correctly spelled 10 words, putting their level at 13 years and nine months. One teacher was unable to spell any of the words while two teachers got only two of the words correct. Overall, 22 teachers misspelled subterranean, 17 couldn't manage embarrassing or miscellaneous and 16 had trouble with adolescence.

The test was held during a two-day course conducted by teacher Denyse Ritchie, who has run programs for the past 11 years giving primary school teachers the basic literacy skills to teach reading. Ms Ritchie, executive director and co-author of THRASS (Teaching Handwriting Reading And Spelling Skills), used by thousands of schools around the nation, said the spelling results were typical of the standard she saw.

She said teachers trained over the past few decades had been influenced by the "whole language" method of teaching reading, in which the letter-sound relationship underpinning written language is only one strategy used to teach reading, and not necessarily the first. "Rather than teaching children the 26 sounds of the alphabet, they need to learn the 44 letter-sound combinations that comprise the English language." Ms Ritchie said teaching children the letter 'c' only as the sound in cat made it impossible for them to work out how to read words like chair, chef and face. With the sound 'f', students are taught that the letter f makes the sound but not that the letters 'ph' make the same sound.

Ms Ritchie said the biggest problem was that teachers were not taught how to break words into their composite sounds and so could not explain it to children. "Teachers are ignorant of the 44 sounds in English and all the spelling choices that make up those sounds; they have a very limited understanding of it. "You can learn to read without knowing phenomics (the sounds that make up words), but when you spell, you have to have a good phenomic understanding to help spell words like said. "Unless you're taught that 'ai' as well as 'e' can make an 'eh' sound in words like said and again, you will spell said as 'sed'. "But many teachers don't have that inherent knowledge,"

The teachers' phenomic knowledge was also tested. When asked to break words into the constituent sounds or phenomes - such as how many sounds in 'cat' (c-a-t) - the average score was 4.1 out of a possible 10 correct answers. When asked to identify the third sound in a word like scrunch (r), the average score was 4.5 out of 10 and the average mark for breaking words into syllables was also 4.5 out of 10.

Ms Ritchie said teachers commonly answered that the word scrunch comprised two sounds (scr-unch) when it actually has six sounds (s-cr-u-n-ch). "Teachers and students need to know that letters don't have a sound," she said. "They need to know that letters are only symbols that are used continually in different combinations to represent sounds."

In Britain, the Government has stipulated that from the beginning of this school year, reading will be taught using "first and fast" synthetic phonics, which teaches students the letter-sounds and how they are blended to form words. But the British teachers association persists in arguing that teaching reading using an intensive phonics approach is inferior to an "inclusive reading program" that has children predict words based on the context of the sentence or the type of word it is.

In a position paper on reading and phonics released by the English Teachers Association of NSW in July, it suggests a child reading the sentence "The car drove along the s..... at high speed" could guess it says street because the word starts with s. If the child said road, the paper says, the teacher will "have to weigh up whether to take the student back to the word" to read it correctly. "They may NOT because they recognise that meaning is most important, that we ALL make such mistakes EVERY time we read, and that this mistake shows that the child understands what they are reading," the paper says.

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18 September, 2007

Higher education has been oversold

By George Leef

In one of his New York Times columns earlier this year, David Brooks lamented that "Despite all the incentives, 30 percent of kids drop out of high school and the college graduation rate has been flat for a generation." Brooks, like many spokesmen for the higher-education establishment, worries that the United States is falling behind in the international race for brainpower.

That is why we keep hearing politicians talk about the need to stimulate a higher rate of college attendance and completion. We're in a global "knowledge economy," and whereas America used to be tops in the percentage of workers with college degrees, we have now fallen behind a number of other nations. At a big education conference I attended back in February, former North Carolina governor Jim Hunt called this situation "scary."

Sorry, scaremongers, but there is nothing to worry about. If anything, America now puts too many students into college, and we certainly don't need any new subsidies to get more there.

Here are my reasons for holding that contrarian view.

First, it isn't true that the economy is undergoing some dramatic shift to "knowledge work" that can only be performed by people who have college educations. When we hear that more and more jobs "require" a college degree, that isn't because most of them are so technically demanding that an intelligent high school graduate couldn't learn to do the work. Rather, what it means is that more employers are using educational credentials as a screening mechanism. As James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield write in their book Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money, "the United States has become the most rigidly credentialized society in the world. A B.A. is required for jobs that by no stretch of imagination need two years of full-time training, let alone four."

Second, the needless pressure to get educational credentials draws a large number of academically weak and intellectually disengaged students into college. All they want is the piece of paper that gets them past the screening. Most schools have quietly lowered their academic standards so that such students will stay happy and remain enrolled. Consequently, they seldom learn much - many employers complain that college graduates they hire can't even write a coherent sentence - but most eventually get their degrees.

Third, due to the overselling of higher education, we find substantial numbers of college graduates taking "high school" jobs like retail sales. It's not that there is anything wrong with well-educated clerks or truck drivers, but to a great extent college is no longer about providing a solid, rounded education. The courses that once were the pillars of the curriculum, such as history, literature, philosophy, and fine arts, have been watered down and are usually optional. Sadly, college education is now generally sold as a stepping stone to good employment rather than as an intellectually broadening experience. Sometimes it manages to do both, but often it does neither.

Fourth, it's a mistake to assume that the traditional college setting is the best or only way for people to learn the things they need to know in order to become successful workers. On-the-job training, self-directed studies, and courses taken with a particular end in mind (such as those offered in fields like accounting or finance at proprietary schools) usually lead to much more educational gain than do courses taken just because they fill degree requirements.

"But wait," I hear readers saying, "isn't it true that people with college degrees earn far more than people with only high-school diplomas?"

That is true on average - an average composed to a large degree of very bright and ambitious people who would be successful with or without a college degree, and also of people who earned their degrees decades ago when the curriculum and academic standards were more rigorous. It simply doesn't follow that every person we might lure into college today is going to enjoy a great boost in lifetime earnings just because he manages to stick it out through enough courses to graduate. The sad reality is that we now find many young people who have spent years in college and have piled up sizeable debts serving up Starbucks coffee or delivering pizza for Papa John's.

A perennial trope among politicians is that more education will make everyone better off. Having a more efficient educational system - one that taught the three Rs well in eight years rather than poorly in 16 - would indeed be a benefit. Simply putting a higher percentage of our young people into college, however, makes just as much sense as spreading more fertilizer on a field that's already been over-fertilized.

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Far-Leftist recommendations from official British body

Teachers must not teach. Oh No!

Pupils should mark their own class work and decide what their school tests should cover, according to the Government's exams advisers. Teachers should train secondary school children to set their homework and devise mark schemes, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority said. Pupils should then assess the results, grading their own efforts and giving "feedback" to their classmates, the latest National Curriculum guidance said.

The QCA, which devised the new secondary curriculum, said such an approach helps children support each other and develop independent study skills. It said: "Peer assessment and self-assessment are much more than learners simply marking their own or each other's work. In order to improve learning, self-assessment must engage learners with the quality of their work and help them reflect on how to improve it. "Peer assessment enables learners to provide each other with valuable feedback so that they can learn from and support each other."

The guidelines suggested teachers in schools that decide to adopt the system would need to train pupils in marking techniques. The suggested "strategies" for developing pupils' peer assessment skills could include:

* Asking pupils in groups to write five questions on a topic and following whole-class discussion, pick the two best questions from each group. "Then ask learners to answer all the selected questions for homework."

* Ask pupils to "analyse mark schemes and devise their own for a specified task".

* Ask learners to "mark each other's work but do not give them the answers. Instead, ask them to find the correct answers from available resources".

Source




How low has academia fallen?

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

Very low indeed. I used to wonder how German universities, among the most distinguished in the world back then, fell into lockstep behind Hitler. How could the supposedly the best minds allow that?

I wonder no longer. The signs are very discouraging, and it isn't the outlier marginal campuses where the problem is greatest. Not just the University of California and Duke. Harvard, fresh off the disgrace of hounding Lawrence Summers from its presidency, is embracing the madness. Scott Johnson of Powerline writes today:

At Harvard, President Drew Gilpin Faust is proving herself to be immune to concerns about intellectual standards or racial discrimination. Indeed, she seeks "a different Harvard" -- one with so many black professors and staff that it could fill Harvard's stadium.

Read for yourself the sort of faculty enjoying President Faust's embrace, and follow the links provided by Scott.

I devoted more than two decades of my life to a career in academia, the majority of that time at Harvard. I am quite simply nauseated at the level of anti-intellectualism rampant at America's most elite academic institutions. Harvard, with its age, prestige, and $35 billion endowment is leading the academy into a vortex. The barbarians are not just at the gates or even inside the gates, they are in command.





17 September, 2007

Unqualified teachers want sympathy for handicapping our youth

Tracy Jan’s expose on minority teachers failing certification exams, even in their designated fields, should be more than an eye-opener for those who continue to believe the blind can lead the blind (“Minority Scores Lag On Teaching Test, Panel To Study Failure Rate, Bias Complaints,” August 19).

The usual protectors of the dignity of non-performing minority teachers are quick to reassure us that the validity of the test is to be questioned due to potential for “cultural biases.” As education school deans ask for the Massachusetts Tests for Educator Licensure to be redesigned, they also lament that we should determine “whether the quality of education that minority teaching applicants receive is good enough.”

So a Cambridge attorney drafts a lawsuit alleging cultural bias against the testing company and the State of Massachusetts on behalf of a special education teacher who has failed the test several times since 1998. And a consultant retained by Boston Public Schools offers, “If you take the achievement gap of high school students, you can just project it forward into college and into the teaching ranks.”

Is it possible that poorly educated public school students can become poorly educated college students, and then, poorly educated teachers of the next generation of poorly educated public school students? What a frightening specter of monumental incompetence. Teachers unions should organize to address this dilemma at least as vociferously as they organize against reforms such as school choice, which have shown proven methods for improving public schools through competition.

Massachusetts is certainly not alone in this crisis. This has been festering unrelentingly for the last 10 years. On September 6, 2001, five days before the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., another disaster was unfolding in Illinois: Chicago Sun-Times staff reporters Rosalind Rossi, Becky Beaupre, and Kate N. Grossman identified “5,243 Illinois teachers failed key exams” that past spring. “In Elgin District 46, students studied the English language with a teacher who had failed 21 of 21 tests for teachers.... Sun-Times found that teachers who struggled to pass their exams can pop up anywhere. Last school year, those who needed at least four tries to pass a single certification test were teaching children in a North Shore junior high, a Palatine special-education classroom and a Hoffman Estates high school.”

The distribution of “struggling teachers” does not trend toward suburban schools, however. It is the poorer inner-city schools of our nation, with the most educationally challenged academic-achievement-gapped minority students, that inherit the least qualified teachers in their dysfunctional public schools. The Joyce Foundation commissioned research under the Education Trust for the entire Midwest to track this dismal phenomenon:

1.Illinois students in the highest-minority and highest-poverty schools are assigned teachers of significantly lower quality than their counterparts in schools that serve few low-income students and students of color.

2.The Illinois research also demonstrates the clear link between teacher quality and student achievement. In the highest-poverty high schools with high teacher-quality indices, twice as many students met state standards as did students in other similarly high-poverty high schools with low teacher-quality indices.

Researchers determined that “students in Illinois who attended schools with average teacher quality and only completed math up to Algebra II actually were more ready for college than their peers who completed calculus but went to schools with the lowest-teacher quality.” “This research shows once again that good teachers can have an enormous impact on student achievement,” said Ellen Alberding, president of the Joyce Foundation. It is time that we accept the challenge of reforming non-performing schools which miseducate teachers so they can miseducate students. No more special pleading for those would-be practitioners who are handicapping our children and demanding higher taxes for the privilege.

Source




Fired Leftist teacher claiming injustice

Deborah Mayer, 57, a former Indiania elementary-school teacher, says she lost her job after saying 'I honk for peace' in class. Kissimmee Middle School reading teacher Deborah Mayer said her world has been "devastated" by four words she uttered in an Indiana classroom four years ago: "I honk for peace." Mayer, who now lives in Celebration, was fired from her teaching job in Bloomington, Ind., after that 2003 comment. Now she's appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court, asserting that her dismissal for expressing her political views violated her First Amendment rights. It's a case with national implications for what teachers can -- and can't -- say in a public-school classroom.

This has been devastating to me," Mayer, 57, said of her case, which has cost her $70,000 in legal fees. "What's important is that when I decided to stand up for my rights and take this school system to court, the court said teachers have no right of free speech."

But Thomas Wheeler, attorney for the Monroe County Community School Corp., said her real problem is she was a bad teacher. Besides, he said, teachers don't have First Amendment rights in the classroom because they teach a curriculum decided by state and local officials. So far, lower courts have agreed -- and the Supreme Court has not decided whether to hear her appeal.

Martin Sweet, an assistant professor of political science at Florida Atlantic University, said Mayer's case has a decent chance of getting a hearing. "The First Amendment does not go away for either teachers or students. But it has to be measured," he said. One measure is subject matter, he said: A teacher discussing current events could more appropriately voice political opinions than, for instance, a biology teacher.

Mayer said her troubles started Jan. 10, 2003 -- the eve of the Iraq war -- during a weekly current-events discussion in her Grades 4-6 class at Clear Creek Elementary School in Bloomington, Ind. A pupil asked if she would participate in a peace rally. "I honk for peace," Mayer, a veteran teacher in her first year at Bloomington, said she told them. She said she also told the students, "People ought to seek out peaceful solutions before going to war."

She said several parents subsequently complained about her comments, leading to the non-renewal of her contract at the end of the year. "I said four little words, and it destroyed my life," said Mayer, whose grown son subsequently served in Afghanistan.

But Wheeler said the peace comments "had absolutely nothing to do with her termination. What happened was, she was a bad teacher." He said parents began complaining in October 2002, and some requested that their children be transferred to another class....

May teachers respond? Mayer said she's not advocating that teachers can say anything they want -- but insists they can respond to students' comments and questions. "Teachers need to know if their in-class speech is ever entitled to First Amendment protection, and if so when," her appeal to the Supreme Court says.

Wheeler, the School Board attorney, said it's clear public-school teachers have no free-speech rights. "We need to keep control of the classroom that's taught in our name," he said. "If they disagree with the curriculum, they can go somewhere else."

The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. "The First Amendment does not entitle primary and secondary teachers, when conducting the education of captive audiences, to cover topics, or advocate viewpoints, that depart from the curriculum adopted by the school system," it ruled....

Source





16 September, 2007

A New Anti-Semitism Takes Root on Campus

Today, pro-Israel students confront a demoralizing challenge on campus defending Israel's right to exist as a democratic Jewish state, as well as expressing views that would be labeled as "conservative." Some examples:

* Natana DeLong-Bas, a lecturer in theology at Boston College, as well as in the Department of Near East and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University, says that she does "not find any evidence that makes me agree that Osama bin Laden was behind the attack on the twin towers. All we have heard from him was simply praise and commendation of those who had carried out the operation."

* Joseph Massad, a Columbia University professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history, writes that "all those in the Arab world who deny the Holocaust are, in my opinion, Zionists."

* Hatem Bazian, a senior lecturer in Islamic studies at University of California, Berkeley, states that "it's about time that we have an intifada in this country that changes fundamentally the political dynamics in here."

On the Horizon

You might think these statements were made somewhere in the Arab world or perhaps in 1930s' Europe. Yet they are found today in U.S. classrooms. Tellingly, these scholars represent what is happening in the halls of academia and illustrate the type of scholarship used to mold future generations.

Moreover, with the release of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, students face another challenge as it relates to the American-Israeli alliance. The authors contend that that there are no genuine or compelling motives for America's support for Israel, which they refer to as a "strategic burden."

In addition, they argue that U.S. foreign policy has been hijacked by the pro-Israel camps and works against the interests of America itself. They even went as far as claiming that one of the results of AIPAC's work was to start the war in Iraq.

Their narrative recounts every colorful report of Israeli "cruelty" toward Palestinians as an indisputable fact. But conveniently, they leave out the rise of Palestinian terrorism before 1967, as well as the 1972 Munich Olympics, Black September and countless cases of suicide bombings against Jews and Israelis.

In an attempt to defuse this, the Jewish Policy Center has organized a panel of experts -- including Daniel Pipes, Cliff May and David Horowitz, and moderated by radio commentator Michael Medved -- to address "The Fight Against Radical Islam and the New Anti-Semitism on Campus." The event will take place at 7 p.m.Wednesday, Sept. 19, at Temple Beth Hillel/Beth El in Wynnewood.

'A Full-Blown Crisis'

When asked about the reason and the importance for holding such an event, Dick Fox, chairman of the Jewish Policy Center, stated that the center "has been addressing the problem of radical Islam and anti-Semitism on campus for several years. Organizationally, this issue has been a top priority for us. Now, it has become a full-blown crisis."

The brouhaha over the "Israel lobby" as a Jewish conspiracy controlling America has been challenged; unfortunately, that has produced even more virulent rhetoric against Israel.

Academia has unconsciously exposed Jews and Israelis as the canaries in the coal mine. If universities are indicators of social trends, then anti-Semitism is becoming more acceptable in the guise of anti-Zionism. The thesis of Israel-bashers is basically that only Jews are unworthy of having a sovereign state.

These attitudes are pervasive on university campuses and are protected by what's called "academic freedom." But if we are to become better advocates for Israel, then we deserve to hear a balanced representation of Israel and the Middle East in our educational institutions. We can start by seeking out those voices that until Sept. 11, 2001, had been predominantely marginalized by the academy.

Source




Ontario Catholic School Board Approves Referrals to Gay-Activist Therapist, Censors Right to Life Material

Article below reproduced without links. See the original for those

Minutes of meetings of the Waterloo Catholic District School Board (WCDSB) Family Life Advisory Committee (FLAC) reveal that the Catholic board has undertaken activities that seriously contradict Catholic teaching. Despite Catholic teaching opposing homosexual acts, the board has approved referral of Catholic students to homosexuality-promoting therapists and organizations.

In the January 25, 2006 meeting minutes, published on the WCDSB website, the FLAC approved the referral of children to an active homosexual therapist for "LGBTTTSIQ sensitivity training/counselling".

The gay therapist, David Vervoot, is an active homosexual who has raised a son with his male partner. According to his website "Rainbow Therapist", Vervoot has offered anti-homophobia workshops in high schools and presented on topics such as "Building LGBT Community Supports in Rural Cities" and "Creating Accessible Health Care Services For Queer Communities". He has been on the committees of Guelph Pride, Guelph's LGBT Lending Library, and co-founded the Waterloo Wellington Gay & Bi fathers peer support group.

During the same meeting, the committee decided that certain Right to Life materials might not be appropriate for students. According to the minutes, the committee "advised that some material seems more appropriate for teachers/adults as opposed to students. Some material may not be appropriate for students."

On March 29, 2006 the same school board committee's minutes document the approval of "OK 2B Me," a three-year project with Family and Children Services to support Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transsexual and Queer children aged 5 to 18. The initiative offers "workshops, peer support/connection, mentoring project, group support and a website." The program will offer "free" and "individual" services as well as provide educational groups and crisis counseling.

On April 26, the FLAC committee put forward another brochure entitled, "Hiding Its Face: Homophobia". The pamphlet supported a "National Day Against Homophobia" that would be celebrated on May 17. The pamphlet was approved for staff use each year.

During the same meeting, the committee approved PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), an organization that advocates the full recognition of the homosexual agenda within schools and other areas of society. The committee authorized the use of a PFLAG brochure as a resource for teachers, social workers, YCW's Chaplains and "as a support for parents with GLBTQ students."

Defend Traditional Marriage and Family (DTMF), a local organization, challenged the Catholic school board on the presence of pro-homosexual material in the school system earlier this year.

The group secured a meeting with the FLAC committee to discuss a problematic book, but were refused the opportunity to discuss the book in question in the wider context of the other homosexuality-promoting materials and programs. Instead FLAC said that their discussions must be narrowly limited to the particular book. DTMF asked the Catholic board to explain pro-homosexual programs such as a workshop program for teachers and staff that was entitled, "Understanding and Supporting Transgender Children and Youth". The Catholic school board complained in a June 25 letter to DTMF, however, that the other materials were a "separate and distinct" matter from DTMF's original complaint against the gay-propaganda book found in the system entitled "Open Minds to Equality".

Responding in an August 3 letter, DTMF communications director Jack Fonseca insisted that the book is in fact only part of a larger issue that has "infiltrated" the Waterloo school system and created an air of tolerance towards active homosexuality. Denying the grounds of the WCDSB's complaint, he emphasized the fact that over thirty gay-propaganda books and videos have been discovered within Waterloo schools, teachers have attended transgender workshops and the school board has partnered with homosexual-promoting groups.

Fonseca insisted that WCDSB's Family Life Committee (FLAC) must discuss all these crucial issues at its next meeting on September 26. Fonseca argued, "Offering this secular, homosexual group (PFLAG) as a resource is tantamount to telling confused kids, 'You can't resist same-sex attractions, so don't even try, just embrace the lifestyle, and here's how to get started.'"

The DTMF letter also brings to the WCDSB's attention a Grade 9 Religious Education lesson that uses ambiguous language that DTMF fears may mislead "students into thinking that the Church has no serious moral objection to homosexual acts."

LifeSiteNews.com contacted Bryan Mahn, Superintendent of Human Resources & Facility Services for the WCDSB, and asked why a Catholic school committee would approve a homosexual activist as a reference for teachers and students. Mahn told LifeSiteNews.com that he would look into the matter and provide answers by the end of the week.

Local Bishop Anthony Tonnos was unavailable for comment on this story since he and auxiliary Bishop Gerard Bergie are out of town this week.

Source




Bipartisan recommendation from Australia: Degrees first -- before teacher training

Though whether many teachers in places like NYC and Los Angeles would be capable of getting a real degree remains a question

ASPIRING high school teachers should have to complete arts or science degrees before undertaking specific studies in education, an inquiry into teaching standards has recommended. The inquiry's report, tabled in Federal Parliament yesterday, also called for more rigorous teaching of literacy and numeracy to trainee teachers at university. It backed offering "incentives" to teachers as part of a broader push to improve their pay and raise entry standards. Education Minister Julie Bishop has been promoting performance-based pay to improve teaching standards in schools.

Teaching education as a compulsory postgraduate course for aspiring secondary-school teachers would be a significant departure from current practice, where many students simply complete a straight bachelor of education.

The bipartisan inquiry by the Senate's employment, education and workplace relations committee was chaired by Victorian Liberal senator Judith Troeth. The committee said many new teachers had "insufficient grounding in the actual subject content they are teaching". "That is, they do not know enough history, have limited appreciation of literature through not reading enough of it, and are ignorant of, and frightened of, mathematics and science," it said. "This has a direct effect on the quality of educational outcomes because it can impede student intellectual growth." [Surprise!]

Senator Troeth, a former teacher, said she had studied history and geography as majors in an arts degree at Melbourne University, as well as a sub-major in English, before going on to complete a specialised diploma in education. She then went to teach Year 11 and 12 English and history and middle school (junior high school) geography. "So often these days, teachers have the general experience of the bachelor of education degree which teaches them the skills of pedagogy but it does not instil the subject disciplines into them," she said. "We feel there should be a movement back to that."

In its report, the committee expressed concerns about weaknesses in the training of teachers. "Some of these may be the consequence of factors outside the control of universities, namely the academic quality of school-leavers wanting to become teachers, although it might be argued that entry levels should be raised to keep out those whose literacy and numeracy are of doubtful standard," it said. Too many students were reaching Year 6 yet remained "functionally illiterate".

Source





15 September, 2007

It's time to abolish the public schools

The public "government" school system has become a nightmare of its own making. For decades, its proponents have done everything they can to keep the public "government" education machine going. Moreover, they have claimed that, without public schools, American children would not be educated and that parents are not fit to decide how their children should be educated. They often say that public schools are needed because children need to be socialized at a very young age and that the state - not the parents or any legal guardian - has a vested interest in the learning development of our children.

The Left, unsurprisingly enough, has often complained that the public "government" schools never receive adequate amounts of funding in order for their schools to work. Obviously, that argument is always the same: we need more money for the schools so that they can do the job of "educating" our very young. Unfortunately, today's generation of Americans are unaware of the fact that the modern welfare state has polluted their minds with the belief that only the public schools can successfully provide a real learning environment for our children - one that parents are just unqualified to furnish for them. Therefore, this has become the very success story of liberal collectivists who erroneously believe that the state knows the child better than the parents. Because liberals cannot and will never be able to successfully justify the welfare statism that they brought to this country decades ago, they cannot and will never see the damage that their socialism - as well as their love for it - has done to America. In effect, they are, without question, largely and morally responsible for bringing about their brand of statism not only to our country, but also to the education system as well.

The Right, on the other hand, sees things somewhat differently. While many conservative collectivists, historically speaking, have correctly noted that the public schools are a disaster waiting to happen, they too have opined that the public schools must continue to exist, despite their view that the schools can be "reformed" via injections of what they erroneously view as "free-market" or "market-oriented" approaches in order to make the schools work. Somehow the idea of using the power of the state to strong-arm families, educators, and local schools into accepting aberrant and distorted - not to mention state-sanctioned (a.k.a. state-imposed) - socialistic machinations under the rubric of "free enterprise" is very appealing to conservatives, who push and call for them at every turn.

Because of these simple truths, it is morally and economically imperative that the government control and monopoly of our education system is dismantled immediately. It is the obligation and moral duty of the citizens of our nation to take the education monopolists and their collectivistic sycophants to task for their immoral and unconstitutional control of the education establishment. That goes for every man, woman, and child who can find it within themselves to oppose the union of education and state.

Furthermore, because of the pervasive evils of a top-down, bureaucratic, and one-size-fits-all public "government" education system that functions at the local, state, and federal levels, local parents, educators, and schools find that they are unable to retain control of their own schools, thanks to the political clout of big government politicians, teacher unions, and their collectivistic union lackeys.

School vouchers

While a number of conservatives have ardently called for disenfranchised and disillusioned parents to remove their children from Godless schools [http://www.getthekidsout.org/] that refuse to allow school prayer, post copies of the Ten Commandments on the walls of the classrooms, and teach creationism over evolution, end political correctness on school grounds, and many other forms of socialistic measures, increasing numbers of them are ecstatically endorsing and even touting school vouchers for religious parents to do just that. Their contention is that, because God has been "taken out of the classroom" (largely thanks to state and federal education bureaucrats, unions, and many Supreme Court decisions [http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/church-state/decisions.html] that were handed down over the years), the schools can neither be trusted nor relied upon to inculcate school children with religious principles and moral values that ought to be a natural part of their education.

What's even more distressing is that these conservatives, including some libertarians [http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Stossel/story?id=1500338], are deceiving parents, students, and the public at large regarding these voucher claims by promoting them in the form of "school choice" - that is, a disguised euphemism for reform of the schools simply designed to broaden the choices for parents to educate their kids with the help of the state. This reform is intended to bring schools on a path to a separation of education and state - "intended" being the operative word here.

A tax-funded voucher system seems like a good idea on the surface, except that it's not. Why? Because there are quite a number of problems with the money. First, as almost everyone knows, vouchers are just a welfare-state scam that basically snookers parents into accepting public "government" money to send their children to a public or private school with the permission and choosing of the state. Parents who take the money will find that the state has already attached strings to the funds. It goes without saying that the state will be making demands in return. That means that the parents and their children will ultimately end up as permanent education wards of the state. Once the private schools begin accepting public money, they will no longer answer to parents but rather to the government. In the end, the private schools eventually become carbon copies of their public counterparts, resulting in their imminent oblivion.

Second, once private schools take the money, they will find themselves under the regulatory gun of the state. Let's not kid ourselves. As soon as they receive the funds, the schools will no longer be responsive to the efficiency of the free market. In a real free market, private schools would have to respond to market competition in order to remain in business. Those schools that do accept the handouts won't have to worry about the incentive to pare down costs if they are dramatically reduced or eliminated.

Third, private schools will eventually be priced out of the marketplace if the voucher system becomes mainstreamed. There are only two ways that this can occur. If the schools refuse to accept vouchers, then the families who are desperate to have the money will patronize the voucher-funded schools, leading to the closing of the non-voucher-funded schools. Moreover, if schools are coerced into embracing the funding, then they may respond by opting to go out of business in lieu of allowing themselves to be under the federal microscope.

Finally, the idea that parents need vouchers to get their children out of the ailing public schools and place them in their better-performing private counterparts perpetuates the myth that parents do not already have "school choice" for their children. On the contrary, parents certainly do have that choice today. That choice is no different than the other choices they have in their lives, choices like food, entertainment, cars, clothes, etc. When voucher proponents talk about "school choice," what they're really saying is that parents have no choice of where they can take other people's money and spend it for their children's education.

Another way of looking at the deleterious effects that vouchers bring to families and children is that the program is equivalent to food stamps for schools. Voucher advocates often say that they don't support food stamps or any other government assistance programs such as public "government" housing and public "government" medical-care programs.

There's more to this problem than meets the eye. Some parents who apply for the voucher programs to send their children to nontraditional private schools will immediately discover that they are not eligible for the state-funded program. States will never give their approval to remit the funds to schools that admit only a certain group of students (customers) of race, gender, and class. Schools that want to be acceptable will have to satisfy academic, curriculum, and textbook standards established by the state. The teachers will have to satisfy those requirements as well. If any educator is found not to possess the certifications as well as the proper degrees from state-run and state-approved colleges, they will not be hired, considering the school wants to be put on the list of government-approved schools.

Parents who choose to homeschool their children will not be allowed to receive the vouchers, considering that the state will discriminate homeschooling parents on the grounds that they do not possess a state-recognized degree from the state's own approved college or university, possess neither the experience nor the certification to educate their children, and are not able to obtain the funds to cover the costs for books, videos, software, and supplies that may have been paid for by the state's voucher program.

Other parents who choose to enroll their children in a religious or parochial school quickly learn that they are denied access to the funds, because a majority of the religious schools, in all honesty, are extremely discriminatory. These schools employ instructors and admit only pupils who adhere to their own particular religion. If a religious institution refuses to compromise its principles and values, they will be denied the vouchers. As human nature would tell us, the temptation to succumb to government demands would be too great. After all, as with all federal regulations, the demands would be meager in the beginning, but eventually they would grow to become terribly invasive.

If there's one group that's mostly overlooked, especially when "school choice" does not fit in the educational scheme of things, it's the taxpayers. They are forced to subsidize others who have the privilege of "school choice." Taxpayers may not realize this, but they are the sole source of funding used to disperse public "government" vouchers, so that parents can employ the money to furnish each school-age child an education under the rubric of "school choice." Childless married couples - that is, those who choose not to have children - already spend thousands of their tax dollars to educate the children of married couples, yet they will now be forced to drop more money, whether they like it or not. While communities at the local level are not forced to pay taxes to feed and provide clothing for the children residing in them, they are, however, forced to subsidize their education.

Not all vouchers are a bad idea though. Currently, many private voucher programs do exist. If all school taxes were dramatically slashed, or preferably repealed, then the money used to pay for the current school system would be available, giving parents a real school choice. This would immediately launch a free-market education system, in which there would be more funding for better schools that respond to consumer demand and respect consumer sovereignty. Moreover, there would be more privately-funded voucher programs, giving parents (consumers) more choices and more options to spend their private education dollars as they see fit. If a separation of education and state were enacted, the free market would immediately take over the education system, allowing parents and their children to patronize schools that consistently meet their needs. Even if such a separation was never allowed and school taxes were cut on a drastic scale, it would require the public "government" schools to compete with the private-voucher-funded private schools, forcing the government schools to either clean up their act or get out of the way.

Tuition tax credits

Another government machination that allegedly fixes the problems plaguing our education system is the tuition tax credit. It is essentially designed to alleviate the school tax burden for parents by allowing them to reduce their school or income tax liability dollar-for-dollar just so that they can enroll their children in private schools.

It is often claimed that the one advantage that tuition tax credits have over public "government" vouchers is that they do provide tax relief for parents who, if given the credits, would keep more of their money from which would most likely be taken. That is absolutely true, as tuition tax credits, on the surface, seem like a better alternative to public vouchers anytime, any day of the week.

Another claim from tax credit proponents is that such credits are superior to the public voucher system because they result in less government control of the schools and less of a chance of uniting church (through religious schools) and state, due to their indirect nature and the unintended consequences that often follow.

Except there's only one problem with this alternative: they lead to greater control and regulation [http://www.heartland.org/archives/heartlander/hlmar02.htm] of the private school industry. To believe otherwise is a pipe dream. Such a measure would open the door to more perverse conditions, such as cash subsidies to parents with children by childless couples, private schools complying with federal tax audits, the denial of parental authority over how the schools spend the money per pupil, and so forth.

With all the problems associated with the public "government" schools, isn't it time to pull the plug on them and put an end to the pervasive evil that is the bedrock of the public "government" school monopoly?

Source




Forced integration has not produced its intended results

Shifts in policy, because the world is complex, often result in unexpected consequences. Some consequences are negative. The net impact of the forced integration of schools in Nashville, and other urban areas, has been negative. First, it prompted an exodus of whites from the public system via non-public academic options and moves to ring counties. Second, it had a deleterious impact on an institution, the black school, which helped anchor a minority culture. Third, it failed to achieve either better educational outcomes or genuine integration.

After a federal judge ordered, in 1971, Nashville schools to bus students in order to achieve racial balance, white enrollment in Metro Public Schools declined by 20,000 in the next eight years. We are left today with a strange sort of educational apartheid, based on class more than race. The middle class voted with its feet and now seven in 10 Metro students qualify for free or reduced lunch. The dubious, and implicitly racist, idea that blacks would do better if given the opportunity to sit next to white children becomes a problem when so many of those white kids are no longer in those public school desks.

There were many examples of successful black schools before forced integration. These schools, run by blacks, with black teachers, and unencumbered by stifling bureaucracies, produced good students despite stingy funding from white-run school districts. Economist Thomas Sowell points out that the black high school, Dunbar, in Washington D.C., scored higher than the average of the white schools and that they had less tardiness and absenteeism. Three out of four Dunbar graduates went to college, much higher than the national rate for whites, through 1955. Dunbar was not an aberration. The parents were not middle class but comprised primarily of laborers and maids. Today, after desegregation, Dunbar is characterized, crudely but honestly, as a ghetto school with all the problems associated with that observation.

The schoolhouse played an important role in the neighborhood, in a culture. The Catholic experience is instructive. The emergence of the parochial school system was a response to discrimination. In 1852, every parish was encouraged to establish a school. Parish life revolved largely around the school. Like the black experience, they did more with less, better outcomes with less funding.

The founding of Bridges Academy is an assertion that culture matters and, contra the views of the black and white elitists who forced integration, that black culture is equipped to achieve excellence.

Forced integration has not led to improved educational outcomes for blacks. In Detroit a black male is more likely to go to jail than to go to college. And, anyone who believes busing has brought us closer together needs to visit a school cafeteria at lunchtime.

The decision of a few helped fuel racial animosity and served to undermine the strength of a minority culture. Providing enhanced opportunity and fostering genuine racial harmony depends on the decisions of many. The many must be free to make those decisions.

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14 September, 2007

U Michigan Resumes Distribution of Anti-Israel Book

Any negative Leftist utterance about groups is "free speech". Any negative conservative utterance about groups is "hate speech"

The University of Michigan announced late Tuesday that the University of Michigan Press would resume distribution of Overcoming Zionism, a book that calls the creation of Israel a mistake and that prompted several pro-Israel groups to complain to the university about its role in making the available a book they characterized as "hate speech." The University of Michigan Press stopped distribution last month, following those complaints, and setting off complaints of censorship by others. Michigan was not the publisher, but distributed the book for Pluto Press, a British publisher specializing in leftist social science for an academic audience. The author of the book is Joel Kovel, distinguished professor of social studies at Bard College.

In a statement released by the university, the press Executive Board (a faculty body) said that while it "has deep reservations about Overcoming Zionism, it would be a blow against free speech to remove the book from distribution on that basis. We conclude that we should not fail to honor our distribution agreement based on our reservations about the content of a single book." The statement continued: "Such a course raises both First Amendment issues and concerns about the appearance of censorship. As members of the university community dedicated to academic freedom and open debate among differing views, the Executive Board stands firmly for freedom of expression, and against even the appearance of censorship. In this instance, both legal and value considerations lead us to the decision to resume distribution of the book."

At the same time, the board tried to distance itself from the book and its publisher. "Had the manuscript gone through the standard review process used by the University of Michigan Press, the board would not have recommended publication. But the arrangement with Pluto Press is for distribution only; the UM Press never intended to review individually every title published by Pluto (or any other press for which it holds distribution rights). By resuming distribution, the board in no way endorses the content of the book." In addition, the board announced that Pluto's decision to publish Overcoming Zionism "brings into question the viability of UM Press's distribution agreement with Pluto Press. The board intends to look into these matters and decide, later this fall, whether the distribution contract with Pluto Press should be continued."

Jonathan Schwartz, a Michigan alumnus who has been blogging critically about the Kovel book at Anti-Racist Blog: Exposing Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism on American College Campuses, said he was disappointed in the university's decision to resume distribution of the book. The university press board "dodged the issue of the racist content of Mr. Kovel's book, and his incredibly offensive messages," Schwartz said. "The University of Michigan made a conscious decision to serve as the distributor of Mr. Kovel's anti-Zionist propaganda. It is shameful that Overcoming Zionism is being distributed with U. of M.'s imprimatur and complicity." Kovel could not be reached Tuesday night.

Roger van Zwanenberg, chairman and commissioning editor at Pluto, said he found the decision about distribution of Overcoming Zionism to be "reassuring," but that he found the statements about the "deep reservations" on the book and the questions about his press to be "less reassuring." And he questioned whether these statements are consistent with academic freedom. "These so called `deep reservations', stem from what is acceptable scholarship and what is unacceptable," he said. Tenure and academic freedom should protect the tradition of "critical scholarship" and assure that "unpopular scholarship can thrive," van Zwanenberg said. Pluto has always worked within the "critical scholarship" framework, he said, publishing Marxist and anarchist theorists, among others, and such well known figures in American academe as Noam Chomsky. "The University of Michigan Press always knew Pluto published scholars under this frame," he said. (Even a brief look at the Pluto Web site shows that the press makes no attempt to hide its views or the political nature of its authors.)

From Michigan's statement, van Zwanenberg said, it appears that "Pluto may be accused that a single volume does not come up to the standards of more traditional scholarship. It would be shameful if this were to occur, as to be accused of something we never set out to achieve by a scholarly community serves no one." Pluto books, he said, "add to the richness of publishing within any university arena."

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Major US Catholic University Caught Deceiving Diocese: Diocese Losing Patience

Vice-chancellor of archdiocese states, "there's a Catholic ethos in this town that rightly smells a rat"

Just a few weeks ago, LifeSiteNews and several online blogs reported on Creighton University's shameful invitation, and then hasty 'disinvitation' of ardently pro-abortion and pro-euthanasia speaker, Ann Lamott. According to several recent news reports, the hasty 'statement' published on the University website to announce the cancellation has not appeased the powers that be at the Catholic Archdiocese of Omaha.

The official Creighton statement announcing the lecture cancellation on the University's website is quoted in part saying, "After careful review of Ms. Lamott's most recent writings (which postdated her contract agreement), we have concluded that key points are in opposition to Catholic teaching which, in our judgment, makes her an inappropriate choice for the Women and Health Lecture Series."

Reverend Joseph Taphorn, chancellor for the Omaha archdiocese, took issue with such an assertion. "Everybody knew what they were getting so it is hard to understand a last minute disinvitation. All you have to do is put the name in Google and you see what she believes."

Creighton's President and Jesuit priest, John P. Schlegel, S.J. penned a memo last week to his colleagues, supposedly justifying the cancellation. Schlegel,s memo reiterates that the decision was made after seeing only the newest material produced by Ann Lamott. "The decision to cancel the lecture was not the result of outside pressure from any group. I made this decision last Friday, August 24, after prayerful reflection upon reading from her latest book, the publication of which post-dated the invitation and in discussion with Amy Haddad, director of the Center for Health Policy and Ethics.

Rev. Schlegel goes on to disparagingly dismiss the 'bloggers' influence on his decision saying "To put it more frankly: my reflection on this question started well before the bloggers latched upon the invitation," while applauding Ms. Lamott for her outspokenness on issues. "I certainly respect [Lamott's] right to express those views, and admire her frankness in doing so[.]"

He referred to her belief in assisted suicide as "troubling" but insists that his misgivings only stemmed from her most recent work. As reported in LifeSiteNews.com, Lamott had openly admitted and documented her direct participation in helping a terminally ill friend kill himself as early as June 2006.

According to the local Lincoln Journal Star, Lamott's own booking agent, Steven Barclay, stands by a different story that that issued from the desk of President Schlegel. Barclay claims that university officials originally confirmed Lamott's lecture but requested that she not speak about assisted suicide and abortion. Barclay unapologetically stated, "It's very evident what her work stands for."

This is not the first time that Creighton and the archdiocese have come head to head on ethical issues. Earlier this year, the archdiocese severed its relationship with the Creighton's Center for Marriage and Family for its proposal in support of premarital cohabitation.

Vice-chancellor of the archdiocese, Reverend Ryan Lewis, commented on Creighton's deception saying, "If you are seeing a pattern, you are seeing correctly." He expressed appreciation that "there's a Catholic ethos in this town that rightly smells a rat."

While Reverend Taphorn would not comment on whether the archdiocese would consider removing the status of "Catholic University" from Creighton, Rev. Lewis acknowledged that "Catholic Omaha is starting to lose patience with some of this stuff."

Schlegel concluded his colleague memorandum encouraging all faculty to "pursue truth as he or she conceives of it." He also concluded with an assurance for the Creighton community: "I know that many of you will be concerned that the logical end of this position is that we will never have a sponsored speaker other than ones by those who agree in every respect with Church teaching. I understand and respect that concern and can assure that it is manifestly not my intent to impose uniformity of this sort. Questions of these kinds are difficult and laden with context."

Over the past years, Schlegel's philosophy seems to have been employed in deciding on past lecturers at the University. In 1995, The Women & Health Lecture Series featured feminist and ardent abortion supporter, Susan Sherwin, PhD as she presented her lecture entitled "Exploring the Ethical Dimensions of Women's Role in Medical Research."

The lecture series also gave platform to former Nebraska Senator Debra Suttle who was well-known for her work in trying to pass legislation that would have mandated insurance companies pay for artificial contraception. Her efforts were widely opposed by pro-life forces in the area and were ultimately defeated.

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Indianapolis: Out of school, out of touch

The high rate of school suspensions and expulsions highlights the need for more discipline options. If there is little that a white female teacher can do to discipline a big and disruptive black student, all the school can do is suspend the offender -- which does very little good for anyone. Heavy use of corporal punishment by an appropriately delegated person would almost certainly improve discipline marvellously

Students at Lynhurst 7th and 8th Grade Center were suspended at a rate of 79 per 100 students during the 2005-06 school year, further burnishing the Wayne Township middle school's notoriety for being among the highest-suspending schools in the state. Most of those suspensions, however, weren't meted out to dangerous troublemakers. Nineteen percent of suspensions were for such obviously dangerous activities as brandishing guns, possessing drugs or injuring teachers and fellow students. Half of all suspensions, on the other hand, were for subjective charges such as "defiance," the catch-all category of "other" -- which can include nonviolent offenses such as chronic truancy -- and one-time schoolyard brawls.

Lynhurst exemplifies the reality that, far too often, schools overuse out-of-school suspensions and expulsions for behaviors that can be better handled through other means. The overuse, in turn, contributes to the state's dropout crisis. Sixth-graders who were suspended at least once had just a one-in-six chance of graduating, according to a study of Philadelphia students led by Johns Hopkins researcher Robert Balfanz. The overuse of suspension and expulsion, along with the presence of zero-tolerance policies, is a national problem. Most cases aren't like high-profile examples such as the three Knightstown High students who were expelled from (and later readmitted to) school for producing a film in which a teddy bear threatened the life of a teacher.

But Indiana's schools have had a particularly nasty reputation for suspending and expelling more students than those in other states: Most suspensions are for matters other than drugs, weapons possession and violent behavior: Forty-seven percent of out-of-school suspensions at Lawrence North High School during the 2005-06 school year were for "other" unlisted reasons. Just 9 percent of suspensions were for drugs and weapons possession. Statewide, less than 3 percent of in-school and out-of-school suspensions were for possession of weapons, drugs, alcohol and tobacco. While schools are categorizing fewer suspensions under the subjective category "disruptive behavior", they are categorizing those punishments under "defiance," a category created as a result of a round of anti-dropout legislation that can be just as subjective as the former.

Schools are suspending more students: Some 819 out-of school suspensions were meted out each day of the 2005-06 school year, a 15 percent increase over the suspensions handed down seven years ago. Meanwhile, the state retains its reputation for expelling more students than any other in the nation. Expulsions have increased by 11 percent between 2003-04 and 2005-06 school years after a four-year decline.

Marion County middle schools suspend more students than high schools: On average, middle schools have a suspension rate of 58 per 100 students, four times the statewide average. The rate for high schools is just 29 per 100. Shortridge Middle School, now being converted by Indianapolis Public Schools into a magnet program, has an astonishing rate of 91 per 100 students.

Black students are suspended more often than their white peers: Revelations by The Star's Andy Gammill and Mark Nichols that black students are suspended three times more often than white students confirm conclusions reached 12 years ago by the Indianapolis Commission on African-American Males. This is a national problem: Blacks accounted for 33 percent of suspensions despite accounting for 17 percent of public school enrollment.

Fears over school safety, arising from real day-to-day concerns and high-profile incidents, is partly to blame for rising suspension numbers. The methods teachers and administrators use to deal with school behavior are also a culprit. The lack of training on how to handle students in real-world classroom settings -- an issue that former Teachers College President Arthur Levine and teaching guru Martin Haberman argue has fostered problems in other aspects of education -- is also a factor in discipline. Frustrated teachers opt to toss students out of classrooms -- and hand them over to academic deans and principals -- before availing themselves of other options.

This lack of training also exacerbates cultural differences between minority students and teachers, most of who remain white and female. The problem grows in middle schools, no matter the race of the teacher, as children develop into teenagers who, despite their emotional development, begin to take on the physical characteristics of adults.

Flexibility in state law governing school discipline, which grants principals the chief decision-making role, contributes to the disparities in discipline. Depending on the district or even the school, a student can be suspended for using a cell phone on school grounds. While the need to maintain safe, orderly schools is important, the overuse of out-of-school suspensions and expulsions does little to address bad behavior and its underlying causes. Suspended students simply end up at home without parental supervision -- and falling behind in school.

Solving those underlying issues and stemming the use of harsh school discipline is one of the many keys to improving the odds of students graduating from school and being prepared for college and the working world. The initiatives taken up by IPS over the past three years, including the creation this year of alternative programs for wayward students, can help, but only if properly implemented. Such programs have a history of being little more than dumping grounds for students that schools have given up on teaching.

More importantly, teachers, principals and even parents will have to take different approaches to discipline. Engaging students, especially those at risk of academic failure [Like how? The success of such approaches is very marginal], is key to keeping students out of trouble and on track towards graduation. Mentoring arrangements, along with music and art programs, can help in this regard. Applying alternative programs such as those used by the Knowledge Is Power Program of charter schools, in which a student can lose his seat and desk for misbehavior and rewards positive behavior, can also help. A student who isn't in school will not learn. Figuring out alternatives to suspensions and expulsions is key to keeping students on the path to finishing school.

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13 September, 2007

Homeschooling comes of age

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the modern home education movement was in its infancy. At that time, most Americans viewed home-styled education as a quaint tourist attraction or the lifestyle choice of those willing to endure more hardship than necessary. What a difference a few decades makes. Homeschooling has undergone an extreme makeover. From maverick to mainstream, the movement has acquired a glamorous, populist sheen.

Flip through a few issues of Sports Illustrated, circa 2007, and there's no shortage of news about photogenic homeschoolers who make the athletic cut. Like Jessica Long who was born in Russia, resides in Baltimore, and is an accomplished swimmer. At 15, Jessica became the first paralympian to win the prestigious Sullivan Award, which honors the country's top amateur athlete. Then there's the dashing Joey Logano who, at 17, has already won a NASCAR race.

Even presidential hopefuls and their spouses have jumped on the school-thine-own bandwagon. Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas) has offered enthusiastic support for homeschooling families, and Elizabeth Edwards, wife of Senator John Edwards (D-North Carolina) told the Wall Street Journal that this fall she plans to home educate the couple's two youngest children "with the help of a tutor."

As for scholastic achievements, this national competition season was remarkable, seeing home scholars crowned as champs in three major events. A twelve-year-old New Mexican named Matthew Evans won the National Word Power competition, sponsored by Reader's Digest. Thirteen-year-old Evan O'Dorney of California won the Scripps National Spelling Bee, and fourteen-year-old Caitlin Snaring of Washington was christened the National Geographic Bee champ.

Then there's Micah Stanley of Minnesota who has yet to receive any lessons in a brick-and-mortar classroom building. For the past few years, he's been enrolled in the Oak Brook College of Law, a distance learning law school headquartered in Sacramento. This past February, he took the grueling, three-day California general bar examination (California allows correspondence law students to sit for the bar), and he can now add "attorney" to his resume. In his spare time, he's finishing up a book titled, How to Escape the Holding Tank: A Guide to Help You Get What You Want. Micah is 19.

A teenage lawyer/budding author, however, wouldn't surprise John Taylor Gatto, an outspoken critic of compulsory education laws and a former New York State Teacher of the Year. Writing in Harper's Magazine, Gatto forthrightly argued that "genius is as common as dirt." Perhaps. But it's also understandable that when everyday folks hear about the homeschooled Joeys and Caitlins and Micahs, they become a tad intimidated — as if this educational choice were the exclusive domain of obsessive-compulsive moms and dads with money to burn, time to spare, and a brood of driven, Type-A offspring.

Although it's commendable when the young achieve Herculean goals, homeschooling has always been more about freedom and personal responsibility than winning an Ivy League scholarship or playing at Wimbledon. In general, it has attracted working-class families of all ethnicities and faiths, who have been eager to provide a nurturing, stimulating learning experience. Of course, the unabashedly adventuresome are always an endearing staple of the movement. The Burns family, of Alaska, set out on a 36-foot sailboat this summer to travel the world for three years. Chris Burns (the dad) told the Juneau Empire he hopes "to connect with Juneau classrooms and host question-and-answer sessions while at sea," as well as homeschool the two Burns children.

In a legal sense, homeschools serve as a glaring reminder of a complex issue that has become the stuff of landmark Supreme Court cases: does the state have the authority to coerce a youngster to attend school and sit at a desk for 12 years? Whether said child has the aptitude and maturity for such a long-term contract (or is it involuntary servitude?) remains an uncomfortable topic because, in the acceptable mantra of the day, "education is a right." Such a national conversation is long overdue, as there are plenty of signs — costly remedial education and rising dropout rates, to name two — to indicate that the status quo public school model isn't kid-friendly.

Homeschooling, after all, began to catch on with the masses because a former US Department of Education employee argued that children, like delicate hothouse plants, required a certain type of environment to grow shoots and blossoms, and that loving parents, not institutions, could best create the greenhouses. It was 1969 when the late Dr. Raymond Moore initiated an inquiry into previously neglected areas of educational research. Two of the questions that Moore and a team of like-minded colleagues set out to answer were (1) Is institutionalizing young children a sound, educational trend? and (2) What is the best timing for school entrance?

In the process of analyzing thousands of studies, twenty of which compared early school entrants with late starters, Moore concluded that developmental problems, such as hyperactivity, nearsightedness, and dyslexia, are often the result of prematurely taxing a child's nervous system and mind with continuous academic tasks, like reading and writing. The bulk of the research convinced Moore that formal schooling should be delayed until at least age 8 or 10, or even as late as 12. As he explained, "These findings sparked our concern and convinced us to focus our investigation on two primary areas: formal learning and socializing. Eventually, this work led to an unexpected interest in homeschools." Moore went on to write Home Grown Kids and Home-Spun Schools. The rest, as they say, is history. The books, published in the 1980s, have sold hundreds of thousands of copies and offer practical advice to potential parent educators.

Nowadays, there's a sea of such self-help material, scores of commercial products, and online opportunities solely dedicated to encouraging families to learn together in the convenience of their homes. Homeschooling has graduated into a time-tested choice that allows children to thrive, learn at their own pace, and which frequently inspires other success stories. As our nation is famous for encouraging immigrants to reinvent themselves and achieve the American Dream, so home education does for youngsters whether they are late bloomers or are candidates for Mensa.

Above all, the merit of homeschooling is that it allows for experimentation, flexibility, and trial and error. Here is the great contrast with state-provided education. As with all systems hammered out by bureaucracies, public schools get stuck in a rut, perpetuate failures, respond slowly to changing times, and resist all reforms. Errors are not localized and contained, but all consuming and system wide. It's bad enough when such a system is used to govern labor contracts or postal service; it is a tragic loss when it is used to manage kids' minds.

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It is not racist to insist on language skills

Gordon Brown is ruling that medium-skilled migrants from outside the EU must speak and understand English. The “highly skilled” already have to; the unskilled, it seems, may remain uncomprehending. The Home Secretary adds enthusiastically that it will help integration if we “expect people coming through the skilled and slightly less-skilled route to actually be able to speak English”.

Well, duh! This is good news (though met with whingeing from employers who fear for their cheap labour, and from Tories who find it not fierce enough). It would be even better news if there were some mechanism to put the same onus on EU citizens who plan to stay, but since that is impossible we could at least refrain from gratuitously featherbedding them by putting up diversion signs in Polish to prevent lorry drivers “coming into conflict with road workers”.

The idea that residents and workers in a country should understand its language is hardly startling, nor is it innately right-wing. This present move, announced to the TUC, has a deliberately protectionist edge to it, but it need not have had. Linguistic cohesion is more important than “British jobs for British people”. Mutual understanding is a deep, vital necessity for any society. The wonder is that for so long, perhaps for the kindliest of reasons, governments have shied away from saying so.

Perhaps it is post-colonial guilt, perhaps an uneasy awareness that we ourselves, as tourists, are chronically bad at foreign languages. Either way, we have connived at a situation that promotes waste, confusion and mutual suspicion. Ignoring linguistic incompetence just extends alienation. It is not really kind at all; it has gone on for too long, and the whistle needs blowing.

It was in December that the BBC revealed the 100 million pound cost of translation services routinely provided by local authorities, courts and the NHS. It became clear that we do not translate only for tourists and asylum-seekers (which is obvious, courteous and kind). Settled residents too are not expected to understand us: in Peterborough refuse collection leaflets appear in 15 languages, and in many boroughs it is routine for all council services to be multilingual. In Islington the NHS provided a Turkish woman with one-to-one counselling, in Turkish, to stop her smoking. She had lived here for five years. A Bangladeshi woman, speaking through a translator after 22 years, memorably said: “When you are trying to help us you are actually harming. Even before we ask, all we have to do is say hello, they are here with their interpreters. We just sit here doing nothing and we don’t need to speak in English at all.”

Trevor Philllips, formerly of the Commission for Racial Equality, huffily insisted that this is globalisation, and that translation is “not a disincentive” to learning the host language. Yeah, right. Any seasoned tourist knows perfectly well that it is, even if you are only there for a week. I feel the usual sneaking British shame at not speaking Spanish, though I have been there a dozen times; but finding myself in a small central town with a healthy resistance to ignorant Brits, I learnt more Spanish in 24 hours than ever before. It was the only way to get food, drink or a train ticket. If you have to struggle into a language, you will. If “Habla Ingles?” suffices, you won’t. And if your “community” of Turks, Poles, Bangladeshis or Brits abroad is geographically tight, you can live 20 years in surly ignorance.

The other day I heard a consumer programme complaining, in righteous PC tones, that not enough banks in Wales offer Polish language leaflets and onsite translators. It made the reasonable point that this would be good business for the banks, but went beyond that into an implication of entitlement, a sense that the Polish arrivals had a “human right” to open accounts without speaking English.

I couldn’t see it. As a tourist I humbly hope for consideration as I battle through some jungle of Croatian consonants or Russian script. But if I went to live and work in a foreign country, I would assume it was my job to grab a phrasebook and limp bravely through the administrative processes. I would not assume it was their job to accommodate me. Most Poles I meet speak good English. Those who don’t – after decades of free BBC English By Radio broadcasts – should find their own translator.

Asylum-seekers – frightened, weary and poor – need special consideration: they have complex cases to make in a country they never wanted to end up in. But we are not talking here about refugees and victims, but about people who work and thrive yet sometimes have so little interest in where they are, and who we are, that they can’t be bothered to speak to us. The assumption that services must be delivered in their own language, as of right, for years on end, needs overturning.

And no, it is not racist to say so. I love those proud school signs saying “32 languages are spoken here”, provided they all speak English too. I feel just as scornful and puzzled about British expats in Southern Spain who can say only “sangria”, and about those bygone colonial memsahibs who in half a lifetime learned nothing beyond a few scolding words of kitchen Urdu. I admire the Turkish cab driver who makes conversation to improve his English, the Polish backpacker who demands “tell when I mistake”, and our Romanian friends who crossed Europe in a rusty Trabant after the fall of Ceaucescu, speaking four languages learnt off the radio and not daring to stop because a round of sandwiches in Germany would cost a month’s salary.

Migrants are often the cream of the human race, hardy and adaptable. We should not insult and emasculate them for the sake of our own liberal angst.

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Australian Feds increasing support for private universities

THE latest round of higher education place allocations cements a plan by John Howard for private providers to be as important in tertiary education as they are in school education. Of 375 new teaching places announced by federal Education, Science and Training Minister Julie Bishop yesterday, more than 50 per cent went to Christian institutions including Avondale College (NSW), Tabor College (Adelaide and Melbourne), the University of Notre Dame (Sydney and Perth) and the Christian Heritage College (Brisbane). These colleges won just over 10 per cent of the 2300 new commonwealth-supported places, or 260 places, including 200 for teaching and 60 for nursing. Last year private colleges received a lower proportion, just 6 per cent of 4600places. Ms Bishop defended the allocations, saying they were for places in accredited courses in areas of national priority.

In contrast with recent years, when regional and outer metropolitan campuses subject to low student demand have been favoured in the allocation of new places, Group of Eight universities featured prominently this year. The University of NSW, Sydney, Adelaide, Monash, Melbourne and the University of Western Australia all were granted more than 100 places each.

Ms Bishop said allocations were based on national and state priorities and fields of workforce shortage. There are more new places in engineering than any other discipline, at 560, followed by nursing (395) and science (390). Ms Bishop said all institutions that applied and were eligible had been granted places. An unprecedented number, 15, did not apply. "This is strong evidence that we have now created as many commonwealth-supported places that are needed to meet eligible student demand," Ms Bishop said. These were the last places to be allocated under the Backing Australia's Future plan for more than 39,000 places over 10 years.

Alan Robson, vice-chancellor of the UWA and incoming president of the Group of Eight research intensive universities, said it was not surprising that Go8 universities had applied for and received more places. "I think the Group of Eight mainly are the universities of first choice for students and hence, when there is a weakening of demand, it filters less into the Group of Eight," he said.

Among regional universities, only Sunshine Coast, Charles Darwin and Ballarat applied for 2008 places. Last year several regional universities including Southern Queensland and James Cook struggled to fill their places, as did Edith Cowan University in Perth. The Government has also revealed figures showing private providers are blitzing public universities in the market for full-fee paying domestic undergraduate places.

Contrary to a recent erroneous media report seized on by the Australian Labor Party and National Union of Students, the number of domestic full-fee paying students in award courses at public universities has risen a modest 6.9 per cent, comparing enrolments for the first half of 2005 with the first half of 2006. That category of enrolments increased by 24 per cent for the private universities, Bond and Notre Dame, during the same period. Among other private higher education providers accredited for the FEE-HELP student loan scheme, domestic full-fee paying enrolments rose by 95 per cent to more than 8000.

Ms Bishop said this showed students were discerning in their choice of educators. "No eligible student is forced to take a place at a private university because there are now sufficient commonwealth-supported places. This is evidence that students are making choices based on factors other than (the availability of government places)." Quality, flexibility in course provision and the availability of niche courses might be among the factors, she said.

University of Adelaide acting vice-chancellor Fred McDougall said the institution was very happy with the additional 235 places, which fit with the university's strategic plan to increase student numbers from 16,000 to 20,000. He said most of the courses targeted areas of high demand such as engineering and mining as well as nursing and other health sciences. "Clearly, given the mining boom, it was important to get extra places in engineering," Professor McDougall said. He said the extra federal funding also allowed the university to establish South Australia's first veterinary school. "We know there is unmet demand nationally for students wanting to study veterinary science," Professor McDougall said. "A new school will help to slow the brain drain of students from South Australia who are leaving to study at vet schools interstate or overseas." ...

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12 September, 2007

Epidemic of Ignorance: Back-to-school blues

By Victor Davis Hanson

Last week I went shopping in our small rural hometown, where my family has attended the same public schools since 1896. Without exception, all six generations of us - whether farmers, housewives, day laborers, business people, writers, lawyers, or educators - were given a good, competitive K-12 education.

But after a haircut, I noticed that the 20-something cashier could not count out change. The next day, at the electronic outlet store, another young clerk could not read - much less explain - the basic English of the buyer's warranty. At the food market, I listened as a young couple argued over the price of a cut of tri-tip - unable to calculate the meat's real value from its price per pound.

As another school year is set to get under way, it's worth pondering where this epidemic of ignorance came from.

Our presidential candidates sense the danger of this dumbing down of American society and are arguing over the dismal status of contemporary education: poor graduation rates, weak test scores, and suspect literacy among the general population. Politicians warn that America's edge in global research and productivity will disappear, and with it our high standard of living.

Yet the bleak statistics - whether a 70-percent high-school graduation rate as measured in a study a few years ago by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, or poor math rankings in comparison with other industrial nations - come at a time when our schools inflate grades and often honor multiple valedictorians at high school graduation ceremonies. Aggregate state and federal education budgets are high. Too few A's, too few top awards, and too little funding apparently don't seem to be our real problems.

Of course, most critics agree that the root causes for our undereducated youth are not all the schools' fault. Our present ambition to make every American youth college material - in a way our forefathers would have thought ludicrous - ensures that we will both fail in that utopian goal and lack enough literate Americans with critical vocational skills.

The disintegration of the American nuclear family is also at fault. Too many students don't have two parents reminding them of the value of both abstract and practical learning.

What then can our elementary and secondary schools do, when many of their students' problems begin at home or arise from our warped popular culture?

We should first scrap the popular therapeutic curriculum that in the scarce hours of the school day crams in sermons on race, class, gender, drugs, sex, self-esteem, or environmentalism. These are well-intentioned efforts to make a kinder and gentler generation more sensitive to our nation's supposed past and present sins. But they only squeeze out far more important subjects.

The old approach to education saw things differently than we do. Education ("to lead out" or "to bring up") was not defined as being "sensitive" to, or "correct" on, particular issues. It was instead the rational ability to make sense of the chaotic present through the abstract wisdom of the past.

So literature, history, math and science gave students plenty of facts, theorems, people, and dates to draw on. Then training in logic, language, and philosophy provided the tools to use and express that accumulated wisdom. Teachers usually did not care where all that training led their students politically - only that their pupils' ideas and views were supported with facts and argued rationally.

What else can we do to restore such traditional learning before the United States loses it global primacy?

To encourage our best minds to become teachers, we should also change the qualifications for becoming one. Students should be able to pursue careers in teaching either by getting a standard teaching credential or by substituting a master's degree in an academic subject. That way we will eventually end up with more instructors with real academic knowledge rather than prepped with theories about how to teach.

And once hired, K-12 teachers should accept that tenure has outlived its usefulness. Near-guaranteed lifelong employment has become an archaic institution that shields educators from answerability. And tenure has not ensured ideological diversity and independence. Nearly the exact opposite - a herd mentality - presides within many school faculties. Periodic and renewable contracts - with requirements, goals and incentives - would far better ensure teacher credibility and accountability.

Athletics, counseling and social activism may be desirable in schools. But they are not crucial. Our pay scales should reflect that reality. Our top classroom teachers should earn as much as - if not more than - administrators, bureaucrats, coaches, and advisers.

Liberal education of the type my farming grandfather got was the reason why the United States grew wealthy, free, and stable. But without it, the nation of his great-grandchildren will become poor, docile, and insecure.

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Australian Leftists defend selective schools

In the State of Victoria

LABOR has launched an assault on the Greens for their policy to phase out selective government high schools such as MacRobertson Girls High. The ALP has funded a mail-out highlighting Greens education policy ahead of this weekend's Albert Park and Williamstown by-elections. Labor's claims have been branded a lie by the Greens.

Former MacRob student Sue Loukomitis yesterday said she approached the ALP to assist after hearing of the "kooky" Greens policy. The policy states that the Greens would work towards "phasing out selective schools, streaming and other models in the government system".

Ms Loukomitis is a former Labor member who works for Auspoll, which is the party's pollster. She does not live in the Albert Park electorate where the letter was distributed. ALP candidate Martin Foley said education had emerged as one of the key issues in Albert Park. "People want to see a good-quality public school option in their community," Mr Foley said.

Labor state secretary Stephen Newnham yesterday compared the Greens' education blueprint with their now-abandoned policy of decriminalising drugs. "The letter is completely accurate. They actually want to shut these schools," Mr Newnham said. The letter does not mention the ALP or Mr Foley, and the only indication the letter is from Labor is fine print declaring it was authorised by Mr Newnham. Labor made a dramatic U-turn on selective schools just before the November election last year, promising two new schools for talented students.

Greens MP Greg Barber dismissed Labor's interpretation of its education policy. "This is a lie. The Greens won't shut down any school," Mr Barber said. Voters this Saturday will choose replacement MPs for former premier Steve Bracks and his deputy, John Thwaites.

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Learn from Asia

Comment from Australia

THERE is much to learn from successful overseas systems, but some Australian educationalists argue that all is well and we need not change. Education, especially in the classroom, in countries such as Japan, Singapore and South Korea is characterised as inflexible, outdated and conservative. Not so. Research published in The Chinese Learner, edited by David Watkins and John Biggs, as well as Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study-related videotapes of Japanese classrooms demonstrate that Asian classrooms are interactive and lessons deal with concepts and skills as well as facts.

APEC has a role in strengthening education, a source of prosperity, in member economies, including ours. Beginning in 1993, the APEC Education Network has met regularly to collect information describing the education systems of members and to research topics such as mathematics and science education, the place of information and communication technologies in the classroom and ways to achieve an increase in the number of multilingual citizens. Australia has much to learn from members' education systems that achieve world's-best results in international tests such as the TIMSS. Held every four years, the TIMSS tests measure student performance in mathematics and science curriculums at middle-primary and lower and final years of secondary school.

Since the tests began in 1995, Australian students have performed above average, but we are in the second XI when it comes to results. While we like to win in sport, in education we are consistently beaten by students from Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan. In the 2003 TIMSS test, out of 49 countries, Australia was ranked 14th in Year8 mathematics and 10th in science. At Year4 level, our students were placed 16th in mathematics and 11th in science. Of concern, when compared with Australia's results in the 1999 tests, is that countries we once outperformed now achieve better results. Indeed, notwithstanding the millions spent on curriculum development and the changes forced on hapless teachers, such was Australia's relatively poor performance that Geoff Masters, the chief executive of the Australian Council for Educational Research and a strong supporter of outcomes-based education, has admitted that all is not well.

"During the 1990s, considerable effort went into the reform of curriculums for the primary and middle years of schooling in Australia, resulting in new state curriculum and standards frameworks," he says. "In the same period, education systems introduced system-wide testing programs to monitor student and school achievement. It is not clear that these efforts have improved levels of mathematics and science performance in Australian primary schools."

Some other APEC-member education systems are able to get more students to perform at the highest level when compared with Australia. In the 2003 test, only 9 per cent of Year8 students reached the advanced level, compared with 25 per cent from Taiwan and 15per cent from Japan. In mathematics, only 7per cent of our Year8 students achieved the advanced level, compared with 44 per cent of students from Singapore.

It also needs to be noted that while Australian students are in the second XI -- as a result of OBE's focus on nurturing self-esteem rather than telling children when they have failed -- our students regard themselves as highly confident and successful. By comparison, students from Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong, even though they perform at the top of the table, do not feel as confident. Why are Australian students underperforming? One reason is that, since the early 1990s, Australian states and territories, to varying degrees, have adopted an OBE model of curriculum. With this model, the focus is on teachers facilitating rather than teaching information. Students are described as "knowledge navigators"' and essential content gives way to new-age generic competency and skills.

As noted last year with Tasmania's so-called Essential Learnings and the debacle represented by forcing OBE into years 11 and 12 in Western Australia, it is also the case that the types of syllabus documents given to Australian teachers are second-rate. Not only are OBE curriculum documents full of jargon and edubabble, but what students are expected to learn is couched in hundreds of vague, confusing and vacuous learning statements that drown teachers in useless detail.

Stronger-performing education systems within APEC never experimented with OBE. More formal approaches to teaching are emphasised and, as a result, students have a clear idea of what is expected of them. There is less disruption and students, given regular testing and feedback, know where they stand in the class. The curriculum is academically based, competition is valued and students are rewarded for success. Teachers are also given clear, concise, year-level syllabuses that detail what needs to be taught. The last point is critical. Unlike in Australia, where teachers are supposed to be curriculum experts and each school has to reinvent the wheel in terms of mapping out what is to be taught, overseas education systems make more time available for teachers to mentor one another and to strengthen classroom practice.

The federal Labor Party and the Coalition Government have both announced that Australia is to have a national curriculum. One approach is to rely on those responsible for Australia's adoption of the OBE model to do the work, in particular the Australian Council for Educational Research and the Curriculum Corporation. As an alternative, given those APEC systems that consistently achieve results that place them at the top of the table in the TIMSS mathematics and science tests, why not look internationally and evaluate any new model of curriculum against overseas best practice?

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11 September, 2007

Corporal (bodily) punishment has a role

Wimpy Leftists call it "barbaric" but still have a kind word for the vast barbarity of Communism so their real motive is, as usual, not what they say. It is more like a wish to make real education as difficult as possible. In today's barely-educated society, I guess that a lot of readers wonder what corporal punishment has got to do with corporals. The answer: Nothing. The word is from the Latin "corpus", meaning "body". Article below by Julian Tomlinson -- from the magazine supplement to the "Gold Coast Weekend Bulletin" of Sept. 8, 2007.

There's always been talk of bringing corporal punishment back into schools and I'm all for it - the sooner, the better. In fact, most blokes who came through the corporal punishment system hardly have a bad word to say about it. They seem to talk about it more as a badge of honour than something which has scarred them for life.

Of course, you hear the horror stories from the old days of Christian Brothers maybe going a bit overboard with the cane or strap, but 99 per cent of people appear to have well and truly got over it. They're not sitting in the foetal position or suing their old headmaster. Hell, we knew we were being bad and we knew the consequences of our actions was getting flogged as hard as possible. Our only concern was hoping the strap or cane didn't nick the tips of our fingers because then it really, really, really hurt.

My old man tells this story: Attending a Melbourne school. he had forgotten his footy boots and was required to explain why. There was another bloke who'd forgotten his boots, too - they made a pretty miserable pair. Dad reckons, the old Brother stood about an inch from his face and said: "Tomlinson, why haven't you got your boots?"

"I forgot them and left them at home, sir," said Dad The old Brother walked to the next bloke and asked him the same thing. "Same reason, sir," said the other fella. Well, Dad reckons this old Brother's feet left the ground as he delivered a massive open-handed clip over the ear which knocked the kid over. "That's not a reason, now tell me why you haven't got your boots," he scowled.

Well that's what the old man reckons anyway. Most blokes who graduated from school, particularly, private school, in 1995 or before have probably had their hands stung by some implement of torture. Sometimes, the reasons for being strapped or caned border on the utterly ridiculous, others are just downright funny.

Once, when I was struggling to keep my eyes open in Year 12 modern history, the teacher turned off the fans because they kept blowing papers off his desk. It was a stinking hot day. One kid had already asked to go to the toilet and just never came back, another bloke had snuck under his desk at the back of the room and was having a sleep and the rest of us were frantically fanning ourselves with whatever we could find.

Finally, one lad, Gav `The Sav', put up his hand and asked Br Smith if he could turn the ceiling fans back on. "No, you can when I'm finished," said Br Smith. After another five minutes of sitting in a pool of sweat that had formed in his plastic chair, Gav just stood up on his desk and began spinning the fan by hand. We laughed,

Br Smith didn't and sent him away to be punished by `Killer' Couani, the hardest strap in the west. It was rumoured he kept his leather strap in an envlope in the freezer just to make it especially hard and painful.

Another Brother's jack was made of two pieces of vulcanised rubber with a hacksaw blade stuck between them to ensure maximum pain. But I don't care how many times Gav was strapped, we all still laugh about that day. By the time we were in Year 10, the strap or `jack'. as it was known, stopped being something to be feared. Blokes used to even have competitions to see if they could get the jack more times than their mate. One bloke even begged one of the Brothers to give him 'six of the best' for no reason just so he could claim the record for the most straps in a calendar year.

Is that a sign that corporal punishment permanently scars its recipients? I don't think so. When we hit our senior year the jack had been completely phased out and it just so happened to coincide with a marked increase in us noticing the younger kids being absolute mongrels. Those parents who began marching straight to the principal's office to demand an apology for hitting poor little Johnny `just because he called the teacher a d-head' have a lot of explaining to do.

We now have a generation of school leavers who got away with absolute murder at school and who now have no concept of discipline until they're lying in a gutter bleeding from a broken nose. Bring back the strap, bring back the cane and make men of these boys. If anything, it makes school life a hell of a lot more interesting.




French President Calls for Educational 'Renaissance': "Religion Should Not Be Left at the School Room Door."

Reminds teachers that they are responsible to form students intellectually, morally and physically

Newly elected French President Nicholas Sarkozy did not shy away from tackling controversial issues in his campaign and he has, once again, engaged a politically hot topic in a nation previously renowned for its secularism. In a letter written by Sarkozy and publicized yesterday, he addressed the teachers of France, calling on them to take part in a "renaissance" and to reflect on the huge responsibility placed in their hands - the responsibility to "guide and to protect the spirit and the sensibilities that are not yet completely formed, that have not yet attained maturity, which are searching, which are still fragile and vulnerable."

Sarkozy explained that such a national rebirth would only be possible through a reform of the French education system. Sarkozy clarified that such a reform must include "rewarding the good, punishing the faults, cultivating an admiration of that which is good, just, beautiful, great, true and profound and [cultivating] a detestation of that which is bad, unjust, ugly, insignificant, untrue, superficial and mediocre. That is how a teacher renders his service to a child in his care."

In his letter, Sarkozy bucked the secularist establishment that has long mandated a total rejection of religion presence in any French schools or curricula. "I am convinced that we should not leave the issue of religion at the school door." He cautioned that he was not advocating for proselytizing in schools or teaching solely "within the framework of a theological approach." Rather, Sarkozy explained, "The spiritual and the sacred always accompany human experiences. They are the source of all civilization. One can open up [more] easily to others and one can dialogue more easily with people of other religions when one understands their religion."

French secularist forces argue that teaching religion or allowing the presence of religion in any form in educational facilities only serves to foster confrontation and animosity.

Sarkozy continued in his letter to remind educators that they must instill the virtue of patriotism in their young charges so that they will grow to be responsible citizens of France, of Europe and of the world. He also called on educators to work to inspire an appreciation for culture in France's young people.

Sarkozy drew his letter to a conclusion, echoing a teaching of the Catholic Church in this regard. He said, "Parents, vous ˆtes les premiers des ‚ducateurs." Translated, it means "Parents, you are the primary educators." Sarkozy encouraged parents to be intimately involved in the education of their children. Alluding to the many difficulties that parents of today face in an age of broken homes, expensive education and high unemployment rates. Sarkozy promised governmental effort to make education possible for all young French citizens. Sarkozy concluded his letter, "The time for a new beginning has come. It is to this new beginning that I invite you. We will navigate it together. We are already slow [in beginning]."

As previously reported by LifeSiteNews.com, this is not the first time that the present president has called for a more public acceptance of religion in France. In 2006, Sarkozy, then acting as the French interior minister, called for France to repudiate its anti-religious prejudice and look again at a positive relationship between Church and state.

In a book-length interview entitled La Republique, les religions, l'esperance [The Republic, the Religions, and Hope], Sarkozy recalls critically "the preceding generations" that "scorned, despised, and ridiculed priests and friars."

Sarkozy also previously called for permission for religious organizations to take advantage of state funding for charitable work. He criticizes those who "think it is natural for the state to finance a soccer field, a library, a theatre, a childcare center; but whenever it is a matter of the needs of a place of worship, the state should not spend so much as a penny."

All too often, election candidates employ strong political platforms during campaigns that then discreetly morph into watered down versions of a previous promise to constituents. So far, newly elected French President Nicholas Sarkozy is staying true to his campaign promises to "give the place of honor back to the nation and national identity [of France]."

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Thousands of Spanish Families Boycott Homosexual Indoctrination Program

Whole Provinces and Schools Declare their Unwillingness to Teach the Material

Spain's socialist government is facing a bitter back-to-school fight this September as thousands of families boycott the pro-homosexual course "Education for Citizenship and Human Rights". The Spanish Family Forum reports that at least 15,000 "conscientious objections" out of 200,000 students have been officially registered with school authorities. However, the number is understated because whole provinces have not yet reported figures from their areas.

Esperanza Aguirre, the president of the Community of Madrid (Spain's largest province), blasted the program, calling it "indoctrination" and said that her government would only teach those portions that were not objectionable to anyone. "The Catholic Church, the churches in general, the doctrines are doctrines, and therefore, because the parents so choose, in the religious schools religion is taught," said Aguirre. "But Alfonso Guerra [a prominent socialist and former vice-president of Spain] has admitted to us that what the government wants to do is to indoctrinate, it wants to create a lay religion for which compliance is obligatory in the schools."

According to the National Catholic Confederation of Heads of Families and Parents of Students (Concapa), one school in the province of Andalucia has decided to list the course, but has privately told them that it will not actually teach it. Concapa says that five parents are suing the government in the Supreme Court of Andalucia to prevent the program's implementation, and that there are 200 more families who wish to join them. Many Catholic schools are implementing the program in name, but are simply ignoring the elements that promote homosexual behavior. Some are using textbooks that positively denounce it.

The program's guidelines state that children are to be taught to reject "existing discrimination for reason of sex, origin, social differences, affective-sexual, or whatever other type" and to exercise a "critical evaluation of the social and sexual division of labor and racist, xenophobic, sexist, and homophobic social prejudices." It also instructs teachers to "revisit the students' attitude to homosexuality" and suggests that a good exercise is to make a list of every type of disrespectful expression referring to foreigners, people of other races, homosexuals, etc., and open a dialog over how they are used in daily life and if they are or are not disrespectful."

The Catholic archbishop of Toledo, Antonio Ca¤izares, denounced the program as students returned to school, stating that "the government is acting in an unconstitutional manner because it is imposing morals." He encouraged Spaniards to resist the program with the means available to them.

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Australia: Amazing defence of false allegations

With constant false allegations against teachers by vindictive girls, it is minimal justice for all allegations to be shielded from publicity unless and until a guilty verdict is reached

A PARENTS' group has attacked union calls for teachers accused of misconduct to be spared being named and shamed.

The Australian Education Union said teachers who were hauled before disciplinary hearings, including those being investigated for sexual misconduct with minors, should remain anonymous unless found guilty. The union suggested the ban in its submission to a government review of the Victorian Institute of Teaching. AEU state president Mary Bluett said the VIT's practice of naming accused teachers who were found not guilty was ruining careers. "Anyone can make an accusation to the VIT and the VIT must investigate it," Ms Bluett said. "For a teacher who is not guilty, simply being named can be enough for some schools to avoid employing that teacher."

Gail McHardy from Parents Victoria said the ban could make a teacher think twice about the consequences of making a wrong choice. "Why should teachers be treated any differently than any other professional or member of the public?" she said.

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10 September, 2007

What have the Democrats got against Pell grants?

Pell grants are money for poor students and Democrats make a great show of caring for the poor so they should be all for the Pell grant program, right? Wrong! The Pell grants have been allowed to decay into near-uselessness while ever more complex bureucratic schemes to "aid" students have been devised. Just giving poor kids fee money does not give the bureaucrats enough of that lovely CONTROL, apparently. Press release below from Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon (R-CA), senior Republican member of the Congressional Education and Labor Committee

Congressional Democrats yesterday rejected key Republican proposals to make college more affordable, instead proposing complex new entitlement and loan benefit programs. In closed door meetings, Democrats assembled a legislative proposal that creates new benefits for college graduates, new spending on institutions, and an untested student loan auction that eliminates parental choice in selecting a student loan provider. Republicans had advocated a straightforward investment in the Pell Grant program in order to provide assistance to low-income students.

"This year, Congress had an historic opportunity to reform federal student aid programs. Yet when presented with a choice between low-income students and big government spending, the Democratic majority put special interests above student interests," said Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon (R-CA), senior Republican member of the Education and Labor Committee. "The Democrat proposal sets program participants up for failure, imposing impossible deadlines for implementation of complex new programs and policies."

"Seven months ago, the Administration helped put us on this crash course by proposing misguided policies that threaten the stability of our nation's financial aid system," continued McKeon. "Then, rather than embracing House Republicans' straightforward approach to reform - making the student loan program more efficient and plowing available resources into Pell Grants - Congressional Democrats made things even worse as they added billions in additional program cuts and went on an entitlement program spending spree."

McKeon has championed efforts to increase college affordability by increasing Pell Grant funding while holding colleges and universities accountable for skyrocketing costs. Since 2003, he has backed proposals to increase transparency in college costs in order to protect and inform consumers. At the same time, he has called for reforms that would generate billions in savings from the federal student loan programs and reinvest them in the Pell Grant program, which serves low-income students.

After weeks of negotiations that excluded Republicans, Congressional Democrats last night released a final conference agreement that misses several key opportunities to strengthen the Pell Grant program and assist students and families. The bill:

* Diverts nearly $9 billion that could have been spent on Pell Grants in order to provide temporary interest rate reductions and complex new repayment benefits to some college graduates, as well as to create new programs that allocate funds to institutions and philanthropic organizations instead of low-income students;

* Fails to provide Pell Grants for students attending college on a year-round basis, creating a particular hardship for nontraditional students;

* Denies parents and students access to more information about college costs; and

* Imposes a complex auction mechanism to limit options for parents seeking low-cost loans to help their children pay for college.

The agreement reached by Democrats calls for a temporary phase down in the interest rate charged to some graduates repaying their loans. The plan falls far short of the promise Democrats made during the 2006 campaign to cut interest rates in half, rendering the claims of proponents that students would save $4,400 meaningless. Indeed, not a single borrower would be eligible for the halved interest rate for more than a single year of college. Moreover, if Democrats were to enact future legislation to extend the 3.4 percent interest rate - half the current 6.8 percent rate - to make good on their promise, it would cost taxpayers an estimated $20 - $30 billion.

Democrats also included in their proposal a radical plan to force parent borrowers to choose between just two lenders selected on the basis of an auction. The untested proposal would institute at least fifty separate auctions, one in each state, every two years to determine which lenders parents would be allowed to work with to take out low-cost federal loans to help their children pay for college.

The Democrat agreement creates a complex new loan forgiveness program for borrowers working for 10 years in the government, other public sector fields or at a nonprofit organization. In order to receive this benefit, the borrower must be in the Direct Loan program. A similar benefit is not available to similarly situated borrowers in the FFEL program. This new program also deliberately excludes teachers at private schools, while including other educators.

"The one positive feature in the Democrat-negotiated reform package is the increase in Pell Grant funding, heeding the calls of Republicans to increase support for this critical program," said McKeon. "While I wish the Democrats had adopted the Republican proposal to invest all the savings from this bill in the Pell Grant program, I'm pleased to see that progress was made on the most fundamental component of this bill - the investment in today's college students."




Maryland: Blacks failing in droves -- so water down the exams

Mustn't make them sit up and pay attention, of course

When Maryland's top school officer proposed that the state back away from its tough high school testing program last week, one reason might have been the troubling performance of some suburban schools. An alarming pattern of failure is surfacing: Minority students, especially African-Americans, are struggling to pass the exams in the suburban classrooms their families had hoped would provide a better education. "It is a wake-up call to African-Americans in Maryland," said Dunbar Brooks, president of the state school board and former president of the Baltimore County school board. "For many African-Americans, the mere fact that your child attends a suburban school district does not make academic achievement automatic." [What an amazing discovery!]

Baltimore City and its suburbs released school-by-school results last week for the Class of 2009 - the first group that must pass the statewide High School Assessments in algebra, English, biology and government to get a diploma. What they show is that in Baltimore County alone, nearly a third of the system's roughly two dozen high schools had pass rates of 60 percent or less. Also, high schools with predominantly African-American populations, such as Randallstown and Woodlawn, had passing rates mostly below 50 percent.

The results were similar, if not so pronounced, in Anne Arundel County, where some of the most urbanized schools - North County, Annapolis, Glen Burnie and Meade - performed well below the rest of the system. Educators point to the gap in achievement between African-Americans and whites as one reason for the slump among inner suburban schools - although not the only one.

Until now, the achievement gap in Baltimore County has been masked by county averages. Some of Maryland's highest-performing schools are in the county's largely white and well-to-do northern corridor, including Towson, Dulaney, Carver and Hereford high schools. Those schools, along with the Eastern and Western technical magnets, boost the county averages.

In Carroll, Harford and Howard counties, disparities between the highest- and lowest- performing schools were not so apparent. Most high schools there had passing rates of 80 percent or more.

African-Americans have long been migrating from Baltimore City to county neighborhoods. The number of African-Americans enrolled in county public schools has increased by 21 percent since 2000, and minorities account for almost 50 percent of the school population.

To be sure, Baltimore City's neighborhood high schools reported bleak results this year, with some pass rates lower than 20 percent. On the other hand, the city's perennial high performers, the citywide academic magnets - Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, Western High, the School for the Arts and City College - had pass rates similar to top suburban schools.

A handful of other academic and technical high schools in the city - such as Dunbar High, Merganthaler Voc-Tech and several new specialty high schools - performed as well as or better than some predominantly African-American suburban high schools.

Critics and activists in Baltimore County see the results in some schools, such as ultramodern New Town High in Owings Mills, as grossly out-of-step with area demographics not related to race.

More than 90.5 percent of area residents have earned a high school diploma and 42.8 percent have at least a bachelor's degree, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and median household income is $53,000.

"It's inexcusable," said Ella White Campbell, a retired city educator and executive director of the Liberty Road Community Council. "You can't say it's income that's the problem. And education levels are very high. ... The disconnect is in the fact that you have an educated community that has not realized kids are not getting the basics."

New Town High, which opened in 2003, has about 1,000 students, 92 percent of whom are African-American.

Walking the hallways yesterday at New Town High, Principal Barbara Cheswick said she knows the school's high school assessment results don't paint a pretty picture. But her staff is working on the problem.

"It's about establishing expectations and communicating those to parents, teachers and students," said Cheswick, in her second year at the helm of the four-year-old school. "As a principal, I have high expectations of students, regardless of their background."

Alexandria Foy, a 16-year-old junior from Owings Mills, said she passed all but the English exam, missing by only two points. To help her pass it the next time around, the school has enrolled her in a "coach class."

Junior Evan Watson, 15, said students should take more responsibility. He said teachers provided plenty of opportunities to prepare with practice exams, but too many students didn't take them seriously.

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9 September, 2007

U.K.: Many degrees not worth it

The expansion of university education has reduced the value of some degrees to zero, as more young people join the workforce as graduates, research suggests. Recent male graduates in arts and humanities are earning no more than those who left education after A levels High School], a study from the Institute of Education has found. The results will add to pressure from universities to be allowed to set student tuition fees according to how much a degree subject is valued by employers. At present the majority of universities charge 3,000 pounds a year, the maximum permitted by the Government. Research universities have pressed for a minimum of 6,000.

The research also calls into question the Government’s long-term aim of increasing university participation to 50 per cent of the adult population, up from 43 per cent at present. Anna Vignoles, Reader in Economics of Education in the department of economic, social and human development at the Institute of Education, who led the study, said that a university degree still had a high value in the labour market. However, a surplus of graduates in some nonscientific subjects could mean that those with degrees in the arts or humanities may soon find that they are not able to earn enough to compensate for the amount that they paid for their university education.

“New graduates in these subject areas are earning similar amounts to those with just A levels High school diploma],” she said. “Some graduates in highly valued subjects, such as accountancy, will continue to profit from the amount they spent on their degrees. But others may gain only a small, or even a nil, return to their investment in higher education.” She added that graduates in arts and humanities subjects, such as history, art, French or English literature, had among the lowest earnings.

Accountancy graduates were earning at least 40 per cent more than them over the course of a lifetime. Dr Vignoles, who will present her findings to the annual conference of the British Educational Research Association in London today, suggested that tuition fees should vary according to subject and institution in order to make students realise what different subjects are worth.

The study draws together a number of research papers into the subject, notably a study of graduate earnings by Professor Peter Sloane and Dr Nigel O’Leary at Swansea University. Dr Vignoles’s findings follow earlier research by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), the consultant, which found that the average university leaver can expect to make 160,000 more between the age of 21 and 60 than those who enter the job market with only A levels. Those with degrees in medicine have the highest earnings premium at 340,315, engineering graduates can expect to make 243,730 more, while those with degrees in geography or history make 51,549 more.

But the PWC report also found that with government grants, bursaries, low interest rates and long repayments, graduates could still expect an average financial return on their investment in their degree of 13.2 per cent a year. Bill Rammell, the Minister for Higher Education, said that despite the expansion of higher education, the financial returns to graduates were high by international standards. “Independent analysis suggests the average premium over a working life remains comfortably over 100,000 (before tax) in today’s valuation,” he said. “I’m glad that potential students are increasingly aware of their likely earnings when choosing a course, but it’s also right that they consider the wider nonfinancial benefits like job satisfaction.”

Source




Germany: Pupils set up own school

Frustrated German pupils have opened their own school, employing teachers and setting up their own timetables. The school, named the Methodos School, was started by nine pupils who were unhappy about the way they were being taught and with the success rates of their teachers. As a result the final year pupils started their own school, where they felt they would improve their A level [High school diploma] exam chances.

The young adults from Freiburg, all 18, have rented rooms, employed 10 teachers, founded a society and set up a budget. The group will bear the total costs for the school year of 34 000 euros. Their parents have agreed to chip in 10 000 euros, and the pupils hope to find sponsors for the remaining amount.

So far the costs are covered by a loan, but "we all carry the risk to have massive debts after our exams", says Alwin Franke, 19, one of the project's organisers. The Methodos project is not for slackers - Franke explains: "We will study in small groups of four or five from 9am to 5pm, six days a week."

Source




Australia's know-nothing generation

This is a pretty clear proof that the educational system no longer teaches the basics

The last time Neville Wran sued The Sun newspaper it was over a picture that cast him as Adolf Hitler. The news shot, circa 1982, captures the then NSW premier with dark, slicked hair and square-rimmed glasses, speaking from a lectern with a bulbous black microphone. The microphone looms over Wran's upper lip like a Hitler-style moustache. The accompanying story speaks of Neville Hitler and Adolf Wran and a matter of rising interest rates. Back then it caused outrage on Macquarie Street. It also cost the now-defunct Sun some serious cash.

These days it makes a humorous case for students of media law. Yet each time I show the clipping to a university class, I have to explain who Wran was. I choose not to explain who Hitler was, but it would not surprise me if some students needed reminding.

For centuries universities have been held up as hallowed halls of light and learning. Even in this country, where a decade of budget cuts has crippled classics departments and left research funding pools in drought, universities are valued for their contribution to intellectual debate. They are also seen as a salve for unemployment and social disharmony. But Australian educators face a serious problem: how to enliven a student body that thinks googling a wiki is a serious academic endeavour. In a world swamped by information, many students have little interest in accessing it. We have law students who have never read a case, English students who do not read books and journalism students who do not buy newspapers. Don't laugh, it's true.

Each semester I ask my students how many of them buy newspapers. Five at most raise their hands. The showing is even more dismal when it comes to listening to radio. Television and online news sites are more popular. But when I ask how many get their main news from headlines on their Yahoo! webmail there is a round of sheepish laughter. For journalism students in particular, the past month has been a great time to be following the news. First there was Rupert Murdoch's controversial take-over of The Wall Street Journal. Then there was the biggest ethical issue since the cash-for-comment debate, when the ABC journalist Michael Brissenden broke an off-the-record agreement with the Treasurer, Peter Costello. The sad reality is that many students do not know who Murdoch is. Let alone Brissenden and Costello. Cash for comment, huh?

When the information technology revolution crashed onto our shores, educators were excited about the possibilities of online learning. They saw the internet as a way of moving learning into the 21st century and online forums as a way of bolstering flagging classroom discussions. Instead, what we have experienced is an information tsunami. Too much data is as dangerous as too little data. We're drowning, not waving. And students have simply tuned out. One NSW lecturer recalls asking a class of second-year law students to name a radio station on the AM band. Not one could. Another law faculty lecturer recalls how her discussion about Nixon and Watergate drew a blank. No one had any idea about either. A health sciences lecturer recalls how she played her students a YouTube clip of geriatric musicians covering the Who's My Generation. "My students had no idea who the Who were," she says. "And no idea why it was significant that the single was recorded at Abbey Road."

In my classes, eyes glaze over when I talk about Michael Harvey and Gerard McManus and the case for journalistic shield laws. There are yawns when I question whether Fairfax journalists should have pounced on the Kevin Rudd strip-club scandal first. And when I argue the importance of leaks in the Mohamed Haneef case, I see the worried brows before me. Mohamed who?

Recently, ABC TV's Media Watch took issue with a Today Tonight story in which Chinese students were interviewed about Australian values. The story, dubbed "Passing The Pavlova Test", featured two young women who admitted they had never eaten pavlova and did not know Don Bradman. Sadly, it is not only international students who admit a gaping lack of general knowledge. Spelling among local students is atrocious. Plagiarism is rife. Academic references include wikis and lecturers' notes. Cut-and-paste technology has made libraries redundant. Many students do not know where the library is and some leave their laptops only reluctantly to attend classes. Some academics believe that in an industry worth almost $10 billion, as many as one in two students are cheating.

It must be said, this is not a criticism of students. Students for the most part are doing it tough. Most full-timers work part-time jobs and all part-timers arrive straight from work. International students are grappling with homesickness and language barriers. What must be addressed is the ideology of the ignorance. Students know what needs to be done and they'll be damned if they'll do any more. One colleague pointed me to the book Age of Extremes, in which the historian Eric Hobsbawm recalls a student asking whether the description "World War II" meant there had also been a first world war.

Contemporary curriculums must move with the times. Completing the assessment and working through the required readings is not enough. If we require students to consider the past, we must also allow them the opportunity to consider the future. Neville Hitler and Adolf Wran would both probably have something to say about that.

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8 September, 2007

Unhappy teachers in France

Why are French school teachers always so miserable? I will not be popular with my teacher friends for taking another shot at an education world that seems permanently angry, defensive and resistant to change. But it's time for a new swipe because most of France's 12 million school children returned to classes yesterday -- including my two teenagers -- and Nicolas Sarkozy used the occasion to upset the teaching establishment with a call for a change of attitude.

If you know the set-up, skip this paragraph: France has a uniform national education system commanded by a single Ministry. Almost 850,000 primary and secondary teachers are civil servants, and 145,000 more work in private schools. They all impart a national syllabus that is heavy on knowledge but light on encouraging imagination. There is little sport or other non-classroom activity. Despite Europe's second highest per capita spending on primary and secondary education (after Sweden), French kids perform modestly by European and world standards. French teachers, who largely support leftwing ideas, see themselves as guardians of the egalitarian republic. They complain but hate anyone touching their status quo.

Sarko did that yesterday, dropping in on a Loire valley school at Blois. He delivered a lecture that was guaranteed to anger the unions who despise him as a rightwing philistine. The president's unwanted medicine for an educational "Renaissance" is being sent as a 32-page letter to all 993,000 professeurs and instituteurs. "The time for a new start has come," says Super-Sarko. "We have delayed it too long."

Teachers must stimulate children and help raise their self-esteem. "For too long, education has neglected the personality of the child (because) knowledge has been put above everything else," says Sarkozy. That might sound odd to parents in, say, Britain and the USA where the pendulum swung long ago towards feel-good education, but it's needed in France. I am tired of seeing the spirits of my bright 13-year-old crushed by joyless teachers who send her home with scores of zero in dictation. "Her problem is she's operating dans une optique d'echec -- in a mindset of failure," the French teacher at her eighth arrondissement school told me the other day..

Sarkozy wants more values and discipline and respect for teachers, with children standing up when they enter the classroom. He also wants more sports and arts activities less time in the formal classroom. The teachers unions were groaning before Sarko had finished speaking. They have been here before, with a string of back-to-basics reforms and governments who see teachers as ageing sixties revolutionaries. Gerard Aschieri, boss of the FSU, the main teachers' union, dismissed the Sarkozy letter as "beneath the challenges of today." The schools, he said, need more staff and resources and extra help to deal with disorder in the poor urban zones.

The Sarkozy letter's "great failings" include failure to address social inequality, said Aschieri. In one of those ideological niggles that tell you everything, Aschieri accused Sarkozy of elitism because "he talks about 'sport' but not about 'physical and sporting education'." The teachers are already furious with Sarkozy because their profession has taken a hit with his scheme for trimming the civil service. Their giant ministry, which employs 1.2 million staff (yes, 1.2 million), is to lose 17,000 jobs next year. Sarkozy and his government say they know that teachers, once a noble profession in France, are underpaid and suffer from declining public esteem. The answer, they say, is better performance.

Sarkozy has a long list of revolutionary things he would like to do but cannot because they will bring the strike-happy unions onto the streets. These include loosening the rigid limits on class-room time, performance-related pay, comparison among schools and the right of schools to hire and fire their own staff. As it is, there is a fair chance that the teachers will strike this winter over Sarkozy's plans to include them in a new law imposing minimum service during public sector strikes. Perhaps I am being unfair. There are many dedicated, excellent teachers and the rigorous French system does help the cleverest children shine. But the faillings are obvious for anyone who comes in contact with the system.

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Unhappy teachers in America

The collective groan heard across America this morning came from America’s most disgruntled group of workers: public school teachers. I’ve never been to jail, but trust me when I tell you that Day 1 of a 180-day school year can feel like the first day of a life sentence.

Fortunately, my post-Labor Day blues are gone forever. I’m officially an ex-teacher now, and statistics reveal than I’m far from alone. A recently published article in the New York Times cites the most recent findings of the Department of Education. In the 2003-4 school year, 269,000 of the country’s 3.2 million public school teachers, or 8.4 percent, called it quits. A desire to pursue another career and dissatisfaction were the reasons 56 percent of these teachers put down the red pen (or purple for those who worked in school districts where red ink is deemed to be too demoralizing) forever. The Times also notes that new teachers often leave because they feel overwhelmed by classroom stress—a result of chaotic, last-minute hiring practices.

This is exactly how my teaching career got started. After graduating from the University of California system with a degree in economics and no clue what I wanted to do with my life, I figured I’d give teaching a try. So I went down to the Los Angeles Unified School District’s main office to fill out the necessary paperwork to become an elementary school teacher. After being sent from one department to the next on multiple visits (if you aren’t familiar with the inefficiency of government bureaucracy, just rent Akira Kurosawa’s “Ikiru”), I was finally ready to mold the minds of the next generation.

I’ll never forget the gentleman from Human Resources who set up the first and only interview I’d have at a school in one of the rougher parts of Los Angeles. I overheard him tell his colleague that I would “definitely get the position” because of where the school was located. In retrospect, I can translate what he meant: Nobody wanted to teach at this inner city school; thus, the principal was starving for teachers. But since I was starving for a job, I missed all the clues that suggested this one probably wasn’t right for me. A ten-minute lesson delivered to the gifted 5th grade class was enough to convince the principal that I could take over the lowest level and worst-behaved 5th grade class a couple of weeks into the school year.

To make a long story short, I got eaten alive that year. My classroom management skills were horrible, and I received very little support from the administration. My students thought I was the nicest teacher in the world, when my goal on most days was to be the most intimidating. As a result, much of my teaching hours were spent dealing with behavior problems: In between phonics lessons, I would break up fistfights and have doors slammed in my face. The afternoon bell, alas, could never come soon enough. While the challenges I had with discipline that year undoubtedly led me down the road to becoming a substitute teacher and eventually quitting, there are many more serious problem with public education that made me (and so many others) eager to exit the world of teaching.

Any discussion of educational reform must begin with the absurdity of teacher credentialing. Is there any reason, for example, why a college graduate with a degree in mathematics and a passion for teaching shouldn’t be able to teach 8th grade geometry without a credential? Or, in my case, why I needed to learn about educational theory in order to teach American history to 5th graders? I was hired with an emergency credential, which required me to enroll in a credentialing program if I wanted to renew my contract.

I never enrolled. Taking classes at night or during the weekends (and paying for them) was the last thing in the world I wanted to do after a draining day or week in the classroom. And even if I had enrolled, I probably wouldn’t have come away with much useful information anyway. Jay P. Green, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, has revealed how education degrees are not linked to classroom success. He notes a study conducted by the Abell Foundation, which found that out of 171 available studies on the impact of teaching credentials on job performance, “only nine uncovered any significant positive relationship…[and] five found a significant negative relationship.”

The negative relationship shouldn’t be surprising. Most credentialing programs are far more interested in teaching teachers how to become multiculturally sensitive than providing them with the tools necessary to make sure students learn how to read. Mike Piscal, founder of some of the most successful charter schools in Los Angeles, has commented on the fact that “training is almost always detached from the reality of the classroom.” Writing on the Huffington Post a while back, he explained that at his schools “a teacher needs only a scholar’s zeal for the subject s/he studied in college, and a burning desire to lead the next generation.” Interestingly, I contacted Piscal, my 8th grade basketball coach, by email during my first year of teaching. He told me I should come down to his school to interview one day. Although I never made it in, I often wonder if things might have turned out differently for me had I been hired at one of his schools, where everything from “lesson planning to classroom management, from discipline to communicating with parents” is taught by master teachers.

My paycheck being too small was not one of reasons I quit teaching. Contrary to the laments of so many teachers, the pay really isn’t all that bad. Indeed, this is another misconception that Jay Greene has thoroughly dispelled. The average teacher makes about $45,000 a year, or rather, three-quarters of a year. The fact is that teachers only have to work about nine months per year because they get summers off. After taking into account that teachers average 7.3 working hours per day, and that they work 180 days per year, Greene found that “the average teacher gets paid a base salary equivalent to a fulltime salary of $65.440.”

Yes, I know all about the amount of work teachers have to do at home. But guess what? All professionals have work to take home. Moreover, because job security for teachers is so strong (it’s almost impossible to fire a teacher), they have less incentive to work extra hours. I actually believe it’s this lack of incentive to work harder that really depresses so many teachers, even if they don’t want to admit it. It is human nature to want to be rewarded for a job well done. But because teachers are paid on a seniority-based schedule, the worst teachers are often paid better than the best ones.

Merit pay is the obvious answer to such a problem. Daniel Henninger wrote a must-read account in the Wall Street Journal of the performance pay program at the Meadowcliff Elementary School in Little Rock, Arkansas. In the first year of the program, the Stanford achievement scores of the school’s students (80 % of whom are black) rose 17 percent. Writes Henninger: “Little Rock has to find a way to hold its best teachers. The teachers I saw at Meadowcliff Elementary seemed pretty happy to be there.” Which brings to mind the question: What, god forbid, would become of teachers’ unions if they were made up of happy teachers?

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7 September, 2007

Middle East Tensions Flare Again in U.S.

The academic year in the United States is opening with flare-ups of tensions over the Middle East, and specifically over scholars who write critically of Israel. On Tuesday, the Middle East Studies Association released two letters protesting what the group considers to be serious violations of academic freedom. One concerns Norman Finkelstein, the DePaul University political scientist who was denied tenure in June and who has since been placed on a paid leave, with his classes called off and his office shut down. The other concerns the decision by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs to call off a lecture by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, two scholars who have written a book that is harshly critical of the influence of Israel and its supporters on U.S. foreign policy.

Today, Finkelstein is expected to stage a protest over his situation by teaching the class that the university canceled and then going to his old office, from which he has been barred. Finkelstein has vowed to enter the office, even if that gets him arrested, in which case he says he will go on a hunger strike. (Update: On Wednesday, Finkelstein and the university announced a settlement. Details will appear tomorrow on this site.)

Meanwhile, at Barnard College, a tenure case that has been attracting attention since last fall is getting more intense (at least among those outside the college). Competing Web sites offer analyses of the work of Nadia Abu El-Haj, an anthropologist whose book that criticizes the use of archaeology by Israel has been praised by some and panned by others. A critic's column this week that suggested that El-Haj's status as a Palestinian was an important area of inquiry is being cited by Middle Eastern studies scholars as a sign of how ugly some of the debates have become.

In all the cases, there are claims and counterclaims. And the Middle East has of course long been a source of debate on American campuses. But to people with a range of views on the issues, it seems that this academic year is starting off with these disputes as tense as ever, with enough flashpoints to assure numerous conflicts. "It seemed to me a year or so ago that things were getting a little better and the attack dogs were calmer, but now there is another spate of cases, of people up for tenure and advocating views," said Zachary Lockman, a professor of history and Middle Eastern studies at New York University and president of the Middle East Studies Association. "There seems to be a new aggressiveness. Issues have surfaced that have given an opportunity for people to mobilize."

Why there is so much tension this year is, not surprisingly, also a cause for debate. Critics of the professors being attacked say that it's a question of exposing shoddy scholarship. Defenders of these professors say that critics are unwilling to let critics of Israel have a hearing on campuses, and that these critics have been emboldened by success. Last year, Juan Cole, a prominent figure in Middle Eastern studies who teaches at the University of Michigan, lost a chance for a position at Yale University. While details of the decision-making process have never been confirmed, it came after he had gained support at the departmental level but was the subject of much criticism on op-ed pages and in letters to Yale officials.

A Lecture Called Off

The canceled lecture in Chicago was just the latest of disputes involving the ideas of Mearsheimer and Walt, who hold endowed chairs, respectively, at the University of Chicago and Harvard University. They have a new book out, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which argues that the United States alliance with Israel has not advanced U.S. interests in the Middle East and criticizes the way supporters of Israel influence Congress and the executive branch. The book is an expanded version of an essay they wrote last year, which was hailed as courageous by some and criticized as irresponsible by others.

As tenured professors at top universities, the authors don't have to worry about job security. But they do seek audiences for their ideas and they were scheduled to talk this month at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. They were uninvited. The council has said that the reason is not fear of their ideas, but the belief that their ideas would be best explored in a program that would include "other perspectives." According to the council, this was always the intent, and when people to oppose them could not be lined up, the event needed to be called off.

The letter from the Middle East Studies Association about the nixed talk calls the decision "a serious violation of the principles of free expression and the free exchange of ideas." It notes that both authors have spoken at the council previously, without having anyone to oppose their views, and questioned why only when talking about their new book are they "subjected to the litmus test of `balance.'"

Laurie A. Brand, a professor of international relations at the University of Southern California who heads the association's academic freedom committee, said the crucial point is the different treatment based on subject matter. If a group wants to always have opposing views of speakers, that's its right, she said. But to let some controversial people speak without opposition raises questions about this choice. "These are people who are prominent professors and then the council decided to withdraw the invitation, presumably because what they have to say is controversial. Part of what academic freedom is about is the ability to present new ideas, and they may be controversial. You don't cancel someone's presentation because you can't find someone to counter it."

The council's schedule does in fact indicate that highly controversial figures do speak there frequently - without anyone in opposition. This week a lecture is scheduled by Bjorn Lomborg, famous and controversial for his "skeptical" view of the environmental movement. No one will oppose him at his talk. Rachel Bronson, vice president for programs and studies at the council, said Lomborg's talk was different because the Chicago group had previously had a panel discussion on the environment. She said that the claims of the Middle Eastern studies scholars were "unfounded" and that the group still planned to have a panel discussion featuring Walt and Mearsheimer. When "emotions run high" on certain topics, as she said was the case with their work, panel discussions are the best approach. "We have a job to do. We provide interesting, stimulating panels to our members and the format is up to us. That's how we view our job," she said. Bronson said that doing so was more difficult when "this kind of barrage comes at us," and she said that "outside pressure" from the Middle East Studies Association "makes this harder."

Showdown at DePaul

The DePaul situation is also much in dispute. Finkelstein's tenure denial followed a long, public debate over his qualifications, and the decision to stop his classes was highly unusual - drawing criticism from a number of academic groups. While DePaul hasn't explained the latter decision, an article in the Chicago Tribune noted concerns about "threatening and discourteous behavior" - concerns that have been much disputed by backers of Finkelstein.

The letter from the Middle East studies scholars released Tuesday does not take a formal stand on the tenure decision, but raises two other issues. First, it calls it "unacceptable" that Finkelstein does not have a venue to appeal the denial, calling the lack of an appeal an "arbitrary and unjust" system. Second, it questions the decision to place Finkelstein on leave, which is setting up today's expected confrontation. The letter to DePaul states: "It is customary to permit faculty who have been denied tenure to teach for one final year. Your administration's abrupt decision to prevent Professor Finkelstein (who is by all accounts an outstanding teacher) from doing so, without his agreement and despite strong objections from members of your own faculty and student body, strikes us as high-handed, if not vindictive."

Brand stressed that it was the violation of academic norms that raised questions about the case, not whether the faculty members agreed or disagreed with Finkelstein's take on the Middle East. Tenure decisions, she said, should be based on the quality of scholarship and teaching, not "someone's opinions on Israel."

A number of prominent professors, generally of the left (Howard Zinn, Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado and others, some of them quite controversial themselves, such as Ward Churchill) have issued calls to back Finkelstein. One such call says his treatment amounts to "a fundamental threat to the intellectual ferment and critical thinking so desperately needed - in academia and in society - at this time in history."

Some at DePaul say that the statements about the impact of the case have been overstated. Jonathan Cohen, a professor of mathematics at the university, said that there is no shortage of criticism of Israel on the campus - and that most such discussion doesn't cause much of a stir. He said one would be "hard pressed" to prove that people who criticize Israel aren't welcome to share their views on the campus. It was not the substance of criticism, he said, but the style that got Finkelstein into trouble, he noted. Indeed, the decisions to reject Finkelstein for tenure talked about his style, and said that it did not reflect the university's values of promoting civilized discussions.

While Cohen is not bothered by the decision in the case, he argued that the university should have challenged Finkelstein's scholarship on substantive grounds. "I feel like there were issues about his scholarship that were real - such as where do you draw a line between advocacy and scholarship," he said. Cohen also said that there is a problem with Finkelstein's research (and with the book by Walt and Mearsheimer) of "serious things being omitted" from the work.

Had DePaul evaluated the quality of Finkelstein's scholarship, instead of talking about tone, Cohen said that the university might not be accused today of infringing on academic freedom. Many supporters of academic freedom, and scholarly and faculty associations, warn that discussions of tone frequently mask discomfort with controversial ideas. "The way they worded it led them into this mess," Cohen said.

There's no telling what will happen today, when Finkelstein has vowed to reclaim his office. A spokeswoman for DePaul said that there were no special plans for security on the campus.

Lobbying at Barnard

The Middle East Studies Association notably did not issue a letter about the case of Nadia Abu El-Haj, the assistant professor of anthropology who is up for tenure and who has not commented on the debate that has been going on over her tenure bid. According to Brand, the academic freedom committee asked El-Haj if she wanted it to examine her case, and she declined, saying that outside letters would not be appropriate at this time. Outside commentary, however, continues to arrive.

Unlike Finkelstein, Walt or Mearsheimer, El-Haj has not been been seeking to be a public intellectual on the Middle East and the controversy concerns a book she wrote about Israeli archeology. The book, Facts on the Ground, was published by the University of Chicago Press and has received some kind reviews and some harsh ones. When the controversy started, Barnard's president, Judith Shapiro, appealed to alumnae to let the normal tenure process proceed. She argued that the use of outside reviewers in El-Haj's field was the best way to evaluate her scholarship (just as such reviewers are used in other tenure cases). She also expressed "concern about communications and letter-writing campaigns orchestrated by people who are not as familiar with Barnard as you are, and who may not be in the best position to judge the matter at hand." Since then, opponents of El-Haj have gathered hundreds of signatures urging Barnard to deny her tenure, while others have published refutations of the criticisms of her book.

Many in Middle Eastern studies have been particularly alarmed by a recent column by Shulamit Reinharz, a Barnard alumna who is a professor of sociology at Brandeis University and wrote about her decision to skip her reunion and her concerns about El-Haj. Much of the column is similar to other criticism of El-Haj's scholarship, but one paragraph in particular is drawing attention. Reinharz writes: "According to information on the Web, El-Haj is a Palestinian. I was unsuccessful in my efforts to find exactly where she was born, a topic that interested me because I am not sure if she identifies as a Palestinian as a consequence of being born in what some people now call Palestine or because she identifies with Palestinians and was born elsewhere. I couldn't find the facts."

In an interview, Reinharz said that this was a legitimate question to ask. "She makes a point of calling herself a Palestinian scholar so I was curious about why she did that. The word Palestinian is a contested term," Reinharz said. "There is no country yet called Palestine so I didn't know what she meant by that." She added that "people who call themselves palestinian garner sympathy for the Palestinian cause, and this is a book that is an attack on Israeli archaelology so I thought maybe it was relevant." She stressed that she wasn't inquiring about El-Haj's religious beliefs, just what she meant by Palestinian. "It's not racism, it's curiosity," she said.

But others see this as the latest sign of how bitter the debates have become. Lockman of NYU, called the comments "slimy" and said "I find it incredibly offensive to question someone's place of birth or nationality." Noting that he is Jewish, Lockman said it was inconceivable that a professor would publish a column critiquing another professor's scholarship and devote a paragraph to wondering about what that professor meant about being Jewish. "People would acknowledge that as outrageous," he said. "Her origin is irrelevant to her scholarship," Lockman said. "It's clear people are pulling out all the stops."

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A partial halt to "social promotion" in Britain?

Underachieving children could be forced to spend an extra year in primary school under proposals unveiled by the Conservatives. Eleven-year-old pupils would be compelled to resit their final year with children a year younger, while their peers started secondary school. David Cameron claimed that this could be part of a "genuine schools" revolution aiming to raise literacy and numeracy standards.

The Conservative leader vied for the spotlight yesterday with Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, with rival announcements timed to coincide with the start of the school year. Mr Balls admitted that improvements in education had slowed in the last year and that schools still had "some way to go to deliver a world class education".

He is writing to all primary and secondary school head teachers for the first time in his tenure, asking them to redouble their efforts, particularly with basic skills and discipline. The letter will focus on the Government's "personalisation agenda", under which individual children can be targeted and taught at a level suited to their ability. As with Mr Cameron's plans, this could result in pupils moving on to key stages at different ages from their peer group.

During the autumn term, up to 500 schools will trial new personalised approaches to assessment and testing, backed by one-to-one tuition for pupils at risk of making slow progress. A Department for Children, Schools and Families spokesman said: "Mr Balls will be looking closely at the experience of these schools and will not hesitate to accelerate national roll-out where personalised teaching techniques, one-on-one coaching and catchup classes are proving to work."

Mr Cameron's comments will be expounded in tomorrow's launch of a review by his party's public services improvement policy group. The report will propose that the worst performers in year six should be made either to catch up at summer classes or to repeat the whole academic year. Mr Cameron promised to "look carefully" at the measure, which is already used in the US and some European countries. He also supported giving extra money to schools for each pupil they take from a disadvantaged background, and said there should be a "bonfire of controls" to free teachers from bureaucracy and targets.

Mr Cameron pledged to stop the closure of special needs schools and to give schools the final say over whether pupils were expelled.

The report also suggests that A/S levels should be scrapped so that students can concentrate on their A-level exams. It proposes that ability sets should be introduced across the curriculum, and that league tables should be simplified and restructured.

Michael Gove, the Shadow Children, Schools and Families Secretary, said that making 11-year-olds stay back rather than go on to secondary schools would be "very much a backstop". He added: "We can't have children going from primary school into secondary school without the skills necessary to make the most of what they are going to be taught in secondary schools."

But Mr Cameron's announcement was criticised by the Government. Jim McKnight, the Schools Minister, said: "Proposals for what the Tories have called a `remedial year' would stigmatise the very children who need extra help. They would increase class sizes and make it difficult for teachers and parents to plan ahead."

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6 September, 2007

High return on early childhood education -- up to age 5

I am a bit dubious about the claims below, even though they are by an economist. I would like to see the benefits dissected out by social class

By Jeffrey M. Lacker

Economists like to think about investment in terms of rate of return, and there is reason to think that the rate of return on early childhood investment could be particularly high. Like any investment in human capital, some of the return accrues directly to the individual in increased lifetime earning ability. But a substantial share of the return -- perhaps as much as three-quarters of the total -- is a broader, social benefit coming from such sources as reduced costs of remediation and other special services in primary and secondary school, as well as from the reduced incidence of the array of social problems often associated with low educational achievement.

There are many explanations for the apparent high economic returns to early childhood education, but a key difference between early childhood investments and investments at primary and secondary education levels is the potential for compounding. That is, enhancing early childhood development appears to improve a child's ability to learn at later stages. This means the return on early education comes not just from the direct effects, say on the development of cognitive ability, but also from the fact that these early investments increase the productivity of later educational investments. Nobel Prize-winning economist James J. Heckman has emphasized this point in his writing on early childhood education.

This compounding effect means disparities in early childhood development have potential to exacerbate inequality within our society. People with limited means are more likely to have difficulty providing their children with high-quality early childhood environment, leaving those children less able to benefit from later investments in human capital. This possibility creates a legitimate public interest in helping people of modest means find and afford quality early childhood education. It holds the promise of expanding the development of human capital more broadly across our society and in so doing, widening our potential for skill-based economic growth.

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As New Orleans restarts its schools, most are now charter schools

Since hurricane Katrina, the city has been determined to reform one of the nation's worst school districts

In three New Orleans neighborhoods, young teachers and administrators at charter schools are preparing with haste for the doors to swing open Tuesday. In the diverse community of Algiers, rookie principal Meredith Summerville relishes a daunting directive: In one week, open a school. Over at McDonogh 15, a charter school in the French Quarter, 20-something assistant principal Kyle Schaffer rules "controlled chaos" from his desk in the middle of the hall. And at New Orleans Charter Middle School in Uptown, an economically and racially mixed area, first-year principal Bree Dusseault prepares to measure her idealism against reality as school begins.

Although hurricane Katrina wrought much destruction and despair, it also provided the spark of reform for one of the nation's worst school districts. Hundreds of young, mostly white would-be teachers and principals from around the country have arrived for the task - replacing a veteran, mostly black teacher corps pink-slipped by the thousands after the storm.

In the two years since Katrina, New Orleans has come to have the highest percentage of students in charter schools among US cities. That's happened partly in response to the needs of rapidly redeploying a shattered system. It's also being done in hopes of improving historically miserable test scores and high dropout and expulsion rates.

Despite some bright spots, however, critics worry that this setup for the school district could further entrench educational and racial inequities. Thus New Orleans is becoming a proving ground for charter schools in US urban areas: Can they really improve academic achievement in places where reform is needed most? "There's definitely a hope that the experience in New Orleans after the hurricane will show that public charter schools can work at scale, particularly for those students who have struggled historically," says Todd Ziebarth, a policy analyst at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Last year, 91 percent of McDonogh fourth-graders passed their end-of-year tests, compared with 51 percent of students in the city's public schools. To help students who have missed classes catch up, the school day runs until 4:30 in the afternoon, and students attend school every other Saturday.

Mr. Schaffer, the assistant principal, helped run the school when it opened in Houston after the storm, as "evacuated teachers taught evacuated students." "What sold me on this model is no shortcuts, no excuses, discipline, but having fun," he says. "I love that we have the autonomy to have a longer school day, and we have teachers who are all on the same page, working together."

Like Schaffer, Ms. Dusseault, the principal at New Orleans Charter Middle, is driven by idealism more than pay. When it opens, the school's population will be largely poor and black. "This is an opportunity for people who like dreaming big ideas to put them into reality," says Dusseault, a multidegreed business consultant.

More here




Special treatment for Muslims in Australia too

HALAL food and prayer rooms should be adopted at all universities to help Muslim students meet their religious and educational obligations, a conference heard yesterday. The religious needs of Muslim university students were addressed at an inaugural conference launched by the University of Western Sydney. UWS Director of Equity and Diversity Dr Sev Ozdowski said they wanted to develop national standards for Muslim students which could be incorporated by other universities.

The "Access, Inclusion and Success - Muslim students at Australian universities" two-day conference is covering issues relating to gender, discrimination and how to meet the fundamental religious needs of Muslim students. Dr Ozdowski told The Daily Telegraph the aim of the forum was to raise awareness and to find a way to make sure Muslim students can meet obligations to their religion as well as the university. UWS already has prayer rooms and halal food at a majority of its campuses for its 2000 Muslim students - the largest tertiary Muslim student population in Australia.

"There is no model or national standard to guide Australia's universities on how they can best address the varied cultural, ethnic and religious needs of their diverse student populations," Dr Ozdowski said. "It's important that all people, including those from Muslim backgrounds, have the ability to fully participate in higher education so they can gain good employment and strengthen their place in society. "We also need to address the practical realities that Muslim students face every day, such as providing prayer space and cafeteria food that is halal, to ensure university campuses are welcoming of all cultures and faiths," he said.

About 150 people are involved in the conference including representatives and speakers from universities and TAFE, the government and local muslim communities. Muslim student Najwa Hussein - who is completing her post graduate diploma in psychology at UWS - believes the conference is a positive step forward for Muslim students. "It is part of our obligations to fulfil these religious duties, to pray and to ensure we eat halal meat," the 21-year-old from Guildford said. "These small things are part of our daily life so if the universities adopt such facilities, that would be awesome," she said. The conference, held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Parramatta, concludes today with practical workshops.

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5 September, 2007

Swedish Moonbats Suppress Knowledge of Communist Genocide

There's a reason 90% of Swedish students aged 15-20 don't know what a gulag is, despite living in the neighborhood of the former Soviet Union. Swedish moonbats openly hold that knowledge of communist atrocities must be suppressed, lest people develop conservative views:

A recent opinion piece in Biblioteksbladet magazine (a periodical for Swedish librarians) denounced the government's plan to spread knowledge to students about the horrors of communism. In the article, two school librarians write that informing students about the crimes of communism would be wrong as it would risk making the pupils' views more right-wing.

Kjell Albin Abrahamsson, who worked as a foreign correspondent in communist countries, was enraged by the piece, noting that by its own admission the Russian government killed 32 million "counterrevolutionaries" during the Soviet era. (The total number of people killed by their own communist governments during the 20th Century is estimated at over 100 million.) Nonetheless:

Support for communism, both hidden and visible, is still quite prevalent among many groups of intellectuals, such as journalists, librarians and those writing in the culture pages of the daily papers. Indeed, outright supporters of communism can be found not only in the Swedish Left Party but also in the Green Party and in the ranks of the influential Social Democrats.

One symptom of this tendency is the widely believed myth among Swedes that Cuba is a relatively prosperous welfare state, offering a decent quality of life and fantastic healthcare to its citizens. Few bother to question the official statistics from a communist country where thousands of citizens have lost their lives whilst attempting to escape on rafts to the United States. Cuba might have gone from being the richest country in Central American to being the second poorest due to Castro's rule - but this has not stopped Swedish intelligentsia from spreading a positive view of his policies.

Similarly, Swedish journalists seem more interested in pointing out that Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is a morally superior socialist standing up to the vile Americans, than looking at his dubious moves towards a socialist planned economy and authoritarian rule.

Moonbats who continue to advocate communism aren't slow learners who haven't yet caught on that their ideology invariably leads to oppression, misery, and death. They know what they want: evil. For evil to triumph, truth must be suppressed. This is why leftists flock to careers in journalism and academia that put them in positions to keep the good in ignorance, the better to corrupt them.

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Happiness lessons: What crap

The latest looniness from Britain. Anything that is not objectively assessable they love. After all, they are extraordinarily bad at teaching things that ARE objectively assessable, like the "3Rs"

Feeling down today? OK, let's talk about how you feel and start again. With this touchy-feely approach, the Government is hoping to bring about a revolution in the classroom. Today Ed Balls, the Education Secretary, will announce that lessons in happiness, wellbeing and good manners are to be introduced in all state secondary schools. The initiative follows an extensive pilot of a programme called Seal (Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning) in primary schools, which has been found to boost both academic performance and discipline by helping children to better understand their emotions.

[Assessed under "double-blind" conditions? Not if it is like most educational "research". So any benefit was probably a "Hawthorne Effect". It now seems generally agreed that there was no Hawthorne effect at the Hawthorne plant but we know something close to it as the placebo effect -- possibly the best documented therapeutic effect in medicine. The basic lesson of the Hawthorne study was that any changes made with enthusiasm had some benefit.]

The adoption of "wellbeing" classes by state schools suggests that emotional intelligence - a term coined in 1995 by psychologists in Britain - has now become entrenched firmly in the educational mainstream. Ministers are convinced that teaching children to express their feelings, manage their anger and empathise with other people makes for a calmer school and boosts concentration and motivation.

It is not just the pupils that benefit. Research published today by the Institute of Education (IoE) into the effect of Seal in primary schools indicates that it is equally beneficial for teachers, reducing their stress levels and boosting their enthusiasm for study. The approach includes wellbeing assemblies and one-to-one sessions in which pupils may, for example, be told a story about a personal conflict that they are then encouraged to discuss.

The wellbeing ethos will be incorporated into all lessons and even into playtime through the use of positive phrases and ideas, such as "OK, let's start again" and "people like me succeed". Susan Hallam, author of the IoE research, suggested that the Seal programme was the perfect antidote to the intense pressure imposed on schools by the testing regime and exam league tables. "Most of the effort in recent years has been on academic work. Seal gives teachers and pupils permission to think about things that are not academic. It allows them to take time to consider how they think about themselves and others," she said.

Professor Hallam evaluated the impact of the Seal in a sample of primary schools from 25 local authorities that used the programme between 2003 and 2005. The programme had seven themes including, "good to be me", "getting on and falling out" and "relationships". Finding that the programme helped them to understand their pupils, teachers noticed that they were shouting less and resolving conflicts more easily. Queues of naughty children outside the head teachers' offices diminished or disappeared entirely. Because the children were more relaxed, their learning, motivation, willing to interact with those from different backgrounds and cultures," Professor Hallam said. Children's behaviour at home also changed: they tidied up without being asked and had fewer confrontations with their siblings.

Anthony Seldon, Master of Wellington College in Berkshire, who has pioneered wellbeing classes in the independent school sector, said the approach was based on hard evidence. "We know much more about how to teach children to be emotionally resilient and self-reliant and to be able to manage their emotions than we did. Even ten years ago there was no empirical evidence to support this approach, but now there is," he said.

Oli Marjot, 16, who took wellbeing lessons at Wellington last year, said: "The wellbeing lessons were a pool of calm. They don't teach you to be happy all the time. They teach you about how to deal with things when you are not happy." But Seal does have its critics. Frank Furedi, Professor of sociology at Kent University and author of Therapy Culture, has cautioned that children are more likely to develop emotional problems if they are encouraged to become obsessed with their emotions.

Source




IQ tests rediscovered in Australia

Although he was shy, overweight and pushing 40, Paul Potts somehow summoned the nerve to perform on the show Britain's Got Talent. He appeared on stage in a wrinkled shirt and cheap, ill-fitting jacket and trembling like a leaf. You could see the three judges looking at each other, wondering what this mobile phone salesman was doing there as he prepared to sing Puccini's Nessun Dorma. But he went on to win the competition and was signed by a record company. People who do not appear to have ability sometimes go on to achieve great things. We need a university entrance system which takes this into account.

Our tertiary admissions system is like a footrace. The first students to cross the finishing line - those with the highest entrance scores - gain entry to the most popular courses at the most prestigious universities; those who run a bit slower get to study less popular courses, and so on. It sounds fair, but is it? In most races, the runners begin at the same starting line, which is rarely true in life. Some students have the advantage of private schooling while others struggle in under-resourced schools; some help out their families by working part-time while others may use the time for extra tutoring.

A fair system should take unequal starting points into account. There are two ways to do this. One is to use special "access" schemes to allow students from deprived backgrounds to enter courses they would not get into under the competitive admissions system. Because these students may displace students with higher entry scores, access schemes face substantial political resistance from those with higher entry marks. In addition, many academics worry that students admitted just because they are socially or economically deprived may lack the necessary motivation or the academic potential to succeed.

This is where admissions tests, such as the one we intend to introduce at Macquarie University this year, can help to uncover hidden talent among educationally disadvantaged students. I expect that those who will be most interested in taking the test will be students whose entry mark has been adversely affected by illness, family problems or poor schooling. This test is already being used by the Australian National University and Monash. No test is perfect, but the UniTest, at least, makes no assumptions about schooling. For example, students may be asked to read and answer questions about a paragraph. All the necessary information is contained in the paragraph, so the test assesses only reasoning, not knowledge.

Tertiary admissions tests had their debut at Harvard University 60 years ago, when the university was the preserve of wealthy students whose families could afford to send them to the best preparatory schools. James Conant, the president of Harvard at the time, believed talented students were missing out because their poor schooling did not prepare them for the curriculum-based achievement tests that Harvard used to select students. He wanted selection to be based, at least in part, on a general "aptitude" test that was not linked to any particular school experience. In Conant's view, such a test would produce an even playing field in which working-class and middle-class students could compete in a contest of brains rather than bank accounts. The test he chose was the Scholastic Aptitude Test.

By the 1990s the test was producing revenue of about $US200 million a year. But critics questioned its status as a test of innate ability. Studies found that coaching improved performance, although how much was debatable, and certainly good schooling helped students achieve higher scores. This doesn't mean the Scholastic Aptitude Test is not useful. The test predicts first-year university performance - the reason it is still widely used to select students.

Although the admissions test may help make the system fairer, it is important to remember that no test can be guaranteed to uncover every Paul Potts. There is no perfectly objective selection device and there never will be. All examinations are influenced by social and economic factors and by life experiences. The best we can hope for is that universities will use test results as part of a holistic assessment. University admissions will always be more of an art than a science and the playing field may never be completely flat, but we can make admissions fairer by using admissions tests.

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4 September, 2007

Teaching unattractive

Who'd want to teach where your main challenge is to get kids to sit down?

The retirement of thousands of baby boomer teachers coupled with the departure of younger teachers frustrated by the stress of working in low-performing schools is fueling a crisis in teacher turnover that is costing school districts substantial amounts of money as they scramble to fill their ranks for the fall term.

Superintendents and recruiters across the nation say the challenge of putting a qualified teacher in every classroom is heightened in subjects like math and science and is a particular struggle in high-poverty schools, where the turnover is highest. Thousands of classes in such schools have opened with substitute teachers in recent years.

Here in Guilford County, N.C., turnover had become so severe in some high-poverty schools that principals were hiring new teachers for nearly every class, every term. To staff its neediest schools before classes start on Aug. 28, recruiters have been advertising nationwide, organizing teacher fairs and offering one of the nation's largest recruitment bonuses, $10,000 to instructors who sign up to teach Algebra I. [How about reintroducing discipline? Controlling a roomful of monkeys is difficult-to-impossible without extensive discipline options] "We had schools where we didn't have a single certified math teacher," said Terry Grier, the schools superintendent. "We needed an incentive, because we couldn't convince teachers to go to these schools without one."

Guilford County, which has 116 schools, is far from the only district to take this route as school systems compete to fill their ranks. Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonprofit policy group that seeks to encourage better teaching, said hundreds of districts were offering recruitment incentives this summer.

Officials in New York, which has the nation's largest school system, said they had recruited about 5,000 new teachers by mid-August, attracting those certified in math, science and special education with a housing incentive that can include $5,000 for a down payment. New York also offers subsidies through its teaching fellows program, which recruits midcareer professionals from fields like health care, law and finance. The money helps defer the cost of study for a master's degree. The city expects to hire at least 1,300 additional teachers before school begins on Sept. 4, said Vicki Bernstein, director of teacher recruitment.

Los Angeles has offered teachers signing with low-performing schools a $5,000 bonus. The district, the second-largest in the country, had hired only about 500 of the 2,500 teachers it needed by Aug. 15 but hoped to begin classes fully staffed, said Deborah Ignagni, chief of teacher recruitment.

In Kansas, Alexa Posny, the state's education commissioner, said the schools had been working to fill "the largest number of vacancies" the state had ever faced. This is partly because of baby boomer retirements and partly because districts in Texas and elsewhere were offering recruitment bonuses and housing allowances, luring Kansas teachers away. "This is an acute problem that is becoming a crisis," Ms. Posny said.

In June, the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, a nonprofit group that seeks to increase the retention of quality teachers, estimated from a survey of several districts that teacher turnover was costing the nation's districts some $7 billion annually for recruiting, hiring and training.

Demographers agree that education is one of the fields hardest hit by the departure of hundreds of thousands of baby boomers from the work force, particularly because a slowdown in hiring in the 1980s and 1990s raised the average age of the teaching profession. Still, they debate how serious the attrition will turn out to be. In New York, the wave of such retirements crested in the early years of this decade as teachers left well before they hit their 60s, without a disruptive teacher shortage, Ms. Bernstein said.

In other parts of the country, the retirement bulge is still approaching, because pension policies vary among states, said Michael Podgursky, an economist at the University of Missouri. California is projecting that it will need 100,000 new teachers over the next decade from the retirement of the baby boomers alone.

Some educators say it is the confluence of such retirements with the departure of disillusioned young teachers that is creating the challenge. In addition, higher salaries in the business world and more opportunities for women are drawing away from the field recruits who might in another era have proved to be talented teachers with strong academic backgrounds.

Source




Standards tell a needed story

Five years ago, when the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) began ratcheting up education accountability standards, the pinch was first felt mainly in inner-city areas where the massive failures of public schools are most evident. Now affluent suburban school systems are coming under pressure and they don't like it one bit.

Nationwide, 20 percent of all public school districts failed to make adequate yearly progress last year, including more than a third of northern Virginia's widely hailed schools. The results aren't much better in Maryland where 56 schools in Prince George's County and 17 in Montgomery County failed for the second year in a row, leaving them subject to sanctions intended to help parents rescue their children from failing schools.

These dismal results illuminate the real story behind efforts earlier this year by local school boards in Virginia to be excused from NCLB rules requiring that all students take the same proficiency tests in reading and math. The tests set an essential benchmark against which all future efforts will be measured. Without the benchmark, progress can't be measured. The local boards backed down only when the feds threatened to withhold millions in federal funding.

Something is terribly wrong with public education when, despite spending more child than has ever before been spent in human history, anywhere from a quarter to half of the students in a school can't pass basic read and math tests. The unions that control public schools often blame the tests themselves, but these diagnostic tools were chosen by each state, not the federal government. What the unions most fear is that NCLB will provide undeniable objective proof that they - not the tests, not student or parent demographics, not even President Bush - are responsible for the scandal of American public schools.

The unions prefer subjective criteria to measure academic performance because the results are so easily manipulatable, especially to gullible parents. But such obfuscation long ago ceased being merely tiresome.

Third-graders shouldn't be expected to read Shakespeare or do trigonometry, but graduating seniors ought to be able to read at a third-grade level and solve third-grade math problems. That achieving such minimal proficiency has become so Herculean a task is a sad testament to the diminished state of public education in America.

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Australia: Government schools not so "free"

STATE schools have been warned not to use debt collectors to recover "voluntary" fees from parents. Draft regulations, obtained by The Australian, say parents should not be harassed or children humiliated because of a failure to pay materials fees or make voluntary contributions. The Victorian government policy follows controversy over what parents are expected to pay at state schools. There have been claims of parents being forced to pay up to $1000 in subject charges and students being humiliated if their parents could not pay. Other instances included students not being allowed to take home finished artwork, students being banned from excursions and others being embarrassed because they were not allowed a school diary until fees were paid.

The draft policy states that the Government only provides funding for "free instruction -- which is defined as the resources, materials and teaching of the "standard curriculum program". It says schools may charge fees to parents for "goods and services provided by the school". This can include textbooks, excursions and extra materials that students "consume" or take home, such as artwork. The draft regulations state that a school can charge a "voluntary" contribution but parents are not to be forced to pay it. "Payments and contributions are to be obtained without coercion or harassment," the document states. "It is not acceptable to send repeated requests for voluntary contributions beyond the initial notice to all parents." The regulations replace a 2004 policy which also instructed schools not to use debt collectors, threaten parents or humiliate students.

Victorian Council of School Organisations president Jacinta Cashen said the new regulations were much more explicit about what fees could be charged. "But the concern for us is the policing side," she said. "We know that previously schools have flouted the guidelines ... and in the past some have used debt collectors." Ms Cashen said the Victorian Government had failed to address the key issue. "If schools don't legitimately have enough money for free instruction, we should put more pressure on the Government for more funding," she said.

Victorian Association of State School Principals president Brian Burgess said he was pleased there had been an attempt to clear up confusion about fees. "There has been some lack of clarity about some of the issues regarding school materials charges," he said. Victorian Principals Association president Fred Ackerman said schools struggled to provide everything for students. "The system isn't funded at a sufficient level not to have to ask for charges," he said. "The books won't balance without a co-contribution from parents."

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3 September, 2007

Not even teachers can speak English

An official state inspection of Arizona public schools reveals that many students are being taught English by Spanish-speaking teachers whose command of English is so poor that the officials can barely understand them. The recent inspection revealed teachers providing instruction in Spanish instead of the legally required English, students unable to answer questions in English, and teachers' instructions such as "Sometimes, you are not gonna know some." The results of the inspections were reported by the Arizona Republic, which concluded hundreds of students in the state are trying to learn English from teachers who don't know the language.

The inspections found teachers who are unable to use English grammar and cannot pronounce English words. The "You are not gonna know" comment came from a Mesa teacher instructing a classroom filled with students trying to learn English. From a Casa Grande Elementary District teacher came, "read me first how it was before," and a Phoenix teacher at Creighton Elementary asked, "If you have problems, to who are you going to ask?"

State officials each year visit classrooms where children are learning English. Of the 32 school districts visited last year, there were problems at about one-third. "Some teachers' English was so poor that even state officials strained to understand them," the assessment found. "At a dozen districts, evaluators found teachers who ignored state law and taught in Spanish." The visits, which lasted from one to three days, discovered teachers did not know grammar or pronunciation. "In one classroom, the teacher's English was 'labored and arduous.' Other teachers were just difficult to understand. Some teachers pronounced 'levels' and 'lebels' and 'much' and 'mush,'" the newspaper reported. Other visits uncovered:

In the Humboldt Unified District, one teacher said, "How do we call it in English?"

In Phoenix's Isaac Elementary, a teacher said. "My older brother always put the rules."

In Marana, a teacher said, "You need to make the story very interested to the teacher."

The report found children in Cartwright Elementary in Phoenix who still were in the beginning stages of learning English were "sitting, comprehending very little, and receiving almost no attention." Another school, in Maricopa Unified, provided English instruction for students, from a teacher's aide at the back of the class.

Changes, however, apparently are on the way. The state under a new plan is requiring that schools put language learners into four hours of classes each day where the students will learn English grammar, phonetics, writing and reading. It also has a new program to help school managers train teachers in the new procedures.

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Corrupt governance of a major U.S. college

Mr. Rodgers founded Cypress in 1982, and now, a lifetime later in the hypercompetitive semiconductor business, it is an industry leader. Mr. Rodgers, for his part, has reached that phase where success purchases new opportunities. Some men of his means and achievement buy a yacht, or turn to philanthropic work, or join other corporate boards. Mr. Rodgers went back to school: He became a trustee of his alma mater, Dartmouth College--and not a recumbent one. He has now served for three years; and though he notes some positives, overall, Mr. Rodgers says, "It's been a horrible experience. I'm a respected person here in Silicon Valley. Nobody calls me names. Nobody demeans me in board meetings. That's not the way I'm treated at Dartmouth. The behavior has been pretty shabby."

Now the college's establishment is working to ensure that the likes of T.J. Rodgers never again intrude where they're not welcome. What follows is a cautionary tale about what happens when the business world crosses over into the alternative academic one. Founded in Hanover, N.H., in 1769, Dartmouth has long been famous for the intensity of its alumni's loyalty. It is not unfair, or an exaggeration, to call it half college and half cult.

In part this devotion is because of what the school does well. "Dartmouth is the best undergraduate school in the world," says Mr. Rodgers, who graduated in 1970 as salutatorian, with degrees in chemistry and physics. There were "small classes taught by real professors, not graduate students," he says, "and I never realized how that was heaven on earth until I went on to my next school." (Mr. Rodgers earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford in 1975.)

Partly, too, Dartmouth's alumni fidelity is a result of engaging graduates in the life of the college. It is one of a few schools in the U.S. that allow alumni to elect leaders directly. Eight of the 18 members of Dartmouth's governing Board of Trustees are chosen by the popular vote of some 66,500 graduates. (The other seats are reserved mostly for major donors, along with ex officio positions for the governor of New Hampshire and the college president.) This arrangement has been in place since 1891.

Until recently, though, Dartmouth's elections have been indifferent affairs, with the alumni choosing from a largely homogeneous slate handpicked by a committee closely aligned with the administration. In 2004, things got--interesting. Mr. Rodgers bypassed the official nomination channels and was named to the ballot by collecting alumni signatures; he needed 500 and ended up acquiring more than 15 times that. He was dissatisfied with the college's direction and resolved to either "do something or stop griping about it." He was elected by 54% of the voters.

Although there were a lot of political issues churning about the campus, Mr. Rodgers decided "that I would pursue just one issue, and my one issue, the one substantive issue, is the quality of education at Dartmouth. . . I decided that if I started debating the political argument du jour it would reduce my effectiveness."

That kind of pragmatism, however, didn't inhibit a highly political response from the aggrieved, including the college administration and some of the faculty. Mr. Rodgers notes that certain professors "seemed to specialize" in accusing him of being retrograde, racist, sexist, opposed to "diversity" and so forth. Or, in the academic shorthand, a conservative.

A curious label for a man who is in favor of gay marriage, against the Iraq war, and thinks Bill Clinton was a better president than George W. Bush. Mr. Rodgers's sensibility, rather, is libertarian, and ruggedly Western. He is also a famously aggressive, demanding CEO, with technical expertise, a strong entrepreneurial bent and an emphasis on empirics and analytics. His lodestars, he says, are "data and reason and logic."

At Dartmouth, he remarks, he has produced dozens of long, systematic papers on the issues. His first priority was to improve its "very poor record of freedom of speech." Soon enough, the college president, James Wright, overturned a speech code. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a watchdog group, elevated Dartmouth's rating from "red" to its highest, "green," one of only seven schools in the country with that status. "We made progress, and I was feeling pretty good," Mr. Rodgers says.

He intended to move on to quality of education next, but the political situation at Dartmouth degenerated. Mr. Rodgers's candidacy was followed by two further elections, in which petition candidates--Peter Robinson, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Todd Zywicki, a professor of law at George Mason University--were also elected. Mr. Rodgers says that, like him, they're "independent people willing to challenge the status quo."

Perhaps sensing that a critical mass was building, Dartmouth's establishment then tried to skew the petition trustee process. The details are complex and tedious, but last autumn they cooked up a new alumni constitution that would have "reformed" the way trustees were elected. In practice, it would have stacked the odds, like those in a casino, in favor of the house.

The measure needed two-thirds of alumni approval to pass, and in an election with the highest turnout in Dartmouth's history, it was voted down by 51%. "It lost big time," Mr. Rodgers says.

Earlier this year another petition trustee, Stephen Smith of the University of Virginia Law School, was elected with 55% of the voters. Quite naturally, Dartmouth's insular leadership has loathed all of this. A former trustee, and a current chair of Dartmouth's $1.3 billion capital campaign, publicly charged that the petition process had initiated a "downward death spiral" in which a "radical minority cabal" was attempting to hijack the Board of Trustees. That was among the more charitable commentaries.

Curious, again, that Mr. Rodgers has been cast as the leader of some sinister conservative faction, since he is open about what his actual goals are. "They attack things that don't matter because they can't attack you for what you stand for--quality of education. . . . The attacks become ad hominem. . . . We get called the problem. The fact is that we're a response to the problem."

In Mr. Rodgers's judgment, the increasingly political denigration--the "rancor," he calls it--has seriously impinged on his effectiveness as a trustee, and on the effectiveness of the board in general. "Before I ever went to my first board meeting," he says, "I did what any decent manager in Silicon Valley does--management by walking around. You actually go and talk to people and ask how they're doing and what they need to get their jobs done."

He noted trends: over-enrollment, wait lists and an increased percentage of classes taught by visiting or non-tenure-track faculty. He concluded that many departments--economics, government, psychology and brain sciences, in particular--were "suffering from a shortage of teaching." "It's a simple problem," Mr. Rodgers says. "You hire more professors." His effort to get an objective grip on the problem would be comic were it not so unfathomable. "I've had to scrounge to get data," he says, the administration not being forthcoming. "My best sources of data come from faculty members and students."

While he can't discuss internal figures, he says there's been "a modest improvement since 2004. It's about 10 professors net gain." That's "going in the right direction, but not nearly as fast as I would like." While the college has added 1.1% faculty per year over the last decade, at the same time its overall expenses have increased by 8.8%, "so the inevitable mathematical conclusion of those numbers is that the percentage of money we spend on faculty is going down, and it has gone down consistently for a long time."

"In general, I don't have a prescription," he says. "I'm not trying to micromanage the place. What I'm saying is take the huge amount of money that an institution like Dartmouth has and focus it on your core business, which is undergraduate education, and make it really, really good. If you want to pinch pennies, pinch pennies somewhere else and not on the core business. That's all I'm saying."

Trustee politics is the reason that this problem with "the core business," as he puts it, has not been addressed. "I don't think we pay enough attention to it and care enough about it. We have time to worry about other things and somehow the main business of the college, which is to educate, doesn't dominate our meetings. "I obviously don't want to talk a lot about what happens in board meetings, but I keep pushing to spend time on it--and that makes me an annoyance. . . . The priority has been, if you look at it, changing the rules to get rid of the petition trustees who are willing to criticize the administration. "Basically," he continues, "I find the meetings to be pro forma--this is an overstatement, but almost scripted. No, we don't roll up our sleeves and think real hard. I certainly don't feel like that what I have to offer to any organization is being used by the board of Dartmouth College." Now, Mr. Rodgers says, the argument has come to its endgame. "This is not a conservative-liberal conflict. This is a libertarian-totalitarian conflict."

One of the main criticisms leveled at the petition trustee process is that it is polarizing, divisive and somehow detrimental to the college. Mr. Rodgers replies, "If 'divisive' means there are issues and we debate the issues and move forward according to a consensus, then divisive equals democracy, and democracy is good. The alternative, which I fear is what the administration and [Board of Trustees Chairman] Ed Haldeman are after right now, is a politburo--one-party rule."

And so, after losing four consecutive democratic contests, the Dartmouth administration has evidently decided to do away with democracy altogether. "Now I'm working on the existence question," Mr. Rodgers notes mordantly.

Though he cannot say for sure--"I'll be kept in the dark until a couple of days before the meeting on what they're planning on doing"--a five-member subcommittee, which conducts its business in secret and includes the chair and the president, has embarked on a "governance review" that will consolidate power. "It looks like they're just going to abandon, or make ineffectual, the ability of alumni to elect half the trustees at Dartmouth," Mr. Rodgers says. He believes that the model is the Harvard Corporation, where a small group "makes all the decisions. They elect themselves in secret. They elect themselves in secret for a life term. How's that for democracy?"

The rest of the Dartmouth trustees, Mr. Rodgers says, "will go to the board meetings to have a couple of banquets and meet a few students and feel good about ourselves and brag to our compatriots that we're indeed on the board of trustees of Dartmouth College."

This drastic action, he says, is unnecessary. "These are small problems that are fixable," Mr. Rodgers argues. "Instead of making them major political wars, we simply ought to go solve the problems and get on with it." The alternative remedy, he continues, is poor corporate governance, for one. "This is committees working in secret, which is a very bad way to run any organization." Besides transparency, it may also present conflicts of interest, in which the college president would dominate those who ultimately evaluate his performance.

But he contrasts the situation especially with his experience at Cypress: "Silicon is a very tough master. It operates to the laws of physics, there are no politics, you can't vote or will or committee your way around it. . . . Therefore the culture of Silicon Valley, where winning and losing is being technologically successful or not, is an objective, nonpolitical culture. It's just different on the Dartmouth board."

Mr. Rodgers expects to be "severely criticized, unfairly and personally," for talking to The Journal. He may even be removed from his post entirely. "It's worth it," he says. "Doing what is right for the college that I love is more important than holding what is largely a ceremonial position."

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Australia: Little recourse against bad teachers

Jim Taylor is not the name of the primary school principal who approached me after a recent column, but it will have to do because he's not supposed to talk to the media. I'd written that it was easier to dismiss poor teachers from the state system these days and he was on the phone to tell me that it's still far too difficult. Since then I've talked to other principals and teachers about this, because it's an issue of concern to many parents, including some of those who transfer their children from the public to the private system. I don't claim to have the final word on the situation, but in at least some places it's a festering issue.

In state schools, teachers' performance is reviewed annually by their principal or a senior teacher. The review cannot include any observation of the teacher in the classroom unless the teacher agrees. In Taylor's experience, most underperforming teachers don't. Therefore the review is usually a paper exercise, conducted with different degrees of rigour in different schools. What this means is that teachers, once they finish their probationary period, can go through their careers without ever being observed and assessed in the classroom by a senior person. Some principals and teachers who talked to me say the annual performance review was a joke and poor teachers could easily make themselves look adequate on paper. One teacher says her principal doesn't even do the review, but just signs the forms and sends them off.

If a teacher is doing a really poor job this will eventually be noticed by colleagues. Her or his pupils might start to display behavioural problems in the playground and the low standard of their work will be apparent to the unlucky teacher who takes them next year. Once this is brought to the principal's attention, he or she usually tries to help the teacher informally. If this fails, the Department of Education and Training is informed and the teacher is put on a 10-week formal support program. This can be extended by six weeks if considered necessary. At the end of the program, the teacher is dismissed if there is inadequate improvement. According to the department, 600 teachers have been put on programs in the past five years, with 270 failing to meet the necessary standards and leaving the department. That's fewer than 60 a year out of 50,000 teachers in primary and secondary schools and the interesting question is whether it's enough.

Taylor believes we need a public debate on the current procedures, because they don't work all that well. He says the teachers involved nearly always take stress leave, which can be paid by WorkCover, so it doesn't affect the teacher's accumulated sick leave entitlement. He says that when the teachers he's put on a program returned from stress leave, the department told him the 10-week period had to recommence, dragging the process out for much longer. (Other principals I talked to had received different advice on this point.) As well as stress leave, teachers can claim they are being victimised or harassed by the principal, which can trigger a messy mediation procedure. In some cases the teacher will be transferred to another school during the program, which then lapses.

One senior teacher said to me: "The process gets extended and then it gets complicated and sometimes it falls over for various reasons. It drags in other staff members, even parents, for and against the principal. In a really bad case some teachers stop coming to the staff room for lunch and the school becomes a factionalised place where you just don't want to work." I have been told of some principals who retired because of the stress created by this process. Others won't initiate support programs in order to avoid the problems they bring on themselves and the school. "You can sympathise with them to a point," one teacher says. "But the other teachers can get resentful about carrying a colleague who's just coasting, and that affects staff morale. It just takes a bit longer to happen."

The present system is an improvement on the past. Geoff Scott, the president of the NSW Primary Principals Association, says: "There used to be two 10-week programs plus a five-week review. It's much shorter now and I think we've got it pretty right." Jim McAlpine, the president of the NSW Secondary Principals Council, is also generally happy with the present system, although he would like to see the program always finish in 10 weeks. "At the moment," he says, "it's often drawn out when the teacher involved takes leave for stress or other reasons."

Angelo Gavrielatos, the deputy president of the NSW Teachers Federation, acknowledges the need for the procedures and says: "They have been in existence for a long time. They're the result of negotiations between the department and the federation, with the exception of the withdrawal of some appeal rights last year, which we opposed." He is concerned that "focusing on this issue detracts from the fact that the overwhelming majority of teachers exhibit a very high level of professionalism every day". I'm sure this is true. But anyone who's talked to many parents about this knows that, far more in public schools than private ones, there's a smattering of poor teachers who stay in their jobs year after year. After talking to Jim Taylor, I can understand why.

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2 September, 2007

Colorado school bans tag

The Puritan instinct or fear of litigation? Probably both. A sad limitation on the exercise and experience of children, however. Maybe the adults who enforced this ban were the ones who were easily caught as kids. I myself was so hopeless at all games that nobody bothered catching me!

A Colorado Springs elementary school is banning the game of tag on its playground -- after some children complained that they'd been chased or harassed against their will. Assistant Principal Cindy Fesgen of the Discovery Canyon Campus school said running games will be allowed, as long as students don't chase each other. Fesgen said two parents complained to her about the ban, but most parents and children didn't object

Two elementary schools in the nearby Falcon School District did away with tag and similar games in 2005 in favor of alternatives with less physical contact. Officials at Evans and Meridian Ranch elementaries say that encouraged more students to play games, and helped reduce playground squabbles.

Colorado Springs schools are not alone. Schools in Cheyenne, Wyo., Spokane, Wash., and Attleboro, Mass., have banned tag at recess. A suburban Charleston, S.C., school not only banned tagged, but outlawed all unsupervised contact sports.

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Private schools in Britain show up government schools

The schools system in England is at risk of drifting into "educational apartheid" with different examination systems for pupils in state and independent schools, according to a leading head teacher. Pat Langham, president of the Girls' Schools Association, was responding to renewed calls from private school head teachers for the GCSE to be ditched in favour of more rigorous examinations, such as the IGCSE (International GCSE). Her comments were made as it emerged that fee-paying school pupils passed nearly six out of ten of their GCSE exams this summer with a grade A or A*, nearly three times the national average of 19.5 per cent. GCSE results for independent schools revealed that 92.9 per cent of pupils achieved five GCSEs at grades A* to C, including maths and English, compared with just 63.3 per cent nationally.

Martin Stephen, head of St Paul's, the top-performing boys' private school in The Times GCSE league tables, said the gulf between the two suggested that the GCSE was no longer fit for purpose. "The GCSE is seriously flawed. It is trying to be all things to all people, but it is failing. Getting five good [A* to C] GCSEs has effectively become the equivalent of passing a school leaving certificate, yet the system is not doing this job very well because 50 per cent of pupils fail to get these grades," he said.

Ms Langham, who is head of Wakefield Girls' School, one of the top 50 girls' schools in the UK, argued against more private schools adopting the IGCSE, saying that it would create further divisions between state and independent schools. She said: "The IGCSE is not the answer. Independent schools should be part of a credible, national examination system and it should be the same as the system in state schools. Otherwise, you get educational apartheid and I don't agree with that. If there are concerns about too many pupils getting A grades at GCSE, we should all work together as teachers in the private and state systems to find a joint solution. "Students in private and state schools are both going out into the same world when they leave school and they deserve the same education."

Ms Langham's comments followed claims by examination boards that standards were falling in private schools. Results for private schools, compiled by the Independent Schools Council, published today, show that 57.4 per cent of GCSE exam entries were graded A or A* this year, with 26.8 per cent of entries awarded an A* grade, up from 26.5 per cent last year. The national A* average was just 6.4 per cent. In 231 independent schools, every pupil achieved five or more A* to C grades. In a further 159 schools, 95 per cent or more achieved this standard.

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Addle-headed literature curricula in Australia

By Imre Salusinszky

Last month's Australian Literature in Education Roundtable, organised by the Australia Council for the Arts, came up with many suggestions for raising the profile of our national literature, past and present, within the education system. And on the eve of the roundtable, federal Education Minister Julie Bishop took one great leap for mankind by announcing the Howard Government would endow a new chair in Australian literature at whichever university put forward the best proposal. At a stroke Bishop increased the number of such chairs by 50 per cent.

But while the state of Oz lit received a decent airing, there was much said at the roundtable that applied to the teaching in our schools of literature generally. As university specialists have ceased to be included on the state boards of studies, which shape curriculums and reading lists, two related developments have occurred. First, the cart seems to have overtaken the horse, with assessment and outcomes assuming precedence over content. Second, curriculums have come to be couched in a formidable bureaucratic jargon, an edu-babble that is inaccessible to mere mortals including, I suspect, most teachers. Here is a passage from the introduction to senior English in the South Australian curriculum:

"Through the study of English, children and students learn that language transmits cultural perspectives, including gender, ethnicity and class; and who or what is or is not important as they think, imagine, challenge, remember, create and narrate.

"They learn how language shapes meaning and reality, what this means for issues of identity and interdependence, and how it is used for a range of purposes in different contexts. Learners need to know how language is constructed and how it is used by different groups in society to shape power relations."

And this, from Western Australia's senior literature curriculum:

"In the literature course students develop skills and understandings of textual production and reception through reading practices that foster the close analysis and interrogation of textual languages and constructions. In addition to expanding their imaginative and intellectual experience, students develop and extend their social, cultural and textual knowledge through a greater comprehension of cultural meaning-making systems.

"Through critical engagement with a range of text types and cultural and historical contexts, students develop their understanding of different approaches to reading texts. This enables them to ask questions about the nature of literary text and how literature is defined by, and functions within Western cultural history.

"Such questions include the reasons why cultural value is assigned to one kind of text and not another; the changing nature of what is valued as literature at different times and in different historical and cultural contexts; and the ways particular social groups are given or denied the power to define what is 'literary' and what is 'not literary'."

It would appear, to put it bluntly, that senior-level courses in English expect students to be able to theorise the process of reading before they have done any. The sorts of inquiries outlined in these documents are perfectly appropriate to the graduate seminar room, but to place them at the beginning of a literary education is like starting arithmetic with advanced calculus.

It seems a particular style of literary theory that enjoyed its historical moment in universities in the 1970s and '80s has returned as farce in the curriculum prescriptions of the Australian states and territories. I am reminded of the way the Finnish system of dexterity training known as Sloyd got taken up in Victorian state schools in the '50s and ended up being plain old woodwork.

There are a couple of significant verbal giveaways in the documents quoted above. One is the use of interrogation, a word that spread through the humanities in the '80s and '90s like privet. When you interrogate a text you are apparently doing something far more important that simply reading or analysing or asking questions about it: you are standing in the middle of the road of ideas, raising your hand as some benighted Western cultural juggernaut rolls towards you, and announcing: "No further!"

The other giveaway is the grammatical slippage evident in "the nature of literary text". It suddenly appears as if literature has become indivisible, like milk. The view implied is that the particularities of author, style and imaginative vision, which arguably distinguish literary texts from each other, are secondary to an ideological impulse that unites and transforms them into an undifferentiated porridge.

The first point to be made about these kinds of curriculum statements is that they are, in all likelihood, harmless. I have little doubt teachers in high schools largely ignore such guff and simply get on with introducing their students to set texts without too much cultural theory clogging the gears.

However, it is the extent to which the texts are chosen to illustrate the frequently tendentious statements in the syllabuses that is a worry. As my friend Peter Holbrook asked in The Australian last month, would there be a glaring lack in a syllabus that simply declared students would be "introduced to some of the most rewarding and influential writing of the 19th and 20th centuries in English"? Such a syllabus would generate a reading list based on notions of quality, or at least canonicity, rather than illustration of appropriate contexts. My fear is that we have become so devoted to interrogation that we are embarrassed by concepts - sorry, constructs - such as genius or greatness.

Senior secondary studies in English enjoy an advantage right now that is unprecedented and may not last: the reading bonanza among younger children being driven by their enchantment with Harry Potter. We will not leverage this advantage by making disenchantment the object of high school literature courses.

What should that object be? Quite simply, literary experience, for its own sake. Until students have undergone at least the beginnings of an inductive survey of poems and stories, they are substantially under-prepared for the deductive assertions of literary theory that await them at university. And only such a survey can form the beginning of an appreciation of specifically literary attributes such as style, structure and influence.

By beefing up the literary content of secondary English courses and elbowing some of the more noisy curriculums out of the way, we would leave students and teachers freer to go wherever a dialogue with the text - which is very different from an interrogation - may lead.

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1 September, 2007

Dumber and dumber: SAT scores hit bottom in city and nation

Students starting college this week posted some of the lowest reading and math scores on the SAT college admissions exam in recent years - a dismal trend reflected in New York City and across the country. Testmaker College Board attributed the drop, in part, to increases in the number of poor students and students whose first language is not English taking the test. The College Board, which released the scores yesterday, called the Class of 2007 high school grads the largest and most diverse group ever to take the competitive exam.

Of the 1.5 million students who took the test this year, 24% did not identify English exclusively as their first language compared with 17% a decade ago. The College Board said 35% of test-takers will be the first in their families to go to college. In New York City, 38,937 kids from the Class of 2007 took the exam last year - an increase of 8.7% over 2006. The number of black students taking the test was up 15.4%, the number of Mexicans was up 22%, Puerto Ricans were up 11.9% and kids who identified themselves as "other Hispanic" were up 22.7%, city officials said.

City public school kids averaged their lowest scores in math and reading since at least 2003, with the average student scoring 462 in math and 441 in reading out of a possible 800 points in each. The city math average is down five points since last year and 10 points since 2005. The reading score is down three points compared with 2006. That's compared with national average where reading scores were at their lowest level - an average of 502 - since 1994. Math scores across the country averaged 515, the lowest since 2001.

In New York State, math declined five points to 505 since last year and average reading scores dropped two points to 491. Scores also dropped on the exam's new writing section, which was introduced last year.

City public schools are hoping for an increase in SAT scores this year after beginning, for the first time last year, an initiative to administer the PSAT - a practice exam - to every 10th- and 11th-grader during the school day and for free. "We're encouraging students to think seriously about college and think about it earlier in their high school career," schools spokesman Andrew Jacob said.

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Setbacks for academic antisemitism

Venues are cancelling appearances by the authors of a book criticizing the impact of the "Israel Lobby" on American foreign policy. Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, university professors who penned the forthcoming book "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," have had a number of promotional appearances canceled, The New York Times reported.

The City University of New York, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a Jewish cultural center in Washington and three organizations in Chicago have turned down or canceled events with the authors over concerns with their controversial thesis or the event format.

At the Chicago council, where both authors have spoken, President Marshall Bouton was reported to have told Mearsheimer that he had a "political problem" and needed "to protect the institution."

The book, an elaboration on a controversial paper the professors published last year, argues that Israel is a strategic liability for the United States and that continued support for the Jewish state is due only to the successful efforts of a broad coalition of groups referred to collectively as the Israel Lobby.

Critics charge that the book echoes traditional anti-Semitic charges. Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, wrote a book refuting the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis. Both books will be released Sept. 4.

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Australia: Does Monash University have different standards for Muslims?

We are entitled to expect that those who lecture at our universities are appropriately qualified. Otherwise, we would be misleading the students that the university is supposed to serve. So for instance, if I have a degree in psychology, I would not be qualified to teach law. If I have a degree in law, I would presumably not be considered for a post in politics.

It used to be, and I hope is still, the case that if one wanted to even tutor at Monash University, the minimum requirement was achievement of a Class 2A Honours.

If one was to be considered for employment as a lecturer; the minimum requirement would probably be at least a PhD, or significant completion thereof, or perhaps a substantial portfolio of works published in refereed journals in the field that the candidate is to lecture in.

What then does one make of the recent appointment of Mr Waleed Aly, of the Islamic Council of Victoria, formerly a lawyer, as a lecturer in Politics at Monash's School of Political and Social Inquiry, Faculty of Arts? Mr Aly graduated in 2002 from Melbourne University with degrees in Engineering and Law.

He obtained a Class 2B Honours in completing the LLB, finishing 8th from the bottom of the list of H2B recipients. He is best known for his newspaper articles, and a recent book, People Like Us, How Arrogance is dividing Islam and the West (Picador Australia). Otherwise he is best known for being the public face of the Islamic Council of Victoria in ICV v Catch The Fire Ministries, a matter heard under Victoria's religious vilification laws.

How the above qualify him to be an academic in the field of politics is a question which is not likely to be answered by Monash VC Richard Larkins. Larkins has yet to provide any answers as to how/why the Monash Asia Institute hired one Zulfikar Shariff, a known supporter of Osama bin Laden, as a research fellow despite the Shariff not having any academic qualifications at all.

Located at adm.monash.edu.au are advertisements for the various positions, including that of lecturer within the Arts Faculty, Monash University, which includes the School of Politics. Readers can see for themselves that the minimum requirement is a PhD or equivalent.

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