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30 September, 2009

More school: Obama would curtail summer vacation

Students beware: The summer vacation you just enjoyed could be sharply curtailed if President Barack Obama gets his way. Obama says American kids spend too little time in school, putting them at a disadvantage with other students around the globe. "Now, I know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas," the president said earlier this year. "Not with Malia and Sasha, not in my family, and probably not in yours. But the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom."

The president, who has a sixth-grader and a third-grader, wants schools to add time to classes, to stay open late and to let kids in on weekends so they have a safe place to go. "Our school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy and not too many of our kids are working the fields today," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

Fifth-grader Nakany Camara is of two minds. She likes the four-week summer program at her school, Brookhaven Elementary School in Rockville, Md. Nakany enjoys seeing her friends there and thinks summer school helped boost her grades from two Cs to the honor roll. But she doesn't want a longer school day. "I would walk straight out the door," she said.

Domonique Toombs felt the same way when she learned she would stay for an extra three hours each day in sixth grade at Boston's Clarence R. Edwards Middle School. "I was like, `Wow, are you serious?'" she said. "That's three more hours I won't be able to chill with my friends after school."

Her school is part of a 3-year-old state initiative to add 300 hours of school time in nearly two dozen schools. Early results are positive. Even reluctant Domonique, who just started ninth grade, feels differently now. "I've learned a lot," she said.

Does Obama want every kid to do these things? School until dinnertime? Summer school? And what about the idea that kids today are overscheduled and need more time to play?

Obama and Duncan say kids in the United States need more school because kids in other nations have more school. "Young people in other countries are going to school 25, 30 percent longer than our students here," Duncan told the AP. "I want to just level the playing field."

While it is true that kids in many other countries have more school days, it's not true they all spend more time in school. Kids in the U.S. spend more hours in school (1,146 instructional hours per year) than do kids in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the U.S. on math and science tests — Singapore (903), Taiwan (1,050), Japan (1,005) and Hong Kong (1,013). That is despite the fact that Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong have longer school years (190 to 201 days) than does the U.S. (180 days).

Regardless, there is a strong case for adding time to the school day. Researcher Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution looked at math scores in countries that added math instruction time. Scores rose significantly, especially in countries that added minutes to the day, rather than days to the year. "Ten minutes sounds trivial to a school day, but don't forget, these math periods in the U.S. average 45 minutes," Loveless said. "Percentage-wise, that's a pretty healthy increase."

In the U.S., there are many examples of gains when time is added to the school day. Charter schools are known for having longer school days or weeks or years. For example, kids in the KIPP network of 82 charter schools across the country go to school from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., more than three hours longer than the typical day. They go to school every other Saturday and for three weeks in the summer. KIPP eighth-grade classes exceed their school district averages on state tests.

In Massachusetts' expanded learning time initiative, early results indicate that kids in some schools do better on state tests than do kids at regular public schools. The extra time, which schools can add as hours or days, is for three things: core academics — kids struggling in English, for example, get an extra English class; more time for teachers; and enrichment time for kids.

Regular public schools are adding time, too, though it is optional and not usually part of the regular school day. Their calendar is pretty much set in stone. Most states set the minimum number of school days at 180 days, though a few require 175 to 179 days. Several schools are going year-round by shortening summer vacation and lengthening other breaks.

Many schools are going beyond the traditional summer school model, in which schools give remedial help to kids who flunked or fell behind. Summer is a crucial time for kids, especially poorer kids, because poverty is linked to problems that interfere with learning, such as hunger and less involvement by their parents. That makes poor children almost totally dependent on their learning experience at school, said Karl Alexander, a sociology professor at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University, home of the National Center for Summer Learning.

Disadvantaged kids, on the whole, make no progress in the summer, Alexander said. Some studies suggest they actually fall back. Wealthier kids have parents who read to them, have strong language skills and go to great lengths to give them learning opportunities such as computers, summer camp, vacations, music lessons, or playing on sports teams. "If your parents are high school dropouts with low literacy levels and reading for pleasure is not hard-wired, it's hard to be a good role model for your children, even if you really want to be," Alexander said.

Extra time is not cheap. The Massachusetts program costs an extra $1,300 per student, or 12 percent to 15 percent more than regular per-student spending, said Jennifer Davis, a founder of the program. It received more than $17.5 million from the state Legislature last year. The Montgomery County, Md., summer program, which includes Brookhaven, received $1.6 million in federal stimulus dollars to operate this year and next, but it runs for only 20 days.

Aside from improving academic performance, Education Secretary Duncan has a vision of schools as the heart of the community. Duncan, who was Chicago's schools chief, grew up studying alongside poor kids on the city's South Side as part of the tutoring program his mother still runs. "Those hours from 3 o'clock to 7 o'clock are times of high anxiety for parents," Duncan said. "They want their children safe. Families are working one and two and three jobs now to make ends meet and to keep food on the table."

SOURCE




British school admissions reforms 'failing'

A £15m Labour plan to get poor pupils into the best state schools has had a “minimal effect”, according to research. But if it had succeeded, the schools concerned would no longer be "best". Feral students will destroy any school in the absence of strict discipline and strict discipline is a distant memory in British schools

The reforms – introduced in 2006 – have benefited less than one child in 100 and are just as likely to help pupils from middle-class families, it was disclosed. Every local council in England is required to run a team of “choice advisers” to make the school admissions system fairer.

Under plans, they are supposed to advise parents about secondary school admissions policies, help them fill out forms and provide information on uniform policies, the curriculum, term dates, travel details and understanding league tables and Ofsted reports.

Launching the programme four years ago, ministers said they would “have a real impact on ensuring that all parents are armed with the information they need to find the right school for their child”. They were introduced alongside a more stringent system of school admissions rules to stop head teachers selecting bright pupils from middle-class backgrounds.

But a study by Sheffield Hallam University said the high-profile reforms had an “incommensurate” impact. “The proportion of children benefiting from the service is, and in any likely policy context could only ever be, tiny,” it said. “While it substantially benefited a small group of parents, some of whom were very needy, it had a minimal effect on the numbers of poorer parents gaining entry to the more popular schools.”

This year, one in six children failed to get into their preferred secondary school. In some areas, such as London, where parents face the stiffest competition for places, up to half of 11-year-olds missed out.

Researchers led by Professor John Coldron, from the centre for education and inclusion research, studied the impact of choice advisers in 15 local authorities. The report said 73,000 children transferred between primary and secondary schools in the affected areas but only 602 had contact with a choice adviser. It represented 0.8 per cent of parents, but only half of those were from the poorest families, the study said.

Researchers suggested other parents taking advantage of the additional help were from middle-class backgrounds. “We dubbed them ‘well-informed, but anxious’,” said Prof Coldron. “They were parents who wanted to ensure no stone was left unturned in their attempt to make sure children got into the best schools.”

The report said the initiative had failed because it ignored the fact that postcode was the “main driver” of school “segregation”. It suggested that – even with the help of advisers – many poor families could not get into the best state schools because they did not live in the catchment area. The study also found that many parents did not want to send children several miles to sought-after schools, preferring the local comprehensive irrespective of quality. "While the choice advice service has delivered a valuable service to a few needy families, the proportion helped was so small it could not make any significant impact on the larger process of segregation of schools and therefore had a minimal impact on the fairness of admissions," it found.

A spokeswoman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: "We’ve outlawed covert selection and given all parents a fair and equal chance to get into a school of their choice through the mandatory admissions code. Choice advisers target families that need the most help with the application and appeal process – it was never designed to deliver fair access for all parents so it is disingenuous for this research to claim it was.

"Parents now have more choice because there are undeniably more good schools and standards have gone up across the board.The vast majority of parents will get a place at a school of their choice - most at their first choice school. We have given the admissions watchdog real teeth to police the system and crack down on unfair admissions.”

SOURCE




Australia: Only one State is set to use the best method of teaching kids how to read

The amazing defiance by teachers of all the research evidence shows how deeply they are involved with the most destructive elements of the Left: Simplistic theories must triumph, no matter how much havoc they cause. And the havoc wreaked on literacy has been extreme, with many kids years behind where they could be in reading ability.

FOUR years after the national inquiry into teaching reading, one Australian government has finally embraced the key recommendation that children be taught the sounds that make up words as an essential first step in learning to read. The NSW government has released literacy teaching guides incorporating the latest research evidence on the best way to teach reading. The guides mandate that children from the first years of school be explicitly taught the sounds of letters and how to blend and manipulate sounds to form words in daily 10 to 20-minute sessions.

The guides set out key principles for teachers to follow in reading instruction, stipulating that phonics need to be taught to a level where children can automatically recall the knowledge. They also debunk "common myths" about phonics that "have almost become accepted as truths", including that "phonics knowledge is caught, not taught" or that having a sound of the week is an effective way of teaching. Devised in response to the 2005 national review on teaching reading, the NSW guidelines were yesterday lauded as the benchmark for the rest of the country.

A bitter debate has raged for the past three decades over the teaching of reading, with the proponents of phonics pitted against those favouring the "whole language" method, which emphasises other skills instead of sounding words.

Whole language advocates encourage students faced with an unfamiliar word to look at the other words in the sentence, the picture on the page or the shape of the letters rather than by "sounding out" the word. The national review, released after an inquiry led by the late educational researcher Ken Rowe, was one of three large international studies in the past decade to examine all the evidence about teaching reading, including an earlier US report and Britain's Rose report, completed in 2006.

All three reviews concluded the same thing, that teaching children phonics and how to blend sounds to make words was a necessary first step in learning to read, but not the only skill required.

The Australian inquiry was prompted by a letter from reading researchers and cognitive psychologists, many based at Macquarie University, concerned about the state of literacy teaching in the nation. One of the signatories to the letter, Macquarie University professor Max Coltheart, yesterday said the NSW guides were entirely consistent with the recommendations of the reading inquiry and that "Ken Rowe would have been delighted". Professor Coltheart called on the other states and territories to follow NSW's lead.

Jim Rose, author of the British report and now reviewing the English primary curriculum for the British government, praised the NSW guides for "establishing the essential importance of phonics". "It provides some firm guidance for principals and teachers rather than leaving them to reinvent reading instruction, school by school," Sir Jim said.

The assistant principal and kindergarten teacher at Miranda Public School in Sydney's south, Susan Orlovich, has already started using the guides in teaching her students. "For the first time, we have really clear materials and guidelines for setting up an early literacy program that's integrated and balanced but ensures we also teach phonics and phonemic awareness explicitly and systematically," she said. Ms Orlovich said the guides had struck the right balance between teaching the skills necessary to sound out words and decode the alphabet, and comprehension with students being able to write their own words. They also gave teachers strategies for students at different stages in recognition that some already understand the phonemic basis of language.

"Some kids can learn with whole language, and make those connections and do phonemic substitution, so if they know how to write 'look', they can write 'book'," she said. "Some kids are able to make that substitution without being taught, but for other students, you need to teach them explicitly, make it visual for them."

In an interview with The Australian during a visit to Australia last week, Sir Jim said the simple view of reading was that it had two dimensions, comprehension and word recognition. While teaching sounds is often denigrated by the whole language side of the reading debate as a decoding skill unnecessary to be able to read, Sir Jim said it was essential children knew how the alphabet worked and that it was a code to be understood. "It's not just barking at print, although that is a stage you go through," he said.

Professor Coltheart, said he understood the new national English curriculum being written would include extensive material on the teaching of phonics in the early years of school, including phonemic awareness in the first year. "This alignment between the national curriculum and the NSW guides for teachers is going to be of enormous benefit for the state's young children. I hope other states will be following in NSW's footsteps," he said.

Sir Jim said the reading debate was a false dichotomy and the two sides had more in common than the extremists were prepared to recognise. "A picture has emerged from the research that is overwhelmingly clear; I can't see any conflict, they're closer than they admit," he said. "I don't understand why they can't accept good evidence that would enrich both sides."

The NSW Education Department has produced two guides, one focused specifically on phonics and a companion guide on phonemic awareness, or the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds that make up words. In response to the myth that phonics knowledge is "caught, not taught", the guide says letter-sound correspondences are arbitrary and therefore difficult to discover without explicit teaching. "Left to chance or inference alone, many students would acquire phonics knowledge too slowly or fail to learn it at all," it says.

Another myth debunked is that teaching phonics impedes student comprehension by having them rely too much on "decoding" rather than "reading for meaning", resulting in students "barking at print" without understanding what they're reading. "Effective phonics teaching supports students to readily recognise and produce familiar words accurately and effortlessly and to identify and produce words that are new to them. Developing automatic word recognition will support and enhance students' comprehension skills," the guide says.

SOURCE





29 September, 2009

Costly Lessons in America

How traditional universities rip students off

By RICHARD VEDDER

In a typical year over the past generation, the cost of attending college has risen at about double the rate of inflation. Family incomes have not kept pace. And despite huge increases in federal financial assistance, the proportion of lower-income Americans in the college population has actually declined over the past 30 years.

The other sector that has seen comparable inflation over the past generation is health care, and this is no accident. In both sectors, government intervention largely neuters the ability of markets to allocate resources efficiently, by establishing third parties (neither consumers nor producers) that pay many of the bills. When that happens, the consumer is not very sensitive to prices, and consumes wastefully. For these and other reasons, a good argument can made that we are overinvested, or at least mal-invested, in higher education.

Compounding the problem, over 90 percent of American higher education is nonprofit. Nonprofit institutions lack incentives to be efficient. The officers of for-profit entities work hard to do two things: increase revenues and reduce costs. But there is no well-defined bottom line in nonprofit higher education. Is Yale having a good year in 2009? Who knows?

For-profit corporations compete to win new customers and despair when they lose market share. But in the U.S. News & World Report rankings, higher scores come from turning customers away — in the form of a lower acceptance rate. Supply therefore tends to be rigid and unresponsive to demand at many of the nation’s best-known colleges and universities. Moreover, with third parties paying part or all of the bills (via government and private “scholarships,” subsidized loans, and subsidies of institutions), schools can often raise fees without dire financial or academic consequences. In particular, they sock it to more affluent customers — whose financial condition they know in exquisite detail, thanks to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which requires a level of disclosure unique in American consumer life.

The supply of educational institutions is itself rigid. Accreditation organizations have restricted the ability of innovative education entrepreneurs to enter the market. The for-profit higher-education sector costs less and, perhaps ironically, disproportionately serves the low-income, first-generation university students whom premier universities have largely abandoned.

In addition, perverse incentives for administrators and students often increase costs. It is often ambiguous who actually runs the school — the university trustees? Top administrators? Faculty? Students? The alumni and major donors? Tenured faculty and their deans usually control the curriculum and can make life miserable for university presidents. The presidents, to buy peace, give the faculty nice salaries and benefits, light teaching loads, and good parking, and maintain low-demand academic programs that should be axed. Students are given fancy country-club-like facilities in which to live and play, and a curriculum of decreasing rigor (average GPAs on a four-point scale have risen from about 2.5 to around 3.1 or 3.2 over the past 50 years), as well as the opportunity to lead lives focused on partying, booze, and sex. The alumni’s favorite collegiate entertainments, typically sporting events, are heavily subsidized. In short, everyone who is part of the “shared governance” of universities is paid off. To make things worse, decisions are often made by committee in a costly, bureaucratic fashion.

Allow me to offer a personal anecdote of university inefficiency at work. In a weak moment a quarter of a century ago, I agreed to be a department chairman. I conned my dean into letting me hire a new faculty member, meaning that 17 people now did what 16 had done before. In other words, the department’s productivity fell — yet I was nicely rewarded for my efforts, since my compensation was based partly on peer evaluations and my colleagues were grateful to have less work. (In what other business do employees have partial control over their boss’s salary, and even a say in who their boss is?)

Universities do little to measure what students learn, and it is hard to assess the value of their research, so good estimates of academic productivity are hard to come by. Nonetheless, under almost any reasonable assumptions, it is lower than it was 40 years ago — and it is certainly not higher. Yet over the past 30 years or so, the number of non-instructional university employees, adjusted for changing enrollment, has roughly doubled. My university has a sustainability coordinator, a recycling coordinator, and umpteen diversity and public-relations specialists — almost none of whose posts existed when I began teaching. How much do they improve the instructional and research programs? Not at all.

Speaking of research, much of it achieves only trivial refinements of insignificant issues, and is produced for a nearly nonexistent audience. Jeff Sandefer of the Acton School of Business estimates that an academic-journal article costs on average $50,000 — and is read by 200 people. That’s $250 per reader. Mark Bauerlein of Emory University notes that over 22,000 articles about the works of Shakespeare have appeared since 1980. Are there that many new and insightful thoughts to be had about the Bard? Have not diminishing returns set in — for this topic and many others?

More generally, statistical analysis from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity suggests that the correlation between economic growth and state-government appropriations for higher education is negative — i.e., resources are taken from the highly productive for-profit sector and reallocated to relatively inefficient universities, retarding growth. As the late Milton Friedman said to me a few years before he died, perhaps he was wrong in his early writings, and instead of subsidizing higher education we should tax it.

The solutions? Reduce, do not increase, the federal student-loan programs that have raised both demand and prices. Give money directly to students, rather than to institutions, and restrict aid programs to those who are truly needy and perform well (40 percent of students do not graduate within six years; support should be cut off after four years of full-time undergraduate study). Substitute a system of good consumer information for most of the current accreditation process, which stifles competition. Make it easier for students to transfer between institutions, and favor lower-cost community colleges that are not as afflicted with the ailments described above. Develop non-university programs for certifying vocational competence — for example, tests similar to the CPA examination.

More radically, a strong case can be made that higher education is a truly private good, that the positive spillover effects of universities are vastly overrated or even nonexistent, and that government should get out of higher education altogether. In short, we should implement roughly the opposite of the strategy favored by policymakers in Washington and most of our states.

SOURCE




British science uptake figures are 'science fiction', says report

Lies never stop from a Leftist regime

Labour has been accused of fiddling the figures on the number of students studying science and maths, covering up the nation's skills crisis. The Government has trumpeted a "significant increase" in the numbers of pupils taking separate GCSEs in physics, chemistry and biology.

But a new report claims the rise is accounted for, in part, by the growth in the number of 16-year-olds, while the proportion studying science A-levels has dropped since 1997. At university level, big increases in the number of undergraduates studying science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) subjects are also a "fiction", according to the study.

The Government now includes as "science", courses such as nutrition and complementary medicine, geography studies, sports science, nursing and psychology, even though in dozens of universities it is classed as an arts degree. "The Government is deliberately trying to make the statistics on STEM subjects appear better than they really are," said Anna Fazackerley, the head of education at the Policy Exchange think tank, which produced the report. "This must stop. We must have a sound picture, based on consistent and meaningful data, of what is really happening to these skills in our schools and universities."

Industry experts insist that Britain need more science skills if it is compete internationally. According to the Confederation of British Industry, 92 per cent of firms across all sectors require employees with science, technology engineering and maths skills but nearly two thirds have problems finding them. By 2014, there will be more than two million extra jobs which need STEM skills.

Ministers have acknowledged their importance and in 2007 designated STEM as "strategically important subjects" to the economy. Since then, they have claimed success in boosting the numbers studying the subjects. But the new report, due to be published tomorrow, said the figures do no stand up to scrutiny.

In 2006, Gordon Brown pledged that all children achieving high grades in science tests at 14 would be "entitled" to study three separate sciences at GCSE. But less than half of state schools entered at least one pupils for the traditional science GCSEs last year. [Not even ONE student!] The percentage of pupils studying three separate sciences barely improved from 1997 to 2007, rising from 6 per cent to 8 per cent. Instead, the vast majority of pupils take a single science GCSE which focuses on scientific literacy and issues that are in the public eye, such as global warming and mobile phone technology.

Teachers and academics warned that the qualification, taken for the first time in 2008, was a "dumbed down" version, needing little scientific knowledge and understanding. One question in a recent science paper asked "why is wireless technology useful?" - the correct answer was: "no wiring is needed". Earlier this year, the exam regulator Ofqual admitted there were serious problems with the exam and ordered it to be redesigned.

At A-level, the percentage of pupils taking biology, chemistry and physics has actually fallen since 1997. In 2008, 6.5 per cent of students were studying biology, down from 7.2 per cent in 1997, while 4.9 were studying chemistry, down from 5.5 per cent. The proportion studying physics fell from 4.3 per cent to 3.3 per cent in 2008.

University level STEM subjects seemed to be rising. The number enrolled has grown from 370,000 to 515,000 in just over a decade. Even when converted to a percentage, they are still increasing, from 38 per cent in 1997 to 42 per cent in 2008. But analysis by the think tank shows that study of the traditional subjects of biology, chemistry and physics has barely changed over this period. Biology has actually fallen, from 13,923 students in 1997 to 12,515 in 2008. The dramatic increase in science numbers has been driven partly by the growth in new subjects and the manipulation of what counts as science.

The Government's classification is now much broader and includes subjects such as sports science, forensic science and complementary medicine. Psychology students have been included as "biological science" students since 2003, adding more than 13,000 students to the STEM total. Even students at universities which classify psychology as an arts degree are included.

SOURCE




Britain: University terms begins again, and the Chinese are back

I was in Sainsbury’s yesterday afternoon. Looking around me I might have been in Guangzhou Tesco. The occasional foreigner (as they will insist on calling us, even in our own country), but otherwise wall-to-wall the sons and daughters of the Middle Kingdom. And then I remembered; it is the end of September, and I live in a small university town.

Yes, around this time of year we go Chinese. I merely observe; I have no racist reactions, and nor does anyone else. Firstly, this is the era of globalisation; virtually a quarter of the world’s population is Chinese, and why shouldn’t that be the case here? Secondly, these are all bright and valuable undergraduate and postgraduate students; they’re not on the dole, and if you get beaten up late at night it won’t be one of them who does it. No doubt they keep our university afloat with the fees they pay. (Economists often complain about the high Chinese savings rate; I wonder if they realise what a large proportion of those savings go to British and American universities, to educate the savers’ grandchildren.)

The strange thing is that Chinese universities are riding high in the world rankings. Only the very best UK/US places of learning can compete with the best of Beijing and Shanghai. So why are so many Chinese parents so keen to send their kids to our universities?

Partly, of course, because the top universities in Beijing and Shanghai are not so easy to get into. The word is that it doesn’t exactly depend on school results. Natives of those cities enjoy a built-in advantage, and good connections also help. Chinese who don’t enjoy these advantages feel better off sending their kids to Western universities than second-rate Chinese ones. Western education, you see, still carries a certain innate cachet. In a society where “face” is everything, it’s interesting to see that our products are seen as automatically superior, however debased we may sometimes feel it is. The Chinese theoretically believe their culture is superior to all others; but they are voting with their feet, or at least their children’s and grandchildren’s feet – and long may it remain so.

SOURCE





28 September, 2009

America’s institutions of higher learning: The idiot factory

Did you know our public universities are producing idiots? PajamasTV’s Steven Crowder goes undercover exposing UC Berkeley’s liberal bias and the indoctrination underway in its classrooms. You won’t believe the hilarious and alarming interactions Steven has with the Berkeley students.

You’ll notice that the most popular president on the campus of UC Berkley is Abraham Lincoln (probably the most hard-to-miss president in U.S. history). Most aren’t sure what political party he belonged to. (Remember, these are college-educated people at a top-rated university–explains a lot, doesn’t it?)

When it comes to the Great Depression (wow!), you know, “the first one,” there isn’t a wealth of knowledge about its causes at this high-rated institute of higher learning. There is also a dearth of knowledge about firearms and the Second Amendment.

Here’s one of my favorites: “The Second Amendment was written in a very different time, socially. It was a time when people lived mostly rural lives, and it was also a time after a huge rebellion against an ‘unjust’ government.” When Crowder asks him about his gesture of quotations around “unjust,” the kid replies, “There were some pressures put on the American people that maybe were unjustified but I also think that those revolutionary people in American history were maybe blowing those issues up a little more.”

There you have it from the young voice of the Left: the United States shouldn’t even be here, because the founders made a mountain out of a molehill. (I wonder if he’s read the Declaration of Independence for himself).

This would actually explain a lot about liberals. If they look at the abuses of the people by a king thousands of miles away and say “Chill, bruh,” then perhaps it’s no wonder they look at the abuses of our own government and its attacks on freedom and say, “What’s the big deal, dude?”

(Don’t forget to look at some of the ultra-Leftist tshirts on some of these recipients of too much of someone else’s hard-earned money)

SOURCE. (See original for video)




Some British students go to America for more generalist degrees and keener teaching

Growing numbers of school-leavers are going to the United States to take their degrees because of “apathetic teaching” and “faceless, sprawling campuses” at too many British universities, a leading head teacher will warn this week. Andrew Halls, headmaster of King’s college school in Wimbledon, south London, believes there is a “growing sense of panic” about whether British universities are places of learning or “vocational conveyor belts” for job applicants.

The vehemence of his comments is rare among head teachers, who are often deterred from speaking publicly by fear that negative remarks may damage the university chances of their pupils. Halls, whose independent school is ranked 18th in the country in The Sunday Times Parent Power league table, will make his comments at a conference he is hosting to promote American higher education.

Halls is among those who believe American universities, usually with more lavish facilities than those in Britain, often give a far broader education: “I was at a meeting where a UK admissions tutor told hundreds of pupils that his university had ‘no interest whatsoever’ — his words — in anything beyond their academic ability.”

He will add in his speech that British universities have been “bullied [by the government] to the very edge of a precipice”. He will warn of grade inflation, “dumbed-down teaching, often provided by dumbed-down graduates” and “worst of all, apathetic teaching, often in groups so large no one actually knows if you are there or not”. “No wonder so many boys and girls at our schools are beginning to say, ‘Does it have to be like this?’,” Halls will say.

Fears about quality have been highlighted by a Commons report and by student protests at universities such as Bristol and Manchester.

However, a report this week by the Higher Education Funding Council for England is expected largely to clear universities of “systemic” failings, finding most claims of poor standards are anecdotal. It will nevertheless recommend that parents and applicants should be given clearer information on how courses are taught and suggest changes to the way the quality of degrees is policed.

The growing popularity of American degrees, particularly at Ivy League universities, is reflected in new figures. At St Paul’s, the boys’ school in London ranked seventh by The Sunday Times, a record 28 of this year’s leavers have gone to America, up from about 20 last year. St Paul’s girls’ school sent 14 pupils to the US, twice the total two years ago.

Other independent schools reporting steady growth in interest include Cheltenham ladies’ college, where 18 pupils have applied to study in the United States next year, a 50% increase on this year. Ten are applying from Halls’s school for entry next year, up from seven. At Wellington college in Berkshire, which is co-hosting Halls’s conference, 25-30 pupils have expressed strong interest in studying in the US next year, up from 15.

There is growing state sector interest. At Monkseaton high school in North Tyneside, six pupils plan to apply, up from two last year. It came to prominence in 2000 when Oxford’s rejection of Laura Spence, a pupil there, resulted in a political row over “university elitism”. Spence went to Harvard.

US universities are reporting growing interest from Britain — Yale received 308 applications for entry this year, up from 257 the year before. It gave places to 26. Harvard reports a rise in state sector applicants.

Britons studying in the US include Felix Cook, a pupil at Wellington who turned down a place at Oxford, in favour of a liberal arts degree at Harvard. A month into the course he is enjoying the breadth of study: “I’m doing English literature but I’ve also got the chance to do Mandarin and sociology. I’ve met a much more diverse range of people than I would at Oxford.”

Celia Harrison, a former Cheltenham pupil now at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, said she found the range of activities “inspiring” although going there was a “major culture shock”. [I believe that!]

One deterrent to studying in the US is financial. Harvard costs more than £40,000 a year in fees and accommodation. But lavish bursaries are available at the richest institutions and even families with incomes of £120,000 have to pay only about £12,000 of the cost at Harvard.

Stephen Spurr, headmaster of Westminster school, which sent 12 pupils to the US this year, said: “As fees go up in this country, as they almost inevitably will do, the gap between the cost of studying in the US and here will narrow still further.” However, Paul Ingham, head of careers at Hills Road sixth form college in Cambridge, warned: “There’s a lot of interest, but when the universities tell you about the scholarships they offer they don’t say how difficult it is to get them.”

SOURCE




Unruly British pupils 'expelled by the back door'

The appalling British school discipline scene again

Schools are expelling thousands of children “by the back door” to ensure they do not appear in official statistics, it has been disclosed. Up to 7,000 pupils a year are transferred to other schools as part of a “managed move”. It is almost the same as the number of children permanently excluded every year – suggesting the real expulsion rate is around twice the official total.

Parents’ groups claim that unruly children are being foisted onto other schools to give the false impression that behaviour is under control. It is also feared that the most disruptive pupils are not being given the support they need. Figures suggest as many as a quarter of children shifted to other schools are eventually forced to move back.

Adam Abdelnoor, a child psychologist and founder of Inaura, a charity promoting policies to keep pupils in school, said: “Heads have to stop passing the buck.” So-called "managed moves" – when pupils are transferred between schools – are supported by many headteachers. They see them as cheaper, less time-consuming and less bureaucratic than permanent exclusions, which can be challenged and overturned.

But pupils transferred in this way do not count in official exclusion data, suggesting figures are being kept artificially low. In 2007/08 just 8,130 primary and secondary school children were expelled in England – a fall of more than 4,000 in a decade.

Ministers claim the reduction is due to Government behaviour initiatives and the use by schools of the "short, sharp, shock of suspension" which "nips problem behaviour in the bud". But research by Mr Abdelnoor suggests figures could be much higher. He surveyed almost 300 schools and more than half conducted managed moves. Extrapolated nationally, research suggests as many as 7,000 managed moves took place over a 12 month period, according to the Times Educational Supplement.

Previous research has shown how pupils suspected of serious offences have been allowed to move to another school under the rules. Among the pupils moved between schools in 2007 were two teenagers from Barnsley who had brought weapons into school. In Bristol, a 15-year-old who attacked a pupil, verbally abused teachers and brought drugs and alcohol into school also escaped expulsion and was transferred. In St Helens, Merseyside, a 12-year-old was moved after threatening a classmate with a knife, as was a 15-year-old who brought a meat cleaver into school.

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27 September, 2009

Tucson Schools To Implement Race Based Punishment - Blacks And Hispanics To Receive Passes

Sounds like a blatant contravention of the 14th Amendment to me: "nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws". Note that it is the person, not the group which is to be treated equally

Black and Hispanic students in the Tucson Unified School District will soon receive passes for breaking school rules if the TUSD board has its way. It proposed a two tiered punishment system for the whole district that will reduce suspensions and expulsions for minority students, even if warranted, so that in the end there is "no ethnic/racial disparities" in punishment meted out.

I wonder why they didn't just go the other direction. Say for instance a white student is 2 minutes late for class, why not expel them, that way the number of white expulsions will eventually catch up to other minority groups.

Some would say I am a racist for even covering this news story, to them I say "What the hell are you smoking?" It is not racist to point out other people in this country who are pushing for racial quotas and special favors for those of minority groups. There can be nothing more racist than giving gifts to those of one race and not to those of another. Doug MacEachern of the Arizona Republic sums up nicely what the TUSD has passed and plans to implement.

From the section of the 52-page plan titled "Restorative School Culture and Climate," subhead, "Discipline":

"School data that show disparities in suspension/expulsion rates will be examined in detail for root causes. Special attention will be dedicated to data regarding African-American and Hispanic students."

The board approved creating an "Equity Team" that will oversee the plan to ensure "a commitment to social justice for all students."

The happy-face edu-speak notwithstanding, what the Tucson Unified School District board of governors has approved this summer is a race-based system of discipline.

TUSD is known nationwide for its open policy on disenfranchising white students through special favors to all other minority groups. It's "Raza Studies" program has been covered numerous times on this website and as recently as last week when I reposted "Raza Studies, Occupied America, Mexican American Heritage And The Reconquest Of America". The "studies group" pushes the agenda of amnesty for all illegal aliens because the southwest really still belongs to Mexico. It also sows hatred of the United States in its students and a pro-racial pride agenda inciting insurrectionist thought.

It should be noted that the Raza Studies program is very well funded and the TUSD board is calling for an expansion of the program. Meanwhile, TUSD has been closing libraries, arts and music programs and laying off teachers in other areas not related to Raza Studies due to funding. You'd think that someone would be looking into where of all this funding is coming from. It is obviously not being funded by those who care about America and equality for all.

MacEachern continues and shows that not only are students are being rewarded by race, the TUSD is participating in race-based hiring.

In a year in which hundreds of district teachers received pink slips, meanwhile, TUSD spent thousands on recruiting teachers from out of state.

And it hired a coordinator at $80,000 per annum to lead the effort.

... TUSD's race-obsessing board of governors is taking racial bean-counting to preposterous extremes.

... increasing the number of minority teachers - per the summer hiring spree, which netted 14 special-education teachers and one math-science teacher.

They are actively doing so, claiming that they want the race of teachers to be the same racial makeup as students. This is illegal under federal law, yet no one is doing anything about it.

It is all quite sickening. The TUSD is populated by Liberal, "tolerance", "social justice" and "race justice" bed-wetters, yet they are the true face of hate in this country. They are too blind to see what they are doing is exactly the opposite of what "equality for all" means. They don't want an equal playing field, they want to hold one group down and promote another without merit. There can be nothing more un-American, or illegal, than that.

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Let’s get back to worksheets

The U.S. is falling behind the world in math. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said, "We are lagging the rest of the world, and we are lagging it in pretty substantial ways." A special analysis put out by the National Center for Education Statistics found that the math performance of U.S. high schoolers was in the bottom quarter of the countries that participated in the most recent Program for International Student Assessment. Results of the 2009 ACT and SAT show that U.S. students are no better in math this year than they were last year. Math performance has improved in other countries while it has remained stagnant in the U.S.

These findings are disturbing in an increasingly global economy where careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) are becoming progressively more important for nations to compete internationally.

According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the proportion of students obtaining STEM degrees from U.S. universities has dropped from 32 percent to 27 percent over the past decade. At the same time, the percentage of non-U.S. students earning these degrees from U.S. universities has increased dramatically.

In The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Friedman argues that getting more Americans to pursue careers in STEM fields is critical to the future of our nation's economy. Friedman is not alone in his opinion.

The National Science Foundation reports that non-U.S. graduates from U.S. universities accounted for more than half of the doctorate recipients in physics (58 percent), computer sciences (65 percent), engineering (68 percent), and mathematics (57 percent). The most numerous of these non-U.S. graduates were from China, India, and South Korea. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that over 40 percent of non-U.S. doctoral degree recipients intended to leave the U.S.

Not only are we losing ground to non-U.S. citizens at our own universities, but we're also falling behind other nations. The U.S. is no longer the leader in STEM education. In absolute numbers, Japan and China are producing more graduates. Our rate of STEM to non-STEM graduates is roughly 17 percent while the international average is nearly 26 percent. We're not even keeping pace with some developing countries.

President Obama has acknowledged that other countries--especially Asian countries--are performing better in math than the U.S. How does he plan to prevent us from falling farther behind?

In the U.S., we used to focus on basic computation skills when we taught students traditional math. Ever since the U.S. National Council of Teachers of Mathematics developed standards for school math in 1989, many U.S. schools starting teaching reform math.

Recently, I visited schools in Japan and Taiwan. I found they're teaching math the way we used to teach it; they're focusing on basic computation skills. Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea--all top performers in math--are also focusing on the basics. Even the cram schools, which are prevalent in Asia, focus on the basics.

The largest and most established cram school in Asia is Kumon. I visited their head office in Tokyo to interview public relations executives Mayu Katata and Shinichiro Iwasaki about the Kumon method. In a nutshell, they focus on using worksheets to help students master basic computation skills. Traditional math emphasizes basic computation skills and algorithms that lead to the correct answer while reform math places more value on the thinking process that leads to any answer.

Both of these skills are needed. However, the major problem with reform math is that it puts the cart before the horse by trying to teach students abstract concepts of math before they have built strong foundational skills. With traditional math, students often work individually on worksheets. With reform math, they often work in groups cutting, pasting, and coloring.

Sure, worksheets and algorithms are boring compared to gluing stuff and explaining how you came up with an answer that may not even be correct, but which method will better prepare our students to compete in an increasingly global economy? America, let's get back to worksheets.

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One in 12 British secondary schools 'failing'

One in 12 secondary schools could be closed or merged unless they hit GCSE targets next year. As many as 270 secondaries, including 40 of Labour’s flagship academies, fell short of the Government’s strict exam benchmark last summer. Those failing to improve by 2011 could be shut, merged with better performing schools nearby or turned into academies, which are sponsored and run by the private sector.

Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, warned that academies which have been open for at least three years could also have their sponsors replaced if they did not show "clear evidence" of improving results.

The Government also announced that it would send expert advisers into a series of local authorities to raise standards. It includes Kent, which has a selective education system that includes grammar schools and secondary moderns.

Mr Balls has previously criticised academic selection, insisting pupils who did not win grammar school places at 11 were made to feel like “failures”.

On Tuesday, he said: “I've always said that non-selective schools in selective areas face extra challenges. It's harder but it's not necessarily harder because there's more deprivation or it can't be done.

“There's no doubt in my mind that if you have a new cohort of young people who have all arrived in secondary school having been told that they didn't succeed then you have greater issues around aspiration and belief.”

Under the National Challenge initiative, every school must ensure at least 30 per cent of pupils gain five A* to C grades at GCSE, including the key subjects of English and maths. They are supposed to meet the target by 2011.

Every school below the benchmark was told it would receive extra funding to help boost scores. The number of schools failing to hit the target has dropped from 638 two years ago to around 270.

Around 40 academies are still below the 30 per cent benchmark, according to the Department for Children, Schools and Families. Of these, around 10 have been open for at least three years, before National Challenge began.

The DCSF said today that it had "concerns" about the performance of a "handful" of these, because their results had either stalled or fallen.

Nick Gibb, the Conservative shadow schools minister, said: “There are still far too many schools where fewer than a third of children reach the basic standard of five good GCSEs including English and maths, and it is the poorest areas that are worst affected.

“We urgently need a different approach with more powers for teachers to keep order, more highly qualified people encouraged into teaching, and making schools answerable to parents instead of bureaucrats.”

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26 September, 2009

Do Charters 'Cream' the Best?

A new study finds breakthrough evidence against Leftist excuses

'Creaming" is the word critics of charter schools think ends the debate over education choice. The charge has long been that charters get better results by cherry-picking the best students from standard public schools. Caroline Hoxby, a Stanford economist, found a way to reliably examine this alleged bias, and the results are breakthrough news for charter advocates.

Her new study, "How New York City's Charter Schools Affect Achievement," shows that charter students, typically from more disadvantaged families in places like Harlem, perform almost as well as students in affluent suburbs like Scarsdale. Because there are more applicants than spaces, New York admits charter students with a lottery system. The study nullifies any self-selection bias by comparing students who attend charters only with those who applied for admission through the lottery, but did not get in. "Lottery-based studies," notes Ms. Hoxby, "are scientific and more reliable."

According to the study, the most comprehensive of its kind to date, New York charter applicants are more likely than the average New York family to be black, poor and living in homes with adults who possess fewer education credentials. But positive results already begin to emerge by the third grade: The average charter student is scoring 5.8 points higher than his lotteried-out peers in math and 5.3 points higher in English. In grades four through eight, the charter student jumps ahead by 5 more points each year in math and 3.6 points each year in English.

Charter students are also shrinking the learning gap between low-income minorities and more affluent whites. "On average," the report concludes, "a student who attended a charter school for all of the grades kindergarten through eight would close about 86% of the 'Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap' in math and 66% of the achievement gap in English."

The New York results are not unique. In a separate study, Ms. Hoxby found Chicago's charters performing even better than the Big Apple's. Using the same methodology, other researchers have seen similar results in Boston.

Charters are also a bargain for taxpayers. Nationwide on average, per-pupil spending is 61% that of surrounding public schools. New York charters spend less than district schools but more than the national average because, unlike district schools, they generally have no capital budget and must pay rent from operating expenses.

Little wonder President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are pressuring states to become more charter-friendly. Why the Administration can't connect the dots from the evidence to other effective school choice reforms, such as vouchers, can only be explained by union politics. Caroline Hoxby has performed a public service by finally making clear that "creaming" is a crock.

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Paedophile fears are 'driving male teachers from British primary schools'

More than a quarter of state primary schools have no male teachers, partly because they have been deterred from working with young children for fear of being labelled paedophiles, an expert claims. The result is that thousands of boys are being taught solely by women and have no educational male role models. The trend is fuelling concerns that a generation of boys is growing up without an authoritative male figure in their lives.

Teaching remains a predominantly female profession, data published today by the General Teaching Council of England confirms. Only 123,827, or 25 per cent, of the 490,981 registered working teachers are men, with the majority in secondary schools and further education. Male teachers make up just 13 per cent of state primary teachers (25,491) and three per cent of state nursery school staff (43). Of 16,892 state primary schools in England, 4,550 have no male teachers - around 27 per cent.

Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, said the figures were concerning. 'It's a sad comment on society that more men aren't attracted into teaching in primary schools. In part, this is due to concerns in society about paedophilia. Men are receiving the signal that it's more appropriate for them to teach in secondary schools than primary schools.'

The 'feminisation' of the curriculum, which includes an emphasis on coursework rather than 'sudden death' exams, is already believed to be responsible for a widening gender gap at secondary level.

Professor Smithers said: 'There's a danger that boys could grow up thinking that education is sissy. 'When it comes to reading, they might be offered what appeals to the female teachers whereas male teachers often have different interests in reading. 'Similarly, in interpreting what's been read, there are distinct male and female points of view. Both these views need to be offered to boys.'

GTC chief executive Keith Bartley said: 'We should focus on attracting the best recruits to teaching, regardless of gender. 'If men do not believe that teaching is a worthwhile career option for them, or worse still, if their interest in teaching is viewed with suspicion, then children potentially miss out on a huge pool of talent.'

Only two men under the age of 25 work in state-run nurseries in England, according to the GTC register. One of them, 22-year-old Jamie Wilson, from Merseyside, insists that children need to be taught by male and female teachers. He said: 'I am firmly of the belief that gender should not be an issue when it comes to early years and primary teachers. Why should it matter? 'However, I have found that it has been an issue in my own experience. Even within my first week I encountered anxiety from a parent who was reluctant to leave their three-year-old in my care because I am a male in a female-dominated environment.'

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Oxbridge: one student explodes the myths

Students have less than a month to get in their applications for Oxford and Cambridge . The fact that the two universities, generally seen as the "top" places to study in the UK, have a different application deadline from other universities, just adds to the aura around them.

Costas Pitas is studying History and French at Balliol College, Oxford. As someone from a grammar school, he says he didn't know what to expect when he applied, and is keen to help others to, as he says, "explode the myths". In fact, he says that Oxbridge should be "at the top of every working class child's UCAS form." Over to Costas....

"There are many misunderstandings surrounding Oxford and Cambridge. You don’t need to be a Lord, or the son or daughter of one, you don’t have to live in a gold-encrusted palace or have a double-barrelled name. In fact, in my view, Oxbridge should be at the top of every working class child’s UCAS form, and not at the bottom. It’s the best place to study if your worried about finances and fancy the shortest term times of any universities. If you’re predicted the necessary grades, or even just short, here are some myth-busting facts to prove why you shouldn’t think twice about applying.

Myth one: the fees are more expensive

FALSE: For most people Oxbridge is actually the best value-for-money choice you could make. On tuition fees, 99 per cent of courses across the country at every uni will charge £3,225 for this coming academic year. Oxford and Cambridge charge the same. When you consider that the pair continually top The Times Good University Guide, and are among the best-performing institutions in the world, it’s surely a bargain price for the best education money can buy.

Myth two: it’ll cost you more to study

FALSE: Oxford and Cambridge have the best libraries of any universities in the country. The Bodleian in Oxford, for example, is a copyright library which means that it has the right to every book published in the UK. With central libraries, faculty libraries and college libraries, Oxbridge has got to be the place where the need to buy your own reading materials is at its minimum. Plus, many of the colleges and faculties offer book-buying grants to students.

Myth three: it’ll cost more to live

FALSE: Research conducted by the National Union of Students shows that students in London will face living expenses of £8,375 per year, whilst those out of the capital save a cool £1,300 a year, down to £7,011. Furthermore, a combination of generous benefactors, rich alumni and a social guilty conscience means that Oxford and Cambridge offer the most generous financial support anywhere in the country. With a household income of up to £25,000, Cambridge will award a bursary of £3,250 per year, whilst Oxford will splash out the same each year plus a potential £875 in your first year to the poorest students. Any household income under £50,000 will entitle you to hundreds or thousands of pounds worth of non-repayable grant.

Myth four: all the students are snobby

FALSE: OK, of course you’ll find some people who believe God reports to them. However, that applies to all walks of life and my experience of Oxford has been entirely positive. Many people at my college come from schools such as Eton, which you might consider to be the crème de la crème of toff towers, but are anything but. In fact many worry that other students will have a whole truckload of preconceptions about them. Roughly 55 per cent of students at both universities come from state schools, so even if you consider snobby synonymous with independent schools that accusation doesn’t stand up either. My experience shows it to be untrue anyway. Ultimately, everyone’s in the same boat on day one of freshers’ week. It took me the week to find my friends, but the vast majority of people do fit in just fine.

Myth five: they’re all…boring

FALSE: There does seem to be a concern that Oxbridge types are, to quote My Big Fat Greek Wedding, ‘toast. No honey No jam just toast, dry toast’. (I wish I could convey the thick Greek accent in text). A small minority may prefer the lecture theatre to the dance floor but in general that is far from the truth. The parties are some of the most extravagant you’ll find anywhere in the world. College balls are renowned for their grandeur and almost every society, of which there are dozens, will throw in a free chocolate fountain here or free drinks there, as a matter of course. Not that I’ve done this with friends, but the sheer amount of corporate sponsorship, means you can pull up to some amazing events, feign interest in corporate law and enjoy a boat party or drinks event with no charge.

Myth six: they’re all right-wingers...or left-wingers

FALSE: Bizarrely, I’ve heard both stereotypes, which is probably the best proof that they’re wrong. Whether you’ve got a photo of Margaret Thatcher on your wall or in your furnace, Oxford is home to a wide range of political viewpoints. The major political parties have their own groups, the Oxford Union sustains debate, and gossip, uni-wide and the Student’s Union takes on welfare and pastoral issues. Each college’s students have their own committee and, in all, if you’re a lefty or a righty, there’s wide scope to get involved. Equally, if you decide that your free time is for fun and games and not more brain power, then you can easily avoid the whole lot of them!

With the most generous bursaries, the best value-for-money tuition fees and great parties, students shouldn’t be on the look out for largely unfounded stereotypes on why not to apply. Instead they should be fighting to print off the application form."

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25 September, 2009

Corruption behind a firing at a British school

'Bully' named by fired dinner-lady is school governor’s son. The school initially tried to cover up the assault until the dinner lady spoke to the mother of the bullied girl. The school then fired the dinner lady for breaching some imagined code of Omerta

A governor at the school where a dinner lady was sacked for telling parents about alleged bullies is the mother of one of the four boys involved, The Times has learnt.

Angry parents are demanding the resignation of the headmistress and governors of Great Tey Primary School, Essex. Some are threatening to remove their children if Carol Hill, 60, is not reinstated. Mrs Hill, who was dismissed this week, has since been banned from a voluntary post in the Beaver Scouts and the local youth group because of the decision. The grandmother has spent thousands of pounds on legal fees and is preparing to take further action against the school.

The headmistress, Deborah Crabb, the governors and the local vicar, John Richardson, struck off the dinner lady for a breach of pupil confidentiality after she informed the parents of Chloe David, 7, that the girl had been tied up and whipped by a group of boys at playtime.

Parents questioned whether the decision was influenced by the fact that Kathryn Spicer, a parent governor who did not take part in the disciplinary hearings, is the mother of one of the four boys accused of tying Chloe’s wrists and ankles with a skipping rope.

Sarah Harris, 36, who has two children at the school, described the treatment of Mrs Hill as terrible and unfair. “Maybe this would have been dealt with differently had a governor’s child not been involved,” she told The Times. “You put your trust in these people not only to teach your children but to keep them safe and look after their pastoral care. I am worried and very concerned as to what else may have been covered up.”

Ms Spicer has been a governor at the school since 2006 and has two children there. She refused to comment yesterday. Mrs Crabb, 35, has been headmistress for three years. She was previously a reception teacher at the school, which has 60 pupils.

Sue Dyer, who has five children at the school, said that she no longer trusted the headmistress or the governors and called for Mrs Crabb to step down. Her husband, Ivan, said that parents had been concerned over the headmistress’s level of experience.

Mrs Hill is preparing a case against the school. Her lawyer was not permitted into the dismissal hearing on Monday but the school’s legal representatives and a human resources adviser from Essex County Council were present to advise the board.

Mrs Hill said that she was not able to comment until her appeal. Her husband, Ronald, 65, said: “She is a very strong person but this has got her down. She really loves her job.”

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Kiddy "bang, bang" game deemed politically incorrect in sick England

Now the deranged headmistress is lying in her teeth about her actions

Excited by stories of the Second World War during school classes, Steven Cheek did what generations of young boys have done before him. Making an imaginary gun with his fingers, the nine-year-old pointed it at a classmate and said: 'We've got to shoot the German army.' Moments later he found himself in front of the deputy head, who accused him of racism because his 'victim' had been a Polish boy.

He was made to stand in front of the class and make an apology while his mother, Jane Hennessey, was called in by the head of Purford Green Junior School in Harlow, Essex. She was informed that a permanent record of her son's misconduct would be placed on file.

Miss Hennessey yesterday accused the school of overreacting. 'Steven has always wanted to join the Army when he grows up,' she said. 'That's his burning ambition and he loved learning about the war in class. 'In the week leading up to what happened, the school had been telling the children about the history of the war and he had come home every night talking about it.

'He's not a racist. He's only nine years old and he didn't single out the Polish boy, who is one of his good friends. This just happened to be who he was playing with. The deputy head shouted at Steven and said, "That's racism", which is ridiculous because Steven has a Polish aunt and they were on our side during the war. 'He didn't understand what he had done wrong. He was just playing a game like kids always do. He came home after being told off and said, "Mum, what's racism?" The school has overreacted and been very heavy-handed. They could have quietly told him off instead of turning it into a big issue.'

Miss Hennessey, 37, who lives in Harlow with Steven's father Darren Cheek, 39, an electrician, said her son got carried away during a class where the war was being discussed. He had never been in trouble before and had been bullied by other pupils since having to make the public apology.

'My main concern is that this will stay on his record and count against him when he goes to secondary school.' Miss Hennessey added: 'Other teachers have told me that they think he has been harshly treated. Everything was blown completely out of proportion. 'This young Polish child had only started at the school in September and I thought he and Steven got along well. 'He speaks perfect English. I don't think Steven even really knew or understood he was Polish and from another country. Children don't see differences between people like adults do.'

Nick Seaton, of the Campaign for Real Education pressure group, accused the school of 'absurd political correctness'. He said: 'It's a shame that teachers these days all too often fail to crack down on real problems like bullying but overreact to a child with a healthy imagination. Boys will be boys and what the teacher should have done was ask Steven not to play in the classroom, instead of sending him to the deputy head who then humiliated him in front of his class.'

The school, which has around 175 boys and girls aged between four and 11 and was rated 'good' in its last Ofsted report, yesterday claimed Steven's class had been learning about space, not the war, when he was reprimanded and denied he had been accused of racism. Headmistress Viv Perri said: 'When a pupil uses inappropriate language or terms that could be offensive, we have a responsibility to explain to them why their behaviour is wrong. 'We want to give all our pupils the best possible start in life which can mean educating them about knowing right from wrong. 'The incident in question involved a short conversation with a pupil to explain the inappropriateness of his comments and then a meeting with the parent to explain the context.'

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Arizona Pols expected to tighten school tuition tax credit rules

Arizona needs to adjust its private-school tuition tax-credit law to ensure better oversight and keep pace with other states that have enacted similar programs, some key lawmakers said Monday. Rep. Rich Crandall, R-Mesa and chairman of the House Education Committee, said the Legislature will consider changes to the law when it convenes next year. "The budget will overshadow everything, but there will be legislation run on this," Crandall said after a meeting of a Democratic-led task force that is examining gaps in the law highlighted in a series of reports by The Arizona Republic. "My guess is there will be something that passes."

The program faces renewed scrutiny after reports that, in many ways, the 1997 law has fallen short of its original purpose: to help make a private education available to all children, not just those who can afford it.

The Republic has found that the school-tuition organizations that collect the tax-deductible donations have almost no oversight and that, last year, 10 of 53 had fallen short of spending at least 90 percent of their revenue on scholarships, as required by the law. Some of the organizations have encouraged a system of swapping donations, allowing even children of affluent families to effectively receive a publicly subsidized private education. The tax credit allows donors to give up to $1,000 for private tuition and cut their income-tax liability dollar for dollar.

Crandall and Rep. David Schapira, D-Tempe, agreed that any legislative changes would likely go beyond the tax-credit donations used to defray private-school costs and would affect a tax credit for those who help underwrite the cost of extracurricular activities at public schools.

At least two groups that advocate for school choice have joined the chorus calling for changes to the state's law. Last week, House Speaker Kirk Adams, R-Mesa, formed a Republican-led special committee to weigh changes to the law, as well. Schapira stressed that his goal is to improve the tax credit, not end it.

Lawrence Mohrweis, an accounting professor at Northern Arizona University who also oversees a tuition organization in Flagstaff, said school-tuition organizations should register with the state and have annual audits or financial reviews, depending on how much money they handle. He also urged lawmakers to give the Department of Revenue some oversight authority. "I compare it to speed-limit signs," Mohrweis said. "What would happen if the state patrol could pull you over but never give you a fine or give you a ticket? . . . That's effectively what we have within STO organizations right now."

The Goldwater Institute for years has suggested changes to the tax credit. Matthew Ladner, vice president for research at the free-market, non-profit think tank, supports auditing responsibilities and empowering the Revenue Department. But he also favors a personal-use tax credit that would allow all parents to deduct at least some of the cost of educating their child regardless of whether the child attends public or private school. At the same time, he would change the current tax-credit law to also help only students from low-income families. Arizona has a corporate-tax credit that must go to the poor, but the credit available to individuals is not limited. "Fundamentally, the program needs some kind of sheriff," Ladner said. "There are different public or private models that could help accomplish that goal."

The School Choice Working Group, which represents more than a half-dozen groups, plans to work with the special committee on legislation that would create need-based criteria for scholarships and would offer reports on how prevalent such scholarships are, said Sydney Hay, a spokeswoman for the group.

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24 September, 2009

Crazy ideas in NYC

Failing kids are going to have to go to school on Saturday? If the first 5 days of the week do no good, how is another half-day going to help? And how are you going to get such kids to school on Saturday? Nobody has much of a clue in NYC. All sides are ignoring the elephant in the room: discipline failures

During an education policy speech at Pace University Tuesday night, City Comptroller Bill Thompson claimed the city's schools are going in the wrong direction. "My friends, it's time for change. The current administration has had eight years to get the job done on education," Thompson said.

The Democratic Mayoral candidate once again took on Mayor Michael Bloomberg's signature issue, and this time offered a plan on what he would do differently. Thompson is calling for universal pre-K, as well as a longer school year for failing students. "Some students may require more time and assistance on certain tasks," Thompson said. "The school week and school year should be extended for these students, including Saturday school."

Chris Cerf, an education advisor for the Bloomberg campaign, listened to the speech and quickly dismissed some of the proposals. "I didn't hear anything in that speech that suggested, that would lead anyone to believe that what were very vague and hopeful promises that would actually be executed," Cerf said.

Team Bloomberg said a longer school day could cost tens of billions of dollars. The Thompson campaign didn't have an estimate, but one supporter said the expense would be worth it. "It may cost hundreds of million dollars. Let's assume it costs a billion dollars. The fact is, Bill Thompson has expressed this has his priority," said City Councilman Robert Jackson.

Education has become one of the most contentious issues in the race. Even before Thompson's speech, the mayor raised questions about the Democrat's time as head of the old board of education.

"The issue for voters really is clear. If you think the schools are better today than they were under my opponent's leadership then you should vote for me," said Bloomberg. "And if you think that they were better when he ran the Board of Education then you should vote for him. And I wonder whether he'd be willing to say the same thing. Don't know."

Thompson ducked the mayor's criticism by saying the race should be about a variety of issues. But it's clear education is going to be at the center of campaign.

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The Leftist war on British education continues apace

Sacked for exposing the bullies: Dinner lady fired for telling parents girl had been whipped. If you can't prevent violent behaviour, cover it up is the British response

A school dinner lady who told the parents of a seven-year-old girl that she had been viciously bullied in the playground has been sacked. Scott and Claire David were simply informed in a letter home that their daughter Chloe had been 'hurt' in an incident with a skipping rope. In fact, she had been tied to a fence, whipped by four boys, had to be dragged to safety and suffered burns to her wrists.

But the attempted cover-up was exposed when Carol Hill - the dinner lady who saved her from further injury - bumped into Mr and Mrs David and told them what really happened. Mrs Hill, 60, was suspended after the incident in June and yesterday it emerged that she has been fired by a disciplinary tribunal for breaching pupil confidentiality at Great Tey Primary School, near Colchester, Essex.

The decision has been condemned by the girl's family, who were prevented from giving evidence on Mrs Hill's behalf. Other parents at the school are considering withdrawing their children in protest.

Friends say that Mrs Hill, from Great Tey, who has worked at the school for almost eight years, is 'shocked and very disappointed' but is planning to appeal. One said: 'She thinks she's been treated really shabbily but she insists that if she saw a child being bullied again she would definitely step in like she did.' Her husband, Ron, said: 'She's not been eating and has been really down. I can't describe how cross I am. I can't believe it's got this far. She's done nothing wrong.'

Mrs Hill has previously told how another pupil alerted her to the bullying incident. She found Chloe bound up and terrified. She said: 'She had eight knots around her wrists and had been whipped across the legs with a skipping rope. I took her back into the school, along with four boys who had been seen with her. Two admitted it.'

Mr and Mrs David say Chloe, who had rope burns to her wrists and whip marks on her legs, was sent home with an accident notification letter. They could not find out what exactly had happened as she was in shock and refused to talk about it. Later that evening, Mrs Hill was helping at a Beaver Scouts meeting and went over to Mrs David to say she was sorry about what happened. Speaking in July, she said: 'As I was talking to her it became clear she did not know the whole story. I had to tell her because she then realised there was more to it.'

Mr and Mrs David have since withdrawn Chloe and their five-year-old son, Cameron, from the school. They say that if Mrs Hill had not told them, they would never have been alerted to what had really happened. They later demanded to see the school's accident book which stated that Chloe had been tied up.

Mr David, 33, a steel worker, said last night: 'I'm disgusted and shocked that Mrs Hill has been sacked and I'm disgusted that the school has been able to cover everything up. 'It was her job to make sure that children's welfare was being looked after. That's what she did but she's now being punished for doing her job properly. 'We back Mrs Hill totally. She did not realise we did not know all the facts. We should have done - we should have been called into the school.' He added: 'Chloe seems to be doing OK now. She seems to have bounced back better than us. We're still trying to cope with what happened.'

Many parents are backing the dinner lady and want her to be reinstated. Sue Dyer and her husband Ivan, 50, a horticultural engineer, have five children at Great Tey Primary School. Mrs Dyer said: 'The way Carol's been treated is totally unjust. I would put total trust in her ability to look after my children. 'Carol is 100 per cent for children, she is a very popular figure in the village and the school. 'The children think Carol's coming back - they keep asking, when is Mrs Hall back?'

Mrs Dyer said that if the headteacher had informed Chloe's parents about the full extent of the bullying in the first instance, the trouble would have been avoided. Margaret Morrissey, of family campaign group Parents Outloud, said: 'I'm absolutely sure she was just trying to act in the best interests of the child. 'I doubt if there's anyone who knew what had happened who wouldn't want to sympathise. I'm sure that parents will be very upset to hear that she's lost her job over it.'

Headmistress Debbie Crabb has insisted that Chloe's parents were told of the incident according to school 'accident and first aid procedures'. But she said the procedures would be reviewed. She said yesterday: 'We can confirm that subject to any appeal Mrs Hill will not be returning to work at Great Tey Primary School.'

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British universities to end 'irrelevant' research

This is reasonable as long as basic science is not affected

The days of university researchers developing formulas for the perfect cheese sandwich or signing up for David Beckham studies may be numbered after the government’s higher education funding body announced plans to tighten its criteria for research grants. Academics will be required to demonstrate that their research is relevant to society in order to be allocated public funds and the biggest grants will go to projects likely to influence the economy or public policy. Critics say the plan, due to come into force in 2012, will sacrifice academic freedoms to market forces.

The plans are due to be announced today by the Higher Education Funding Council for England. It will allocate £1.76bn a year in government funds for academic research under the Research Excellence Framework. From 2012, university departments must submit their work to be rated by a panel of academics. Marks will be awarded, 25 per cent for the impact the research will have and 15 per cent for the department’s research strategy, staff and student development and its engagement with the wider world.

The Hefce said the system would pay out for research in the arts and humanities as well as science and technology.

But Sally Hunt, general secretary of the University and College Union, told The Guardian: “Academic research should never be at the behest of market forces. “History has taught us that some of the biggest breakthroughs have come from speculative research and it is wrong to try and measure projects purely on their economic potential.”

David Sweeney, Hefce’s director for research, said: “The Research Excellence Framework will recognise and reward excellent research and sharing new knowledge to the benefit of the economy and society, and will ensure effective allocation of public funds. “It will encourage the productive interchange of research staff and ideas between academia and business, government and other sectors.”

Under the previous funding allocation system, universities were able to take on star academics at the last minute to boost their research performance.

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23 September, 2009

Lazy, illiterate teachers, cynical heads who have given up, and pupils who treat them with contempt. A horrifying portrait of the British schools failing young boys

It's the most disturbing social issue of our age - why Britain is plagued by a generation of violent, barely literate young men living outside the normal bounds of society. For nine months, a leading investigative journalist has been examining their world for the Mail. Here, in the third part of our exclusive serialisation of her findings, she takes on our failing schools.

When Darren was 14, he became one of the bad boys. Barely able to read and write and unable to keep up in the classroom, he started truanting with nine other pupils who also felt school had nothing to offer but humiliation. Trashing bus shelters and stealing anything for kicks soon progressed to stealing in earnest when they discovered a fence in their small town in the Midlands. They'd have the wheels off a BMW and £100 in their pockets within the space of an hour. Then they moved into drugs, selling cocaine and ecstasy to the queues outside nightclubs.

Weren't they afraid of getting caught? Oh no, getting arrested was 'part of the game', said Darren, now 21. Half the time, the police would let them go; otherwise they'd usually get away with a £50 fine in the youth courts. Once, he remembered: 'Four or five of us were arrested three times in two weeks. In fact, Darren found himself at his local police station so often that he used to say breezily to the charging sergeant: 'No worries. I'll take myself down to the cells. I know which cell to go to.' The charging sergeant would shout after him: 'Don't forget to shut the door!'

Darren, however, doesn't have much to laugh about now: he may have given up crime, but he lives on benefits and can't get a job - despite being obviously bright. The wrong turning he took at 14, when he abandoned school, has probably wrecked his life. Even so, he's done better than his nine mates who arrived with him from primary school all barely able to read and write. Two of them are dead - one committed suicide in prison and the other smashed a stolen car into a bus shelter at 80mph. Two are serving long prison sentences - one for stabbing someone in the neck. The fifth is a 'very bad' alcoholic. Three now control the drug scene in the town. And Darren's closest friend, a gifted football player, is homeless, hooked on crack and weighing just 7st.

Why do so many boys from poor backgrounds go so catastrophically off the rails in their mid-teens? The trend in education and sociology circles is to point the finger at parents, violent DVDs or deprivation. What they never mention is school.

The link between illiteracy and delinquency is beyond doubt: when 14-year-old boys such as Darren and his friends can no longer keep up in class, they misbehave and often drop out.

Despite the Government's Literacy Hour and a massive increase in spending on schools, a third of all 14-year-olds have a reading age of 11 or below. One in five has a reading age of nine. This is an extraordinarily high level of failure. After all, learning to read is a routine business managed by countries a lot poorer than ours. Cuba, Estonia, Poland and Barbados, for example, all boast higher literacy rates than ours, despite spending far less on education. We wouldn't accept it if one in three everyday hospital operations ended in failure - so why do we accept it in our schools?

The age of 14 is when children are most likely to play truant, disrupt classes or face exclusion from school. And those most likely to do so are the black Caribbean and white working-class boys, who are, in turn, more likely to join gangs and terrorise their neighbourhoods.

To find out why this is happening, I spent nine months talking to black and white working-class teenagers from low-income families, as well as youth-club leaders, teachers, school inspectors and charities. The more I found out, the clearer it became that poor schools lie behind most of the statistics on crime, social disorder and drug abuse.

Educationalists argue that schools cannot compensate for the failings of society. But this is exactly what schools should be doing. School is our one opportunity at social engineering. It is our one chance of transforming the future of boys with chaotic home lives. Yet all over the country, schools are failing them - for reasons that could so easily be put right.

Certainly, for the majority of the boys I interviewed, school was part of the problem and not the solution. Most, such as Darren and his friends, hadn't been taught to read and write properly at primary school and were at best semi-literate. For such boys, their lives are all but finished before they have really begun. The effect on society is devastating, too: feral gangs roam our streets and many people are scared to leave their homes. How has this been allowed to happen?

At one comprehensive I visited, I was surprised to find the headmaster in a jubilant mood. Not because his pupils were doing particularly well - but because he'd just discovered a GCSE English exam that didn't require them to read a single poem or book. 'You have to be ahead of the game,' he told me. As far as he was concerned, he was perfectly justified in 'ducking and diving' between exam boards in a quest to increase the number of pupils scraping by with a pass (grade C) - and so fulfil that all important Government target. Many were barely able to read and write when they arrived at his comprehensive - despite passing SATs tests after much coaching - and their chances of ever learning were already ebbing away.

Why? Because this same headmaster has given up on them, claiming he lacks the funding or the staff to help them catch up. Breathtakingly cynical? Certainly, but his attitude isn't uncommon in schools across the country. Heads are judged on how many good A-C grades their pupils get at GCSE, not on how many disadvantaged boys they turn around. Better that the bad boys drop out than drag down a school's results.

One problem is the sheer numbers who arrive from primary school without the ability to read and write properly. Time after time, as I visited comprehensives across the country, I was told that there was no chance of giving the new intake the extra lessons they needed. Even at one predominately white suburban secondary school, the man in charge of teaching literacy skills told me 40 per cent of the first-years were 'at least' two years behind in reading or spelling or both. He'd worked out he had five minutes a week for every pupil who needed help.

A science teacher in an inner-London school told me: 'I am so used to teaching 14-year-olds who have a reading age of seven that I don't even think of it as strange anymore. It's become the norm rather than the exception.' Last year, almost 250,000 children - 40 per cent - started GCSE studies without having achieved the level of reading, writing and maths needed to cope with the course.

So what's the solution? Four years ago, the Government announced that schools would be switching to the most successful method of teaching children how to read - synthetic phonics - in which children are taught letter sounds and blending skills. But it didn't quite work out that way. Instead of introducing this tried-and-tested method, which has had spectacular results with boys from disadvantaged backgrounds, a new phonics-based method was devised, which is not as effective. And, still, some teachers are not even using that. They prefer pupils to try to pick up the meaning of words from looking at pictures. Or, as a school inspector remarked: 'The child is put in a corner, surrounded by books and assumed to be able to read by osmosis.'

For Jake, 14, who was in the top maths and science sets for his first two years at an East Anglian secondary school, this has been a disaster. In the end, he told me: 'The lack of reading and writing kills you in every subject. Even in maths, you need to be able to read the question.' His school never addressed the problem.

Like phonics, the concept of sitting pupils in rows of desks facing the teacher is widely considered too didactic. Now, most primary schoolchildren sit at tables scattered about the classroom, as I saw for myself when I sat in on one class for a week in the East End of London. On my table, the three children giggled, kicked each other and chatted. Their attention lay on what was immediately in front of them: themselves. Somewhere on the periphery of our vision, the teacher walked about, struggling to keep order. Somewhere else, behind our heads, hung a white board with work upon it, gleefully ignored by my table.

When I blamed the children's poor discipline and concentration on the layout, the teacher looked at me with horror. 'The pupils are working together, directing their own learning,' she said emphatically.

The educational establishment emphasises what ought to work; it doesn't investigate or accept the evidence of what actually works. As one science teacher in the East End told me: 'I'm instructed to put into place initiatives for which there's no educational evidence whatsoever.' Another complained: 'Education is an evangelical movement - evidence has nothing to do with it.'

Children are now expected, for example, to be 'independent learners' in charge of their own education. ('Why do teachers keep asking me what I want to learn? How am I supposed to know?' one boy asked me in exasperation.)

This approach has a disastrous effect on the academic achievement of boys from poor backgrounds. Yet faced with a pupil who's incapable of directing his own learning, teachers and psychologists question what's wrong with the child, not what's wrong with the teaching.

The school regulator, Ofsted, has proved remarkably toothless - indeed, two of its own inspectors are so disillusioned that they risked their jobs to talk to me. Instead of concentrating on the basics, they said, they have to check that schools are complying with the latest educational ideology and Government initiative. Both inspectors have been shocked by the low standard of writing, even in good schools - which one of them blamed squarely on poor marking (never to be done in red ink). Many teachers, they noted, had stopped correcting children's grammar, spelling and speech at all, for fear of discouraging them. But when one of the inspectors complained about a school's marking policy to her boss at Ofsted, he replied: 'I don't have a problem with that.'

In any case, the inspector continued, teachers at some of the schools she visits are poor at spelling and grammar themselves. Examining the work of one form, she found the teacher had made numerous spelling mistakes and marked one essay with the comment: 'You need more stuff.'

The Government, as we constantly hear, is on a mission to improve our schools. How? Well, this year, the emphasis is on promoting healthy eating and 'community cohesion'. Indeed, every single school I visited had material on these two topics prominently displayed on their noticeboards. What a pity that some of their pupils were unable to read it.

One of the inspectors told me: 'I spend more time looking in children's lunchboxes than testing their literacy.' Someone, she said despairingly, needs to make children sit down, work hard and learn to concentrate.

Schools are also failing boys from deprived backgrounds in less obvious ways. Recent research has produced compelling evidence that self-discipline is more than twice as important as IQ when it comes to doing well in exams. Even more surprisingly, self-motivation has a bigger impact than even reading ability on future earnings.

Application and self-discipline, of course, are not dictated by intelligence, class or privilege. So the failure of schools to teach them is condemning boys from poor backgrounds to a lifetime of wasted opportunities. They have been crippled as surely as if someone had hacked off a limb.

I met many men in their 20s and 30s who had never experienced the repetition and effort needed for schoolwork. 'No one ever made me sit down and learn,' said one. 'I never caught the habit.' This meant they'd never learnt self- discipline or how to concentrate. Consequently, they don't know how to turn a burst of enthusiasm into the day-to- day effort required for success.

Bright boys from chaotic backgrounds are almost totally dependent on their teachers for that first step to a different life. Yet, shockingly, some teachers saw their educational and social status not as a cause of inspiration to their pupils, but of shame. 'My main focus is not to offend my pupils,' said one. 'I don't want to push my middle-class values on them.' So when a bright pupil told this teacher he'd probably end up stacking supermarket shelves, she didn't urge him to think about an alternative career. Instead, she told me: 'I pointed out to him the many positive aspects of the supermarket job - meeting people and so forth.'

Another teacher told me firmly it wasn't 'his place' to encourage a bright pupil to move from his area or live in anything but a council house. With such an appalling lack of encouragement, it's little wonder that so many 16 to 18-year- old youths - about one in ten - are neither in education, jobs or training, and have little aspiration to succeed.

Were they at school today, the chances of David Lloyd George, the nephew of a cobbler, and Aneurin Bevan, a poor miner's son, rising to become Prime Minister or a Cabinet minister are almost nil. Like so many of the bright young men I interviewed, they'd probably end up in prison or on the dole.

A decent education broadens horizons; it should also provide authority, moral leadership and - through sport - an appropriate outlet for aggression. Then it has the power to transform lives, even the most unlikely.

Take Jason, whose earliest memory is learning how to roll a spliff. His father is a drug dealer, and his home in the North of England is a hangout for addicts - among them schizophrenics, who regularly drop round to exchange their medication for drugs. Against a home background that also included violence and incest, Jason found school a welcome contrast. He joined everything on offer, including the choir and the Boy Scouts - and he was lucky enough to have good teachers. 'I didn't miss a single day,' said Jason. And now? He's training to be a teacher himself.

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Mass: School officials, education boss disagree on bills

As usual, teacher representatives don't like charter schools

The state's top education official clashed with public school leaders on Thursday over Gov. Deval L. Patrick's bills to expand charter schools and improve the worst performing schools. During a crowded hearing by the Committee on Education, S. Paul Reville, the state's secretary of education, said the bills are aimed at closing a wide achievement gap in public schools between white students and minorities and between poor and wealthier students. "No student should be forced to languish in a dungeon of a failing school," Reville told committee members. "By creating and expanding successful charter schools and by fostering the rapid turnaround of underperforming schools through these bills, our students won't have to."

One of Patrick's bills calls for lifting a state cap on charter schools in only those school districts that are among the lowest 10 percent of MCAS scores on a statewide basis, including Holyoke, Springfield and Chicopee. The Patrick administration released an analysis showing Holyoke was the worst performing school district in the state last year on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System exams, Springfield was the second worst and Chicopee the 13th worst.

Springfield currently has four charter schools, while Chicopee and Holyoke each have one. The governor's bill would allow for several additional charter schools in Springfield, at least one more in Holyoke and probably a couple more in Chicopee.

Patrick's second bill would establish new types of innovative public schools operated by school districts. Teachers, parents, universities, museums and nonprofit groups could be partners in the proposed new schools. Leaders of these schools would receive a lot of flexibility and autonomy in areas such as curriculum, schedule and exemptions from teacher contracts. The bill would clear the administration to appoint a receiver to operate chronically low-performing schools. Reville said this would apply to about 30 schools in the state.

Anne T. Wass, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, said Patrick's bill to establish new types of public schools would allow for changes in teacher contracts without negotiating between a school committee and a union. "Keep teachers involved in improving our schools by giving them and their union a voice," Wass said.

Paul S. Dakin, superintendent of schools in Revere and a member of the executive committee of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents, criticized Patrick's bill to expand charter schools. Compared to the school districts from which students are drawn, charter schools do not have equal percentages of students who speak a main language other than English or special education students, particularly those with severe needs, Dakin said. "Yet, we are here today at a time of unprecedented budget crisis talking about the possibility of raising the cap and funding more unproven and costly charters," he said.

Charter schools are financed with tax dollars but operate independently of school districts. Teachers are not unionized in the state's 61 charter schools, except for one in Boston. School districts must pay charter schools for each student. The charter schools partially reimburse the districts for each student over three years. Supporters said charter schools are more free to innovate. They often have longer school days and longer school years.

Last year, Reville said, 70 percent of students in next year's high school graduating class with a main language other than English failed the MCAS test. Last year, he added, 70 percent of black students and 60 percent of Hispanic students graduated from high school in four years compared to 90 percent of white students.

About 100 students and parents from the Boston Preparatory Charter School attended the hearing wearing blue T-shirts with a quote from President Barack Obama that charter caps need to be eliminated. "Charter schools give the kids so much more discipline and they stay focused," said Theresa A. Bowman, parent of a 12-year-old boy at the Boston charter school.

Richard C. Lord, president of the Associated Industries of Massachusetts, a statewide association of employers, said charter schools are a vital part of public education especially in cities. Lord said both of Patrick's bills are needed for Massachusetts to win a maximum share of $4.5 billion in federal "Race to the Top" money under the federal stimulus law. He said the additional federal money would allow the state to move ahead with plans to improve public school teachers, turn around troubled schools and boost technology.

Arne Duncan, the U.S. secretary of education who appeared with Patrick to introduce his charter bill in July, has said that states could be at a "competitive disadvantage" for the federal stimulus dollars if they cap the growth of charter schools.

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22 September, 2009

An education success story -- the old-fashioned way

Tales of Dr. Ben Chavis have been drifting out of the Bay Area for a while now. However, there have been few high-profile media stories, and the educational apparatus in this country is no doubt doing its best to squelch reports of his accomplishments.

So it’s a good thing that Chavis has written a book, Crazy Like a Fox: One Principal’s Triumph in the Inner City, which provides a first-person account of one of the country’s greatest educational success stories. It’s true that Chavis is a controversial figure — the book provides ample evidence of that. He’s profane, boasts of humiliating his students when they “act a fool,” and isn’t afraid to tell a teacher or a parent who he feels is out of line where to stick it. He’s beyond politically incorrect and talks about race with a frankness that would make Chris Rock blush.

Chavis gets away with a lot because he’s undeniably one of the country’s finest educators. In 2000, he took over the American Indian Public Charter School (AIPCS) in Oakland, an inner-city charter school composed almost exclusively of low-income minority students. By the time he stepped down in 2007, he had turned it into the fifth-highest-rated middle school in the state — out of 1,300. (Of the four that rank higher, none has an underprivileged student body.) And Chavis’s curriculum and educational approaches are being spread with notable success to other middle and high schools in Oakland.

What the educational establishment really hates about Chavis is that he has achieved this success by exploding nearly every liberal myth about education. His approach to education is strictly old-school, and based on proven, effective methods. The only thing innovative about what he’s doing is that he’s doing it in the face of decades of “progressive” education. A few core tenets of his educational philosophy are:

Requiring near-perfect attendance.

Maximizing the amount of class time and number of school days. (Summer school is required, and teachers are expected to assign a minimum of two hours of homework each day.)

Heavily weighting the curriculum toward language arts and math. (Chavis’s schools spend twice as much time on those subjects as most other California schools.)

Liberally handing out disciplinary actions such as detention, and otherwise ensuring that order is maintained.

Setting and enforcing standards — e.g., every eighth-grader must pass Algebra I. (In many California high schools, it’s possible to graduate with just “General Math.”)

Making a big public point of not setting lower standards for minority students. (Too many educational institutions indulge in the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” as President Bush memorably put it.)

None of this is, or should be, particularly controversial. Chavis’s one major departure is his insistence on keeping students in one self-contained classroom where one teacher teaches all the subjects and stays with the same group of students as they move from one grade to the next. Chavis maintains that this both increases educational accountability and introduces a level of stability important for underprivileged kids.

Otherwise, Chavis’s emphasis on hard work and high standards is simply the foundation of any good education. “What we’re doing is so easy,” Chavis told the L.A. Times last year. The trouble comes from the educational establishment, which is deeply in thrall to people Chavis calls “squawkers, multicultural specialists, [and] self-esteem experts” that this commonsense approach seems downright revolutionary.

Chavis doesn’t just dismiss the current obsession with self-esteem and multiculturalism, he despises it. The American Indian Public Charter School was on the verge of closure when Chavis inherited it. Its administration was incompetent, and its curriculum was a joke. Because Oakland has a significant American Indian population, thanks to government relocation programs from decades past, somebody in the Oakland Unified School District got sold on the idea of a junior high teaching kids Native American crafts such as basket weaving and bead making. Not to mention that the school went in for pseudo–Native American traditions such as passing a branch of burning sage around while everybody sat in a circle and adults told the kids about their problems. Chavis refers to the principal who preceded him as “Chief Bad Example.”

When Chavis dismisses diversity-heavy education, he doesn’t do so lightly. He is a Lumbee Indian born to an uneducated mother and raised in a sharecroppers’ shack in rural North Carolina. He’s certainly proud of his heritage, but where most modern educators insist that improving self-esteem is necessary to facilitate learning, Chavis insists they have it backwards. “Many Indian elders who live on a Navajo reservation know a lot about their culture. Does that qualify them to get into Harvard or Stanford?” he writes. Chavis once bought into the educational dogma he now wholly rejects; he writes that his eyes were opened when he was pressured by his dissertation committee to make the conclusion of his dissertation more politically correct: “That was a major turning point for me. . . . I started to question the sacred cows of education: parent involvement, volunteer work, more money for schools, culture, self-esteem, bilingual ed and minority holidays.”

Chavis’s educational insights have made him as effective an educator as he is unpopular with his peers: “Most public-school educators don’t see eye to eye with me. . . . I have no problem badmouthing educators who cheat minority students with their pity, community circles, bead making, general math for twelfth-graders, bilingual education for twelve years, sheltered English immersion, and low expectations. Can you think of a better way to screw over minorities in education and dumb us down?”

As a result of his frustration over the low standards set for minority students, Chavis embraces standardized tests. “We do not believe standardized tests discriminate against students because of their color,” writes Chavis in a document called “Common Sense & Useful Learning at AIPCS.” “Could it be many of them have not been adequately prepared to take those tests?” Where public-school teachers everywhere whine about “teaching to the test,” Chavis has dedicated his book to George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy for passing the No Child Left Behind Act. He repeatedly praises the legislation for mandating standards and making schools publicly accountable to them.

Chavis tells the truth with the bark off. Here he is on school funding: “Taxpayers have been conned for years . . . into thinking the problem with schools is they need more funding. This is the biggest lie in public education in this country. . . . The financial incentive in America is to be a failing school.” On hiring teachers: “If you want to do a child a favor, hire a great teacher to educate him. The whole political agenda of ‘We need more Indians, we need more black teachers’ is racist, ridiculous, and often provides inept educators with a way of getting on the payroll. Just because someone’s Indian doesn’t mean he’s a better role model for an Indian child than someone who’s not Indian.”

Throughout the book, Chavis emphasizes preparing his students for the world of free-market capitalism. In fact, number seven of the American Indian Model Students’ Ten Commandments reads: “Thou shalt beware of quacks who believe in communism. Thou hast the quickest route to freedom through free market capitalism and private property ownership. Hast thou ever heard of illegal immigrants risking their lives to enter Cuba?”

Dr. Chavis certainly has a knack for getting people’s attention. But despite his best efforts, the left-wing educational establishment doesn’t want to hear what he has to say. The educational system in this country is designed to chew up and spit out people who expose its failings. Remember Jaime Escalante, the teacher who had amazing success teaching calculus to barrio kids in Los Angeles? Edward James Olmos portrayed him in the film Stand and Deliver, and America got all warm and fuzzy over how he helped those kids. Well, Hollywood didn’t bother making the sequel, where Escalante was systematically targeted by teachers’ unions and drummed out of a job for working long hours and generally making other teachers look bad.

If Chavis is to have any measurable impact on the educational debate in America, he’s going to have to go over the heads of professional educators. Thrust this book into the hands of all the parents you know and implore them to read it. It’s hard to imagine a clearer call for pulling American education out of a haze of multiculturalism and fuzzy math, and getting back to the basics of the three Rs and hard work. Chavis is passionate, articulate, and entertaining. He’s also right.

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British universities to axe places for UK students and take more foreign students

Remarkably perverse

LEADING universities are drawing up plans to slash thousands of places for British undergraduates and replace them with foreign students paying far higher fees to cope with an expected cut in government funding of 20%-25%. They argue that reducing admissions is preferable to making deep cuts to staff numbers and harming the quality of teaching, for which universities have recently faced fierce criticism.

The plans have been disclosed by Michael Arthur, vice-chancellor of Leeds and the new chairman of the Russell Group of elite universities, in an interview in The Sunday Times today. “It is very, very worrying,” Arthur says. “The general view round the table is it is better to cut places than to cut [funding per student].” Arthur, who fears cuts of 20%-25% in government spending on higher education after the election, believes the number of people going to university has peaked and says the government’s target of 50% of school-leavers taking degrees is unlikely to be reached. Last week, even Gordon Brown, the prime minister, admitted for the first time that cuts in public spending would be necessary.

Arthur argues for a rise in tuition fees to at least £5,000 to make it financially worthwhile to take on British undergraduates. The current level is £3,225, but those from outside the European Union pay at least three times this amount. Imperial College London says it loses £2,500 a year on every British undergraduate.

One recently retired vice-chancellor described educating UK students as “the charity end of the business”, adding: “We do want to educate them and we have to but in financial terms they are nothing but a drain.”

Bahram Bekhradnia, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, said: “If cuts happened on any scale, it is likely that significant numbers of the most prestigious universities would take fewer cut-price British students and more of the overseas students.” Some already plan growth in overseas numbers, partly to earn money. They include University College London (UCL), Leeds, Lancaster and Newcastle. UCL plans to cut 600 British and EU students by 2012, 6% of the total, and replace them with overseas undergraduates and with postgraduates.

Lancaster plans to freeze UK numbers and increase its overseas contingent by half by 2015. Currently, nearly 900 of its 8,800 undergraduates and almost 1,400 of its 3,100 postgraduates are from outside the EU. Newcastle this year increased recruitment of overseas students by 26% to shore up its finances. Bristol, Leeds, Manchester, Reading and Sheffield are among those cutting hundreds of jobs. Sheffield is shedding more than 300. Exeter is cutting spending by 5% this year, as are Imperial and Warwick. King’s College London is reducing spending by 10% even before the scale of government cuts is known and has announced the closure of its engineering department.

Institutions now disagree on what to do next. Many former polytechnics and other new universities believe it must be a priority to increase the numbers of people taking degrees especially during a recession, even if the amount available to teach each one falls as a result.

Traditional universities in the Russell Group and 1994 Group want to preserve what they spend on teaching each student. They have been stung by criticism that the quality on which they trade to attract foreign students is declining. Concerns have been highlighted by student revolts at universities such as Bristol and Manchester and by a scathing Commons report.

While most vice-chancellors have denied there are any problems with the quality of teaching, David Lammy, the universities minister, warned them this month: “Even if you aren’t complacent about quality, you sometimes appear to be. I think you have to recognise that and deal with it.”

Steve Smith, vice-chancellor of Exeter and president of Universities UK, which represents campus executive heads, said: “There comes a point when if you cut [funding per student] it will damage quality.”

Some are worried cuts could devastate institutions. The last time funding fell steeply was in the early 1980s, with a 15% overall reduction. Salford university lost more than 40% of funding.

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21 September, 2009

Thousands of British pupils receiving police escorts home in anti-social behaviour crackdown

What an appalling sign of social breakdown. Leftist leniency on crime bears fruit

Thousands of pupils are to have police escorts home because of a surge in youth crime. Patrols by community support officers will provide 'visible reassurance' to pupils and the public, according to Whitehall officials. The patrols started in high-risk areas four years ago and are in place in all major cities and 12 London boroughs.

To date, 65 local authorities in England have carried out 15,292 patrols covering 1,632 primary and secondary schools, according to figures from the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF). Some 64,017 pupils have been spoken to by officers, the figures show, and 2,497 have been referred to other services, including drug and alcohol services, or activities in their area. As about 5,000 schools already have a dedicated police officer linked to them, it means many children are effectively being policed from the start of the school day, until evening.

It is believed that police have been focusing their efforts on areas where there have been reports of violence or anti-social behaviour caused by rival gangs meeting up after school. In Wood Green, North London, extra police and support officers are on duty for three hours protecting pupils at the end of lessons. Officers based in secondaries escort children on to buses or walking home from lessons.

Ian Kibblewhite, of the Metropolitan Police, said: 'The idea of a visible presence is to keep a lid on things. 'We don't want to arrest anybody - if that happens we've failed. 'This is preventative work to stop us having to respond to trouble.'

The DCSF said it would support patrols in any area that it is deemed necessary, but added they did not expect them to be used around every school. But Will McMahon, of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King's College, London, warned: 'More behaviour will be criminalised.'

Government grants of up to £765,000 per district are on offer to fund the patrols.

SOURCE




Australia: Negligent government school: 8yo left behind on excursion -- many miles from home

SHE packed her violin, making sure it fitted snugly in its case after she finished her performance and waited for her classmates, teachers and bus to take her home. But the eight-year-old Warwick Central State School pupil sat alone crying on a Toowoomba park bench for a bus which had already left without her. “I was there by myself for about an hour,” the Year 4 pupil said yesterday.

Her mum Belinda Evans was “absolutely disgusted” when she learnt of the ordeal. “You drop your kids off to school and you think they'll be safe,” Mrs Evans said. “You don't think they'd be left behind - sobbing on a bench in Toowoomba - 40 minutes from home.”

The little girl was spotted by another Warwick Central mum who attended the Today's Youth in Music Education event on Thursday. “She recognised the Central uniform my daughter was wearing, saw her crying and alone and knew the bus had already left,” Mrs Evans said.

The Good Samaritan called Central to inform the school a little girl had been left behind and, while grateful for the woman's help, the forgotten pupil's father Brian was ropable. “The bus didn't come back (for her); a stranger drove my daughter home,” Mr Evans said. “I keep thinking 'what if?' What if that lady didn't find her?” Mrs Evans added. “When I got her back, I didn't want to let her go; let go of my baby. “Anyone could have got her, that's what scares me the most.”

The Evans' said the worst part about their daughter's ordeal was that the school was not transparent in their actions or in dealing with the situation. “They (Warwick Central SS) did not contact us (after the incident),” Mr Evans said. “There were 18 kids on the trip. They should've done a roll call or head count; don't they have procedures?”

Angry, the couple went to principal Trish Maskell for answers when their daughter was safely returned about 4pm. Unhappy with the response, Mr Evans contacted Education Queensland. According to the Evans', it will be a while before their daughter goes on another school excursion. “She has been transferred to another Warwick school next term and the first thing I asked them was if they've ever left a child behind,” Mr Evans said.

A Department of Education Queensland spokesperson yesterday confirmed they were investigating the incident at Central. “(The department) is treating the matter extremely seriously and considers it unacceptable that a student could be left behind,” the spokesperson said. “A large number of schools from across the region also took part (in the event); the department has offered its support and apologised to the student and her parents. “The Acting Executive Director Schools has been in contact with the family again (yesterday) to provide further support and an explanation of what happened. “(Warwick Central State School) is reviewing its processes around excursions and student rolls.”

SOURCE




Australia: One country-school classroom to cost $850,000

More "stimulus money" waste

A 9m by 6m classroom will cost a small country school $850,000 under the federal school building program, even though for only $100,000 more, the local council built a library 10 times the size.

Jerilderie Public School applied to refurbish and extend its administration block under the Building the Education Revolution, which, after approval from the NSW Education Department, added a new stand-alone classroom.

But Parents and Citizens Association president Craig Knight said the project managers appointed by the department, Laing O'Rourke, had informed the school in southern NSW last week that the $850,000 grant would now be enough to build only one classroom.

Mr Knight said the school rejected the offer of a single classroom, saying the administration block, which would include a staff room, one classroom and school offices, was the priority. He said it was unbelievable that one small building could swallow most of the school's grant.

"There are local non-government schools around the district who are getting multiple classrooms, toilet blocks, kitchenettes and covered outdoor areas for their $850,000," he said.

Mr Knight said the local council built and fitted out a library, which opened in March, that covers about 500sqm, including landscaping, toilets and kitchen for $915,000. "Our admin building only has a kitchenette, not even the plumbing associated with toilets," he said.

Answering a question on the issue in parliament yesterday from the local member, Liberal MP for Farrer, Sussan Ley, Education Minister Julia Gillard said she would look into the matter.

"I would issue these words of caution: when matters have been raised by the opposition in the past, we have frequently found that things asserted as facts are nowhere near facts," she said. "We have also frequently found, when we have tried to follow matters up with members of the opposition, or at least some of them, that they are more interested in making a political point than they are in getting matters resolved for their local schools."

Ms Gillard then read to parliament an email from a rural principal, Tony Shaw of Glen Park Primary School in Victoria, lamenting the "unprecedented" attack by the opposition to "discredit" the BER, which he said "calls into question the high-quality education provided in rural schools in a condescending and arrogant manner".

In a letter addressed to Ms Gillard from another school and tabled in the Senate last night, Abbotsford Public School council questioned the cost of a BER proposal to demolish four of the school's classrooms and replace them with four new classrooms at a cost of $2.5m.

The letter said the school community had unsuccessfully sought cost breakdowns and was "bewildered why (the NSW Education Department) employs such practices and products that are quadruple the cost of what could be obtained in the free market".

The department was unavailable for comment last night.

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20 September, 2009

House backs bill to overhaul student loan program

That good ol' generous U.S. taxpayer again. How can the government give more to students and save money at the same time? It's cuckoo talk. And does anybody believe that a Federal bureaucracy will be more efficient than a private bank?

The House voted Thursday in favor of the biggest overhaul of college aid programs since their creation in the 1960s — a bill to oust private lenders from the student loan business and put the government in charge. The vote was 253-171 in favor of a bill that fulfills nearly all of President Obama's campaign promises for higher education: The measure ends subsidies for private lenders, boosts Pell Grants for needy students and creates a grant program to improve community colleges, among other things. "These are reforms that have been talked about for years, but they're always blocked by special interests and their lobbyists," Obama said Thursday during a rally at the University of Maryland.

"Well, because you voted for change in November, we're going to bring change in the House of Representatives today," the president said. Ending loan subsidies and turning control over to the government would save taxpayers an estimated $87 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Lawmakers would use that money to help make college more affordable, increasing the maximum Pell Grant by $1,400 to $6,900 over the next decade.

"The choice before us is clear. We can either keep sending these subsidies to banks or we can start sending them directly to students," said the bill's sponsor, California Democratic Rep. George Miller, chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. Yet the money also would be spent on things that don't help pay for college, such as construction at K-12 schools and new preschool programs.

And while the measure would increase Pell Grants, it would do nothing to curb college costs, which rise much faster than Pell Grants do. In addition, the CBO says that when administrative costs and market conditions are considered, the savings from switching to direct government lending could be much lower, $47 billion instead of $87 billion.

Republicans warned that instead of saving the government money, as Democrats promise, the bill could wind up costing the government more money. "Unfortunately, the numbers just don't add up," said Minnesota Rep. John Kline, senior Republican on the Education Committee.

Lawmakers split largely along party lines on the bill, with only six Republicans in favor and three Democrats against. The measure goes next to the Senate, where its fate is a little less certain.

Obama didn't get his way on one thing: The president proposed earlier this year to take Pell Grants out of lawmakers' hands entirely, making the program an entitlement like Social Security and Medicare, which would have cost an estimated $117 billion — more than lawmakers have to spend. Under the measure, Pell Grants would rise slightly more than inflation over the next decade, increasing on average about 2.6% yearly, according to the bill's sponsors. However, the grants would still depend on annual spending bills and could rise less than promised, as has happened in the past.

Lawmakers met Obama halfway on the labyrinthine college aid form; Obama proposed to eliminate it altogether when he ran for president, but the bill would keep the form and shorten it.

As consumers, college students probably wouldn't notice much difference in their loans, which they would get through their schools. However, officials at several colleges worry they may not be able to make the switch to direct government loans in time for next year, and Education Department officials said this week they do not intend to extend the deadline.

More schools administer federal loans through the subsidized loan program than from the government's direct loan program. Private lenders made $56 billion in government-backed loans to more than 6 million students last year, compared with $14 billion in direct loans from the government.

Republicans argued it is wrong to put the government in near-total control of student lending. Many also worry about job losses in their districts. Private lenders employ more than 30,000 people whose jobs depend on the subsidized loan program, and the industry says many would be laid off. Sallie Mae, the biggest student lender, has about 8,500 employees in the program and probably would lay off about 30% of those workers. It still will have contracts to service federal loans. Its employees have held a series of town hall meetings and petition drives to involve local leaders in Pennsylvania, Florida, Delaware, New York and Indiana.

Democratic Rep. David Wu of Oregon said lenders still could make all the loans they want. "What will not happen anymore is making those student loans with taxpayer subsidies," he said.

SOURCE




Professor Fired, Escorted from Campus by Police over Mysterious ‘Sexual Harassment’ Charge Two Days after Complaining about Defects in Policy

The abuse of campus sexual harassment policies to punish dissenting professors has hit a new low at East Georgia College (EGC) in Swainsboro. Professor Thomas Thibeault made the mistake of pointing out—at a sexual harassment training seminar—that the school's sexual harassment policy contained no protection for the falsely accused. Two days later, in a Kafkaesque irony, Thibeault was fired by the college president for sexual harassment without notice, without knowing his accuser or the charges against him, and without a hearing. Thibeault turned to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for help.

"If you were to write a novel about the abuse of sexual harassment regulations to get rid of a dissenter, you couldn't do better than the real-life story of Thomas Thibeault," FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. "Anyone with a modicum of respect for freedom of speech or simple fairness should be aghast at this blatant abuse of power by East Georgia College."

Thibeault's ordeal started shortly after August 5, 2009 when, during a faculty training session regarding the college's sexual harassment policy, he presented a scenario regarding a different professor and asked, "what provision is there in the Sexual Harassment policy to protect the accused against complaints which are malicious or, in this case, ridiculous?" Vice President for Legal Affairs Mary Smith, who was conducting the session, replied that there was no such provision to protect the accused, so Thibeault responded that "the policy itself is flawed."

Two days later, Thibeault was summoned to EGC President John Bryant Black's office. According to Thibeault's written account of the meeting, which was sent to Black and which Black has not disputed, Thibeault met with Black and Smith. Black told Thibeault that he "was a divisive force in the college at a time when the college needed unity" and that Thibeault must resign by 11:30 a.m. or be fired and have his "long history of sexual harassment ... made public." This unsubstantiated allegation took Thibeault by surprise. Black added that Thibeault would be escorted off campus by Police Chief Drew Durden and that Black had notified the local police that he was prepared to have Thibeault arrested for trespassing if he returned to campus. At no point was Thibeault presented with the charges against him or given any chance to present a defense. Refusing to resign, Thibeault understood that he was fired.

Most likely realizing that he had fired Thibeault without any of the due process mandated by Georgia's Board of Regents, Black then began attempting to justify Thibeault's firing after the fact. On August 11, Black wrote Thibeault to say that since Thibeault had failed to resign by the deadline, "EGC has begun dismissal proceedings. ... [A] faculty committee has been appointed to conduct an informal inquiry." He then paradoxically wrote, "Their charge is to advise me whether or not dismissal proceedings shall be undertaken." Meanwhile, Thibeault still had not been provided with any charges, he was still banned from campus, and he still appeared to be fired-with the "dismissal proceedings" occurring after the fact.

Then, on August 25, Black wrote Thibeault again, claiming for the first time that Thibeault had actually been suspended, not fired: "the committee's finding was that there is sufficient evidence to support your suspension." Black added that Thibeault was about to be terminated for sexual harassment, that the charges finally would be sent upon request, and that Thibeault finally could request a hearing. Thibeault requested the charges on August 28 but has received no response. His lawyer also has inquired for weeks with no response.

"How can a public college professor in the United States be fired and kicked off campus by the president and police but, more than a month later, still have no idea why?" asked Adam Kissel, Director of FIRE's Individual Rights Defense Program. "Do Georgia's taxpayers know this is how their colleges are treating their professors?"

FIRE outlined many of these shocking violations of due process and freedom of speech in a letter to University System of Georgia Chancellor Erroll B. Davis Jr. on August 27, with copies to Black and Smith. None of them has responded. Neither Black nor Smith has even bothered to comment on the discrepancies between Thibeault's account and Black's erratic letters.

"It is hard to imagine a worse failure of due process in this case," Kissel said. "Nobody knows what the actual allegations are because they are being kept secret, even from Thibeault himself. In the stunning absence of any charges, evidence, or hearings, it is clear that EGC has punished Professor Thibeault for speaking out against a flawed harassment policy."

SOURCE





19 September, 2009

Back-to-School Patriotism

Whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, American history is an irreversible force, ever-progressing and changing the course of human history. Within the past five years alone, America established the first modern democratic state in the Middle East and elected the first African-American president in history. Yet, as students made their way back into America’s classrooms this fall, studies show that our children are less interested in history than ever before.

In 2005, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough testified before the U.S. Senate that American history was the nation’s worst subject. Two years later, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the “Nation’s Report Card”) confirmed McCullough’s findings.

And recently, Diane Ravitch of New York University said, “Every national assessment has shown that students don’t know history … scores for U.S. history are consistently the lowest of any subject tested; typically more than half of high school seniors score ‘below basic,’ the lowest possible rating. In no other subject do a majority of students register so little knowledge of a subject taught in school.”

It is a sad and telling diagnosis of America’s conscience. How can we expect the next generation of Americans to protect and defend the country’s legacy if they do not know their own history? Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote, “When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.” Our country’s very freedom and future hinges on education. How can we ask our children to fight, and perhaps die, for a country they do not know?

America’s love for history has always been self-propelled. Long before the ivory towers of pedagogy there were the log cabins of self-education. Men like Abraham Lincoln were voracious readers, often going to great lengths to get their hands on, and minds around, the classics. Education wasn’t limited to five days a week, seven hours a day and nine months out of the year; it was an on-going process with children often spending their few spare hours of the day reading under candlelight.

Today, our textbooks are more intent on political correctness, dulled-down event reporting and universal appeal. The dramatic and realistic story of America is mostly absent in the study of American history. Text authors, publishers and higher education experts have desiccated the rich drama and conflicts of history and replaced them with dry narratives that read more like recipe books and less like thrilling, page-turning novels.

My goal, along with a group of award-winning teachers, is to reverse this precarious trend and reshape the future of history education in America. Known as Team HOPE (History Opens Eyes), we have begun incorporating “America: The Last Best Hope” and other curriculum materials into a comprehensive and compelling narrative about our country. “Last Best Hope” does not look or read like any other textbook. It is the story of a people inextricably linked by the common threads of freedom and virtue, a story of men and women who rallied a great people behind them throughout the course of our nation’s history. In “Last Best Hope,” history is more than rote memorization or tedious facts; it is drama, romance, comedy, mystery, action, tragedy and triumph. I believe in the “warts and all” version of American history—not “warts, and that’s all.” And because of this, our project has been positively reviewed by scholars from all ideological perspectives.

This revolution we are commencing is not limited to classrooms or textbooks. Remember parents: You are a child’s first and most important teacher and the single-most effective Department of Education. President Ronald Reagan said, “Let me offer lesson No. 1 about America: All great change in America begins at the dinner table.” As our children return to school this fall, let us actively engage and encourage their interest in history—from the dinner tables to the classrooms.

If we are to restore America’s love for its rich and great history, we must begin by telling the truth, not in a prosaic, tiresome fashion, but in a captivating and memorable way. Our story is one of great suffering and great triumph; it is what Abraham Lincoln called “the last best hope of earth.”

As we prepare for the new school year, let us remind our children of America’s true greatness, and in so doing, let us give them a true love story.

SOURCE




Once upon a time there was a subject called history . . .

A profound and pitiful ignorance of Britain's national past is the shameful legacy of so-called progressive educationalists, says Dominic Sandbrook

In April 1942, the Luftwaffe launched a series of night bombing raids against the historic cathedral cities of Exeter, Bath, Norwich, York and Canterbury. The targets had been picked out of the Baedeker Guide to Britain, not because they were militarily important or commanded crucial transport routes, but because they represented something vaguer but more profound.

The Nazis' aim was to smash Britain's moral and historical heritage – and, of course, they failed. More than 1,500 people were killed, but York Minister and Canterbury Cathedral still stood proud and unbowed amid the flames, symbolising the long centuries of England's past. Not even the might of the Nazi empire, it seemed, could break the thread of our national history.

What a tragic irony, then, that where Hitler's bombers failed, a generation of home-grown political meddlers and "progressive" educationalists have succeeded all too well. For to anyone with even a passing interest in the teaching, reading and writing of our national past, the Historical Association's massive new survey on history teaching in secondary schools reads like the report of some callous, devastating military barbarism.

Across the board, history teaching is in retreat. Seven out of ten teenagers say they enjoy the subject, yet barely three out of 10 study it to GCSE level. Among younger children, the hours set aside for history are being slashed to make way for supposedly vocational subjects. And almost unbelievably, 12-year-olds in half of Tony Blair's beloved academies study history for just one hour – one! – a week.

An entire generation, in other words, is leaving school ignorant of what their parents and grandparents once took for granted: the solid, reassuring knowledge of what we all once recognised as our national story.

Terrible as they are, the Historical Association's figures come as little surprise. A few years ago, when I was a lecturer at one of northern England's biggest redbrick universities, I quickly realised that it was a mistake to assume any prior knowledge of British history on the part of our 18-year-old students. Most had studied the Nazis and the American civil rights movement in great detail at A-level, but few had heard of, say, David Lloyd George or Stanley Baldwin, or could explain why Britain had won and lost a global empire.

They were bright and keen to learn, but had been betrayed by a system that fed them titbits of knowledge, and by a culture of continuous testing that left little time to appreciate the broad sweep of our national past. But by today's standards, they were lucky. For as the Historical Association points out, if the trend continues, history may well decline into virtual irrelevance as a school subject, overtaken by Media Studies and Beauty Therapy.

It is too easy to blame the students, who find themselves under intense pressure to get the best possible grades for their university applications – which inevitably means that they pick subjects that are seen as "easier" or that offer more "value". And it is too easy, I think, to blame their teachers.

Whenever I give sixth-form talks, whether in private or state schools, I am always struck by the sheer love of history shown by most teachers, whose attitudes often put academics themselves to shame. Only a few weeks ago, giving a lecture to a talented and engaging group of A-level students on the Isle of Man, I felt almost humbled by the enterprise and sheer commitment of their history teachers, a husband-and-wife team who might have been an advertisement for education as one of life's most enriching vocations.

But there is no doubt that something has gone badly wrong when seven out of 10 schoolchildren are no longer studying history at the age of 16, when two out of 10 think Britain was once occupied by the Spanish, and when some identify Sir Winston Churchill as the first man on the moon. And the blame lies at the very top, shared by politicians of both parties, who have been systematically cheating and betraying our children since the 1980s.

During the Thatcher years, it was meddling from the top that downgraded history from a compulsory to an optional subject at the age of 16 – which, because it was seen as "difficult", made it easy pickings for Mickey Mouse subjects such as Beauty Therapy. It was supposedly "progressive" interference, meanwhile, that did away with old-fashioned essay questions and replaced them with empathy exercises and multiple-choice quizzes that sacrificed any sense of intellectual depth or discipline.

And perhaps above all, it was in Westminster and Whitehall that officials designed our absurd Yo! Sushi approach to history, in which schools randomly pick unrelated historical topics like saucers from a conveyor belt, instead of studying our national story as a continuous narrative, which is how any sensible person sees it.

What makes this betrayal all the more depressing is that in society at large there is clearly such an eager appetite for historical narrative. Even now, 20 years after I was forced to do empathy exercises ("Imagine you are a housewife in Hamburg in 1932 …") as part of my history GCSE lessons, British readers devour more popular history than almost any other nation, helping to keep Andrew Roberts in silk pyjamas and Simon Schama in leather jackets.

With almost four million members happily forking out to visit its country houses, castles, factories and workhouses, the National Trust is the biggest membership organisation in the country. Even the latest Booker shortlist reflects our deep shared thirst for history, from A S Byatt's lovingly evoked Edwardian social landscape to Sarah Waters's haunting recreation of Attlee's Britain and Hilary Mantel's coruscating portraits of Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII. And, of course, it was the readers of this very paper who contributed £25,000 to the reprint of H E Marshall's Our Island Story, the children's history of England first published in 1905 that still gives a more entertaining overall account of our national story than most modern textbooks, even if it is a bit dated.

Any sensible government, recognising the extent of the popular enthusiasm for history, would have intervened long ago to restore the subject as a central, compulsory element of the national curriculum. Instead, Labour have flapped and floundered, bleating about Britishness lessons and citizenship classes instead of doing the one thing guaranteed to inculcate a sense of community and identity: teaching children their national history.

One reason that America has proved so successful as a melting pot for immigrants, after all, is that its schools give their children a solid and reassuring sense of themselves as Americans, embedded in a shared national past which is studded with patriotic landmarks from the Declaration of Independence to the Gettysburg Address. And we have only to look across the Irish Sea, where schools in the Republic patiently trace their national story from Ireland's first Christian missionaries to its bloody struggle for independence, to see that teaching your national history from start to finish is hardly rocket science. Nor is it necessarily reactionary or old-fashioned or even conservative, as its critics suggest. It is simply common sense.

"The past is a foreign country," L P Hartley famously wrote at the beginning of his great novel The Go-Between. "They do things differently there." Exploring that vast and impossibly rich continent ought to be one of the most exciting intellectual adventures in any boy or girl's lifetime: a chance not just to tread the fields of Hastings or Bosworth, or to see Shakespeare and Milton at work, but to encounter an enormously, uproariously diverse range of characters, to make lifelong acquaintances, to draw lessons and parallels, to meet humanity in the raw.

In any sane and decent society, that journey ought to be the centrepiece of the education system, a long and thoughtful expedition, not a botched and half-hearted day-trip to which most children are no longer invited. And one day, I suspect, we will look back and judge that our Government's ignorance and neglect of that wonderful, dazzling, irresistible country was among the greatest of its failures and the most unforgivable of its many betrayals.

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18 September, 2009

Educational rot in DC

Instead of President Obama addressing school students across the nation, he might have accomplished more by focusing his attention on the educational rot in schools in the nation's capital. The American Legislative Exchange Council recently came out with their 15th edition of "Report Card on American Education: A State-by-State Analysis." Academic achievement in no state is much to write home about but in Washington, D.C., by any measure, it approaches criminal fraud. Let's look at the numbers.

Only 14 percent of Washington's fourth-graders score at or above proficiency in the reading and math portions of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test. Their national rank of 51 makes them the nation's worst. Eighth-graders are even further behind with only 12 percent scoring at or above proficiency in reading and 8 percent in math and again the worst performance in the nation. One shouldn't be surprised by Washington student performance on college admissions tests. They have an average composite SAT score of 925 and ACT score of 19.1, compared to the national average respectively of 1017 and 21.1. In terms of national ranking, their SAT and ACT rankings are identical to their fourth- and eighth-grade rankings -- dead last.

Washington's political and education establishment might excuse these outcomes by arguing that because most students are black, the schools are underfunded and overcrowded. Let's look at such a claim. During the 2006-07 academic year, expenditures per pupil averaged $13,848 compared to a national average of $9,389. That made Washington's per pupil expenditures the third highest in the nation coming in behind New Jersey ($14,998) and New York ($14,747). Washington's teacher-student ratio is 13.9 compared with the national average of 15.3 students per teacher, ranking 18th in the nation. What about teacher salaries? Washington's teachers are the highest paid in the nation, having an average annual salary of $61,195 compared with the nation's average $46,593. Despite the academic performance of Washington's students, they have a graduation rate of 61 percent compared to the national average of 70 percent. That suggests the issuance of fraudulent high school diplomas.

Currently, Washington, D.C. has an Opportunity Scholarship Program, which allows qualified low-income families to claim up to $7,500 per student toward a private education of their choice. Obama's Democratic Congress, acting on the behalf of the education establishment, has killed the program and there's the possibility that the 1,700 students currently enrolled will have to return to D.C. public schools.

The staunchest opponents of school choice are hypocrites. They want, demand and can afford school choice for themselves but for others not so affluent school choice it is a different matter. President and Mrs. Barack Obama enrolled their two daughters in Washington's most prestigious Sidwell Friends School, forking over $28,000 a year for each girl. Whilst senator from Illinois, the Obama's enrolled their girls in the University of Chicago's Laboratory School, a private school in Chicago charging almost $20,000 for each girl. A Heritage Foundation survey found that 37 percent of the members of the House of Representatives and 45 percent of senators in the 110th Congress sent their children to private schools. Public school teachers enroll their own children in nonpublic schools to a much greater extent than the general public, in some cases four and five times greater. In Cincinnati, about 41 percent of public school teachers send their children to nonpublic schools. In Chicago it is 38 percent, Los Angeles 24 percent, New York 32 percent, and Philadelphia 44 percent. The behavior of public school teachers is quite suggestive. It's like my offering to take you to a restaurant and you find out that neither the chef nor the waiters eat there. That suggests they have some inside information from which you might benefit.

For people in power to tolerate the Washington, D.C. school system is despicable. For a black president to do so might qualify as betrayal.

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Straight Pride

by Mike Adams

Dear UNC-Wilmington PRIDE:

I am writing to express my interest in joining you during your appearances at UNC-Wilmington Resident Assistant (RA) training next semester. At the beginning of every semester, members of your UNC-Wilmington student group speak to all of our RAs. You describe yourself as an organization dedicated to the eradication of bigotry and the promotion of inclusion. But then you contradict yourself by saying you seek to "Improve the quality of LGBTIQA lives and increase understanding and acceptance of LGBTIQA individuals in the general university community."

Unfortunately, you've excluded a very important group of students on our campus. I would like to come join you to speak on their behalf. That group is, of course, the straight student population that refuses to join your political alliance in support of the gay "civil rights" agenda.

If I understand correctly - and, forgive me, as I've never taken the Queer Theory course offered by my department - LGBTIQA stands for the following: Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, Trans-gendered, Inter-sexed, Queer, and Allies.

During the two and a half days of training concerning LGBTIQA issues I am told you made the following major points: 1) Heterosexist privilege is rampant in America; 2) Most people are guilty of heterosexism. You also passed out sheets defining certain terms such as "homophobia" and "inter-sexed." I'm glad you decided on one definition for those unable to decide upon one gender identity - those who seek to change genders, not to mention bathrooms, from one day to the next.

I am told that the president of your group spoke at RA training and that others shared their "coming out" stories. I would like to speak to you about my own coming out story, which was the day I decided I was opposed to endless gay indoctrination. People stopped talking to me (read: excluded me) after I came out. I'm sure that's happened to others on our campus. Therefore, I would like to pass out "Straight Pride" stickers at the end of my talk - that is, if you are in favor of intellectual diversity, tolerance, and inclusion.

You may or may not know that - shortly after RA training was over - there was a small fire in one of our dormitories. The RA in charge of evacuating the students was unsure of what to do but he managed and no one was hurt. His uncertainly was due to the fact that there was no training for fire evacuation. Although not taught about fire evacuation procedures the RAs are taught about hate crimes. I think we might want to consider protecting all students from fires, which actually happen on campus, instead of protecting a tiny fraction from hate crimes, which never happen on campus.

Although hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation never happen on our campus there is a problem with homosexual harassment. I'm not talking about harassment of homosexuals. I'm talking about harassment by homosexuals.

At the end of training, all RAs are asked to become "allies" who will put a little bookmark on their door and offer their rooms up as "safe spaces." Over the course of these last few years some RAs have told PRIDE members and university officials that they would prefer not to be "allies." The response has been to recommend more LGBTIQA training - as if two and a half days were not enough. One student was even told "You really need to talk to someone" as if he were suffering from an illness.

But disagreeing with the gay agenda is not a disease. It is a different point of view. And it should be respected.

PRIDE and UNC-Wilmington will be quick to point out that RAs are not forced into becoming allies or forced into making their dorm rooms "safe spaces." But there is no need for a mandate when people abandon their principles.

Unfortunately, after people abandon those principles they feel a sense of shame and remorse. I want to do something about that. I want them to feel proud of who they are and willing to stand up and articulate what they believe.

So, in conclusion, will you consider including me in your RA training sessions? I can do it in less than two and a half days. I can even show them how to put out fires that are real.

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Australia: Useless Victoria police do nothing while "refugees" destroy Australia's Indian education industry

You are not allowed to mention it these days but in the past there was more open acknowledgement that the street thugs are mostly African refugees. That means, of course, that the police are hamstrung by political correctness

India has urged Australia to quickly put in place promised measures to protect its citizens after new assaults last weekend in Melbourne. India's foreign ministry confirmed two Indian nationals and two other persons of Indian origin were assaulted in Australia on September 12. "It would help if various measures being contemplated by the Australian side, in addition to those already announced, are put in place at the earliest, to prevent reoccurrence of such incidents in the future," said a statement from the foreign ministry.

Victorian Premier John Brumby said incidents such as the weekend attack on four Indian men will make his mission to repair damaged relations between Australia and India all the more difficult. Mr Brumby leaves Australia for India next Monday for a trip designed to promote Melbourne as a safe destination for Indian students to study. [What a laugh!]

"I don't think there is any doubt at all that some of the events over the last few months have damaged our brand and the Australian brand in India," he told reporters on Wednesday. "It will make that task (promoting Melbourne as a good place to study) difficult. I think it makes the trip to India even more important."

A series of attacks on Indian students since May has strained diplomatic ties between New Delhi and Canberra and each new attack prompts wide media coverage here.

The Australian government has promised to increase police patrols and weed out suspect education and migration agents after revelations that foreign students were falling victim to sub-standard courses and visa scams. "We are concerned at the recurring attacks on Indians in Australia and we hope that the latest incident is investigated with care and the culprits are dealt with," the statement said.

The attacks have cast a shadow over the Australian education industry for foreign students which is worth $15.53 billion. About 95,000 Indians are studying in Australia after a university publicity blitz targeting the country's growing middle class. The ministry said it had taken note of assurances given by the Australian authorities but now expected some action.

SOURCE

Some excerpts from another report about the pathetic police handling of the most recent attack:

Police have defended a four-day delay in releasing details about a racist attack on four men in Melbourne’s north-east that has sparked outrage in India. The Times of India today reported that up to 70 people were involved in the bashing of Sukhdip Singh, 26, his brother Gurdeep Singh, uncle Mukhtair Singh and nephew Indpal Singh, 20.

But Victoria Police acting Senior Sergeant Glenn Parker said the attack had been exaggerated in Indian press reports and denied there had been a cover-up by police. Acting Senior Sergeant Parker today denied Indian media reports that up to 70 people had been involved in the assault. He said 15 to 20 people were believed to have watched the assault and were yelling racial abuse when police arrived...

A Victoria Police spokeswoman said because four men were arrested following the assault there had been no "operational reason" for police to publicise the incident. The four arrested men, aged between 20 and 30, were later released without charge. Police are now seeking witnesses.





17 September, 2009

Critical thinking? You need knowledge

THE LATEST fad to sweep K-12 education is called “21st-Century Skills.’’ States - including Massachusetts - are adding them to their learning standards, with the expectation that students will master skills such as cooperative learning and critical thinking and therefore be better able to compete for jobs in the global economy. Inevitably, putting a priority on skills pushes other subjects, including history, literature, and the arts, to the margins. But skill-centered, knowledge-free education has never worked.

The same ideas proposed today by the 21st-Century Skills movement were iterated and reiterated by pedagogues across the 20th century. In 1911, the dean of the education school at Stanford called on his fellow educators to abandon their antiquated academic ideals and adapt education to the real life and real needs of students.

In 1916, a federal government report scoffed at academic education as lacking relevance. The report’s author said black children should “learn to do by doing,’’ which he considered to be the modern, scientific approach to education.

Just a couple of years later, “the project method’’ took the education world by storm. Instead of a sequential curriculum laid out in advance, the program urged that boys and girls engage in hands-on projects of their own choosing, ideally working cooperatively in a group. It required activity, not docility, and awakened student motivation. It’s remarkably similar to the model advocated by 21st-century skills enthusiasts.

The list goes on: students built, measured, and figured things out while solving real-life problems, like how to build a playhouse, pet park, or a puppet theater, as part of the 1920s and 1930s “Activity Movement.’’ From the “Life Adjustment Movement’’ of the 1950s to “Outcome-Based Education’’ in the 1980s, one “innovation’’ after another devalued academic subject matter while making schooling relevant, hands-on, and attuned to the real interests and needs of young people.

To be sure, there has been resistance. In Roslyn, Long Island, in the 1930s, parents were incensed because their children couldn’t read but spent an entire day baking nut bread. The Roslyn superintendent assured them that baking was an excellent way to learn mathematics.

None of these initiatives survived. They did have impact, however: They inserted into American education a deeply ingrained suspicion of academic studies and subject matter. For the past century, our schools of education have obsessed over critical-thinking skills, projects, cooperative learning, experiential learning, and so on. But they have paid precious little attention to the disciplinary knowledge that young people need to make sense of the world.

For over a century we have numbed the brains of teachers with endless blather about process and abstract thinking skills. We have taught them about graphic organizers and Venn diagrams and accountable talk, data-based decision-making, rubrics, and leveled libraries.

But we have ignored what matters most. We have neglected to teach them that one cannot think critically without quite a lot of knowledge to think about. Thinking critically involves comparing and contrasting and synthesizing what one has learned. And a great deal of knowledge is necessary before one can begin to reflect on its meaning and look for alternative explanations.

Proponents of 21st-Century Skills might wish it was otherwise, but we do not restart the world anew with each generation. We stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us. What matters most in the use of our brains is our capacity to make generalizations, to see beyond our own immediate experience. The intelligent person, the one who truly is a practitioner of critical thinking, has the capacity to understand the lessons of history, to grasp the inner logic of science and mathematics, and to realize the meaning of philosophical debates by studying them.

Through literature, for example, we have the opportunity to see the world through the eyes of another person, to walk in his shoes, to experience life as it was lived in another century and another culture, to live vicariously beyond the bounds of our own time and family and place.

Until we teach both teachers and students to value knowledge and to love learning, we cannot expect them to use their minds well.

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British education unions don't like incentive pay

It offends against their Leftist obsession with equality

The bonus culture is creeping into state schools as a result of market values being imported into the public sector, unions warned today. Education union representatives told the TUC that the public sector risked a rise in the very culture of the finance sector that had contributed to the economic crash.

Unions want current measures that allow school leaders to receive unlimited additional pay on top of their salary to be switched in favour of clearly defined limits, with criteria set down for any additional payments made.

Hank Roberts, from the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, warned of the perils and told delegates how he was temporarily suspended for whistleblowing after he discovered the headteacher at his school was receiving thousands in bonuses on top of his salary of more than £100,000, backed by the chair of governors, who said he was "worth every penny".

In one year alone, the head had been paid more than £400,000 – more than twice what the prime minister earns. He also said other payments to a tiny handful of staff brought the total to almost £1m.

Roberts said the root of the problem was that state schools are responsible for their own budget. "If you set up a system that multiplies the opportunities for graft and corruption, you will get more graft and more corruption," he said.

The proliferation of rising pay differentials was part of the privatisation agenda infecting state education, he added. "There have to be limits on the pay of public servants or they will no longer have it as their priority to serve the public interest, but will substitute it for the serving of their own."

Ed Balls, the schools secretary, has previously backed bonuses for headteachers if linked to their performance.

Brian Cookson, from the NASUWT, said there was "no place" for the bonus culture in the public sector. "It allows individuals to abuse the system and put self interest at the expense of children," he said. "We need to learn the lessons from the behaviour which contributed to the global financial crash. We need to be clear the bonus culture has no place in the state education system."

Unions also backed calls of a government review of the financial accountability for schools, including academies [charter schools].

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Australia: Dumb official attempt to stop school bullying

They are "developing a plan" Big deal!

An autistic boy being bullied at his Ipswich primary school was given a "stop" sign which he waved at his tormentors, sparking outrage from his mother. The eight-year-old boy was armed with the sign by staff at Ipswich West State School after he said he had been pushed down a staircase by bullies and even dangled over a second-storey veranda.

Far from deterring the attacks, his mother said the sign only made him a target for more bullying. “My son is terrified of going to school and no-one is helping him. He’s totally on his own,” she told The Queensland Times. “The situation is atrocious and I think that giving my son a card to wave at these bullies is completely inappropriate."

An Education Queensland spokesman said: “Ipswich West State School implements a range of programs, including one that uses alternative communication methods, to help children – in particular to support students with a disability.”

But the department denied the boy was given the card to show bullies. A spokeswoman said he had been given the card as a prompt for himself, not others. "This student was taking part in a specialist support program called `Stop, Think, Do' which encourages students to stop and think about their own actions before they act or make decisions,'' she said. "This card serves as a prompt for the student to think about his own actions. "This was implemented as part of the student's individual support plan in consultation with specialist staff. The student's parent was aware of the plan. "The school is in the process of developing a new support plan for this student, in consultation with his parents and the specialist staff.''

The spokeswoman also didn't deny that the boy had used the card incorrectly as a defence against bullies.

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16 September, 2009

Harvard offering a degree in education propaganda

They are trying to teach more effective ways of pushing the same old Leftist nostrums, it would seem. You can bet your bottom dollar that not one of their graduates will be pushing for all education to be privatized (vouchers etc.). "How to become a good little Soviet apparatchik" will be more like it

Starting next academic year, Harvard’s Graduate School of Education will offer a new tuition-free doctoral degree program that aims to better equip 25 graduates each year with skills needed to transform the U.S. education system, school officials announced today. The three-year Doctor of Education Leadership Program will be led by faculty at the School of Education, the Harvard Kennedy School, as well as Harvard Business School, and is being billed as the first of its kind in the nation.

Doctoral students at the School of Education currently graduate with an Ed.D.—essentially a research degree not specifically designed to prepare them for shaping education policy, said School of Education Dean Kathleen McCartney. “We really needed to think about a practice doctorate like a J.D. in law or an M.D. in medicine,” McCartney said. “We have to think about how to have a greater impact on education policy and practice, since we already have a huge impact on education research.”

The program is designed for students who already have a few years of work experience and possibly an “entry-level” leadership position in the workplace. It offers a year-long residency program at a Harvard-approved education organization—including Teach for America, well-developed urban school districts across the country, or the Massachusetts Department of Education—during their third year.

Instead of writing dissertations, which McCartney said do little to train future education policymakers and leaders, students enrolled in the new program will receive hands-on training and lead a “capstone project” at the partner organization where they do their residencies. “This program is a big experiment on our part,” McCartney said. “If it’s successful, we hope it will become a model for other education schools.”

The School of Education plans to raise $77 million to support the program—roughly $1 million per student—and the school has currently raised $34 million through a combination of re-purposed funds and donations, most notably, a $10 million grant from The Wallace Foundation, which “seeks to support and share effective ideas and practices that will strengthen education leadership, arts participation and out-of-school learning,” according to its Web site.

Planning for the new degree program first started in December 2005, and McCartney, then the school’s acting dean, asked The Parthenon Group, a consulting firm with an office in Boston, to conduct a market research study to determine what skills employers would be looking for in an Ed.L.D. graduate.

With guidance from the study’s findings, faculty from the three participating schools designed a “modular-based”—rather than a traditional course-based—curriculum, with emphasis on three areas, including learning and teaching, leadership and management, and understanding and transforming the education sector.

The experimental program sparked considerable discussion among faculty when first introduced, McCartney said, and school administrators will be closely monitoring faculty and student feedback for the program.

Arthur E. Levine, the president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and former president of Teachers College at Columbia, expressed his support for the new leadership program. Levine published a study surveying education schools across the country a few years ago, concluding that the majority of programs offered do not adequately prepare aspiring teachers for the classroom. “Admission standards were low, curricula weren’t tied to any skills people needed in their jobs, and field experience was weak,” Levine said. “I looked around the country for an exemplary program and couldn’t find one.” But the “innovative” elements of the School of Education’s new leadership program show promise, Levine said.

Levine, who taught at the School of Education roughly two decades ago, pointed to the “richness” of the third-year residency program as well as the school’s collaboration with faculty at the Kennedy School and the Business School in particular as strengths. The real challenge, Levine said, is whether the School of Education is able to implement the program as planned. “What stands out now is the creativity, the boldness, the coherence of the plan,” Levine said. “But every one of those parts need to be implemented.”

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Australia: Unruly students 'should be sent to brat class'

VIOLENT and unruly students would be isolated in special classes to cool off under a bold plan to tackle worsening violence in our schools. Public school principals fed up with a lack of resources to deal with troublesome kids who endanger others and disrupt classes have called for the changes in a submission to the Victorian State Government, the Herald Sun reports.

Victorian Principals Association president Gabrielle Leigh yesterday said a network of student development centres staffed by specially trained teachers and welfare workers were needed as schools struggled to cope with extreme behaviour. "It starts at primary level and that's why those schools need the support," she told the Herald Sun. "If the behaviour is being exhibited in year 1 or 2 why can't we do something about it rather than wait for it to become a more serious issue later on in schooling?"

Last year, more than 16,000 public primary and secondary students were suspended in Victoria and more than 200 were expelled. In its submission to the Government, the VPA says the centres would provide an alternative to suspending misbehaving students and hopefully enable them to return to normal classes. Students would be sent with the agreement of principals, parents and department officials.

Ms Leigh said the existing system of dealing with troublemakers was inconsistent and lacked resources. "There are centres, but they are few and far between," she said. "A review into the issue has been going on for months, but nothing has happened and in that time students are being lost to our system."

Youth worker Les Twentyman said the idea was long overdue. "We need to give troubled kids another means of learning. We need to keep them in classrooms and out of court rooms," he said.

Ms Leigh said only one-in-two primary schools had full-time welfare officers. "We want one in every primary school," she said.

SOURCE





15 September, 2009

British homeschoolers protest at government inspections of children

Thousands of parents are prepared to go to court over plans to limit home schooling, The Times has learnt. Parents whose children are educated at home do not have to register with their local authority and are not inspected. But proposals being considered by the Government would change this and threaten parents’ ability to choose the curriculum for their children, campaigners say. “We have a lot of problems with inspectors because they know schools and that model of education isn’t very useful when you are teaching a small number of children,” said Leslie Barson, who is organising a demonstration this week against the plans.

The home-educated child dictated what they learnt, she added. “It doesn’t matter what they learn about, as long as they think it’s a fantastic world out there. The beauty of home education is its flexibility. This would be outlawed by the local authority.”

The Badman report, published this year, recommends that home educators should be made to register with councils annually and set out in writing their plans for educating the child for the next year. They would also be inspected. Graham Badman, the author of the report, said that home education as it stood lacked “the correct balance between the rights of parents and the rights of the child either to an appropriate education or to be safe from harm”. Ed Balls, the Children’s Secretary, has said that he backs Mr Badman’s findings.

Opponents will gather in Central London tomorrow to demonstrate against the plans and have begun a petition on the No 10 website, which already has almost 3,000 signatories, asking the Prime Minister to reject the proposals. They claim that implementing the plans will cost councils £150 million a year and put extra pressure on already oversubscribed schools. Campaigners are also planning to march on Westminster next month.

“We are hoping to get it stopped at this early stage,” Dr Barson said, “But this is a fight to the death. There are people talking about civil disobedience. We would take it to the highest court that we could,” she added. It is not known how many children are home-educated because they do not have to be registered. Supporters of the plans argue that they will help to protect children who are targets of child trafficking or forced marriage.

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Ridicule and hatred are routine hurdles for women rejecting the leftist emphasis on Australian university campuses

Note for non-Australian readers: The major conservative party in Australia is called the Liberal party, which actually makes a lot more sense than the American usage, where "liberals" are big-government devotees, not champions of individual liberty

At the start of her Sydney University orientation, Sasha Uher checked out the political clubs. She found the Socialist Alternative, the Greens, the Marxists, the anti-war party, the Labor Left, the Labor Right. ''I knew university would be more left-leaning but the extreme nature of some of these clubs really concerned me.'' She wondered why the choice was between soft left, mid-left, hard left, far left, lunar left. The Liberals, so important in national politics, seemed not to exist, but Uher eventually found them tucked away in a corner, and decided on the spot to join them.

The abuse started soon after. ''Liberals cop a lot of abuse from the Socialist Alternative, a radical leftist group on campus,'' she told me. ''They label us racist, sexist, homophobic. During an election campaign one socialist came up to me and said 'I campaign against scum like you every day'. There is a particularly strong anti-Israel bias, crossing into anti-Semitism. An insult I've often heard thrown at Liberal students is that we are 'dirty, war-mongering Jews'.

''This is why I am such a passionate advocate for voluntary student unionism. It is a matter that has rallied the Liberals. We strongly believe in individual responsibility … not expecting the government to be the solution to all problems.''

A commerce student, she is president of the university's Liberal Club. Hate speech, Uher says, is not the biggest problem in campus political life because most students are apolitical and steer away from the obsessives and zealots. More insidious, she believes, is the ideological bias of the faculty, and the subtle pressure to conform. ''Lecturers and tutors are predominantly left-leaning and this bias is often reflected in course material and in the way in which class work is marked.''

Every young Liberal woman interviewed for this story said the same thing. ''Unfortunately the only acceptable view within the mainstream of university politics is that of the left,'' said Sarah Constable, 20, an arts student at Sydney University. ''Of course, there is a minority of those who share Liberal values but we are often ostracised. It is pretty tough on campus for us because the minute someone realises you are a Liberal, you are automatically branded a heartless extremist.

''I cannot quantify the countless times I have been called a fascist because I'm a Young Liberal. Tutorials are some of the toughest times. Politics tutorials in particular are filled with people who, if the name John Howard is mentioned, go into some sort of a frenzy. The worst part is that the tutors are often even more extreme. ''At first I thought it was just the Socialist Alternative-types who were extreme; however I have had to sit through countless America-bashing tutorials.''

She joined the Liberal Club after returning from an extended period living in Britain. ''Growing up under an ineffective Labour government just served to reaffirm my Conservative values. I want to see Australia grow and prosper, so I'll work to see the Liberal Party re-elected.''

Prue Gusmerini, 26, studied law at the University of NSW, was apolitical at university, but came to the conclusion she was being fed rubbish by her teachers after two years of volunteer work for poor children. The work led her, after graduation, to her current job as campaign manager for Give Us A Go, a coalition of indigenous groups from Cape York. The campaign is headed by the Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson.

''I worked in some of toughest neighbourhoods in Australia in an effort to understand how the world really worked,'' she said. ''And let me tell you, that reality rarely accorded to the lessons being taught in university halls. ''The predominance of leftist thinking amongst the arts/law faculty was so strong that it took me almost two years to shirk some of its core teachings. I wasn't political at university, but I realised that the emphasis on leftist ideas divorced students from the political realities at play in the outside world.''

Ideological pressure and unreality within universities is a serious issue, but most universities pretend the problem does not exist. An outspoken exception is the vice-chancellor of Macquarie University, Steven Schwartz. ''Universities once had clear ethical purposes but over the years we have lost our moral direction,'' he said in a speech last month. ''The central ethical premise of universities has changed fundamentally … Postmodernists sneered at the achievements of the West and universities slowly sank into the morass of moral relativity.''

Schwartz believes that theory-dominated universities are divorced from practical realities. He is implementing a radical measure to require all students to undertake volunteer work off campus.

He could talk to Prue Gusmerini: ''My first gig in the real world was tutoring children at the Police Citizens and Youth Club at Waterloo, where most of the children were indigenous or the children of recently arrived migrants. From the get-go, it was obvious to me that there were massive institutional barriers to progress.''

She said she later joined the Liberal Party ''because the party's values complement my own conservative disposition, which is in part an extension of my childhood experiences and an extension of my experiences in indigenous politics and communities''.

She was also offended by the left's sneering attitude. ''Within the left there was a group of Howard haters who had no interest in fighting for a strong set of ideas or principles, which I respect, but were motivated by a deep hatred of and contempt for John Howard. It was this group that irked me the most. They stood for nothing.''

Being a Liberal at university can be politically very lonely. Courtney Dunn, 19, has never knowingly met another Liberal at the two University of Western Sydney campuses where she studies for a combined arts and law degree. ''The most visible political students on campus are the hard left, who the average student doesn't relate to, which is further reason why voluntary student unionism is such a positive thing.

''Our assigned reading materials clearly reflect ['progressive'] views. Texts can be so blatantly biased it can be frustrating. One of my lecturers even had the nerve to claim that Anzac Day is a celebration of war and touted it as a strange tradition. One textbook I had this year criticised the Howard government in almost every chapter and did not question a single Labor policy. It is obviously quite intimidating to challenge the views of your peers and ultimately the views of those marking their papers.''

Dunn's family is largely working-class and Labor-voting. She grew up in Campbelltown, and joined the Liberal Party at 17, much to the dismay of Labor-voting uncles.

''I think one of the dangers facing upcoming generations, including my own, is that we are developing an attitude of 'what will the government do about it?' I think the Rudd Government is sending the wrong message to Australians that we can't function without the Government's help in each area of our lives and I feel that this is fundamentally wrong.''

She expects ridicule for being a Liberal at the University of Western Sydney, but adds: ''No-one should be ashamed of being a member of a political party in a country like Australia, which is a democracy and is supposed to be a fair country. Universities are meant to be centres of critical thought.''

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14 September, 2009

The Quietest Trillion

Congratulations. You're about to own $100 billion a year in student loans

The furor over President Obama's trillion-dollar restructuring of American health care has left his other trillion-dollar plan starved for attention. That's how much the federal balance sheet will expand over the next decade if Mr. Obama can convince Congress to approve his pending takeover of the student-loan market.

The Obama plan calls for the U.S. Department of Education to move from its current 20% share of the student-loan origination market to 80% on July 1, 2010, when private lenders will be barred from making government-guaranteed loans. The remaining 20% of the market that is now completely private will likely shrink further as lenders try to comply with regulations Congress created last year. Starting next summer, taxpayers will have to put up roughly $100 billion per year to lend to students.

For decades, loans carrying a federal guarantee have been the most common way of borrowing for college. After raising money in the private capital markets, lenders made the loans, paying a fee to the government for each one. The government covered most of the cost of defaults while allowing the private lenders to make a regulated return.

The system broke down after Congress in 2007 legislated a return so low that no private lenders could make money holding these assets. To keep the money flowing to student borrowers, the government began buying the loans from private originators last year. But this larger federal role was intended to be temporary, with an expiration date next summer. The news from Washington now is that rather than scaling back federal involvement, the pols want the U.S. Department of Education to be the exclusive banker to America's college students.

It's not a popular idea on campus. Loans directly from the feds have been available for decades, but the government's poor customer service has resulted in most borrowers choosing private lenders. This week three dozen college administrators, representing schools from Notre Dame to Nevada-Reno, signed a letter urging a longer transition period to this "public option." The fear is that the bureaucrats will not be able to pull off a takeover in just eight months. "Any delay in getting funds to schools on behalf of students will result in our needing to find resources at a time when credit is difficult to obtain," warns the letter.

Tough luck for the Irish. Democrats have already greased this fall's budget reconciliation to pass all of this on a mere majority vote. They are helped by rigged government accounting that disguises the cost of making below-market loans to unemployed 18-year-olds. Democrats have claimed their plan "saves" $87 billion in mandatory spending by cutting out the private middlemen, and the Congressional Budget Office has dutifully "scored" $87 billion in mandatory "savings" (or a net of $80 billion after subtracting administrative costs).

But in a remarkable letter to Senator Judd Gregg, CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf admits that government accounting is bogus. He writes that the statutory methodology "does not include the cost to the government stemming from the risk that the cash flows may be less than the amount projected (that is, that defaults could be higher than projected)." Mr. Elmendorf further notes that the government's accounting system is specifically skewed to make direct loans from the government appear to cost much less than guaranteed loans made by private lenders. He says the real "savings" are only $47 billion, even though, in a deception that would be criminal fraud if it weren't mandated by Congress, the official estimate remains at $80 billion.

Even the unofficial number is dubious. The government has been claiming lower default rates than private lenders, but most government loans have been to students at four-year colleges. The private lenders have serviced a higher percentage of students at community and two-year colleges, where defaults are more common regardless of lender.

If the feds are now making and owning all such loans, expect default rates to soar. When the government hires contractors to collect on its loans, it pays them for simply calling the borrower, regardless of the result. Private lenders, on the other hand, make money from a performing loan and have a greater incentive to do careful underwriting and aggressive collection.

The government will nonetheless start spending these illusory "savings" immediately, and this spending is certain to top official estimates. The Obama plan also adds a CBO-estimated $46 billion in new spending over 10 years to enlarge Pell grants. Ominously for the federal fisc, starting in 2011 these grants will automatically rise each year by the consumer price index plus 1%. Not that students will actually benefit from this subsidy explosion. Colleges have reliably raised prices to capture every federal dollar earmaked for education financing.

Rep. John Kline (R., Minn.) decided the cost estimate for Pell grants was too low, so he asked CBO to take a second look. Along comes another enlightening letter from Mr. Elmendorf. This week he wrote that Mr. Kline is correct —it looks like they will cost another $11 billion. Unfortunately, the earlier estimate must remain the official score under budgeting rules, even though the official scorekeeper says it is wrong.

All of this is certain to pass the House, and the only chance for stopping it is in the Senate. If it passes, parents will soon have no choice beyond a Washington bureaucracy to borrow money for their college-bound children, and taxpayers will pay a fortune for the privilege.

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“Inconsistent” British degrees to be overhauled

Universities are to face a reform of their marking systems after accusations that some are awarding too many first-class degrees. Vice-chancellors announced yesterday at their annual conference in Edinburgh that they had decided to review their marking to ensure consistency. It comes a month after MPs attacked universities for having wildly different degree standards.

In a separate move, the Government will expect universities to give more information to students about how many lectures they will have and their employment prospects.

In a combative speech to vice-chancellors at the event, organised by their representative body, Universities UK, David Lammy, the Schools Minister, said: “Even if you aren’t complacent about quality, you sometimes appear to be. I think you have to recognise that and deal with it. “Clear and accurate information must be a big part of that. Learners need to know what their courses will involve, how much teaching they’ll get and how they’ll be assessed.”

Announcing the evaluation of degree standards, Professor Steve Smith, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Exeter and the new president of Universities UK, told the conference: “We will lead a UK-wide review of external examiner arrangements to ensure that it is a robust system that delivers on expectations.”

The move comes after a highly critical report by MPs on the Innovation, Universities and Skills Select Committee saying that vice-chancellors were guilty of “defensive complacency” and were unwilling to address problems with degree standards. It said: “There needs to be a change of culture at the top in higher education. We found no appetite to investigate important questions, such as the reasons for the steady increase in the proportion of first-class and upper second-class honours degrees over the past 15 years, or the variation in study time by students taking the same subjects at different universities.”

Mr Lammy also told vice-chancellors at the conference that they must be more responsible for raising money, rather than relying on the taxpayer in the recession. He announced a new era of funding, with universities forced to compete for cash and concentrate on improving their own “economic outcomes”. He said: “In funding terms, universities have had it good for more than a decade. Nevertheless, current levels of public investment are unlikely to be sustainable in future.

“The sector’s future prospects depend on how you face up to the financial challenges that are coming. Not least, that includes taking a disciplined approach to pay and pensions. “But there are also more positive steps you can take, like continuing to diversify your sources of income by encouraging endowments or providing bespoke training [for companies]. “Private investment in universities has not kept pace with the huge increases in public spending that the last decade has brought. Any sensible analysis can only conclude that you need to find new ways to leverage more private money into the system.”

Mr Lammy said that a greater proportion of the public money awarded to universities in future would be “contestable”. Institutions would have to bid for it and the best bid would receive more, rather than being awarded a grant calculated according to their size. This contestable funding would favour maths, science and engineering.

Professor Smith, however, said that ministers should spend more public money on universities because of the recession. “Universities are fundamental to achieving social and economic progress and to establishing the kind of country that can compete and prosper in the future,” he said. “But for the UK to win the race to the top the university sector needs investment.” He admitted that it would be unrealistic for all of the investment to come from the taxpayer.

A review of tuition fees is due to begin this autumn and is expected to recommend lifting the £3,000 annual cap on fees, which would bring in more income from students.

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13 September, 2009

A Real Education Outrage

Protesting D.C. parents ignored by the media

President Obama's speech to students this week got plenty of attention, and many conservatives looked foolish by fretting about "indoctrination." They would have done far more good joining those who protested on Tuesday against the President's decision to shut down a school voucher program for 1,700 low-income kids in Washington, D.C.

"It's fundamentally wrong for this Administration not to listen to the voices of citizens in this city," said Kevin Chavous, the former D.C. Council member who organized the protest of parents and kids ignored by most media. Mr. Chavous, a Democrat, is upset that the White House and Democrats in Congress have conspired to shut down the program even though the government's own evaluation demonstrates improved test scores.

The nationwide black/white achievement gap has grown in recent years, and it's significantly wider than it was two decades ago. Yet the Obama Administration, in deference to teachers unions that oppose school choice, is shuttering a voucher program that is narrowing the racial learning gap.

"The D.C. voucher program has proven to be the most effective education policy evaluated by the federal government's official education research arm so far," writes the Education Department's chief evaluator Patrick Wolf in the current issue of Education Next. "On average, participating low-income students are performing better in reading because the federal government decided to launch an experimental school choice program in our nation's capital."

Democrats had pledged that if the D.C. Council supported the voucher program, they'd revisit it. "The government of Washington, D.C., should decide whether they want [the voucher program] in their school district," declared Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, who sponsored the provision to kill the program. Well, a majority of the D.C. Council has since sent lawmakers a letter expressing support. Yet Democrats are still preventing Congress from living up to its end of the deal and voting to restore funding. Meanwhile, Mr. Obama sends his own daughters to the best private school in the District.

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OECD study puts Australian education policy in perspective

By Jennifer Buckingham

This week, the OECD released its annual Education At A Glance report which provides country comparisons of spending, participation, completion, performance and various other aspects of education. At 475 pages, it contains much useful information, but for those who can’t bring themselves to read the whole report, here are some highlights.

As usual, Australia is ranked fairly close to the OECD average in terms of overall spending on education with the exception of pre-primary education, where we are right at the bottom.

The federal government has chosen to blow steam about this figure out of the thousands of possible figures, but this report suffers from the same flaw as all other OECD publications on early childhood education and care. The expenditure figure is misleading because it only includes direct spending on pre-school education and government programs and administration. It does not include the enormous household subsidies for child care in this country, which form a large part of the early childhood education sector.

There are some interesting figures relating to school education. Although public spending on school education is below OECD average, private investment in school education in Australia as a percentage of GDP is exceeded by only two other countries – Korea and Chile. [i.e. LOTS of Australian families send their kids to private schools -- especially for High School]

Australia is among the countries with the highest number of instruction hours, with an average of 962 hours a year for 12 to 14 year olds. This compares with an OECD average of 892 hours per year. The countries that outperform us in the PISA literacy, numeracy and science assessments have much fewer instruction hours per year– Sweden (741), South Korea ( 867) and Finland (777) – but devote proportionally more compulsory instruction time to these core subjects. Australia only devotes 13% of compulsory instruction time to reading, writing and literature, which is the lowest in the OECD.

New analyses of the 2006 PISA results show that socioeconomic disadvantage has a relatively low impact on performance in Australia compared with most other OECD countries. In the science component of PISA 2006, 39.4% of ‘strong’ performers (with scores in the top two performance bands) were students with a socioeconomic status index below the national average.

Figures provided in OECD publications are often accepted as Gospel, but they should always be viewed with caution and considered in light of each country’s policy context. The above figures, while interesting and informative, are no exception.

The above is part of a press release dated Sept. 11 from the Centre for Independent Studies. Enquiries to cis@cis.org.au. Snail mail: PO Box 92, St Leonards, NSW, Australia 1590. Telephone ph: +61 2 9438 4377 or fax: +61 2 9439 7310




Australia: A school run by castrati

But they have not been physically unmanned. They have been castrated by Left-inspired anti-discipline laws. Once upon a time a 10 year old waving a small stick would have GOT the stick and that would have been the end of it. Now they have to call police

ANOTHER Ipswich school has been placed into lockdown, after a 10-year-old boy carrying a stick threatened the safety of staff and students. Police were called to Churchill State School yesterday morning after a young student began abusing classmates and teachers before picking up a stick and threatening to attack staff. The boy's parents picked him up before police arrived and no one was hurt during the incident.

The parents of a student at the school said their child also saw the boy hitting classroom windows with his scooter. “My kids said he was rolling along on his scooter and then using it to try and break windows,” a parent said.

The Ipswich Child Protection Investigation Unit said the child lashed out because he did not like being told what to do. Police later spoke to the boy and warned him about his aggressive behaviour.

The lockdown, which lasted for 10 minutes, was the third time an Ipswich school had been closed due to the threat of violence in the past 12 days. Ipswich State High School was in lockdown for an hour late last month after a gang of females invaded the site, threatening students and staff. Brassall State School was placed in lockdown the next day when an Ipswich State High student was chased from that site into the primary school across the road. The fleeing teenage student had to hide in Brassall State School's administration office while police were called.

Education Queensland (EQ) said the incident at Churchill State School was handled swiftly. “The acting principal acted calmly and professionally. The lockdown was put in place as a precautionary measure and it proceeded smoothly and without incident,” an EQ spokesman said. “A student became aggressive towards staff and students on the school oval. The student picked up a small stick and made general threats.”

When a school is in lockdown, students must remain on the ground while all classroom doors are locked and a bell is sounded. After the incident, Churchill State School teachers handed students a letter to pass to their parents explaining what had happened.

A parent who spoke to The Queensland Times said the lockdown was excessive. “I think it was over the top,” the parent said. “You would imagine a 10-year-old kid with a stick could be handled by teachers.”

Education Queensland said lockdowns were necessary for a wide range of incidents. “Lockdowns can be used in any situation that may threaten the safety of staff and students. This can include gas leaks near the school, external police operations or on-site altercations,” an EQ spokesman said.

Most parents The Queensland Times spoke to said the school looked after their children well and the site had not been on lockdown before. “It's a good school, my kids don't cop much stick from other students,” a parent said.

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12 September, 2009

Public school indoctrination in America

Yesterday, I blogged about the indoctrination that is an inherent part of any government school system, whether in Cuba, the U.S., England, North Korea, or any other country. Government officials have a vested interest in ensuring a citizenry that accepts the official version of things and a citizenry that is compliant, obedient, and supportive of the government. Over a period of many years, people’s mindsets are molded to encourage them as adults to let off steam by carping about the foibles and inefficiencies of politicians and bureaucrats but never to challenge, in a fundamental sense, the role that government plays in people’s lives.

Let’s compare the public school systems in Cuba and the United States. They are similar in the fact that governments in both countries own and operate the systems. Children who attend the schools are there because the law has mandated their attendance. The schoolteachers and administrators are government personnel. Whether at a national, state, or local level, the textbooks must be approved by the government and the curriculum is set by the government. In both countries, attendance is “free.”

Of course, that doesn’t mean that the indoctrination is the same in both countries. In Cuba, for example, it is ingrained in schoolchildren that the CIA, with its program of assassination, torture, and regime change, is a force for evil in the world. In the United States, Americans schoolchildren are taught that the CIA is a force for good in the world and that it is essential to the national security of the country.

It would be difficult to find a better example of a purely socialist program than public (i.e., government) schooling, especially given its central-planning features. Thus, it’s not a coincidence that Cuba’s public-school system is the pride and joy of Fidel Castro, one of the world’s most ardent devotees of socialism.

Interestingly, while public schooling is also the pride and joy of Americans, most of them have no idea that America’s public school systems are socialist in nature, which itself is a testament to the success of the indoctrination that takes place in the institution. From the first grade to the twelfth, Americans are taught that public schooling is one of the core features of America’s “free enterprise system.”

An even better testament to the power of indoctrination in public schooling, however, is the conviction that it instills in students that socialist programs are essential to society. A good example of this phenomenon occurs in the health-care debate. Whenever libertarians suggest that the solution to the health-care crisis is simply to repeal Medicare and Medicaid, health-care regulations, and medical-licensure laws, most Americans go ballistic. Without Medicare and Medicaid, the poor and the elderly would die from lack of medical care, they cry. Without regulations and medical licensure, quacks would be conducting brain surgery on people, they say. Free markets are fine but not in such an important area as health care, they claim.

How have people arrived at such deeply held convictions? Take a wild guess! Oh, by the way, national health care in Cuba is also a pride and joy of Fidel Castro.

Perhaps the best example though of the power of indoctrination in public schooling is with respect to the very idea of public schooling itself. Whenever libertarians suggest that this entire socialist system should be junked, that school and state should be separated, and that a total free market in education should be established, statists go haywire. Free enterprise is great, they say again, but not in an important area like education. Why, how would the poor get educated without public schooling? they ask. With a free market in education, we’d quickly end up with a nation of dumb, illiterate people, they say.

Another example of what public schooling has done to instill a faith in socialism and to damage people’s faith in freedom and free markets is with respect to the overall welfare state itself. Whenever libertarians call for a repeal, not a reform, of this immoral and destructive way of life, statists respond, “Without the welfare state, the poor would die in the streets.”

Of course, that’s ludicrous, especially given that free markets are the means by which the poor are able to maintain increasingly higher standards of living. For example, compare a nun here in the United States who has taken a vow of poverty with a nun in Guatemala who has done the same. The nun here will have a much nicer standard of living as a result of the positive economic spillover that inevitably takes place in a wealthier society.

An important prerequisite to getting America back on the right track is a restoration of people’s faith in freedom and free markets and an understanding of why socialism is so immoral and destructive. Fortunately, what public schooling has done to inculcate a love for socialism and to inculcate doubts about freedom and free markets is reversible. Libertarians are proof positive of that.

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British students who get extra marks simply for turning up

Students are being rewarded with marks simply for turning up to university lectures. The practice has been criticised as a form of bribery and blamed for turning lecture halls into “drop-in centres”.

Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, writing in the Times Higher Education magazine, argued that giving students marks towards their degree for attending lectures was based on the experience of secondary education and relied on compulsion and bribery.

“The real problem with rewarding timekeeping implicitly devalues the work and effort made by students who are genuinely interested in regarding the seminar room as a place of intellectual engagement rather than as a drop-in centre,” he said. Marks are awarded for attendance at a range of institutions. At the University of Kent’s English language faculty, students gain 5 per cent based on seminary and workshop attendance.

The method has also been adopted by the University of Glasgow where 10 per cent of a final mark in an English literature course is based upon attendance alone. A spokesman for the university said that the practice was employed “to encourage a culture of attendance among new students unaccustomed to the amount of responsibility for their studies that university places on them”.

Laurence Goldstein, head of the School of European Culture and Languages at Kent, said: “If a bit of coercion awakens them to the joys of learning, then it is probably justified.”

SOURCE




Beauty therapists and bouncers used as 'cheap' cover teachers in British classrooms

Thousands of former beauty therapists, driving instructors, postmen and bouncers are being used as 'cheap labour' in classrooms. Schools are employing unqualified 'cover supervisors' with just a few days' training after ministers made a pact with teachers' unions to limit their members' workloads. The supervisors are meant to stand in for short periods only and just to keep order while pupils complete work set by teachers. But research commissioned by the Government reveals that some are taking classes for whole terms or longer.

Many had little or no link to education before entering the classroom. Some had worked in the beauty industry, Post Office and as driving instructors. Others are former bouncers, soldiers or security guards, hired for their ability to keep classes under control.

The growing reliance on unqualified helpers - who take classes of children as young as five on wages of just £6.50 an hour - follows a deal ministers struck with unions in 2003. The aim was to limit the time teachers spent covering for absent colleagues. But the research from London Metropolitan-University reveals that, instead of employing extra teachers or traditional supply staff, many schools routinely use supervisors.

The researchers, who surveyed 1,764 heads, 3,214 teachers and 2,414 support staff and studied 19 schools in-depth, found 80 per cent of state schools were using unqualified support staff to cover lessons when teachers were absent. Some are teaching assistants with 'higher level' training, which means they are allowed to teach, but many more are cover supervisors.

The report said: 'While, in theory, the cover supervisors' role was to supervise, most reported that they sometimes did more than this.' It added: 'In a minority of schools, support staff, including cover supervisors, were deployed to teach whole classes for prolonged periods of time (several weeks in primary schools, or over a whole term or more in secondary schools). 'In secondary schools, those who did this generally taught lower sets.'

One cover supervisor interviewed by researchers had worked for the Post Office for 28 years. She said she thought the work would be easier and sometimes returned home in tears after struggling to control rowdy pupils.

Research leader Professor Merryn Hutchings said: 'Cover supervisors were teaching - setting a task, giving advice and commenting on work. 'They are not trained or in any way qualified for that. It's fine to use them for short periods but we find that some in secondary schools are taking the bottom set for weeks on end. That is distinctly worrying.'

Teachers also raised concerns. One told the research team: 'I feel it's cheap labour.'

The report suggests teachers' workload has not actually reduced, because extra Government initiatives have been introduced.

Shadow Children's Secretary Michael Gove said last night: 'Raising the status of teachers is vital to raising standards. Unfortunately the Government is taking things in the opposite direction, piling teachers with bureaucracy and recruiting untrained staff.'

Schools Minister Vernon Coaker said: 'We are absolutely clear that we want teachers in front of classes, not cover supervisors. It is the responsibility of heads to make sure good practice is maintained.'

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11 September, 2009

America's public schools are crippling the economy

America's public schools are failing. From the smallest towns to the biggest cities, our schools aren't delivering the tools that young people need in today's economy. Many kids simply aren't finishing school. And too many who do graduate are unprepared for college and the working world. Comprehensive reform is needed.

There are plenty of signs that there's something wrong with the status quo. Over 7,000 students drop out every day -- that's about 1.2 million students each year. The national high school graduation rate, around 73 percent, is lower than it was 40 years ago.

Students couldn't be quitting school at a worse time. Technology is catapulting us forward. Jobs are increasingly complex. According to the federal government, more than half of all new jobs in the next five years will require some college. Only about 30 percent of low-income young Americans go on to earn any kind of degree or certificate after finishing high school.

But simply reducing the dropout rate won't make things better. Getting a high school diploma is no longer a guarantee that someone is ready for college. More than one third of America's college students require remedial classes to learn what they should have learned in high school. Roughly 60 percent of students at community colleges have to take some remedial classes before they can pursue their degree. These extra courses cost taxpayers, students, and parents about $2 billion annually. And businesses now spend substantial amounts of time and money teaching employees what they should have learned in school.

To produce the next generation of workers, we must improve our schools. Lawmakers have the most important role to play. They could start by looking at ways to change the way teachers are taught and recruited. They should also consider restructuring the teacher-student relationship. Perhaps students and teachers should stay together for multiple years.

Raising state standards will also help. One idea that's gaining traction is the creation of a uniform roadmap from primary school to high school, so that once a student receives a diploma, she would actually be able to continue onto college or smoothly transition into the workforce.

Nonprofits, too, can improve educational outcomes. Over the last decade, for example, the Millennium Scholars program from the Gates Foundation has provided 12,000 scholarships to promising low-income students. The result? About eight in 10 students receiving these funds graduate from college within five years.

The business community also has a role to play. Together with the Gates Foundation, Viacom has launched "Get Schooled," a five-year initiative that creates a platform for corporate and community stakeholders to address the challenges facing the public education system.

American businesses must also find innovative ways to encourage today's students to succeed. We need to make a habit of communicating with government leaders and educators on a regular basis. We can -- and should -- offer insights into how the world economy is evolving.

We can't allow the nation's students to be left behind. Our failure to produce a properly educated workforce today will cripple our ability to compete in the global arena tomorrow. The time to act is now.

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What the American Public Thinks of Public Schools

High-school graduation rates are lower today than in 1970

Yesterday President Barack Obama delivered a pep talk to America's schoolchildren. The president owes a separate speech to America's parents. They deserve some straight talk on the state of our public schools.

According to the just released Education Next poll put out by the Hoover Institution, public assessment of schools has fallen to the lowest level recorded since Americans were first asked to grade schools in 1981. Just 18% of those surveyed gave schools a grade of an A or a B, down from 30% reported by a Gallup poll as recently as 2005. No less than 25% of those polled by Education Next gave the schools either an F or a D. (In 2005, only 20% gave schools such low marks.)

Beginning in 2002, the grades awarded to schools by the public spurted upward from the doldrums into which they had fallen during the 1990s. Apparently the enactment of No Child Left Behind gave people a sense that schools were improving. But those days are gone. That federal law has lost its luster and nothing else has taken its place.

It's little wonder the public is becoming uneasy. High-school graduation rates are lower today than they were in 1970. The math and reading scores of 17-year-olds have been stagnant for four decades.

You cannot fool all the people all the time, President Lincoln said. And when it comes to student learning, the public seems beyond deceit. When asked how many ninth graders graduate from high school in four years, the public estimated that only 66% of students graduated on time—slightly less than the best available scholarly estimates.

When asked how American 15-year-olds compare in math with students in 29 other industrialized nations, the public did not fool itself into believing that the U.S. is among the top five countries in the world. Those polled ranked the U.S. at No. 17, just a bit higher than the No. 24 spot the country actually holds.

In another sign of declining confidence, the public is less willing to spend more money on public education. In 1990, 70% of taxpayers favored spending "more on education," according to a University of Chicago poll. In the latest poll, only 46% favored a spending increase. That's a 15 percentage point drop from just one year ago when it was 61%.

But when it comes to actual dollars spent per pupil, Americans get the numbers wrong. Those polled by Education Next estimated that schools in their own districts spend a little more than $4,000 per pupil, on average. In fact, schools in those districts spend an average of $10,000.

One can understand the public's confusion on the dollar and cents question. Schools' money pots are filled with revenue from property taxes, sales taxes, income taxes, gambling revenues, and dozens of other sources. It's not easy to add up all the numbers, and no one does it for the voter except the federal government, which manages to get the information out two years late. When those surveyed are told how much is actually being spent in their own school district, only 38% say they support higher spending.

The public also dramatically underestimates the amount teachers in their state are being paid. The average guess in 2007 was around $33,000—well below actual average salary of $47,000 across all states. When told the truth about teacher salaries, support for the idea that they should get a salary increase plummeted by 14 percentage points.

A presidential truth-in-spending address is definitely in order. Over $100 billion of the stimulus package went to K-12 education, doubling the federal contribution to school spending. A powerful public-school lobby will fight fiercely to keep federal aid to education at these historic highs. President Obama could head off such deficit-driving pressures by sharing accurate information about how much students learn, how much schools spend, and how much teachers are paid.

The president didn't hesitate to tell American kids to take responsibility for their behavior. It's time he delivered that same message to states, school districts and unions.

SOURCE




Australia: Another NSW government school destroyed because of ban on effective discipline

BALACLAVA-clad students jeered as frightened children stood outside the gates of their government high school yesterday with signs reading "Stop the violence". School bullying has become so rampant that parents fearing another Jai Morcom-style death threatened to remove their children from school.

Police have charged two 15-year-old boys with assault and affray after an alleged serious attack on students at Airds High, near Campbelltown in Sydney's southwest. Two students were suspended for 10 days and two others for four days after a brawl that left three teens injured - one with a broken nose.

Yesterday, protesting students shielded their faces with placards. Students worried about bullying plan a mass walkout tomorrow. Parents said the death of 15-year-old Jai Morcom after a schoolyard fight at Mullumbimby on August 29 was a chilling reminder of the potential dangers children faced.

Yesterday, Airds High students said they were "living in constant fear of being next". "All it takes is just looking at someone the wrong way and then you're hit," one student, too frightened to give his name, said.

Students leaving the school yesterday told of a "vicious" culture of bullying at the school. They said the bullying was indiscriminate, with victims targetted regardless of age, race or religion. "It's pretty vicious - people bash each other and call each other names," one Year 7 student said. "The bullies target anyone they think they can get to - they don't hurt people because of race. "But there are always people getting hurt in the playground."

Tracey Ross said she feared sending her son Jacob to school each morning after he was severely bullied by a group of older students. "I was told . . . that not one of these kids is safe between school hours," she said. "Jacob is in Year 8 but the students who were picking on him are in Year 10 . . . he was physically and emotionally bullied so badly that he was removed from school for six weeks."

Rebecca Hoffman said she often felt "scared" for her daughter Danielle in Year 9. "When I saw the (Mullumbimy High) incident on TV I was very worried," she said.

The two 15-year-olds charged after the incident on September 3 will appear in Campbelltown Children's Court on September 28. A Department of Education and Training spokesman said they would be placed on probation on their return to school. [Meaning what? More empty talk]

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10 September, 2009

America can do better on education

As our nation's students and teachers return to school in uncertain economic times, Americans across party lines agree that a quality education is indispensable to the future of each child, our competitiveness, and our country.

Fully 30 percent of our nation’s students drop out of high school each year and most high school graduates don't complete college. While America was first in the world in high school and college graduation rates 30 years ago, we have slipped back into the middle of the pack among industrialized countries. Our results have stagnated while other nations are racing ahead of us.

As a former U.S. secretary of education and a former majority leader of the U.S. Senate who is now dedicating a substantial portion of time to education reform in Tennessee, we believe America can and must do better. While government has a crucial role to play to ensure quality schools, government can't do it alone. The evidence and our common sense make it clear: a good education also depends on hard work and personal responsibility for learning and achievement from individual students, parents, grandparents, and educators.

That's why we are supportive of the president of the United States – whether it is a Democrat or Republican – speaking directly to our nation's students to emphasize the core American values of education, hard work, and personal responsibility. We are pleased that presidents Reagan and Bush (Sr.) delivered similar speeches when they were serving in the White House in 1986 and 1991 respectively, and that is why we have both delivered similar speeches in many local schools throughout our careers.

Tuesday at noon, President Obama will address the nation’s students on the importance of personal responsibility, hard work, staying in school and getting a good education. Schools and classrooms all across America can tune in to the speech on the web or on television. Although the decision of whether to watch the speech is appropriately left up to individual educators and parents, we encourage everyone to have their students watch and discuss the speech – and find every other possible way they can to underscore the value of education to our children. If parents are concerned about the content of the speech, they can read the speech first (already available on the White House website) and then decide whether or not they want their child to listen to it.

One of the most important steps in turning around our nation’s education system is ensuring all of our children understand the value of education and the key role hard work plays in being successful in school and in life. The more people we have echoing this message, the better off our nation will be. President Obama, both because of his office as president but also because of his compelling personal story, is well-positioned to deliver this message and serve as a role model to students across our nation.

As individuals who have held leadership roles in both political parties, we encourage all Americans to support every effort to encourage children and parents to take ownership of their future. We are excited that President Obama is delivering this message across our nation today, and we hope every president will continue to do so in the future.

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Gates brings education message to MTV, Nickelodeon

Students who might be too glued to their televisions to keep up with homework are going to find channels like MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon prodding them to get on task and graduate.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is partnering with Viacom Inc.'s television networks, education leaders and celebrities to launch an awareness campaign to reduce the number of dropouts. The foundation, started by Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates and his wife, has invested more than $2 billion in educational programs since 2000. "People should understand how the system is falling short today and how it really contradicts our commitment to equal opportunity," Gates told The Associated Press. "If we don't change it now, it will hurt the future of the country as a whole." Only one-third of American high school students graduate with the skills necessary to succeed in college and the nation's workplaces, he said.

"All too often, the value and benefit of education are not real enough to kids," said Tony Miller, deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Education. Charities and industry won't have to go it alone; about $100 billion of the federal stimulus package is dedicated to improvements in education, said Miller.

The "Get Schooled" initiative focuses on low graduation rates in college and high school and the accountability of teachers. Gates criticized the practice of salaries rewarding seniority over proven efficacy, calling it a detriment to quality education.

A student drops out of an American high school every 26 seconds, according to the Seattle-based Gates Foundation. At that rate, not enough American children are graduating high school and college to stay competitive in the global marketplace, said Viacom President and CEO Philippe Dauman. "We don't know much about substance, we're about fluff at Viacom," Dauman said with a laugh. The Viacom chief, whose networks also include VH1, CMT, Spike TV, TV Land and Logo, said he told Gates a year ago, "We know kids, we know how to reach them; if you provide the substance we can be the megaphone."

To launch the five-year campaign, the documentary "Get Schooled" was set to premiere on all of Viacom's networks simultaneously at 8 p.m. EDT Tuesday night. The documentary features pop singer Kelly Clarkson, basketball star LeBron James and President Barack Obama, but the program's real focus is on people behind the scenes, like a presidential speechwriter, and how education brought them success.

Dauman said the "Get Schooled" initiative would find its way into plot lines and programs, like BET's documentary "Bring Your 'A' Game," which featured prominent black men who have achieved success. But "we're not going to go to all PBS-type programming," Dauman said. "In order to reach kids, you have to entertain them." Activism is not new for Viacom and its networks. MTV has raised AIDS awareness, promoted participation in elections and led other education initiatives.

At a Los Angeles event to launch the "Get Schooled" campaign, New York City schools chief Joel Klein said he was hopeful the approach would succeed because "trying to get traction with the millions and millions of kids in school is something that's been a challenge." "When you bring the resources and the vision that the Gates family and foundation has, coupled with the distribution assets that Viacom has — the role models, the glitz they can produce — it feels like a good mix of stuff that will capture kids," Klein said.

Klein and others praised the successes of charter schools, which have drawn the ire of union representatives and school officials. Union leaders in Los Angeles say that such schools would decrease the size of districts and that instructors at charter schools are not covered by unions. An e-mail to the nation's largest labor union, the National Education Association, was not returned immediately Tuesday.

Privately operated schools undertook fresh approaches to schooling, had happier teachers and inspired healthy competition in achievement among New York City schools, said Klein. In Los Angeles, the Board of Education approved a resolution that invites outsiders to submit proposals to develop new charter schools, while increasing accountability standards. Private charter school operators, communities and the mayor's office will submit proposals for the operation of 50 new schools that will open over the next four years, as well as 200 existing schools that are chronic underperformers.

Tuesday's event coincided with a speech Obama made in Arlington, Va., that was broadcast to schools across the nation. In the address, Obama urged students to hit the books, saying that success is hard-won and that every student has something at which they excel.

SOURCE




Australia: Literacy hit squads for schools

Trying to pick up the literacy wreckage caused by disastrous and long-disproved Leftist theories that demonize phonics. The "whole word" madness goes back to the psychology laboratory of Wilhelm Wundt in 19th century Germany, would you believe?

And mathematics results are poor because many of those teaching it have no expertise or interest in it. The small number of people who are good at mathematics and who choose to teach it mostly do so in private schools rather than in chaotic government schools. My mathematician son was inspired to a career in mathematics by good mathematics teachers in his private school

FLYING squads of specialist teachers will swoop into 300 Queensland schools next year under a plan to boost literacy and numeracy results. The so-called Turnaround Teams will be deployed to low-performing schools to identify why their results are below average and develop strategies to improve literacy and numeracy levels.

``Some schools may have problems with truancy or behaviour management, others may need extra help with early childhood learning or teaching science for instance,'' Premier Anna Bligh said today.

The teams are part of the State Government's three-year bid to turn around poor results in Queensland schools and will cost $9 million. The program will be trialled at 10 schools in the Wide Bay/Burnett region later this year before being rolled out to the other schools next year.

The 2008 NAPLAN tests _ National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy _ were an embarrassment for Queensland, with the state's students coming second-last, overall, nationally.

SOURCE





9 September, 2009

The great escape

Many of the issues of our times are hard to understand without understanding the vision of the world that they are part of. Whether the particular issue is education, economics or medical care, the preferred explanation tends to be an external explanation-- that is, something outside the control of the individuals directly involved.

Education is usually discussed in terms of the money spent on it, the teaching methods used, class sizes or the way the whole system is organized. Students are discussed largely as passive recipients of good or bad education. But education is not something that can be given to anybody. It is something that students either acquire or fail to acquire. Personal responsibility may be ignored or downplayed in this "non-judgmental" age, but it remains a major factor nevertheless.

After many students go through a dozen years in the public schools, at a total cost of $100,000 or more per student-- and emerge semi-literate and with little understanding of the society in which they live, much less the larger world and its history-- most discussions of what is wrong leave out the fact that many such students may have chosen to use school as a place to fool around, act up, organize gangs or even peddle drugs.

The great escape of our times is escape from personal responsibility for the consequences of one's own behavior. Differences in infant mortality rates provoke pious editorials on a need for more prenatal care to be provided by the government for those unable to afford it. In other words, the explanation is automatically assumed to be external to the mothers involved and the solution is assumed to be something that "we" can do for "them."

While it is true that black mothers get less prenatal care than white mothers and have higher infant mortality rates, it is also true that women of Mexican ancestry also get less prenatal care than white women and yet have lower infant mortality rates than white women. But, once people with the prevailing social vision see the first set of facts, they seldom look for any other facts that might go against the explanation that fits their vision of the world.

No small part of the current confusion between "health care" and medical care comes from failing to recognize that Americans can have the best medical care in the world without having the best health or longevity because so many people choose to live in ways that shorten their lives. There can be grave practical consequences of a dogmatic insistence on external explanations that allow individuals to escape personal responsibility. Americans can end up ruining the best medical care in the world in the vain hope that a government takeover will give us better health.

Economic issues are approached in the same way. People with low incomes are seen as a problem for other people to solve. Studies which follow the same individuals over time show that the vast majority of working people who are in the bottom 20 percent of income earners at a given time end up rising out of that bracket. Many are simply beginners who get beginners' wages but whose pay rises as they acquire more skills and experience. Yet there is a small minority of workers who do not rise and a large number of people who seldom work and who-- surprise!-- have low incomes as a result.

Seldom is there any thought that people who choose to waste years of their own time (and the taxpayers' money) in school need to change their own behavior-- or to visibly suffer the consequences, so that their fate can be a warning to others coming after them, not to make that same mistake.

It is not just the "non-judgmental" ideology of the intelligentsia but also the self-interest of politicians that leads to so much downplaying of personal responsibility in favor of external explanations and external programs to "solve" the "problem." On these and other issues, government programs are far less likely to solve the country's problems than to solve the politicians' problem of getting the votes of those whose think the answer to every problem is for the government to "do something."

SOURCE




British universities 'swamped with students, but no extra funding'

Universities risk being swamped with more students but no extra funding because of government policy, a leading vice-chancellor will tell university heads at a conference this week. Steve Smith, the new president of Universities UK, which represents vice-chancellors, will give his inaugural address at its conference in Edinburgh. Professor Smith, who is Vice-Chancellor of the University of Exeter, told The Times that the theme of the conference would be that universities needed support during the recession.

He said: “Whatever government is in power will need a strong university sector. The key point is that if universities are to take more students, it’s essential we don’t see a return to what happened in the 1970s and 80s, with a decline in the funding per student. “It’s essential that in the recession we don’t keep putting in more students without the funding. The bottom line is that, if we keep taking more and more students without funding, the quality of the university experience could be threatened.”

A review is expected to begin this autumn, into whether the £3,145 cap on annual top-up tuition fees should be lifted. It is not due to conclude until after next year’s general election. However, it is expected that the review group will recommend that universities should be allowed to set higher fees, and this would bring in additional income.

SOURCE




More British grade-school children to be educated in "academies" (charter schools)

Thousands of primary schoolchildren will be educated in academies because of a surge in the number of all-through schools opening this term. Eight of the schools, which cater for children from the age of 3 to 18, are opening their doors this week and two more are planned, doubling the number of all-through academies (semi-independent, state-funded schools). Sponsors no longer have to provide £2 million in funding but need to show that they have the skills and leadership to run an academy.

David Miliband, Harriet Harman and Andy Burnham were among 19 ministers from a range of departments who turned out in force to open their local academies yesterday in a show of support for the scheme.

Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, said: “Scrapping the £2 million sponsorship has led to a boom in the number of universities, schools and colleges coming in – so it makes sense to do the same for the voluntary and private sector.” He said that a robust selection process would be used to assess potential sponsors thoroughly, but teaching unions disputed this.

Christine Blower, general-secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: “The requirement of interested companies simply having to prove they have the ‘necessary skills and leadership’ to run an academy really does not stand up to scrutiny. “One of the latest academies to open is being sponsored by Aston Villa Football Club. I defy anyone to suggest that a football club can know more about the running of schools than a local education authority. “Where the focus needs to lie is on strategies which will genuinely help children from socially deprived backgrounds, rather than feeding a burgeoning two-tier system.”

The Tories, and some education experts, want to see primary schools become academies. Michael Gove, the Shadow Schools Secretary, said this year that primary schools would be able to apply for academy status within two years of the Conservatives winning a general election. But the Government is reluctant to do this because of the cost implications, and because it does not want to divert focus from the drive to improve standards in secondary schools. A source at the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), said the issue of primary-only academies had been explored and dismissed by ministers, adding: “In particular there were concerns about the large costs involved.”

The primary element of all-through schools is funded by local authorities. Children as young as 3 will be starting at eight new all-through academies this term. They include the Nottingham Academy, created from two secondaries and a primary school. It will eventually become the largest school in the United Kingdom, with 3,600 pupils. Barry Day, the chief executive, who turned around one of the predecessor schools, said: “We’re working with a primary school because our fundamental belief is, if we have children from the age of three, we can do absolute wonders with them. “We serve a very deprived inner-city area. We already have a track record of getting a large number of pupils through to university.”

A DCSF spokesman said: “We back all-through academies where they are part of robust plans to drive up standards. We know that many academies already work closely with their feeder primaries so it is common sense to extend this. Ministers are clear that improving the transition between primary and secondary school is vital in making sure children do not fall back — so there are clear benefits in pupils have seamless continuity during their school careers with shared facilities and coherent leadership, ethos and school policy.”

SOURCE





8 September, 2009

Schools can do better with less money

Budget cuts and demands for improved student achievement test public-school administrators more than ever – but, undaunted, some scrappy innovators are passing that test with an 'A.' -- by CUTTING BUREAUCRACY. Rather unbelievable

When Alberto Carvalho took charge of Miami-Dade County Public Schools last September, his first goal was to scour the district's nearly $5.5 billion budget to find money for teacher raises, which had been on hold because of state funding cuts. He brought together a budget review team – including some outside experts – for a series of weekend number-crunching meetings fueled with buy-your-own-pizza lunches. They were able to cobble together the needed $45 million – in part by cutting overtime and changing food service delivery.

The superintendent recalls feeling "euphoric." But he didn't stop there. Maybe there were more savings to be had if they dug even deeper, he reasoned, so the search continued, line by line. The euphoria was short-lived: The leader of the 340,000-­student district, the nation's fourth largest, discovered he was on the precipice of a financial crisis that previous budget scenarios hadn't projected. Healthcare and other costs had been underestimated, revenues overestimated. It added up to $158 million of imminent deficits. And more state cuts were on the horizon. Raises would have to wait again.

Educators across the country find themselves staring over the edge of some steep financial cliffs these days. As never before, they're squeezed between the twin pressures of budget cuts and calls for improved student achievement. The demand is to do more with less, and it's a daunting one. But even in the darkest shadows of the recession, there are many – scrimpers, innovators, or just plain optimists – who are finding ways to do exactly that.

Mr. Carvalho saw the Miami-Dade crisis as an opportunity for a "budget transformation ... that would increase efficiency and force us to invest more in our core function." His approach, colleagues say, boils down to a keen sense of frugality and common sense. The plan he and his team came up with last fall redeployed administrators to classrooms, whittled down central-office expenses dramatically, and protected teachers' jobs.

The result of the leaner and meaner approach: a healthier budget – with reserves to offset future revenue drops – and impressive academic gains. "The traumatic impacts of budget reductions and the economy have pushed us to do more with less, but also to do better with less," Carvalho says. The district starts its new year Aug. 24 with state grades dramatically improved for many of its schools – including one "F" school earning an "A."

This kind of self-examination and reinvention is what US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is urging districts to do as they receive infusions of federal economic stimulus. The more they spend wisely and innovate, the more money he's likely to send their way. But traditional approaches – laying off teachers with least seniority, closing schools, and cutting back nonacademic classes – may prevail, observe scholars and advocates who follow education trends.

"There are [several] states, like California, where there's a supercrisis and a broad awareness that ... practices are going to have to be dramatically altered in order to cope," says Edward Kealy, executive director of the Committee for Education Funding, a coalition in Washington.

Still, while basic savings on everything from cafeteria food to transportation are widespread, many districts anticipating the federal stimulus aren't going beyond stopgap measures, perhaps in hope of maintaining the status quo until the good times roll again, Mr. Kealy observes. "They're in a strange period of [wondering], 'How bad is it really, [and] is it going to turn around over the next year?' " he says. In the meantime, school districts share a common quest to accomplish more with less. How successful will they be?

The Monitor took a closer look at Miami-Dade's transformation – and three examples of individual schools' approaches – to glean creative ways education leaders have been directing dollars in the hope of bringing out better results for kids.

While his colleagues cite Carvalho's methodical common sense, they also note that what he does is not common at all. Out of seven superintendents that chief budget officer Judith Marte has worked for, Carvalho is the only one who has probed the budget line by line and vetoed hotel expenses for professional development or BlackBerrys for employees who didn't need them.

Chief financial officer Richard Hinds, who came out of retirement to work with the new superintendent, offers another anecdote: When Carvalho saw movers this summer clearing furniture out of a central-office space slated to become a new school, he canceled the $12,000 contract and rounded up school custodians, already on the payroll, to do the job.

Last fall, the budget team started at the top, eliminating about 350 positions in the central office (a 20 percent cut), including the seven with salaries over $200,000. More than half were reassigned to teaching jobs or other open positions.

By looking at average costs and best practices in other large districts, they found they could save millions on food and transportation and could cut dozens of assistant principal jobs. They froze hiring and all purchases of nonessential supplies. They trimmed overtime spending by more than $15 million.

Overall, the district cut 27 percent of central-office costs. Miami-Dade now spends less per pupil on those costs than any other school district in Florida, while before it ranked 27th, according to the district's analysis.

More HERE




MA: Science MCAS stymies many

6,000 seniors still lack passing score Other data show improvements. The response: Water down the requirements, of course

Approximately 6,000 high school seniors are in jeopardy of not graduating next spring because they have not yet passed the new science MCAS exam, state education officials announced yesterday, possibly setting the stage for a new revolt against the 11-year-old standardized test system. The students, members of the first class that must pass the science exam in order to receive a diploma, will have at least two more chances to take the test before school officials face the difficult prospect of barring them from the graduation stage.

Those who do not pass by graduation day would probably have to delay any college plans and return to high school for more science instruction, then take the test again the following February. Or they could instead try to earn a General Educational Development credential, which involves passing multiple tests.

The seniors’ plight surfaced yesterday as state education officials announced the results of the spring’s MCAS exams, which showed progress at most grade levels in most subjects, but a lingering disparity between students from different socioeconomic and racial backgrounds. Although state education officials expressed concern about the failure rate in science, they emphasized that the problem is not nearly as widespread as earlier this decade when passing the English and math MCAS exams first became a graduation requirement, starting with the class of 2003. When those students entered their senior year, 19 percent of them still had not passed one or both of the tests. This year, 10 percent of seniors have not yet passed all three test subjects, with failure on the science exam representing by far the largest chunk.

“I’m always concerned if students are not being successful,’’ Mitchell Chester, the state’s commissioner of elementary and secondary education, said in an interview. “But I do think holding onto this requirement [passing the science exam] is the right thing to do. It’s important to prepare students for opportunities after high school.’’ Since last fall, as members of the class of 2010 have retaken the exams and passed, they have cut their failure rate in half, from 20 percent.

Chester said the state is working with individual high schools to help students pass the exam this year, but officials also are preparing for an onslaught of requests from high schools to exempt students from the testing requirement.

Last year, the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education eased rules for bypassing the science test requirement, in recognition that students often show an understanding of the subject through experiments. As long as students have strong grades in a comparable science course, schools can appeal after the student fails the exam just once, instead of after three failures as is required for English and math appeals.

More here




Britain: Larger sixth forms help students perform better, say researchers

Another blow to the "smaller classes" religion bleated by most teachers

Teenagers studying in large sixth forms perform better on average than those in smaller establishments, research shows. Small primary schools have a reputation for achieving good results, but the reverse may be true when it comes to further education.

Research by the Association of Colleges (AoC) suggests a link between a sixth form or college’s size and the attainment of its pupils at A level and equivalent qualifications.

Martin Doel, AoC chief executive, said: “The poor performance of smaller school sixth forms is a source of concern, as it raises serious doubts about continued political support for an increase in the number of school sixth forms. New smaller school sixth forms do not look like an efficient investment, according to this data, particularly at a time when public spending is so constrained. “This is not a colleges-versus-schools contest. It’s about getting the best for young people in a way that is cost effective for Government — a point that needs to be accepted by all three parties.”

The AoC examined the average Level 3 point scores (equivalent to A levels) per student, which show a difference of 241 points between the largest and smallest school sixth form providers. At schools or colleges with fewer than 50 pupils, the average score was 561, for those with 101 to 150 students this was 657, and institutions with more than 250 pupils had an average score of 802. This excludes independent schools.

SOURCE





7 September, 2009

Students Borrow More Than Ever for College

Heavy Debt Loads Mean Many Young People Can't Live Life They Expected

Students are borrowing dramatically more to pay for college, accelerating a trend that has wide-ranging implications for a generation of young people.

New numbers from the U.S. Education Department show that federal student-loan disbursements—the total amount borrowed by students and received by schools—in the 2008-09 academic year grew about 25% over the previous year, to $75.1 billion. The amount of money students borrow has long been on the rise. But last year far surpassed past increases, which ranged from as low as 1.7% in the 1998-99 school year to almost 17% in 1994-95, according to figures used in President Barack Obama's proposed 2010 budget.

The sharp growth is "definitely above expectations," says Robert Shireman, deputy undersecretary of the Education Department. "But we're also in an economic situation that nobody predicted." The eye-opening increase in borrowing is largely due to the dire economic environment, which is causing more people to seek federal loans, he says.

The new numbers highlight how debt has become commonplace in paying for higher education. Today, two-thirds of college students borrow to pay for college, and their average debt load is $23,186 by the time they graduate, according to an analysis of the government's National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, conducted by financial-aid expert Mark Kantrowitz. Only a dozen years earlier, according to the study, 58% of students borrowed to pay for college, and the average amount borrowed was $13,172.

Some options for graduates having trouble making payments on their federal student loans:

* Borrowers can request a deferral or forbearance, which suspends payments temporarily

* The extended-payment option makes monthly payments smaller by increasing the loan term

* Income-based repayment means the borrower pays up to 15% of discretionary income each month

The ripple effects for today's heavily indebted young people are becoming palpable. A growing body of research suggests that tough loan payments are affecting major life decisions by recent graduates, forcing them to put off traditional milestones—from buying a first home to even marriage and having children.

Also, the rising levels of borrowing may ironically be contributing to the accelerating cost of college, say some college-finance experts. Loans can give colleges an artificial sense of a family's ability to pay tuition. To some extent, that false sense of security gets built into the assumptions schools make when setting prices, say experts. The idea is that as prices rise, families borrow more and more, spurring prices to rise further, which in turn requires more borrowing. Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, says this phenomenon is playing a role in why tuition grows at about twice the rate of inflation. "Instead of imposing tougher choices" on college costs, he says, it's "easier to raise prices...because this additional loan amount is made available."

These and other impacts are likely to continue to spiral for future generations of tuition payers, college finance experts say. It is unclear whether we have seen the worst of it. Mr. Kantrowitz predicts the rate of increase will slow to 12% for the 2009-10 school year due mainly to what he expects to be a rebounding economy. On the other hand, Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's Economy.com, says he thinks unemployment rates will be at least as high as they are now, and housing prices will fall further, making it difficult for families to borrow against home equity.

"Growth in student lending can remain very strong, at least through the next school year," Mr. Zandi predicts.

The total borrowing limit for dependent undergraduates who take out federal Stafford loans—the most popular federal aid program—grew to $31,000 this past school year from $23,000. Raised limits in federal loans may have siphoned some borrowing away from riskier—and costlier—private loans, which are now harder to get due to the retrenchment of that business. The move away from these risky loans may be one bright spot in an otherwise frenzied student credit environment, Mr. Kantrowitz says.

Still, students cringe when they think of what they will owe by the time they graduate. Kordi Solo, a senior majoring in journalism at Central Michigan University, expects to owe about $60,000 in student loans by the time she graduates in the spring. She had hoped to owe much less, but her father, a construction worker, has been out of work since last fall. She worries about the ramifications that debt will have on her future—whether it is being able to afford health insurance or qualifying for future loans.

Zack Leshetz, a 30-year-old lawyer in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., has $175,000 in student loans from his seven years in college and law school. Lately he has had his eye on the real-estate market. "Everyone says that it's a great time to buy a house," he says. But that is not an option right now, he says, thanks to $800 a month in payments—and another chunk of student loans in forbearance, which means payments are halted while interest accrues. "I find myself living paycheck to paycheck," he says.

He has also been engaged since March, but has held off on marriage. "There's no way I can pay for a dream wedding, or even just a regular wedding," Mr. Leshetz says. "I feel like I'm putting my entire life on hold."

"There are no guarantees about how easily you'll be able to pay off your student loans," says Lauren Asher, president of the Institute for College Access and Success.

These students' experiences are mirrored in research by Mathew Greenwald & Associates Inc. for investment-management firm AllianceBernstein LP. In a 2006 survey of 1,508 graduates under age 35, 39% of college graduates say it will take them more than 10 years to pay off their household's education-related debt. The survey says that this has caused a delay in certain key "rites of passage" associated with adulthood. Forty-four percent of respondents said they delayed buying a house because of their student loans, while 28% delayed having children.

"Loans have gone from being the exception to being the norm for most students," says Mr. Nassirian. He laments that, rather than fixing the problem of sticker price, policy makers typically tweak student-aid programs to make it easier for students and families to continue to borrow more.

Attacking the problem of cost is thorny because it is politically difficult to get all the interested parties -- which include federal and state governments, foundations and private institutions—to agree. "There are so many stakeholders, different explanations at different schools as to what's happening with cost, that it becomes politically dicey," says Christine Lindstrom, higher-education program director for U.S. Public Interest Research Group, which advocates for consumers. Also, colleges can be big employers in congressional districts, making it challenging for politicians who represent them to also take them on. "You're not going to win friends if you're alienating them," she says.

Some Republicans made attempts at controlling tuition increases when they held the majority in Congress. Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon of California championed legislation in 2003 that would have penalized colleges for raising tuition too much by taking away federal subsidies. Though the bill died, he plans to continue pursuing the issue in the upcoming Congress, a spokeswoman says.

Some recent graduates say they wish they had known more about the consequences of debt before taking it on. Lillian Russell graduated from law school at the University of Pittsburgh last year with $181,000 in debt from her seven years in school. She has spent much of the past year looking for work. In recent weeks, she found a job clerking at a small law office. While she settles into her job, she has deferred payments on most of her federal loans, though interest continues to accrue.

"I wish I had considered the long-term impacts of what I was getting into," Ms. Russell says. When she entered school, "the idea was I'd take out the loans, get a job, and pay it back," she says.

It seemed straightforward. But as the economy has soured, "I feel like it's shifted a lot of my life goals," says Ms. Russell, from buying a house to starting a family. "I'm really concerned about handling this obligation while taking on new ones."

SOURCE




Indianapolis Tests Out Education Reform

A confluence of factors favors school choice—for now

The classrooms were full and bustling with activity at Valley Mills Elementary School on the city's southwest side one recent rain-soaked morning. Children smiled and raised their hands, eager to answer questions, and to tell me how happy they were to be in school on a summer day. This was not your father's summer school—punitive and mandatory—but a fresh approach to bridging the achievement gap.

Education reform has long been a popular buzz phrase. But too often it's proven to be a hollow call as the education establishment kills off common sense reforms even while we watch districts struggle with failing schools and low graduation rates. Last year, for example, the district that serves the core of Indianapolis had a heartbreakingly low graduation rate of 47% and half of the state of Indiana's schools failed to meet federal improvement standards in English or math.

But now, as the new school year begins, a confluence of events is making Indianapolis a test case for real reform. Reformers here have dared to introduce a modicum of school choice through charters and have tried to focus the system on the quality of instruction (not just dollars spent) through merit pay. Here, reformers are receiving a bipartisan assist from U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, state and local policy leaders, and from a nonprofit organization that's filling the city with education entrepreneurs. The stars are aligned for reform, which means that if it doesn't happen now, and it doesn't happen here, it's hard to image how it could happen.

Take Valley Mills Elementary. I visited the school to see an education entrepreneur in action. Three years ago, David Harris founded a nonprofit called The Mind Trust with former Democratic Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson with the goal of luring new education ideas to the city. One of their successes was on display at Valley Mills this summer. It's called Summer Advantage USA—a five-week pilot program funded by a state grant that selects teachers and provides lively instruction to students in low-income areas. The hope is to help these kids advance by keeping them focused on their studies through the summer.

Summer Advantage is run by Harvard and Yale graduate Earl Martin Phalen. He told me his goal is to bridge the achievement gap between students of different socioeconomic groups by reversing an education tradition that "leaves three months on the table each year." Low-income kids often fall further behind over the summer because their parents can't afford to enroll them in summer programs. Thanks to Mr. Phalen, the students at Valley Mills didn't suffer that fate this summer.

Other steps are being taken to increase school performance across the city. In recent years, the mayor's office has sponsored 18 new charter schools, a trend started by Mr. Peterson and carried on by current Republican Mayor Gregory Ballard. The Mind Trust has brought several national education groups to the city, such as Teach for America. And the state's new superintendent of public instruction, Tony Bennett, is trying to break habits that have long guided school policy.

Mr. Bennett recently unveiled a plan to pay bonuses to top teachers willing to work at the city's worst schools, and to tie their pay to student performance in the future. He also wants to require teachers to have more expertise in their subject areas than they are required to have now.

"Our intent is to be the leader on education reform," Mr. Bennett said in launching his initiatives earlier this year. "The question is not, how much can we do? It is, how do we become the leader?"

But change comes hard. Mr. Bennett has come under fire from local superintendents, unions and education-school leaders who fear, among other things, that merit pay will unravel a seniority system that rewards longevity not quality of instruction. Meanwhile, a group of state legislative Democrats, cajoled into action by urban school leaders, earlier this year tried to pass a bill to curtail the future growth of charter schools in the state.

It was a tough fight that ended in a close victory for reformers and that ultimately highlighted the increasing strength of the reform movement. The measure passed both houses of the legislature but was shelved in late-session negotiations after Mr. Duncan warned that he will be handing out about $5 billion this year to states that show "a deep-seated commitment to education reform," which he partly defines as an embrace of charters.

The fight also underscored the bipartisan push for reform. Mr. Bennett and Gov. Mitch Daniels, both Republicans, routinely praised the Obama administration for challenging teachers unions on merit pay and charters, and for helping shape the debate in Indiana.

And that debate is at a full simmer at Indianapolis Public Schools, which serve the core of the city. Superintendent Eugene White has begun lobbying against collective bargaining policies that prevent merit pay for teachers and make it difficult to fire older, poorly performing teachers. Earlier this year several of the district's "Teacher of the Year" nominees found themselves on a list of teachers who could be laid off if school budgets are cut. The reason top-notch teachers made the list is that it is based strictly on seniority.

"If you are truly going to be fair to urban students you have to provide them with the best teachers they can have," Mr. White told me recently. "You shouldn't have a mandate that says you are untouchable because you have been here longer."

While Indianapolis teachers union President Ann Wilkins promises to fight any attack on seniority rules, Mr. Bennett agreed with Mr. White and told me, "The rules have to be challenged." He isn't alone in that belief. The New Teacher Project, a New York-based nonprofit that has studied Indianapolis Public Schools, recently surveyed district officials and found that 74% of teachers believe the district should consider more than seniority on key staffing decisions.

"That's big stuff," Daniel Weisberg, one the authors of The New Teacher Project's study, told me. It's also encouraging because it suggests support for education reform stretches from the White House to the statehouse to many of the classrooms in this city. That gives Indianapolis a rare moment to build a broad coalition for reform and enact substantial changes. But, Mr. Weisberg warned, the "window of opportunity is a small one." If reformers fail to capitalize on the moment, it will be lost. "Now is the time to think big," he said. "This is a once in a lifetime opportunity."

SOURCE




Britain: Children worse off with classroom assistants

There's no substitute for good teachers and good discipline but I think that this finding should be rather obvious. It is the dummies who get handed to the TAs and it is also of course the dummies who do less well. The study is presented to make teachers look good when it shows nothing of the sort

Children do worse in tests and exams the more time they spend with classroom assistants, according to a major study published today. The report, due to be unveiled at the British Education Research Association conference in Manchester this morning, says the classroom assistants have significantly reduced teachers' stress levels - but had a negative effect on pupils' progress.

The findings are an embarrassment to Labour which has made great play of its achievement in increasing the number of support staff in schools since it came to power. Since Labour came to power in 1997, their numbers have risen from 133,500 to 322, 500 last year.Researchers at the Institute of Education, London University, discount the idea this is because of the low attaining profile of the children teaching assistants work with. They say their survey of 8,000 pupils compared youngsters of similar ability, social class and gender who were with or without classroom assistants.

Professor Peter Blatchford, who headed the research, said one of the key reasons was that less than a quarter of the teachers surveyed had been trained to manage teaching assistants. In addition, only a quarter of the teachers surveyed - and only one in 20 in secondary schools - had allocated any time for feedback on pupils with their teaching assistants.The report also found that - the more time a pupil spent with a classroom assistant - the less contact they had with the teacher.

"While TAs are extremely dedicated - many work extra hours without pay - their routine development to pupils most in need seems to be at the heart of the problem," said Professor Blatchford. "Pupils with the most need can be separated from the teacher and the curriculum.

"The report describes the negative results on academic progress as "troubling", adding: "We found a negative relationship between the amount of additional support provided by support staff and the academic progress in pupils in years one (five and six-year-olds), three (seven and eight-year-olds) and seven (11 and 12-year-olds) in English and mathematics and ten (14 and 15-year-olds) in English."

In national curriculum tests, results showed seven-year-olds given support for between one and 50 per cent of their time at school scored one point less in English (which could be the equivalent of achieving level two - the standard for a pupil of that age - and failing). the difference between those with the most and least support was three points. It was a similar story with maths and in national curriculum tests for 11 and 14-year-olds.

"A consistent view of teachers, when they considered the benefits of support staff for their own teaching and pupils' learning and behaviour, is that the TA's presence allows more teacher attention to the rest of the class and therefore better progress for the rest of the class," the report added.

It went on: "Some support staff are less well qualified than teachers and this might be expected to be related to the educational progress of pupils that are supported..."TAs' subject knowledge did not match that of teachers."

It concludes: "It would seem appropriate to argue that all pupils should get at least the same amount of a teacher's time, and, indeed, that those in most need are most likely to benefit from more, not less."

SOURCE





6 September, 2009

UK foundation to distribute textbook that lauds Muslim world's scientific and cultural heritage

This is tired old garbage. The one thing they get right is that the Dark Ages were not uniformly dark. The Christian Greek half of the Roman empire -- Byzantium -- continued on alongside the Islamic imperium for fully half a millennium. They were militarily powerful and the Muslims could not conquer them. It was actually the Venetians who ended up destroying Byzantium. Classical scholarship was at no time lost in the Christian world, though it was largely lost in Western Europe. The Muslims simply borrowed books from the Greek Christians of Byzantium next door. They also took over the learning of the Persian empire when they conquered it. And the scholarship in Spain was mainly the work of Jews. And many so-called Muslim books were in fact the work of Assyrian Christians. There is very little in so-called Muslim civilization that is actually Muslim. It was little more than a patchwork of borrowings from other cultures

An educational foundation in the UK has announced plans to distribute to high schools a free book that highlights the scientific and cultural legacies of Muslim civilization. "1001 Inventions: Muslim Heritage in Our World" is the creation of the Foundation for Science Technology and Civilization (FSTC), a Manchester-based organization set up to raise awareness of the contributions of the Muslim world to modern civilization.

FSTC said the contribution that Muslim and other civilizations have made to the modern world has been widely overlooked and that its team of academics has focused on debunking the myth of the so-called "Dark Ages of Civilization." "The period between the 7th and 17th centuries - which has been erroneously labeled 'the Dark Ages' - was in fact a time of exceptional scientific and cultural advancement in China, India and the Arab world," Prof. Salim Al-Hassani, chief editor of the book, said. "This is the period in history that gave us the first manned flight, huge advances in engineering, the development of robotics and the foundations of modern mathematics, chemistry and physics."

The foundation said it hoped to distribute 3,000 copies of the book to UK schools by October and is seeking public support for the campaign through a sponsorship scheme.

Last month, British evolutionary biologist, popular science author and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins announced plans to distribute free DVDs to high schools across the UK. "While the Dawkins campaign, supported by the British Humanist Association, positions science and religion as opposing forces, the 1001 Inventions project reminds us that for 1,000 years the religious and the scientific were comfortable bedfellows and led to unprecedented openness to new ideas and social change," the FSTC said.

The foundation said it was not challenging Dawkins with the free book but only wanted to "encourage debate about the relationship between science, faith and culture." It said FSTC has campaigned for school curriculums to acknowledge the scientific achievements of Muslim civilization for more than a decade. "Whilst the Dawkins DVD teaches young people about the experimental scientific method, it fails to point out that it was pioneered by a religious physicist called Ibn-Al Haytham, who saw no conflict in being both a Muslim and a scientist," Prof. Al-Hassani said. The book comes with a DVD, a poster set for classrooms, a free Teachers Pack and lesson plans.

Responding to the initiative Jon Benjamin, chief executive of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the representative organization of Anglo-Jewry, said: "Foundations can distribute materials to schools, but that does not mean that schools will or should use them. We would expect the DCSF [Department for Children, Schools and Families] to monitor carefully what is made available to children for appropriateness and balance."

The project has been accused of being Islamic propaganda by a London-based think tank. "This organization calling itself the FSTC is not an educational project. It is a dawah project. That is, it is Islamic propaganda," said Douglas Murray, director of the Center for Social Cohesion, a non-partisan organization that focuses on issues related to community cohesion in the UK.

"There is significant ignorance these days, in the Britain, and the West in general, about our own scientific and cultural heritage. Organizations like the FSTC aim to step into the gap created by that ignorance and claim that the roots of our culture do not lie in our Greek and Judeao-Christian heritage, but in Islamic history."

Murray accused the FSTC of mixing propaganda with scientific history. "There are those who would claim that no good whatsoever has come from the Islamic world, such claims are demonstrably ignorant. But it is also ignorant and indeed ridiculous to mix propaganda with scientific history as the people behind this project seem to be doing."

A spokesperson from the Department for Children, Schools and Families said schools could use the material at their discretion.

SOURCE




An open letter to Notre Dame's president to release abortion protestors

Dear Father Jenkins:

I’m writing you, as president of Notre Dame, my alma mater, with an urgent plea that you drop the criminal trespass charges that have been pending against the many defendants – most of whom are faithful, fervent pro-life Catholics – who “dared” to venture onto Notre Dame’s campus last Spring, 2009, to bear peaceful, prayerful witness to the sanctity of all human life, from conception to natural death.

Among them were at least one priest and several nuns, Norma McCorvey, the “Jane Roe” of Roe v. Wade, former presidential candidate Alan Keyes, two ladies – Jane Brennan, author of Motherhood Interrupted (2008), and Laura Rohling – who preach about healing and hope after abortion in the Archdiocese of Denver, Colorado, and many other non-violent participants in America’s pro-life movement.

Many were praying the rosary or singing religious hymns. The priest – Fr. Norman Weslin, who regularly prays and counsels abortion-bound women about live-saving alternatives outside the Omaha, Nebraska abortion facility of late-term abortionist, Dr. Leroy Carhart – carried a heavy wooden cross and a rosary.

Others carried signs proclaiming that life is sacred, that abortion kills children, and other pro-life messages. All were arrested, handcuffed, and hauled off to jail where they spent the night and sometimes longer in custody. Surely that protracted detention and the humbling impact of a public arrest on trying to enter the campus of America’s premier Catholic university was enough of a penalty to offset whatever “injury” or “insult” these good people inflicted on Notre Dame’s property rights.

So, it was shocking to hear that the charges were not quickly dropped, and an even worse surprise to hear that these good Catholics had to return to South Bend to enter their pleas of “not guilty” and then again to demand jury trials.

When the St. Joseph County prosecutor backed off the latter demand, we were yet more deeply aggrieved on hearing, Fr. Jenkins, that you had responded to a request that the charges be dropped by claiming that “it is out of [your] hands.” With respect, Father, the future of these cases – if they must go on – is squarely in your hands. Notre Dame is the complainant. Its security personnel directed and/or conducted the arrests, pointing out those who would be arrested (pro-lifers) and those who would not (those carrying pro-Obama signs and/or taunting the pro-lifers).

Participation of Notre Dame witnesses will be essential if these 88 cases – all of which are to be scheduled for jury trials – actually go forward. Some defenses that already have been raised by initial trial counsel – e.g., Catholics’ access to the Sacred Heart Basilica on campus – also would require Notre Dame witnesses’ involvement in the trials.

I’m not only a Notre Dame alumnus but also president and chief counsel of a public interest law firm, based in Chicago, the Thomas More Society. We founded the Society over 10 years ago to carry on the defense of a nationwide federal class action lawsuit against pro-life protesters, NOW v. Scheidler. The Scheidler case involved charges that what Dr. M.L. King called “peaceable, non-violent direct action” (Letter from Birmingham Jail (April, 1963)) constituted the federal felony crimes of extortion and racketeering. We won Scheidler only after two decades of litigation and three U.S. Supreme Court appeals. We finally prevailed, with two successive Supreme Court wins, both by decisive, bipartisan margins: by 8-1 (2003) and then by 8-0 (2006).

Notre Dame helped us when we defended NOW v. Scheidler. Fr. Hesburgh wrote letters and agreed to testify as a character witness at the trial. Fr. Joyce sent us many generous donations. Notre Dame law professor Bob Blakey argued our first Supreme Court appeal.

But now the “Notre Dame 88" have asked us to take the lead in their defense. Not to spite Notre Dame but because we love it, we have agreed. America’s civil rights movement is ongoing, and the pro-life movement is its next phase. Notre Dame should not only support this new civil rights movement but lead it. It should honor all who dare to speak out for the dignity of all human beings – born or unborn, wanted or unwanted, humble or exalted – not prosecute them!

SOURCE [I doubt that the make-believe Catholics of Notre Dame will take much notice of this. They are not even religious enough to be called today's Pharisees]




British independent schools score far more A and A* grades at GCSE than do State schools

About two thirds of GCSE exams taken at independent schools this year gained at least an A grade, compared with only one in five in the state sector. The increase in the proportion of top marks at private schools comes as a growing number of independent head teachers abandon GCSEs in favour of more rigorous exams, casting doubt on their usefulness.

Westminster School, London, which leads this year’s independent schools table with 98.1 per cent of all grades at either A or A*, will offer ten subjects as International GCSEs (IGCSE) in the next academic year. “Pupils taking more rigorous IGCSE exams have found them more intellectually stimulating and enjoyable, so they do even better in them [than in GCSEs]” said Stephen Spurr, the headmaster of Westminster.

The IGCSE contains no coursework element and is similar to a traditional O level. It is favoured by all of this year’s Top Ten independent schools but is still not recognised by the Government. Dr Spurr said the GCSE syllabus for some subjects, particularly science, is not challenging enough for pupils at the £19,000-a-year school. “We want them to have reached a level of scientific understanding which is going to help them make informed scientific decisions in the future, even if they are not taking it at A level,” he said. “The GCSE doesn’t allow for that — for the academic level of pupils at Westminster it is too low.”

At St Paul’s Girls’ School, also in London, which heads the independent girls table with 97.3 per cent at A or A*, only maths is offered as an IGCSE. But Clarissa Farr, the school’s High Mistress, said that the school was planning a review of education for 14 to 16-year-olds this year. “We want to be sure that the curriculum provides sufficient challenge for our students,” she said. The school is considering expanding the number of IGCSEs it offers and could also adopt the middle years baccalaureate in place of GCSEs.

Magdalen College School, Oxford, came top of the all-boys table with 97.9 per cent A and A* grades. Tim Hands, the headmaster, said he still believes in the capacity of the GCSE syllabus to test even the cleverest. “They offer a broad base, discriminate between schools effectively and are challenging,” Dr Hands said. “If we have too much change, then young people are deprived of stability.”

Almost 60 per cent of GCSEs and IGCSEs taken by independent pupils were awarded A or A* this year compared with 21.6 per cent of those taken in state schools. Admissions tutors at top universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, have indicated that they value the IGCSE most highly. State schools cannot take IGCSEs and are allowing their brightest pupils to leap-frog GCSEs and take AS levels instead.

One in seven independent schools has boycotted the league tables published by the Independent Schools Council. Among them is St Paul’s School for Boys in London, whose High Master, Martin Stephen, denounced league tables as a “lie”. He said: “The problem with league tables is they compare apples and pears. It’s absolutely idiotic to have a highly selective day school compared on the same basis as a comprehensive entry rural school.”

SOURCE





5 September, 2009

Zogby Poll: 25% of College Grads Say Degree Not Worth the Cost

Survey finds 52% of likely voters believe higher education today is worth the price, 33% say it is not

One in four college graduates -- 25% -- believe higher education is not worth the price of attendance, given today's significant college costs including tuition, room and board, and books, a new Zogby-Scoop44 interactive poll shows.

There is a considerable difference in opinion between those who have earned their college degree and those who have not. Nearly two-thirds (63%) of respondents who have a college degree think the money spent on higher education is worth it. Among respondents who do not have a college degree, fewer than half (44%) think higher education is worth the cost. Overall, slightly more than half (52%) of all respondents believe the costs associated with a college education are worth it, while 33% say they are not. Another 14% are not sure. Women with a college degree (65%) are slightly more likely than men with a college degree (61%) to believe higher education costs are worth it in the end.

The interactive survey of 2,530 likely voters nationwide was conducted Aug. 18-20, 2009, and carries a margin of error of +/- 2.0%. Margins of error may be higher in subgroups. The survey was commissioned by Scoop44.

While respondents of all ages are more likely to view a higher education as worth the expense, older respondents are most likely to believe the costs of college are worth it in the end - 61% of those age 65 and older feel this way. Among those age 65 and older with a college degree, 70% say the cost is worth it, and more than half of these oldest respondents without degrees (55%) feel the same.

On the younger end of the spectrum, more than half (55%) of those age 18-29 believe higher education is worth the price, while 35% disagree and 10% are not sure. Many of these youngest voters are already well aware of the high price tag associated with college attendance and the hefty student loans they may face after they get their degree, but those age 18-29 with college degrees are much more likely to believe the costs are worth it (62%). Even so, 28% of these younger respondents with degrees don't believe higher education is worth the cost. Younger respondents without degrees are even more likely to think higher education isn't worth the money (41%).

More here




Homeschoolers are beating the state

Moderate temps, shorter days, state fairs, football, peppers and gourds, “Labor Day” weekend….back to school. Except for some. A growing number of families have bucked the autumn tradition of pep rallies and discount office supply shopping. They have chosen to homeschool.

A few posts back, Brad showed how Sweden is trying to outlaw homeschooling. This is a travesty, and if you want to try to help all those young Bjorns and Bjorks who might have had a taste of true freedom, there is a petition here.

Reading about how Sweden is trying to crack down on homeschoolers, I get a very rare feeling of pride to be an American. Liberty lovers are losing the battle on all sides right now, but we do have one extraordinary victory in the recent past we can point to with pride, and that is the homeschooling movement.

In 1964, John Holt published How Children Fail, a small book of observations from a teacher, epic in its implications. Although he didn’t know it at the time, Holt was tearing down the notion of formal classroom schooling so thoroughly that he would kick off an international movement. Holt wasn’t alone, of course. Many parents, teachers, and child psychologists in the mid-sixties were beginning to suspect that kids might be better off if they stayed away from school altogether. So some of them started leaving their kids out.

These early pioneers frequently operated in violation of compulsory attendance laws. In 1976, Holt, now fully convinced that the classroom was a destructive place, called for a “Children’s Underground Railroad” to help children escape compulsory schooling. Families that were homeschooling in secret around the country contacted him. Through Holt, homeschoolers formed a network to help one another and work at legalizing their activity.

Homeschooling grew in the 70s as the movement figured out creative ways to get around compulsory attendance laws. With this growth came successful removal of legislation that prohibited it, state by state, including a landmark case in 1978 that concluded that “the Massachusetts compulsory attendance statute might well be constitutionally infirm if it did not exempt students whose parents prefer alternative forms of education.”

By 1980, homeschooling was completely legal in 40 states, and legal in the other 10 if overseen by a government-certified teacher. In 1983, The Homeschool Legal Defense Fund was founded. Once that legally approved door was opened, fundamentalist Christians began entering the homeschool movement in large numbers. Today homeschooling is legal in all 50 states. 2.5 million kids are doing it.

And, as readers would expect, the homeschoolers are torching their government school counterparts. On average, homeschool students score 37 per cent higher than their peers on standardized tests. There are no discernable achievement gaps between races, genders, and income levels in the homeschool movement, with homeschoolers consistently landing in the 85th percentile or higher on achievement tests, regardless of background. The average annual education-specific expense for a homeschooler is $500. For a government school student, it is $10,000.

With American homeschooling, we have a pro-liberty, anti-state movement that is:

a) Achieving positive results that far surpass the government alternative.

b) Growing rapidly.

c) Allowing a huge number of children to grow up in freedom.

d) Resistant to government attempts to thwart it.

It’s letter D that I think of as I read about the poor Swedish kids. In America, the government, which is winning in the battle against liberty at every turn, is losing its battle to shut down the homeschool movement. In 1997, as the explosive growth in homeschooling was first becoming evident, the National Education Association adopted its first anti homeschooling resolution, saying that homeschooling programs “cannot provide the student with a comprehensive education experience.” Clearly fearing that homeschooling would expose the government schools for the scheme they are, the NEA also resolved that, if homeschooling is chosen, “instruction should be by persons who are licensed by the appropriate state education licensure agency.”

The NEA continues to adopt an anti homeschooling resolution in their charter every year, and lobbies state governments to make it harder to homeschool. The UN has adopted and is now considering resolutions that clearly are opposed to homeschooling.

Homeschoolers are under the same assault as anyone else trying to secure freedoms from the government.

But unlike most other pro-freedom movements, the homeschoolers are winning.

Since the NEA adopted its first anti-homeschooling resolution, the number of homeschoolers has doubled. Their number is growing at 7% a year, and through an immensely organized nationwide effort, they continue to win court cases and legislative battles making it easier to homeschool in America, even as the NEA tries to make it harder.

In homeschooling, I see real-time activity that improves lives, increases freedom, contributes to our efforts to one day achieve a free society, and successfully holds back the state. Not only is it growing, but its growth rate is accelerating.

Clearly we have a model of success. I wonder what lessons we might learn from the homeschool movement that can be applied to other freedom-seeking efforts.

SOURCE




Australian school wins right to hire male handler for aggressive student

Except for the complete destruction of school discipline by Leftist "educators", this would never have arisen. It is a disgrace that anyone was ever exposed to danger by an unrestrained monster like this. Plenty of thrashings in response to his acts of violence would have slown him down and taught him the badly-needed lesson that violence begets violence

A SCHOOL has won permission for a male handler for a primary pupil so violent the principal fears for the safety of teachers and other pupils. The special school in Melbourne's eastern suburbs was given an exemption by the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal to employ a man to supervise the youngster, because he is too dangerous for women. The school will now spend between $35,000 and $42,000 a year on the "education support" officer, the Herald Sun reports.

The youngster's "extreme" violent behaviour is escalating, despite intensive counselling and constant talks with the boy's family and protective services officers, the tribunal heard. The boy, not yet even a teenager, is so unruly he is allowed to use the playground only for a limited time in school breaks and under one-on-one supervision. He was also regularly hauled from class because of the disruption he caused, the school's application to the tribunal stated. The age of the youngster has not been released, but the school only accepts children aged five to 12.

The school contended it was "very difficult to provide a safe work environment for our staff, most of whom are female, and for our student population, without a male education support officer".

VCAT gave the school an exemption from anti-discrimination laws so that it could specifically employ a man for the role on August 26. "This student has exhibited extreme violence both within and outside school grounds," VCAT deputy president Anne Coghlan said in the tribunal's decision. "He demonstrates threatening and aggressive behaviour towards students and staff."

While the school accepts students with "severe behaviour disorders", its assistant principal confirmed the latest measure was a first. "This is the first time we have ever done it, that's purely something we decided as a staff to do," she said. "Within our school we have mainly women (staff)."

Australian Education Union state president Mary Bluett said in rare cases some special schools had to take the measure for extremely difficult students. "They get to a size and physical strength that it is a challenge to restrain them for both their protection and the protection of others," she said. "What it is, on the face of it, is an enormous effort by the school to maintain the student in their care and education. "At least we are not back in the dark days where these children were actually shut away. "In these cases we have to make every effort to ensure it is a safe working environment for teachers and other children."

Department of Education and Early Childhood Development spokeswoman Karen Harbutt said the department backed the school's decision.

SOURCE





4 September, 2009

Using student loans to slow tuition-fee growth

IT’S back-to-school time for college students, which means big tuition bills. Most will defer large out-of-pocket costs until after college through the use of student loans. No one is happy about the explosion in student loan debt to pay rising tuition, but there is a silver lining: We can use student loans to slow tuition growth.

There are two sides to the college affordability ledger: financial aid and tuition. Politicians focus almost exclusively on expanding financial aid, which is crucial, but it’s like chasing a rabbit. Tuition outpaces inflation, grant aid, even health care cost growth, and, most importantly, median family income. To keep pace with rising tuition, student loan debt doubled over the last decade.

To slow tuition growth, supply-and-demand incentives have to change. If suppliers are on the hook for a portion of student loan default costs, they’ll be less likely to run up tuition beyond what they can expect students to repay. If consumer demand can be nudged at the same time toward colleges that are good investments, schools that offer poor value at a high price will have to slow tuition growth and improve student outcomes. We shouldn’t regulate tuition; we should nudge it in the right direction.

Colleges, because their mission rightly is to build and diffuse knowledge, have insatiable growth aspirations. Many will raise tuition as much as the market will bear, and it bears a great deal.

But families choose colleges and borrow almost blindly. They have relatively little information as to how good an investment a particular school is. Ranking guides like that of US News & World Report focus on the top 20 percent of schools and inputs like class size as opposed to outcomes like how much students learn.

If colleges are made responsible for a portion of student loan default costs, they’ll be more responsible in who they let in, how much they charge, and how well they prepare students for good-paying jobs that enable those students to pay off their debt. In the private student-loan market, banks are increasingly placing proprietary colleges on the hook for a portion of student loan default costs. The federal student loan market is five times as large. We need recourse there as well.

There’s a danger colleges will respond by pricing their exposure to defaults into even higher tuition. That’s why we also need to nudge demand away from high-cost, poor-value schools. Most colleges supply a good product, and shouldn’t be penalized simply for serving high-risk populations. But a subset of schools is clearly not serving students well. Community colleges in that group aren’t the issue here, because of their low cost and low borrowing rates. The real problem is with low-level private institutions and shoddy for-profit trade schools. We should steer students away from them, but how?

Few Americans want to see No Child Left Behind-like testing at the college level. But it’s relatively easy to compare colleges according to what students most want out of higher education: good jobs and financial security.

We need a price-to-earnings ratio - that is, price of college to expected future earnings - for higher education. The US Department of Education has the average net price for each college. It can generate lifetime student default rates for each school as well. A private website, Payscale.com, lists median starting and mid-career salaries for hundreds of schools. Put such data together and construct a higher-education value index, including a “lemon list.’’ Just like politicians have to say they approve campaign commercials, make the lemons warn consumers on their marketing materials.

“Warning: One in two Acme College borrowers defaults on a student loan within three years of separation from Acme College. Acme graduates earn an average starting salary of $22,000 a year. Be careful before assuming substantial student loan debt to attend Acme College.’’

Schools will want to be identified as good-value options and shudder at the prospect of being on a lemon list. To avoid it, they’ll be less quick to raise tuition - and more interested in making sure their students get good-paying jobs.

SOURCE




Crooked German academics

Germany's academic community is being shaken by doubts cast on the integrity of around one hundred professors.

The professors, working across all academic disciplines at many major German universities, are suspected to have accepted thousands of euros in bribes from the now-insolvent Institute for Scientific Consulting ("Institut für Wissenschaftsberatung") in Bergisch-Gladbach, near Cologne.

The scandal is the latest in a series of investigations into the Institute's business practices. Public prosecutors searched its offices back in 2005 and again in March 2008, after malpractice accusations first emerged.

In July 2008, the managing director of the Institute was sentenced to three and a half years in prison and a €75000 fine for having paid a law professor in Hanover up to €4000 to accept PhD candidates, some of whom did not fulfill the prerequisites for studying towards a PhD. The law professor was also convicted of accepting bribes.

Files found after the Institute was searched last year created enough suspicion to trigger the current investigation.

Most of the professors involved are of junior status, without full tenure, although some tenured professors are among those being investigated, says Cologne's senior public prosecutor, Günther Feld.

"This is not about selling PhD titles, but about whether academics accepted money to take on particular PhD candidates," Feld emphasises.

Even so, there are grave concerns within the academic community. The federal minister of education, Annette Schavan, said on Sunday that the credibility of Germany's academic community could sustain major damage if the accusations turn out to be true.

The president of the German Association of University Professors and Lecturers (DHV), Bernhard Kempen, said that a thorough investigation of these cases was urgently needed and that the legitimacy of an agency offering services to students to help them obtain PhDs should generally be questioned.

He called for university regulations to require PhD candidates to sign statements that they have not accepted any outside help in obtaining their PhDs.

SOURCE




Hate shouldn’t be a pillar of Islamic education

When the Islamic Saudi Academy in Fairfax, Va., requested to expand the campus, protests about the curriculum came to a head. Why allow such an expansion when the school’s books are tainted with hate? The books are the same as those used in schools in Saudi Arabia: Students are taught to incite violence and cause human rights violations, to be hostile toward non-Muslims, and how to punish people, among other shocking passages.

Under pressure from a congressional report in 2008, the academy changed its textbooks — but inflammatory passages remain. An 11th-grade textbook reads: “Scholars of the People of the Book know that Islam is the true path because they find it in their books, but they shy away out of ignorance and stubbornness. And God knows their deeds and will judge them.” The “People of the Book” are Jews and Christians, who are allegedly ignoring the truth of Islam. Even more horrifying, the books promote child marriage, going so far as to condone forced marriage with a 1-year-old child. In Saudi Arabia, there are many examples of such marriages between children who are prepubescent.

There are over 5 million students in the state schools in Saudi Arabia, not to mention the sizeable quantity of students enrolled in Saudi-supported schools across the world, including the one in Fairfax. What students are taught in school should be a concern for the United States, and stopping the problem at its roots should be a top priority.

Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, the school’s former valedictorian, was convicted in 2005 of joining al Qaeda and planning to assassinate President George W. Bush. Another graduate of the academy, Raed Abdul-Rahman Al-Saif, was arrested just last month at a Florida airport while trying to board a plane with a concealed butcher knife.

The existence of a Muslim school in the United States should not even be debated. There has been some strong response to the Islamic Saudi Academy, perhaps some of which may be too reactionary.

Generalizing Islam as a fanatical religion that breeds hatred and terrorism is false. Students instead need to be taught Islam without the influence of the Saudi government and its archaic, strict practices.

Achieving a moderate and appropriate curriculum has proved to be an attainable goal. The King Fahd Academy in London, a sister school to the one in Virginia, used to teach from the same controversial textbooks. Over time, the school modernized its curriculum to contain moderate teachings of Islam. In the United States, students should be able to go to Islamic schools. But getting rid of these toxic textbooks should be part of the package.

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3 September, 2009

Nasty British university finally trumped

A law student who refused to accept the results of her final examinations has won a four-year legal battle to have her marks upgraded. Alice Clarke was given low marks in two assessments for her Bar Vocational Course that all lawyers have to pass to practise as a barrister. She claimed that the low marks for her oral examinations in advanced criminal law and legal negotiation were because of disagreements with her tutors and asked Cardiff University to reassess them. When it refused, she pursued her claim through the High Court.

An independent assessor who listened to her performance in criminal law examination gave her 71 per cent instead of the 40 per cent that she originally received. The university was ordered to allow her to retake the negotiation test, which she passed with 62 per cent instead of 46 per cent.

In a written judgment Mr Justice Wyn Williams ordered that the revised results should be accepted as though she had passed when she sat the papers the first time.

Mrs Clarke, 43, a mother of two, studied law as a mature student after a career as a nurse. She said that the legal battle to have her results reassessed had been worth it even though it has cost her tens of thousands of pounds. She said: “I am very glad to have won but I am sad that I have lost four years of my career fighting this battle. “The university only finally accepted I had passed in March, four years after I took the exams. It’s been a living nightmare but I am just so pleased the court has vindicated me.”

Mrs Clarke was determined to have the original results cancelled out after claiming that disagreements with tutors had led to her being marked down. She said: “I was worried that barristers’ chambers wouldn’t take me on if they thought I’d failed the two papers at the first attempt. “I decided to challenge it through the courts even though I knew it would cost me thousands of pounds. On a professional level it’s simply astonishing, on a human level it’s extraordinary the way I have been treated by the university. They banned me from taking a resit, they banned me from campus and they even began disciplinary proceedings against me.”

After graduating in law in 1998 Mrs Clarke carried on working as a nurse and bringing up her two children Sarah, now 12, and Aaron, 9, before taking the advanced law degree. She was finally registered as a barrister in March and is hoping to find work representing people whose homes have been repossessed.

Mrs Clarke is waiting for a High Court hearing to decide who is responsible for the majority of costs in a case that she believes has legal fees of up to £400,000. She said: “I don’t know the exact amount of my costs but they could be as much as £100,000. There have been eight hearings in the High Court but however much it cost me I was determined to fight to its conclusion.”

In his written judgment, Mr Justice Williams said: “I have reached the conclusion that the decision of the extenuating circumstance committee of June 30, 2005, to refuse the claimant’s application for extenuating circumstances relating to her negotiation assessment should be quashed. “Unless any representation is made to the contrary, I propose also to quash the decision of the reconvened examination board of September 27, 2005, insofar as it relates to the claimant’s application for extenuating circumstances.”

Cardiff University said that it was considering the implications of the judgement:“The university is aware of the judgment handed down at the Royal Courts of Justice in London. At this stage, the university is considering the implications of this judgment in consultation with our legal advisers. “It is of relevance that the university offered independent marking at a hearing as long ago as October 2006. “Mrs Clarke only agreed to this after 18 months and three orders of court. This delay caused the court to order Mrs Clarke to pay towards the university’s costs.”

SOURCE




Australia: School covers up brutal bashing

Days after a 15-year-old boy died after a schoolyard brawl, a Gold Coast high school has been accused of covering up a savage assault that left a 17-year-old boy with a fractured skull. Southport State High School student Angelo Feraru, 17, will need plastic surgery after the unprovoked attack on August 21 that broke his nose and fractured his skull. His mother Mihela is just grateful her son, unlike Jai Morcom, is alive.

Angelo was sitting, eating his lunch when he was attacked by another student and punched in the face. His face was covered in blood and he was taken by ambulance to the Gold Coast Hospital where doctors said the teen's nose was badly broken and his sinus bone fractured. Doctors reset his nose and told Mihela her son would need extensive surgery to repair the damage.

Despite the severity of the attack, Southport State High School failed to report it to police. It handled the issue internally by dishing out a 10-day suspension. [What a joke!] Queensland Police yesterday confirmed they had no record of the vicious assault.

It is understood Angelo's attacker is a fellow student with a history of violence. He was expelled from another Gold Coast school after attacking a fellow student, breaking his jaw. He transferred to Southport High School where he assaulted another Southport student only three weeks before attacking Angelo.

On Monday, Ms Feraru and her son went to the Runaway Bay Police Station to report the incident but were warned against the complaint. The officer who dealt with the pair warned Angelo of the potential fallout if he pressed charges. "They tell us to be careful because Angelo has to live with this kid for the next few months before he finishes school," said Ms Feraru.

Gold Coast police district Superintendent Jim Keogh said it seemed 'incredible' police had only been told of the matter nine days after the assault. He said police needed Angelo to make a formal statement before officers could act on the complaint.

Mrs Feraru said she was scared to send her son back to school.... Ms Feraru said she went to the police station hoping they would stop the violence.

The danger of inaction is all too clear after the death of Jai Morcom last week. The 15-year-old died in Gold Coast Hospital on Saturday after suffering massive head injuries during a brutal brawl over lunch tables on Friday. "It make me feel sick in my stomach," said Ms Feraru.

In a statement released yesterday, Education Queensland confirmed 'an incident took place on August 21 and a student required medical attention'. "A student was disciplined in line with the school's Responsible Behaviour Plan," it read. The department said it would investigate any reports of schools not following policy. [So that's policy?? Expose innocent kids to brutal violence and do nothing significant to prevent a recurrence??]

SOURCE




Australia: Teachers are powerless to stop schoolyard violence

Not exactly surprising in the light of the severe limits placed on discipline by a Leftist government

The bashing death at school of a 15 year old boy in Mullumbimby last week is a symptom of a much bigger statewide problem in schools. Teachers are too scared to step in before things get totally out of hand. Put simply teachers now have little control. The consequences for students of bad, even violent behaviour, are now so insignificant students simply don’t care.

A teacher cannot restrain a student at all, they can’t yell at students or else they will be accused of emotional abuse. A teacher must simply say “please don’t do this” and then hope they are obeyed. Step outside this rigid set of rules and you risk being “EPACed” - every teacher’s worst nightmare. To be “EPACed” is to be investigated by the Education Department’s Employee Performance and Conduct Unit, a Gestapo-like division.

Students know this and play on it and why wouldn’t you if you were a child and knew what you could get away with. Eventually the ultimate punishment for persistent disobedience (after the student refuses to come to detention and throws the detention slip at the teacher) is suspension from school.

This means they are rewarded a holiday for their actions. If there are too many suspensions at a school the department then asks the school Principal to explain why so many students are being suspended and to come up with strategies to reduce the high suspension rate at the school.

Any teacher who physically intervenes in a physical fight in the play ground risks being reported by a student for physical assault and marched off to EPAC, where the onus is on them to prove their innocence.

EPAC acts as policeman, prosecutor, judge, jury and then executioner. EPAC do not make final decisions using the words Guilty or Innocent. Unless a student actually admits they were lying when they complained about their teacher, then the most a teacher can expect if they are innocent is if EPAC finds “there is insignificant evidence to prove the conduct occurred” the teacher then has this black mark on their record for life.

Some examples of a teacher being EPACed include a primary school teacher and friend of mine in Sydney’s North Shore who broke up a fight by physically restraining a student who was bashing another student.

That teacher was then EPACed and although it was found that the teacher trying to exercise their duty of care, the record of this incident is in their teacher job file held in Oxford Street (where EPAC keep all files) for the rest of their teaching career.

Another incident involves a teacher at a high school who whilst taking students on an excursion to an Art gallery was asked about a particular painting which was on public display which may have been interpreted as having sexual themes. The teacher told the students they did not want to discuss this painting and to move on.

Two female students then complained and the teacher was EPACed for allegedly showing students sexually explicit artwork. Even though EPAC decided that “there is insignificant evidence to prove the conduct occurred” the teacher now has that case in their EPAC file for the rest of their career.

Whilst a teacher is being EPACed they are told by the Principal not to discuss the investigation with anyone at the school. This makes them feel anxious and even more upset and attempts to punish them psychologically even though nothing has been proven against them.

After two accusations where there is “insignificant evidence” the teachers name is reported to the Commission for Children and Young People, (CCYP) essentially they are labeled a child abuser on the hearsay of often vindictive students who know they have the power now.

As a result of all this is it any wonder that what started as a fight in the playground at Mullumbimby lead to a bashing death of a student?. Students have the power and teachers know they can’t intervene physically anymore. The DET student discipline policy and it EPAC procedures are to blame and the situation statewide is only going to get worse as students relish in their new found power at school.

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2 September, 2009

Court orders Christian child into government education

BECAUSE she is a Christian. First Amendment, anyone?

A 10-year-old homeschool girl described as "well liked, social and interactive with her peers, academically promising and intellectually at or superior to grade level" has been told by a New Hampshire court official to attend a government school because she was too "vigorous" in defense of her Christian faith. The decision from Marital Master Michael Garner reasoned that the girl's "vigorous defense of her religious beliefs to [her] counselor suggests strongly that she has not had the opportunity to seriously consider any other point of view."

The recommendation was approved by Judge Lucinda V. Sadler, but it is being challenged by attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund, who said it was "a step too far" for any court. The ADF confirmed today it has filed motions with the court seeking reconsideration of the order and a stay of the decision sending the 10-year-old student in government-run schools in Meredith, N.H.

The dispute arose as part of a modification of a parenting plan for the girl. The parents divorced in 1999 when she was a newborn, and the mother has homeschooled her daughter since first grade with texts that meet all state standards. In addition to homeschooling, the girl attends supplemental public school classes and has also been involved in a variety of extra-curricular sports activities, the ADF reported.

But during the process of negotiating the terms of the plan, a guardian ad litem appointed to participate concluded the girl "appeared to reflect her mother's rigidity on questions of faith" and that the girl's interests "would be best served by exposure to a public school setting" and "different points of view at a time when she must begin to critically evaluate multiple systems of belief ... in order to select, as a young adult, which of those systems will best suit her own needs." According to court documents, the guardian ad litem earlier had told the mother, "If I want her in public school, she'll be in public school."

The marital master hearing the case proposed the Christian girl be ordered into public school after considering "the impact of [her religious] beliefs on her interaction with others." "Parents have a fundamental right to make educational choices for their children. In this case specifically, the court is illegitimately altering a method of education that the court itself admits is working," said ADF-allied attorney John Anthony Simmons of Hampton. "The court is essentially saying that the evidence shows that, socially and academically, this girl is doing great, but her religious beliefs are a bit too sincerely held and must be sifted, tested by, and mixed among other worldviews. This is a step too far for any court to take."

"The New Hampshire Supreme Court itself has specifically declared, 'Home education is an enduring American tradition and right,'" said ADF Senior Legal Counsel Mike Johnson. "There is clearly and without question no legitimate legal basis for the court's decision, and we trust it will reconsider its conclusions."

The case, handled in the Family Division of the Judicial Court for Belknap County in Laconia, involves Martin Kurowski and Brenda Kurowski (Voydatch), and their daughter.

The ADF also argued that the issue already was raised in 2006 and rejected by the court. "Most urgent … is the issue of Amanda's schooling as the school year has begun and Amanda is being impacted by the court's decision daily," the court filing requesting a stay said. "Serious state statutory and federal constitutional concerns are implicated by the court's ruling and which need to be remedied without delay.

"It is not the proper role of the court to insist that Amanda be 'exposed to different points of view' if the primary residential parent has determined that it is in Amanda's best interest not to be exposed to secular influences that would undermine Amanda's faith, schooling, social development, etc. The court is not permitted to demonstrate hostility toward religion, and particularly the faith of Amanda and Mother, by removing Amanda from the home and thrusting her into an environment that the custodial parent deems detrimental to Amanda."

"The order assumes that because Amanda has sincerely held Christian beliefs, there must be a problem that needs solving. It is a parent's constitutionally protected right to train up their children in the religious beliefs that they hold. It is not up to the court to suggest that a 10-year-old should be 'exposed' to other religious views contrary to the faith traditions of her parents. Could it not be that this sharp 10-year-old 'vigorously' believes what she does because she knows it to be true? The court's narrative suggests that 10-year-olds are too young to form opinions and that they are not yet allowed to have sincerely held Christian beliefs," the ADF said.

"Absent any other clear and convincing evidence justifying the court's decision, it would appear that the court has indeed taken sides with regard to the issue of religion and has preferred one religious view over another (or the absence of religion). This is impermissible," the documents said.

The guardian ad litem had an anti-Christian bias, the documents said, telling the mother at one point she wouldn't even look at homeschool curriculum. "I don't want to hear it. It's all Christian based," she said.

SOURCE




Let’s stick up for boisterous boys

Comment from Britain: Dreary coursework and earnest women teachers have let pupils down. Many prefer the excitement of sudden-death exams

It was an axiom of 1970s feminists that, apart from a bit of irritating biology, boys and girls were the same. Girls could be motorbike engineers and corporate lawyers, boys could be homebody childminders. And so they can.

They adjured us to give our girl-babies toy power-drills and press dollies and dusters on the lads. Any female infant found wrapping her Fisher-Price workbench in a shawl and nursing it, any boy-child going “Neeeeeeowwwwwww!” and setting up aerial battles between his toy dustpan and brush, must in this theory be firmly dissuaded.

Worse still was the school of thought that did acknowledge inbuilt differences, but despised them: Jill Tweedie, of The Guardian, wrote with angry scorn even about her teenage sons, and when Jenni Murray’s first boy was born, she relates with horror that a friend hissed: “Poor you, having to raise one of the enemy!”

I never bought in to this viperous pretence, as I grew up with three brothers and spent three years in a rough-and-tumble village school. I saw that boys were not the enemy, but that on the other hand neither were they girls. Alfie at school might push me in a ditch in a fit of high spirits and say a rude word, but Annie would tell sneaky tales behind my back. On the other hand Alfie was creative and daring in the raiding of woodpiles at Guy Fawkes, and when Annie was nice we could yarn for hours.

I like boys and men. The sexes have a lot to learn from one another. Of course, rights must be equal, and of cours,e there have been terrible injustices to women. But the pretend war, the psychological war, is only for amusement — Violet Elizabeth Bott foils William and the Outlaws. We need both sexes to complete the full and fabulous picture of humanity.

Education should reflect this happy synthesis, but it hardly does. In reaction against the days when bigots argued that educating girls caused sterility, and more recent decades when girls were denied sciences other than Domestic, the system has swung over into a bias against boys. As fewer and fewer primary teachers are men (rightly scared of demonisation as child molesters), a feminised culture rises. Boys, says the staffroom, are “exhausting”: lazy, aggressive, disrupters and debunkers, too fond of rude jokes.

More seriously, as the writer Doris Lessing said in a 2001 lecture, boys are told that their gender made the world dangerous. She visited a classroom where an earnest young woman taught that war is caused by the violent nature of men. The boys “sat there crumpled, apologising for their existence”. Out of the classroom, no doubt, they hastened to the shrine of Arnie Schwarzenegger, as the most positive role model.

Meanwhile, girls — more keen to please, gentler, less driven by itching muscular energy, are seen as sugar and spice. Easier for Miss to relate to. I remember once being faintly ashamed of my own gender on arriving in a playground where the boys were tearing around in some wild happy game while a knot of little girls stood still in clean socks, testing one another on their times-tables. With a caveat about oversimplification (there are happy wrestling tomboys and gentle anxious boys), the fact is that boys’ natural behaviour prompts a belief that what they mainly need is — well, controlling.

Quite apart from the literal feminisation of the teaching profession, even school routines militate against young male biology: as fewer children walk to school, boys arrive with natural surplus energy, which it is a torment to suppress. One primary school that used to start with a quiet assembly tried replacing it with ten minutes of energetic running at the start of the day: boys’ disruption in class fell away.

Various studies confirm the way that expectations of boys (trouble! disruptive!) can damage their education. In 1964 in California an experiment was carried out in which 132 five-year-olds were taught reading by a machine: both sexes reacted in the same way and the boys scored marginally higher. Taught conventionally by women teachers, boys’ scores dipped. The plea that teachers have to spend “three times more attention” on boys is countered by researched observations (in an Australian study of 2001) that actually, a lot of this attention is devoted to berating them for “inappropriate behaviour”. Some of which, of course, may be simply boisterousness: a more exuberant style of learning and reacting. Tiring, yes: but natural. Yet even at A level the poor lads suffer punitive assaults on their whole sex as they are forced to study feminist dystopianism like The Handmaid’s Tale alongside smugly pious girls.

For those of us who have been uneasy about this for years, and hated the growing triumphalism about girls outperforming boys, there was a considerable buzz in last week’s exam figures. GCSE coursework is a plodding, dreary business, less a test of knowledge and understanding than of compliance and tidy punctuality. It has ruled the roost under new Labour, but after various scandals is gradually being cut down in favour of the more daredevil, challenging ordeal of the “sudden death” exam where you have to pull out all the stops on one hot summer day.

They cut coursework from maths for this year: and what happens? After nearly 20 years of girls outdoing boys in that subject, the moment the coursework is dropped the boys surge slightly ahead. QED. It is only one small proof, but underlines the strong probability that the style, the ethos, the expectations of schools are demoralising boyish boys.

And hear this: such a bias also damages and demoralises quite a few boyish girls, too. For just as some boys are quiet and anxious, some females are not compliant, quiet, teacher-pleasers prone to apple-polishing and recreational times-table-testing. There are swashbuckling girls who take risks, stir things up, laugh at inappropriate moments, hit deadlines in an adrenalin rush, and prefer the risky terror of the examination hall to organised, deliberative female steadiness.

When we worry about boys we should remember these girls too: just as concern about the status of female professions should include those men who join them. We need yin and yang, male and female, buccaneers and consolidators, nurses and surgeons, stevedores and embroiderers — of either sex. We should celebrate both.

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Australian school bullying shame: three children a class bullied daily

But all schools have "policies" about it -- policies that are a vacuity in the absence of significant disciplinary powers

BULLYING has become such a "pervasive problem" in schools that three children in each class are bullied daily or almost daily. Startling research, held by Queensland's Education Department, shows another five children per class are bullied in some way weekly. Education Department assistant director-general of student services Patrea Walton told a community forum at the weekend that bullying was a "pervasive problem in schools" and had been identified as "one of the biggest fears parents have for their children".

The State Government has hired national bullying expert Professor Ken Rigby to help address the scourge.

Up to 70 per cent of suspensions currently handed out in Queensland schools relate to bullying. The horrific death of year 9 Mullumbimby student Jai Morcom, who suffered massive head injuries after he was allegedly targeted during a schoolyard brawl on Friday, has reignited the debate on student cruelty and violence.

Rising school violence continues to dog Education Minister Geoff Wilson, who is trying a raft of measures to tackle the problem, including hiring Prof Rigby. [Ken Rigby is a nice guy but there are severe limits on what psychology can do]

Australia's largest study of school bullying, released two months ago, showed Queensland had among the highest levels of bullying in the country. The forum, organised by the Queensland Council of Parents and Citizens Associations Metropolitan West Regional Council, heard terrifying accounts of cyber bullying in which students spoke of killing peers. Speakers also told of messages in which students wrote of hurting students' families.

Ms Walton said research showed bullying victims were more likely to be depressed, anxious, have low self-esteem, exhibit medical problems and talk about suicide than their peers. But she said it was not a recent phenomenon and not confined to schools.

Tullawong State High School principal Leonie Kearney, credited with turning her Caboolture school around through a tough stance on bullying and bad behaviour, said 70 per cent of suspensions she administered related to bullying.

Ms Walton said she didn't believe the proportion of suspensions for bullying would be as high across the state, but was unable to provide a figure, citing no agreed definition. More than 50 per cent of the 55,000 suspensions handed out to state school students in 2008 were for physical, verbal and non-verbal misconduct.

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1 September, 2009

American parents should demand public school refunds

And now, from the tortured and twisted logic department, comes this little tidbit from an activist opposed to vouchers being used to send D.C. students to private schools. Last week, about 100 supporters of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program held a rally outside the U.S. Department of Education headquarters. According to news reports, about 200 students were awarded vouchers this past spring. Then our federal government double crossed the kiddies and yanked the vouchers.

The voucher program gives parents who are unable to afford to send their children to private schools the same choice the ones who can do, and that's why Robert Vinson Brannum, the activist in question, opposes vouchers. "Not every choice can come on a public dollar," Brannum said in one news report. "I should have to pay for my child to go to private school. If it's acceptable for those who oppose abortion not to have their dollars used to pay for abortions, I should have that same choice."

And, by comparing the use of taxpayer money to fund abortions to the use of taxpayer money to send a kid to private school, Brannum wins the twisted, tortured logic award for 2009. His reasoning is wrong on so many levels it's hard to know where to begin to pick his argument apart, but I'll start with this one. Government doesn't compel anyone to have sex. Government doesn't compel women to get pregnant, either.

Having sex is strictly a private matter, one that should be the most private. In fact, when the so-called "pro-choice" crowd supported Norma McCorvey - the Jane Roe in Roe v. Wade - in her case that went to the Supreme Court, they used the "right to privacy" argument. They went rooting around in the "penumbra" of the Constitution and just yanked the right out. The "right to privacy" is the ball field the "pro-choicers" chose to play on. Later, they decided that they didn't really mean a "right to privacy" at all, but the right to an abortion at any stage of a woman's pregnancy. And they insisted that poor women should have the same right as rich women, and advocated for public funds be made available for abortions for poor women.

Realizing that they were asking the public to foot the bill for the consequences of a very private act, the pro-choicers completely abandoned their "right to privacy" language. These days they say "a woman's right to choose."

Public education isn't even a different pew in the same church. Heck, it's an entirely different religion. Government makes education compulsory for children up to a certain age. That means those parents who don't have the money to send their children to private school or the time to home school them have to send them to public schools. Once the government has compelled parents to send their children to public schools, it has entered into a contract with those parents.

Government has promised not only to educate children, but also to do so in a safe environment. If the school either provides little to no education or isn't safe, or both, then the government has reneged on its promise. At that point, parents have the right to demand that government provide them with an alternative. I've gone so far as to say those parents have the right to demand the government cut them a check for whatever the per-pupil expenditure is in their district for public education. With that check they should be able to pick between another public school, a charter school, a private school or even a parochial school.

I developed my refund philosophy some years ago, after I learned one Baltimore public high school was so bad that it had a section called "The Level of Death," where the hoodlums smoked pot and played craps and where no serious student or even faculty member dared to venture. Why, I asked myself, are taxpayers required to even fund a public school with a "Level of Death"? What kind of education could possibly go on at the school? Why, none, of course. Maryland taxpayers, I concluded, would be perfectly justified in demanding a refund of any tax money that went to fund "Level of Death" High.

Vouchers aren't about choice. They're about government refunding our tax dollars misused for public education.

SOURCE




Meddling with Britain's final High School exams has hit standards, says top head

The head of the top school for A-levels yesterday condemned ministerial meddling in exams for putting academic standards at risk. Bernice McCabe, head of the North London Collegiate School, warned that syllabuses increasingly required schools to solve social problems instead of promoting rigorous education.

She spoke out as her £11,925-a-year girls' day school topped the Daily Mail's A-level league table for independent schools. Pupils passed 99 per cent of exams at grades A and B, with more than 90 per cent at A.

But Mrs McCabe said political interference was 'skewing' the curriculum in favour of fashionable causes such as encouraging pupils to lead 'healthy lifestyles' and giving them an awareness of poverty. She accused the Government of a knee-jerk reaction to problems in wider society. 'That is inappropriate political interference in education,' she said. 'I would love an exam system separate from Government interference. 'I'm not sure that it's helpful to have such central control. It doesn't seem to have worked particularly well over the last 20 years.'

She added: 'Healthy lifestyles is a sort of criteria that's dominating it in a way that skews things and feels non-educational. 'It's very easy for the Government always to take the moral high ground, and say "how could you possibly disagree with that?" 'Naturally these things are important. But to put that right up there as a top priority brings everything down to it.' Education policy should be inspired by 'a proper education philosophy' and not in response to problems of society-she said.

Mrs McCabe's remarks came as the head of a second high-performing school said top A-level grades had become easier to come by. The availability of examiners' marking schemes and sample papers mean it is 'not hard to get a good grade', according to Cynthia Hall, head of Wycombe Abbey School in High Wycombe. She said: 'A-levels are still an appropriate challenge, but there is much more information for students about what is expected of them.' Pupils can 'see what the job is' and get on with it in a 'methodical' way, she added.

A-level results from 400 independent schools, published today, show that pupils passed 53.6 per cent of exams at grade A, compared to just over 20 per cent at comprehensives. But many schools including Eton, Winchester and St Paul's refused to allow their results to be used in tables for the second year running.

Perse School for Girls, in Cambridge, said the tables were a 'flawed beauty parade'. However, Richard Cairns, head of Brighton College, said: 'It is patronising to suggest that parents are confused by league tables and that therefore they should not exist. 'Fee-paying parents have the right to know our results.'

Rising numbers of parents are paying up to £2,000 in legal fees as they fight for places at sought-after state schools. A BBC survey of legal firms found that nearly all have been bombarded with requests for help winning school admission appeals. Parents who can no longer afford private education and wish to give their children the best chance of getting into a state grammar school or good comprehensive are said to be fuelling the trend. An initial meeting with a legal firm to discuss an appeal can cost more than £80.

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Some British university graduates now working in call centres

“HELLO, I’ve got a 2:1. How may I help you?” Call centres, once seen as the sweatshops of the British economy, are being flooded with job applications from university leavers who have found that traditional career opportunities wither in a recession. Hays, a recruitment agency for call centre staff, said the number of new graduates seeking jobs as operators had trebled in the past year. Thousands of this summer’s graduates are now thought to be applying for jobs through Hays and other firms.

Those which have seen a surge in graduate applications for call centre jobs include O2, the mobile phone provider, and Denplan, the dental health insurer. Cambridgeshire county council has reported a similar trend.

Vacancies for degree-level jobs have fallen 25% in the past year, according to the Association of Graduate Recruiters, while some economists have warned that those aged 18-25 risk becoming a “lost generation” with nearly 1m of them already unemployed.

The fear of joblessness has led growing numbers of university leavers to enter careers not traditionally seen as suitable for those with a degree. The call centre industry, which employs more than 900,000 people in Britain, insists that the boom in graduate interest is not simply a result of the recession but shows that being a phone operator dealing with customers is seen as a possible route to a high-flying career.

It has also continued to expand throughout the recession, despite the trend in recent years for companies to locate call centres in countries with cheap labour, such as India.

Peter Mooney, head of operations at Holiday Extras, which specialises in selling pre-booked airport car parking and hotels, said he had had 250-300 applications for 17 vacancies at the company’s telephone sales centre near Hythe, Kent. They have included graduates from universities such as Leeds and York. He added that the quality of applicants would mean a highly educated call centre workforce.

“It is partly because of the recession,” said Mooney. “But we expect some of the graduates to stay with us. A lot will go via the call centre for a couple of years and will then be poached by other departments.”

Elspeth Hutchinson, 22, a Holiday Extras employee, graduated from Christchurch Canterbury University this summer with a psychology and history degree. “When I first graduated, I was initially thinking I wasn’t going to stay here long and I would go elsewhere and the recession wouldn’t hold me back, but since then I’ve changed my mind.”

SOURCE







Primarily covering events in Australia, the U.K. and the USA -- where the follies are sadly similar.


TERMINOLOGY: The British "A Level" exam is roughly equivalent to a U.S. High School diploma. Rather confusingly, you can get As, Bs or Cs in your "A Level" results. Entrance to the better universities normally requires several As in your "A Levels".


MORE TERMINOLOGY: Many of my posts mention the situation in Australia. Unlike the USA and Britain, there is virtually no local input into education in Australia. Education is mostly a State government responsibility, though the Feds have a lot of influence (via funding) at the university level. So it may be useful to know the usual abbreviations for the Australian States: QLD (Queensland), NSW (New South Wales), WA (Western Australia), VIC (Victoria), TAS (Tasmania), SA (South Australia).


There were two brothers from a famous family. One did very well at school while the other was a duffer. Which one went on the be acclaimed as the "Greatest Briton"? It was the duffer: Winston Churchill.


The current Left-inspired practice of going to great lengths to shield students from experience of failure and to tell students only good things about themselves is an appalling preparation for life. In adulthood, the vast majority of people are going to have to reconcile themselves to mundane jobs and no more than mediocrity in achievement. Illusions of themselves as "special" are going to be sorely disappointed


Perhaps it's some comfort that the idea of shielding kids from failure and having only "winners" is futile anyhow. When my son was about 3 years old he came bursting into the living room, threw himself down on the couch and burst into tears. When I asked what was wrong he said: "I can't always win!". The problem was that we had started him out on educational computer games where persistence only is needed to "win". But he had then started to play "real" computer games -- shootem-ups and the like. And you CAN lose in such games -- which he had just realized and become frustrated by. The upset lasted all of about 10 minutes, however and he has been happily playing computer games ever since. He also now has a degree in mathematics and is socially very pleasant. "Losing" certainly did not hurt him.


Even the famous Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci (and the world's most famous Sardine) was a deep opponent of "progressive" educational methods. He wrote: "The most paradoxical aspect is that this new type of school is advocated as being democratic, while in fact it is destined not merely to perpetuate social differences, but to crystallise them." He rightly saw that "progressive" methods were no help to the poor


I am an atheist of Protestant background who sent his son to Catholic schools. Why did I do that? Because I do not personally feel threatened by religion and I think Christianity is a generally good influence. I also felt that religion is a major part of life and that my son should therefore have a good introduction to it. He enjoyed his religion lessons but seems to have acquired minimal convictions from them.


Why have Leftist educators so relentlessly and so long opposed the teaching of phonics as the path to literacy when that opposition has been so enormously destructive of the education of so many? It is because of their addiction to simplistic explanations of everything (as in saying that Islamic hostility is caused by "poverty" -- even though Osama bin Laden is a billionaire!). And the relationship between letters and sounds in English is anything but simple compared to the beautifully simple but very unhelpful formula "look and learn".


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


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


A a small quote from the past that helps explain the Leftist dominance of education: "When an opponent says: 'I will not come over to your side,' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already. You will pass on. Your descendents, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time, they will know nothing else but this new community.'." Quote from Adolf Hitler. In a speech on 6th November 1933


I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age.

I imagine that the the RD is still sending mailouts to my 1950s address!


Discipline: With their love of simple generalizations, this will be Greek to Leftists but I see an important role for discipline in education DESPITE the fact that my father never laid a hand on me once in my entire life nor have I ever laid a hand on my son in his entire life. The plain fact is that people are DIFFERENT, not equal and some kids will not behave themselves in response to persuasion alone. In such cases, realism requires that they be MADE to behave by whatever means that works -- not necessarily for their own benefit but certainly for the benefit of others whose opportunities they disrupt and destroy.


Comments above by John Ray