President Barack Obama said on NBC on Monday he would like American children to spend more time in public schools. Here is a better idea: American children should spend no time in public schools.
County by county, state by state, Americans should begin functionally abolishing government-run schools and replacing them with a free market in schools. On the federal level, Congress should kill the Department of Education by choking off its funding. The department was not constitutional in the first place.
Everybody's children should get the same chance Obama's children have had to attend the private school of their parents' choice.
American children should have the opportunity not only to attend schools where they are well instructed in reading, writing and arithmetic, but also where they are unambiguously taught that our Declaration of Independence is right -- that God is the Author of our rights and that even the government must obey His laws.
We should aim for a society where children spend more time with their most important teachers, their parents, and less time with the less important teachers at their school.
Obama wants the opposite. And he does not want our children spending more time with just any teachers, but with government teachers -- who often double as liberal propagandists seeking to indoctrinate children with values contrary to those they learn at home, while failing to teach them reading, writing and arithmetic.
"I think we should have a longer school year," Obama said on NBC. "We now have our kids go to school about a month less than most other advanced countries. And that makes a difference. It means that kids are losing a lot of what they learn during the summer."
Obama then made a class-war argument to defend his point -- in the process taking a snotty swipe at what he presumes to be the inferior reading habits of lower-income families. "It's especially severe for poorer kids who may not be seeing as many books in their house during the summers, aren't getting supplemental educational activities," Obama said. "So, the idea of a longer school year, I think, makes sense."
In keeping with his Marxist analysis, Obama pointed to the education system in the People's Republic of China -- a nation governed by the Communist Party -- as a model for the United States to emulate when it comes to dealing with teachers.
"When I travel to China, for example," said Obama, "and I sit down with the mayor of Shanghai, and he talks about the fact that teaching is considered one of the most prestigious jobs and a teacher's getting paid the same as an engineer, that, I think, accounts for how well they're doing in terms of boosting their education system."
Obama's unstated assumption: Central planners, not the free market, ought to determine the value of a particular job and who gets paid what. I say: Let the market decide -- especially in education.
The greatest problem with primary and secondary education in America today is precisely that it is dominated by government-run schools that people are compelled by force of law to pay for whether they like them or not and whether they send their children there or not. The second greatest problem is that the political power controlling these government-run schools has become increasingly centralized, gradually removing decision-making from local communities, passing it up to the state and federal level.
On NBC, Obama made clear he wants to use increased federal education spending to increase federal leverage over local schools, forcing policy changes preferred by him. That would move power in exactly the wrong direction.
The historical record compiled by the Department of Education itself shows that increased government spending on education does not improve the academic performance of government schools. "From 1989-90 to 2006-07, total expenditures per student in public elementary and secondary schools rose from $8,748 to $11,839 (a 35 percent increase in 2008-09 constant dollars), with most of the increase occurring after 1997-98," says the Education Department's The Condition of Education 2010.
In 1980, 17-year-old students in public schools earned an average score of 284 out of 500 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test. In 2008, they still scored 284. Despite increased per pupil spending, the needle did not move.
In 1999, 17-year-old students in American public schools earned an average score of 307 out of 500 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress math test. In 2008, they scored 305. The needle moved in the wrong direction.
Every community in America should give all parents a voucher equal to what it now pays per-pupil for its public schools, allowing those parents to use those vouchers at any school they choose. Let the market decide if government-run schools survive.
Britain's Attorney General orders review of private school charity rules
Controversial rules forcing private schools to offer free places to poor pupils could be scrapped after doubts were raised by the Government’s top law officer. Dominic Grieve, the Attorney General, has ordered a review into guidance issued by the charities regulator that effectively requires independent schools to provide more bursaries to children from deprived families.
His intervention could pave the way for a dramatic overhaul of a new “public benefit” test that almost 1,000 schools must pass to remain open and hang on to charitable tax breaks. Analysts claim the Charity Commission guidance jeopardises the future of some fee-paying schools already threatened by falling income in the economic downturn.
Earlier this year, two private prep schools become the first in England to increase the amount of money spent on bursaries to satisfy the rules. It is feared others may be forced to raise fees for existing parents to fund more free places.
On Wednesday, the Attorney General called for a hearing to be held into the commission's guidance after admitting it created “uncertainty as to the operation of charity law in the context of fee-charging schools”. It follows claims from the Independent Schools Council that the commission was acting “illegally” by misinterpreting key charities legislation. They have already petitioned the High Court for a judicial review of the guidance.
Andrew Grant, vice-chairman of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, which represents 250 top independent schools, said: “The insistence that public benefit can only be demonstrated through fee remission has seemed to us a clear over-interpretation of the legislation. The provision of education is, ipso facto, a public benefit to the country.”
Under Labour’s 2006 Charities Act, fee-paying schools are no longer automatically entitled to charitable status. They must prove they provide “public benefit” to hang to tax breaks worth around £120m a year to the sector.
The charities regulator issued guidance in late 2008 telling schools how they could meet the new requirement. It said they could theoretically pass the test by offering range of services, including access to swimming pools and concert halls, master-classes in A-level subjects not provided in local state schools and running one of the Government’s academies.
But the document made it clear that providing more bursaries was the most straightforward way of satisfying the rules. It suggested schools should consider "increasing general fee levels in order to offer subsidies to those unable to pay the full cost".
The ISC claim it constituted a “gross misinterpretation” of the law.
The Attorney General’s Office said the Charities Tribunal – a legal panel – would now be asked to clarify key issues surrounding the Charity Commission guidance. It has the ultimate power to rule that parts of it are unlawful and must be changed.
A notice of reference issued to the tribunal says: “There is uncertainty as to the operation of charitable law in the context of fee-charging independent schools. “That uncertainty is contrary to the interests of charity because it means that the charities concerned do not know whether or not they are operating within or without the terms of their constitutions.”
Matthew Burgess, ISC deputy chief executive, said he was “delighted” with the intervention. “The Attorney General has got a role of protector of charity law and we feel that he is making this reference because there are uncertainties as to the way the Charity Commission has behaved in terms of independent schools," he said.
A spokesman for the Charity Commission said: "We accept, like any public body, that the way in which we carry out our statutory responsibilities is subject to legal challenge. "In preparing all our guidance on public benefit, the commission was at all times diligent in consulting charities and others affected, and in making clear the process we had followed.
“We set out our legal reasoning clearly and carefully alongside our guidance. We stand by our approach and the legal analysis which underpins it, and we are confident that the commission has acted reasonably and followed due process."
Australian Labor party to bring back compulsory university amenities fees
This is not the same as the bad old mad old system of the past. Using the fees to finance political activity was the bugbear in the past but is banned in this iteration
THE Gillard government will introduce legislation today to restore compulsory student amenities fees at Australian universities. Minister for Tertiary Education Minister, Senator Chris Evans, appealed today to the new parliament to support the bill, saying he wanted it to be passed by Christmas to ensure it will take effect next year.
Senator Evans said it was important to restore a range of depleted services at universities, particularly in regional Australia, and cited sporting, health and counselling services as key areas.
The legislation would allow students to be charged a fee of up to $250 a year for the provision of student services with Senator Evans claiming it was supported by both universities and students.
He also took a swipe at the Howard government’s voluntary student unionism legislation which had abolished services and amenities fees for students. “Under the arrangements left by the Coalition government, close to $170 million has been ripped out of university funding. This has led to the decline, and in some instances, the complete closure, of vital student services,” he said.
The Higher Education Legislation Amendment was defeated in August last year in the Senate, but Senator Evans said the bill had now been changed to make it more attractive and allow the $250 fee to be paid over time. “The main measure… is that we’ve allowed fees to be treated as part of the HECS debt so there’s not the upfront requirement,” he explained. “This legislation makes it very clear that those fees, which will be in the order of $150 a year... can be added to the HECS debt.”
Senator Evans encouraged the Coalition to review its opposition to the bill and said the legislation would be supported by the independents in the lower house. “We agreed with them that we would reintroduce the legislation and I’m hopeful of Getting Mr Crook from Western Australia to support the legislation,” he said.
The following excerpt from Dinesh D'Souza sets out to critique American education in terms that might just make sense to some American "liberals". It is very good but rather long so I am putting it alone up today -- JR
Each fall some 13 million students, 2.5 million of them minorities, enroll in American colleges. Most of these students are living away from home for the first time. Yet their apprehension is mixed with excitement and anticipation. At the university, they hope to shape themselves as whole human beings, both intellectually and morally. Brimming with idealism, they wish to prepare themselves for full and independent lives in the workplace, at home, and as citizens who are shared rulers of a democratic society. In short, what they seek is liberal education.
By the time these students graduate, very few colleges have met their need for all-round development. Instead, by precept and example, universities have taught them that "all rules are unjust" and "all preferences are principled"; that justice is simply the will of the stronger party; that standards and values are arbitrary, and the ideal of the educated person is largely a figment of bourgeois white male ideology, which should be cast aside; that individual rights are a red flag signaling social privilege, and should be subordinated to the claims of group interest; that all knowledge can be reduced to politics and should be pursued not for its own sake but for the political end of power; that convenient myths and benign lies can substitute for truth; that double standards are acceptable as long as they are enforced to the benefit of minority victims; that debates are best conducted not by rational and civil exchange of ideas, but by accusation, intimidation, and official prosecution; that the university stands for nothing in particular and has no claim to be exempt from outside pressures; and that the multiracial society cannot be based on fair rules that apply to every person, but must rather be constructed through a forced rationing of power among separatist racial groups.
DOWN WITH ARISTOTLE
Although minority activists dominate race relations on campus, their original troubles began in the classroom, and it is to the classroom that their political energy ultimately returns. This phase of the struggle begins with a new recognition. Usually within the atmosphere of their separate enclaves, and often under the tutelage of an activist professor, minority students learn that extensive though their experience has been with campus bigotry, the subtlest and yet most pervasive form of racism thrives undiscovered, right in front of their eyes.
The curriculum, they are told at Stanford and Duke and other colleges, reflects a "white perspective." Specifically, as Stanford Professor Clayborne Carson said earlier, it reflects a predominant white, male, European, and heterosexual mentality which, by its very nature, is inescapably racist, indisputably sexist, and manifestly homophobic.
This realization comes as something of an epiphany. Many minority students can now explain why they had such a hard time with Milton and Publius and Heisenberg. Those men reflected white aesthetics, white philosophy, white science. Obviously minority students would fare much better if the university assigned black or Latino or Third World thought. Then the roles would be reversed: they would perform well, and other students would have trouble. Thus the current curriculum reveals itself as the hidden core of academic bigotry.
At first minority students may find such allegations hard to credit, since it is unclear how differential equations or the measurement of electron orbits embody racial and gender prejudices. Nevertheless, in humanities and social science disciplines, younger scholar-advocates of the au courant [fully informed] stripe are on hand to explain that the cultural framework for literature or history or sociology inevitably reflects a bias in the' selection or application of scholarly material.
Restive with the traditional curriculum progressive academics such as Edward Said at Columbia and Stanley Fish and Henry Gates at Duke seek a program which integrates scholarship and political commitment, and they form a tacit partnership with minority activists in order to achieve this goal. Since all knowledge is political, these scholar-advocates assert, minorities have a right to demand that their distinct perspectives be "represented" in the course readings. Ethnic Studies professor Ronald Takaki of Berkeley unabashedly calls this "intellectual affirmative action."
Tempted by these arguments, many minority leaders make actual headcounts of the authors and authorities in the curriculum, and they find accusations of white male predominance to be proven right. Why are Plato and Locke and Madison assigned in philosophy class but no black thinkers? How come so few Hispanics are credited with great inventions or discoveries?
Feminists ask: Why is only a small percentage of the literature readings by women? These protests sometimes extend beyond the humanities and social sciences; at a recent symposium, mathematics professor Marilyn Frankenstein of the University of Massachusetts at Boston accused her field of harboring "Eurocentric bias" and called for "ethno-mathematics" which would analyze numerical models in terms of workforce inequalities and discrimination quotients.
Few minority students believe that democratic principles of "equal representation" should be rigorously applied to curricular content. Feminists make this argument because they want to replace alleged sexists like Aquinas and Milton with Simone de Beauvoir and Gloria Steinem. Blacks, Hispanics, and American Indians generally assent to this proposition because it provides an immediate explanation for the awkward gaps in academic performance.
Not only are these differences evident in classroom discussion, grades, and prizes, but also in suspension and dropout statistics. Minority students must face the disquieting fact that many of their peers at places like Berkeley fail to graduate, if indeed they even stay through freshman year. It seems irresistible to adopt the view that if only the curriculum were broadened or revised to reflect black (or female, or Third World) perspectives, these academic gaps would close or possibly reverse themselves....
PROFILES IN COWARDICE
Many university presidents are not intellectual leaders but bureaucrats and managers; their interest therefore is not in meeting the activist argument but in deflecting it, by making the appropriate adjustments in the interest of stability. When a debate over the canon erupts, university heads typically take refuge in silence or incomprehensibility; thus one Ivy League president responded to Allan Bloom's book by saying that the purpose of liberal education was to "address the need for students to develop both a private self and a public self, and to find a way to have those selves converse with each other."
Earlier incidents reveal the posture of presidents Heyman of Berkeley, Kennedy of Stanford, Cheek of Howard, Duderstadt of Michigan, Brodie of Duke, and Bok of Harvard to be a curious mixture of pusillanimity, ideology, and opportunism.
As we saw at Stanford, Duke, and Harvard, when minority groups, assisted by activist professors, urge the transformation of the curriculum toward a "race and gender" agenda, they face potential opposition from a large segment of faculty who may be sympathetic to minority causes but at the same time believe that the curriculum should not be ideologically apportioned. These dissenters are branded as bigots, sexists, and homophobes, regardless of their previous political bona fides.
If minority faculty and student activists are not a numerical majority, they inevitably are a kind of Moral Majority, and they wield the formidable power to affix scarlet letters to their enemies. Few dare to frontally oppose the alliance between minority groups and faculty activists; like Stanford's Linda Paulson, most wrestle with their conscience and win and even professors with qualms end up supporting curricular transformation with the view that change is inevitable....
Moreover, most university leaders have no answer to the charge that the curriculum reflects a white male culture, and consequently embodies all the hateful prejudices that whites have leveled against other peoples throughout history. Nor can they explain why, if not for discrimination, minority students aren't doing as well as other students.
As we saw with Harvard's "Myths and Realities" letter, universities have insisted from the outset that standards have not been lowered, so why do black and Hispanic students fall behind if not for curricular racism? And won't the rationing of books among different ethnic "perspectives" make an indispensable contribution to "diversity"?
Thus begins the process, already far advanced, of downplaying or expelling the core curriculum of Western classics in favor of a non-Western and minority-oriented agenda. Universities like Stanford, Berkeley, and Harvard establish ethnic studies requirements, multicultural offerings, Afro-American Studies and Women's Studies departments.
The typical rationale is that white professors cannot effectively communicate with, or provide role models for, minority students. This argument is somewhat transparent, since it relies on the premise that interracial identification is impossible, and no one has ever alleged that minority professors are racially or culturally disabled from teaching white students.
College administrators will privately admit that "minority perspectives" is a pretext for meeting affirmative action goals. The so-called "studies" programs also serve the purpose of attracting minority students who are having a difficult time with the "white" curriculum, but who, like Harvard's Tiya Miles, Eva Nelson, and Michelle Duncan, feel psychologically at home in a department like Afro-American Studies.
What transpires in the "race and gender" curriculum is anything but "diverse." As we saw at Harvard, typically these programs promulgate rigid political views about civil rights, feminism, homosexual rights, and other issues pressed by the activists who got these departments set up in the first place. Thomas Short, a professor of philosophy at Kenyon College, observes that "ideological dogmatism is the norm, not the exception, in the 'studies' programs, especially Women's Studies. Intimidation of nonfeminists in the classroom is routine." Short adds that, curiously, ideologues in these programs practice the very exclusion that they claim to have suffered in the past.
Even if some faculty in the "race and gender" curriculum seek to promote authentic debate or intellectual diversity, this is difficult in an atmosphere where activist students profess to be deeply offended by views which fall outside the ideological circumference of their victim's revolution. Once a professor finds himself the object of vilification and abuse for tackling a political taboo-the fate of Farley, Thernstrom, and Macneil -- others absorb the message and ensure that their own classes are appropriately deferential.
Eugene Genovese, a Marxist historian and one of the nation's most distinguished scholars on slavery, admits that "there is just too much dogmatism in the field of race and gender scholarship." Whatever diversity obtains, Genovese argues, is frequently "a diversity of radical positions." As a result, "Good scholars [who] are increasingly at risk are starting to run away, and this is how our programs become ghettoized."
The new awareness of racially and sexually biased perspectives is not confined to the "studies" programs, however; minority activists inevitably bring their challenging political consciousness into other courses as well, although this usually does not happen until junior or senior year. At this point, the students begin to function as sensitivity monitors, vigilant in pointing out instances of racism and sexism in the course readings or among student comments.
Other students may inwardly resent such political surveillance, but seldom do professors resist it: indeed they often praise it as precisely the sort of "diversity" that minority students can bring to the classroom. Minority students are often given latitude to do papers on race or gender victimization, even if only tangentially related to course material: thus some write about latent bigotry in Jane Austen, or tabulate black under-representation in the university administration.
Minority activists can be offended when they do not receive passing grades on such papers, because they believe that their consciousness of oppression is far more advanced than that of any white professor. Further, they know how reluctant most professors are to get involved in an incident with a black or Hispanic student; hence they can extract virtually any price from faculty anxious to avoid "racial incidents."
University administrations and faculty also permit, and sometimes encourage, minority students to develop myths about their own culture and history, such as the "black Egypt" industry evident at Howard and elsewhere. This cultural distortion is routine in multicultural and Third World studies-the case of Stanford is typical.
Bernard Lewis, professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton, describes what he calls "a new culture of deceit on the campus," and adds, "It is very dangerous to give in to these ideas, or more accurately, to these pressures. It makes a mockery of scholarship to say: my nonsense is as good as your science."
But even university officials who agree with Lewis say they aren't sure what they can do to counter these distortions, since the ideological forces behind them are so strong. Although curricular and extracurricular concessions by the university greatly increase the power of minority activists, it is not clear that they help minority students use knowledge and truth as weapons against ignorance and prejudice, nor that they assuage the problems of low morale and low self-esteem which propelled them in this direction to begin with.
Nor does an apparently more even "balance of power" between minority and non-minority students produce greater ethnic harmony. In fact, like Michigan activists Kimberly Smith and Tracye Matthews, many minority students find themselves increasingly embittered and estranged during their college years, so that by the time they graduate they may be virtually isolated in a separatist culture, and espouse openly hostile sentiments against other groups.
At graduation time, it turns out that only a fraction of the minority students enrolled four years earlier are still around, and even among them the academic record is mixed: a good number (most are probably not affirmative action beneficiaries) have performed well, but a majority conspicuously lag behind their colleagues, and a sizable group has only finished by concentrating in congenial fields such as Afro-American or Ethnic Studies, under the direction of tolerant faculty advisers.
Relatively few of these students have developed to their full potential over the past four years, or have emerged ready to assume positions of responsibility and leadership in the new multiracial society.
PRINCIPLES OF REFORM ...
There is no conflict between equal opportunity for individuals in education, and the pursuit of the highest standards of academic and extracurricular excellence. After all, equal opportunity means opportunity to achieve, and we achieve more when more is expected of us. Test scores and grade point averages are mere measurements of achievement, which are necessary to register how much intellectual progress is being made. They provide a common index for all who seek to improve themselves, regardless of race, sex, or background.
High standards do not discriminate against anyone except those who fail to meet them. Such discrimination is entirely just and ought not to be blamed for our individual differences. ... Liberal education settles issues in terms of idealism, not interest; in terms of right, not force. There is nothing wrong with universities confronting controversial contemporary issues, especially those involving human difference that are both timely and timeless.
Nor is radicalism itself the problem; if radical solutions may not be contemplated in the university, where else should they be considered? Because they are sanctuary institutions, universities can be a philosophical testing ground for programs of revolutionary transformation which, if improperly executed, might lead to lawlessness, violence, or anarchy. "The university sponsors moral combat in an atmosphere where ideas can be tested short of mortal combat," in the words of sociologist Manfred Stanley of Syracuse University. ...
Liberal education in a multicultural society means global education. Provincialism has always been the enemy of that broad-minded outlook which is the very essence of liberal learning.
Today's liberally educated student must be conversant with some of the classic formulations of other cultures, and with the grand political and social currents which bring these cultures into increased interaction with the West. Such education is best pursued when students are taught to search for universal standards of judgment which transcend particularities of race, gender, and culture; this gives them the intellectual and moral criteria to evaluate both their own society and others. There is much in both to affirm and to criticize....
Equality and the Classics
Universities can address their curricular problems by devising a required course or sequence for entering freshmen which exposes them to the basic issues of equality and human difference, through a carefully chosen set of classic texts that deal powerfully with those issues. Needless to say, non-Western classics belong in this list when they address questions relevant to the subject matter.
Such a solution would retain what Matthew Arnold termed "the best that has been thought and said," but at the same time engage the contemporary questions of ethnocentrism and prejudice in bold and provocative fashion.
It seems that currently both the teaching of Western classics as well as the desire to study other cultures have encountered serious difficulties in the curriculum. As the case of Stanford illustrates, an uncritical examination of non-Western cultures, in order to favorably contrast them with the West, ends up as a new form of cultural imperialism, in which Western intellectuals project their own domestic prejudices onto faraway countries, distorting them beyond recognition to serve political ends.
Even where universities make a serious effort to avoid this trap, it remains questionable whether they have the academic expertise in the general undergraduate program to teach students about the history, religion, and literature of Asia, Africa, and the Arab world.
The study of other cultures can never compensate for a lack of thorough familiarity with the founding principles of one's own culture. Just as it would be embarrassing to encounter an educated Chinese who had never heard of Confucius, however well versed he may be in Jefferson, so also it would be a failure of liberal education to teach Americans about the Far East without immersing them in their own philosophical and literary tradition "from Homer to the present." Universal in scope, these works prepare Westerners to experience both their own, as well as other, ideas and civilizations....
The liberal university is a distinctive and fragile institution. It is not an all-purpose instrument for social change. Its function is indeed to serve the larger society which supports and sustains it, yet it does not best do this when it makes itself indistinguishable from the helter-skelter of pressure politics, what Professor Susan Shell of Boston College terms "the academic equivalent of Tammany Hall."
Nothing in this [selection] should be taken to deny the legitimate claim of minorities who have suffered unfairly, nor should reasonable aid and sympathy be withheld from them. But the current revolution of minority victims threatens to destroy the highest ideals of liberal education, and with them that enlightenment and understanding which hold out the only prospects for racial harmony, social justice, and minority advancement.
Many university leaders are supremely confident that nothing can jeopardize their position, and they regard any criticism with disdain. As Professor Alan Kors of the University of Pennsylvania has remarked, "For the first time in the history of American higher education, the barbarians are running the place."
Liberal education is too important to entrust to these self-styled revolutionaries. Reform, if it comes, requires the involvement of intelligent voices from both inside and outside the university students who are willing to take on reigning orthodoxies, professors and administrators with the courage to resist the activist high tide, and parents, alumni, and civic leaders who are committed to applying genuine principles of liberal learning to the challenges of the emerging multicultural society.
Americans are pessimistic about education, a new NBC News/WSJ poll shows
A majority of Americans are pessimistic about the public education system with nearly six out of 10 saying schools need either major changes or a complete overhaul, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
Only 5 percent of those surveyed thought the school system in the United States was working well, according to results of the telephone survey of 700 adults. The findings come as NBC News on Sunday kicked off a weeklong special conversation about the state of America's classrooms, called "Education Nation," to explore the challenges and opportunities facing students today.
National statistics show that 68 percent of 8th-graders in the United States cannot read at their grade level and American students rank 25th in math and 21st in science compared to 30 other industrialized countries.
The poll shows most Americans don't think enough is being done to close that achievement gap with 70 percent of those polled giving schools either a "C" (45 percent) or "D" (25 percent) grade.
Yet even as many people give the overall school system in the United States a poor grade, they were more optimistic about the state of education in their own communities, with 45 percent giving them either an "A" (13 percent) or "B" (32 percent.) Video: Are teachers under attack?
In trying to determine the cause of the problems, most blamed elected officials (53 percent) or parents (50 percent). When asked who could most effectively improve the system, 48 percent said teachers.
Overall, when asked about the best ways to improve America's school system, 75 percent pointed to recruiting and retaining better teachers. Other strategies include reducing class sizes (64 percent) and requiring teachers to pass a competency test (54 percent).
And nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of those polled said they would be willing to pay higher federal taxes to improve America's schools.
For-profit colleges often turned to by vets struggling to get degrees
Since the post-9/11 GI Bill with expanded education benefits for returning soldiers took effect Aug. 1, 2009, for-profit colleges have snared $618 million, or 35 percent, of the almost $1.8 billion in tuition and fees spent by US taxpayers, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. The industry is now targeting the more than 1.2 million veterans deployed since 2001, and their college grants.
Five of the top 10 colleges with the most students funded by the GI bill in April 2010 were for-profit, mainly online institutions, including Apollo Group Inc.’s University of Phoenix and Washington Post Co.’s Kaplan University, according to data from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Of veterans receiving the benefits, 22 percent have enrolled in for-profit colleges. About 10 percent of all college students attend for-profit institutions.
Enrolling at online colleges hampers veterans’ reintegration into society and increases their risk of dropping out, said John Schupp, national director of the nonprofit group Supportive Education for the Returning Veteran. “They don’t transition sitting next to a computer in their room,’’ Schupp said.
While some veterans say online schools provide an opportunity for education that they otherwise couldn’t fit into their schedules, the swelling number of former soldiers at for-profit colleges is drawing scrutiny from the Senate education committee.
That’s because these colleges, which typically charge higher tuitions than public institutions, have been criticized for enrolling students who aren’t academically ready and are more likely to default on their federal loans.
An undercover investigation by the Government Accountability Office found that recruiters at for-profit colleges encouraged applicants to lie on federal financial aid forms and misled them by exaggerating graduation rates and potential salaries.
Graduation rates are lower at for-profit colleges. Only 22 percent of first-time, full-time candidates at for profit-colleges get bachelors’ degrees, compared with 55 percent at public institutions and 65 percent at nonprofit schools, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
All-boy prep school boom in Britain as parents reject 'macho culture' of mixed primaries
All-boys schools are booming as parents shun mixed schools which put boys under pressure to act 'tough' and play the fool, it was claimed today. New figures show a surge in pupil numbers at single-sex prep schools which cater for boys up to the age of 13.
The trend is a reversal of the picture only a decade ago, when demand for girls' schools was growing strongly.
Head teachers' leaders revealed that parents are increasingly concerned about a macho culture at some mixed schools where boys consider it 'cool to be a fool'. They feel their sons are more likely to grow up 'fully rounded' at a single-sex school, instead of merely 'half a boy' at some co-educational schools.
It was also claimed that 'savvy' parents nowadays are increasingly splitting their families between different schools, rather than opting for the convenience of the same primary or secondary for all siblings. Some parents may be choosing mixed schools for their daughters but all-boys schools for their sons, it was suggested. This may result in them paying for private education, since there are significantly fewer single-sex primary schools in the state system than the independent sector.
Other experts suggest that, during a recession, parents are more likely to invest in private education for boys rather than girls. This is because they believe that daughters are more likely to succeed wherever they are educated, whereas boys may need extra support.
Figures issued by the Independent Association of Preparatory Schools, representing 600 private prep schools, show that nearly a third of single-sex boys' schools - 29 per cent - showed strong growth in numbers this year. These schools registered an increase in September enrolments of three per cent or more, it emerged.
Girls' and mixed schools showed a more mixed picture.
David Hanson, chief executive of IAPS, highlighted TV's recent 'Britain's Youngest Boarders' programme, which followed the progress of three youngsters at an all-boys prep school. 'Those little boys could succeed academically and yet be fully-rounded, caring and have all the cuddly toys and so on, without anybody at any point saying "you're soft",' he said.
'It was great to see it from their perspective, that in an all-boys environment, they could be a fully rounded little boy, rather than half a boy, in some other environment where you have to pretend to be tough and act cool, and not want to learn, because it's cool to be a fool.'
He went on: 'In the past, the received wisdom was this, that parents want boys to be in co-ed schools because it's civilising, and parents want the girls to be in single-sex schools because then girls can achieve without boys slowing them down and being disruptive. 'This was received parental wisdom.
'What we see in the data now is the polar opposite - parents saying actually I think I want my boy to be in a single-sex school because I feel he will do better there, but I would probably like my daughter to be in a co-ed school. 'That seems to be a complete turnaround to where we were five, ten years ago, in terms of the messages we were getting.'
Mr Hanson added that a strong diet of sport was a 'big driver' of demand for boys' prep schools. 'We know that sport has a big part to play,' he said. 'A lot of parents will say that they worry that in maintained school their child is never off the floor or out of the chair.'
Andy Falconer, chairman of IAPS and head of St Olave's Prep School, in York, said some parents found their sons did better apart from girls at primary school because girls mature more quickly. Others felt it was important for children to taught in a mixed school because 'that's the real world'.
He added: 'Parents are now much more savvy about shopping around, and rightly, picking the right thing for their child, rather than the convenience element of having everybody in the one school, because there's the one school run.'
Figures were released on Monday as heads gathered in London for the IAPS annual conference suggested that prep school numbers are bearing up in most schools despite the recession.
Mr Hanson added: 'These figures support what we know anecdotally: even in difficult circumstances, parents are willing to sacrifice holidays, new cars and other material goods to continue to give their children a quality education.'
David Guggenheim, the man behind An Inconvenient Truth and Obama’s 2008 DNC bio-infomercial, has just released another film — this one a stabbing indictment of teachers’ unions and a plea for more charter schools, titled Waiting for Superman. Democrats for School Choice hosted an advance screening of the documentary, to which black clergy, New York City education chancellor Joel Klein, and National Review were invited. The school-choice cause evidently transcends traditional ideological boundaries.
Waiting for Superman intends to influence policy, yet its narrative follows not politicians, but five children. Bianca, Daisy, Emily, Anthony, and Francisco come from diverse locales — Harlem, L.A., Silicon Valley, D.C., and the Bronx — and are black, Hispanic, and white, but they share the same basic problem: Each is consigned by geography to an inadequate public school. Each wants a choice.
The stories — of Bianca, whose single black mother struggles to afford parochial school but misses the final payment that would let Bianca attend graduation, and of Anthony, who carries a picture of his dead, drug-using father as he seeks a spot at a rare charter boarding school that might keep him away from the streets, to name two — are heartbreaking. But the real message of the movie is revealed in the scenes of the adults who produce this heartbreak. Superman’s most memorable episode is the cartoon illustration of the “lemon dance,” in which school principals waltz their “lemons” (teachers who just can’t teach but can’t be fired) from school to school. The musical number would be hilarious if it weren’t so devastating. So, too, for the shots of the infamous “rubber rooms,” where middle-aged teachers sit in school kids’ chairs, playing cards or laying their heads on their desks to sleep, collecting full pay and pensions.
Guggenheim chooses one champion and one villainess. Michelle Rhee, the chancellor of D.C. schools, is energetic and assertive. She bluntly admits that D.C. students “are getting a crappy education right now,” she fires a couple hundred incompetent educators, institutes some incentive pay, and starts to turn D.C.’s schools around. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and Rhee’s foil, is on the defensive. She seems most solicitous about the egos of teachers; a speech to her union culminates in the cry, “You are heroes!” In her interviews, Weingarten reminds us what good-hearted people teachers are, and condemns school-choice advocates for demonizing teachers. She has maintained this pattern off-screen as well. “It’s in vogue to bash teachers and unions rather than celebrate the work they do to help kids,” she said, responding to Superman. “That being said, I’m a big girl.”
Weingarten, obviously, can take the criticism, but she hasn’t rebutted it. Perhaps it augurs victory that the only thing she can find to fault is her opponents’ tone of voice. For now, though, Weingarten still has the power and the money. Weingarten’s AFT funneled over $1 million to defeat D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty (who appointed and supported Rhee) in the recent Democratic primary. The winner, Vincent Gray, used his victory speech to announce his desire for “a strong, empowered chancellor who works with parents and teachers.” Translation: Rhee is out. This is part of a pattern. Guggenheim, whose political sympathies are normally liberal, admits that the Democratic party is, on education policy, a “wholly owned subsidiary of the teachers unions.” The AFT and NEA — combined, the biggest campaign contributors in the U.S. — send more than 90 percent of their donations to Democrats.
Last week’s D.C. primary is a fitting political backdrop to the narrative of Waiting for Superman. Unions stood in Rhee’s way every step of her chancellorship. An unforgettable scene in the documentary shows Rhee sitting aside from a podium, shouted down from her speech by members of D.C. teachers unions, full of sound and fury. “We will not be silenced,” a teacher snaps. Don’t doubt her.
One problem is that no allowance is made for the fact that they see the world differently -- Another is that the world is designed around average people. Report below from Britain
Exceptionally talented children are just as likely to fail in life as succeed according to a new study. In one of the most extensive studies carried out, research found that out of 210 gifted children followed into later life, only three per cent were found to fulfil their early promise.
Professor Joan Freeman, said that of 210 children in her study, 'maybe only half a dozen might have been what we might consider conventionally successful.' 'At the age of six or seven, the gifted child has potential for amazing things, but many of them are caught in situations where their potentials is handicapped.'
Professor Freeman tracked the development of children who had exceptional ability in fields such as maths, art or music from 1974 to the present day. Many of those who failed to excel did so because the 'gifted' children were treated and in some cases robbed of their childhood, the study found. In some cases pushy parents put the children under too much pressure, or they were separated from their peer group, so they ended up having few friends.
The research findings follow a decision earlier this year to scrap a £20 million National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth set up by the government eight years ago. While meant to aid high achievers in state schools, it was considered to have failed to live up to its intended purpose.
Professor Freeman is keen to emphasise that 'the gifted' are no more emotionally fragile than anyone else - and may even have 'greater emotional strength.' But she said that 'being gifted means being better able to deal with things intellectually but not always emotionally.' She adds: 'I want to stress that the gifted are normal people. But they face special challenges, especially unreal expectations, notably being seen as strange and unhappy.
'Others such as parents and teachers, can feel threatened by them and react with put-downs. What they need is acceptance for who they are, appropriate opportunities to develop their potential and reliable moral support.'
An example of a child prodigy who failed to achieve early promise includes Andrew Halliburton, who studied maths at secondary school level at the age of eight. He quit university and ended up working at a McDonald's burger restaurant, although he now plans to return to study.
Other examples of the differing paths gifted children can take is illustrated by Anna Markland and Jocelyn Lavin, who both started at Chetham's school of music, in Manchester on the same day at 11.
Markland, now 46, from Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire, went on to be the BBC Young Musician of the Year, 1982. She went on to study music at Oxford, did two years postgraduate study, and now is a profesional musician, which for her is 'the best job in the world.'
By contrast, her friend Jocelyn turned her back on music to pursue science, and got the best A-level grades of all 210 children in the study - six A grades. But after going to University College London at 17 she failed her finals in Maths and Astronomy and left without a degree. After 20 years as a school maths teacher she has resigned, and her home is under threat of repossession because of mortgage arrears. She said: 'I didn't know what I wanted to do, apart from go into space', she said in the book.
Part of the problem for the gifted, Professor Freeman says, is that often the gifted excel in many areas - and may have to try out several things before they settle in one discipline.
Ultimately attempts to 'hothouse' children will fail if they are put under enormous pressure to perform. She writes: 'The pleasures and creativity of childhood are the basis of all great work. Don't take childhood away from children.'
One Australian State holding out against dumbed-down education
NSW school curricula have not been dumbed down as much as in other States because of the influence of long-time NSW Premier Bob Carr. Carr is a scholarly man and blocked any erosion of standards during his time in office
State Labor governments are under pressure to fall into line with the new national curriculum. A statement from the national curriculum authority seems to assume state education ministers will not object to the final version of its national curriculum plan. The statement says: ‘‘Once Ministers endorse the curriculum in December, it will be available for implementation from 2011’’.
The 20-year history of numerous failed attempts to develop a national curriculum are also spelled out in full. The message is clear that the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority wants any obstruction from the states to stop.
The NSW government said nothing to criticise the national agenda in the lead up to the federal election this year. The order for silence had come from above.
The NSW Board of Studies quietly posted its objections to the national curriculum in late July. That is according to the state government which issued no press release at the time. The response went unnoticed for several weeks.
The Board was blunt in its criticism of the national curriculum draft. This view was widely supported by NSW science, English, history and maths teachers. Their collective view is that the national curriculum draft is vastly inferior to existing NSW standards.
The Board of Studies said the draft curriculum for kindergarten to year 10 students lacked an overarching framework and was overcrowded with content. It said the draft maths and science curriculums failed to cater for the full range of student abilities. Year 10 science was said to be too difficult for most students. The draft history curriculum was described as "far too ambitious to be taught effectively".
The question is whether Labor state governments will be brave enough to take on their Federal colleagues later this year when the nation’s education ministers meet to discuss adoption of the final version of the national curriculum.
The head of the national curriculum authority, Barry McGaw, said his press release was not an attempt to pre-empt their decision. He is confident that any grumblings from the states will have been sorted out in the final curriculum documents.
However, teachers and school principals remain unconvinced that this state will not be selling out what they believe is a gold standard curriculum in NSW.
U.S. Education Secretary Vows to Make American Children 'Good Environmental Citizens'
20% of American students graduate High Schools functionally illiterate and Dunc thinks that there is time for this propaganda? I guess it will make the kids scientifically illiterate too, so Dunc is at least consistent.
A good comment on the Fascist/Communist echoes in Dunc's plan here. Hitler was a Greenie too, of course
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan vowed on Tuesday that his department would work to make American children into "good environmental citizens" through federally subsidized school programs beginning as early as kindergarten that teach children about climate change and prepare them "to contribute to the workforce through green jobs."
“Right now, in the second decade of the 21st century, preparing our children to be good environmental citizens is some of the most important work any of us can do. It’s work that will serve future generations--and quite literally sustain our world,” Duncan said at the Education Department’s "Sustainability Education Summit: Citizenship and Pathways for a Green Economy."
“This week’s sustainability summit represents the first time that the Department is taking a taking a leadership role in the work of educating the next generation of green citizens and preparing them to contribute to the workforce through green jobs,” said Duncan. “President Obama has made clean, renewable energy a priority because, as he says, it’s the best way to 'truly transform our economy, to protect our security, and save our planet.'
“Educators have a central role in this. A well educated citizen knows that we must not act in this generation in ways that endanger the next,” said Duncan. “They teach students about how the climate is changing. They explain the science behind climate change and how we can change our daily practices to help save the planet. They have a role in preparing students for jobs in the green economy.”
“Historically," Duncan said, "the Department of Education hasn’t been doing enough to drive the sustainability movement, and today, I promise that we will be a committed partner in the national effort to build a more environmentally literate and responsible society." "I want my department to help advance the sustainability movement through education," he said.
Duncan explained that the funding for this environmental education will come through a new initiative of the Department of Education called the "Blueprint for Reform."
"The president has proposed $265 million for this program in his fiscal 2011 budget," said Duncan. "These grants will support subjects such as the arts, foreign languages, history, and civics--all of which receive funding under current Education Department programs. Because we recognize the importance education plays in the sustainability movement, these grants also will support environmental education."
Duncan said that his department's "Blueprint for Reform" envisions environmental education being incorporated into so-called "STEM" classes ("science, technology, engineering and mathematics") for students as young as kindergarten.
"These projects have the prospect to build the science of sustainability into the curriculum, starting in kindergarten and extending until the students graduate high school," said Duncan.
Texas education board OKs resolution against 'pro-Islamic bias' in textbooks
The State Board of Education on Friday narrowly approved a resolution that instructs textbook publishers to counter a "pro-Islamic/anti-Christian bias" that proponents say is pervasive in world history books. The resolution, which passed on a 7-6 vote, calls for a "balanced treatment of religious groups in textbooks" and cites examples of perceived bias in textbooks used before 2003.
Balance, however, appears to be in the eye of the beholder. Board member Ken Mercer , R-San Antonio, said the objective of the resolution "should be that we want the world religions treated with accuracy and balance."
But board member Bob Craig , R-Lubbock, argued that the resolution, with its references to "gross pro-Islamic/anti-Christian distortions," failed to achieve that objective. An alternative resolution offered by Craig carried the same message about equal treatment of different faiths, he said, "without attacking one religion over another." "It is very clear to the publishers where we're headed and what we want," Craig said.
Mercer and six other members, however, sank that alternative measure and several other attempts to delay or scuttle the adoption of the resolution.
Questions about the accuracy of the evidence used to justify the resolution were initially rebuffed. But an hour after approval, board members learned that a reference in the resolution to "Middle Easterners buy(ing) into the U.S. public school textbook oligopoly" was not accurate. They voted to remove the reference and then reapproved the revised measure on a 7-5 vote.
The practical effect of the resolution is unclear. Social studies textbooks will probably not be adopted and bought until 2016 because of the state's budget crunch. Also, the resolution is not binding and reflects the opinions of the board members — opinions that could change with time and elections. "This is a cosmetic exercise," said board member Mavis Knight , D-Dallas.
But other board members say the resolution sends an important message to textbook publishers. Board member Terri Leo , R-Spring, said Christianity has been denigrated in past textbooks, citing the evidence in the resolution, and said the problems continue in the current books.
But those problems cannot be addressed in the resolution because of a board rule that limits when a resolution can be considered regarding textbooks in use. "We've seen it done in the past, as with the books cited in the resolution," Leo said. "What we're trying to do is prohibit and send a clear message to the publishers that it should not happen in the future."
Imam Islam Mossaad of the North Austin Muslim Community Center said the board resolution has generated a lot of heat and debate over recent weeks, but it is not representative of how Muslims here are treated by their Christian and Jewish neighbors. "This is so far away from ... the vibe that I get," Mossaad said. "We have differences, but we're still neighbors."
There were more than 75,000 applications for just 4,520 teacher jobs in Scotland. Every teaching vacancy in Scotland is being chased by an average of 17 applicants, according to official figures. The competition for the posts varied from 49 for each job in Stirling to three per vacancy in Shetland.
The Liberal Democrats, who obtained the details through freedom of information requests, said the figures showed teachers' talents were "being wasted". Education Secretary Michael Russell said the numbers were "a concern".
In total, 75,579 applications were made for 4,520 vacancies in 2009-10 - an average of about 17 for each position. The average number of applications per job included 14 in Aberdeenshire, 21 in Dundee, 27 in Edinburgh and six in Glasgow.
Lib Dem education spokeswoman Margaret Smith said the figures "will be deeply concerning for teachers". She added: "The SNP said they would maintain the record number of teachers they inherited from the previous executive but teacher numbers are down by 3,000.
"Scotland's young people are also missing out on the opportunity to learn from newly-trained, enthusiastic teachers who have a wealth of talent and skill, being wasted as they struggle to find jobs."
Education Secretary Michael Russell said: "The difficulties faced by teachers looking for a post is a concern. "Scotland is already unique in guaranteeing a year's employment after graduation from initial teacher education, but we want to do more and we are examining ways we can provide further help.
"While recent figures show that teacher unemployment is lower in Scotland than elsewhere in the UK, we are still working hard to address the issue and have cut student intake, which will reduce competition for jobs."
When retiring University of Illinois at Chicago Professor Bill Ayers co-wrote a book in 1973, it was dedicated in part to Sirhan Sirhan, Robert F. Kennedy's assassin.
That came back to haunt Ayers on Thursday when the U. of I. board, now chaired by Kennedy's son, considered his request for emeritus status. It was denied in a unanimous vote.
Sirhan Sirhan was one of more than 150 "political prisoners" to whome the book "Prairie Fire" was dedicated. Sirhan is serving a prison sentence for assassinating Robert F. Kennedy in June 1968.
Before the vote, an emotional Chris Kennedy spoke out against granting the status to Ayers. "I intend to vote against conferring the honorific title of our university to a man whose body of work includes a book dedicated in part to the man who murdered my father," he said. "There can be no place in a democracy to celebrate political assassinations or to honor those who do so."
Later, Kennedy told the Chicago Sun-Times he and the board have not seen any signs of remorse from Ayers in the nearly 40 years since the dedication. "There's no evidence in any of his interviews or conversations that he regrets any of those actions -- that's a better question for him," he told the Sun-Times.
Kennedy, who was 4 when his father was killed in 1968, said the board's decision did not hinge on his own personal feelings. "The decision was grounded in great university governance," he told the newspaper. "Obviously, there was a personal angle for me, but Ayers' actions were inconsistent with open dialogue and debate that should define any great university." Ayers should not expect any change in that position.
"He asked for this privilege," Kennedy said. "He's not going to get it from me or that board."
In his remarks to the board Thursday, Kennedy noted that emeritus status is a privilege and not automatic, and that Ayers had initiated the request. "Our discussion of this topic therefore does not represent an intervention into the scholarship of the university, nor is it a threat to academic freedom."
Emeritus status at the U. of I. is purely honorific and does not include perks granted by some other schools, such as office space, insurance benefits and free parking.
University spokesman Tom Hardy said no one could recall the last time a request for emeritus status had been denied. "It's highly unusual," he said.
Before he became a professor of education at UIC, Ayers was a co-founder of the radical anti-Vietnam War group the Weather Underground. The group participated in several bombings, and Ayers spent time on the run from the FBI. Federal charges against Ayers were dropped, and he joined the UIC faculty in 1987.
The dedication to Sirhan Sirhan appeared in the book Prairie Fire. Sirhan was one of more than 150 "political prisoners" to whom the book was dedicated.
Ayers went on to contribute to Chicago's school reform program and was one of three co-authors of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant proposal that won $49.2 million to study public school reform. In the 2008 presidential campaign, Ayers' connections to Barack Obama became a lightning rod. Ayers has denied any close association with Obama.
Contacted by a reporter, Ayers declined to comment about the board's action, but when he announced his retirement in August, his former boss, Vicki Chou, dean of UIC's College of Education, told the Sun-Times, "He's done a spectacular job as a teacher here."
Kennedy told the board that he "is guided by my conscience and one which has been formed by a series of experiences, many of which have been shared with the people of our country and mark each of us in a profound way. "My own history is not a secret. My life experiences inform my decision-making as a trustee of the university."
The Department of Education (DOE) has proposed new rules for accrediting colleges and universities, including expanding the power of states to authorize higher education institutions, definitions of what constitutes a “credit hour,” and de facto price controls through measures to ensure graduates’ “gainful employment.” According to the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, the new rules will mark a substantial shift in the accrediting process:
Current regulations do not define or describe the statutory requirement that an institution must be legally authorized in a state. Under the new rules, the institution’s authorization must be subject to adverse action by the state. [The DOE] notes that, while state authorization was in the past viewed as a “minimal” requirement, the Department now views state authorization as a “substantial requirement where the State is expected to take an active role” not only in approving institutions but also in monitoring and “responding appropriately” to public complaints about institutions.
The DOE has also proposed a new rule pertaining to the definition of a credit hour, which could include standardizing the definition of a credit hour by the federal government.
But Sylvia Manning, president of the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association (a regional accrediting agency for 19 states), argued that universities are better equipped to establish the metrics that demonstrate student learning than is the federal government, especially when it comes to non-traditional higher education—such as what the University of Phoenix offers.
“Alternative modes of delivery, most notably Internet-based distance delivery that permits a student to participate in classroom activities at any time from anywhere, make nonsense of the idea of seat-time,” says Ms. Manning. Federal overreach into the definition of a credit hour would end up increasing the amount of resources spent by universities in “demonstrating compliance with the regulation.”
Finally, the Administration has proposed a new “gainful employment” rule that would affect virtually all for-profit private higher education institutions. The new rule is based on a requirement in the Higher Education Act, which requires for-profit universities to provide “an eligible program of training to prepare students for gainful employment in a recognized occupation.” According to Inside Higher Ed, the new rule would create three tests for for-profit colleges to qualify for federal financial aid funding:
The debt-to-earnings ratio, the debt-to-discretionary income ratio, and the loan repayment rate. If a program does better than the department’s preferred standard on any one metric—8 percent debt-to-earnings, 20 percent debt-to-discretionary income, 45 percent repayment rate—then it is fully eligible for Title IV [funding].
Insider Higher Ed also notes that, according to Terry Hartle of the American Council of Education, the new gainful employment rule is “the most complicated regulatory package that the Department of Education has ever promulgated—this really is a brave new world.” The DOE will issue final rules by November 1, 2010, in order to have the new gainful employment regulations take effect by July 1, 2011.
Some U.S. Senators have voiced support for the gainful employment regulations, including Tom Harkin (D–IA), Dick Durbin (D–IL), and Al Franken (D–MN). But in a letter signed by numerous Representatives on the House Education and Labor Committee, Ranking Republican Member John Kline and others expressed concern that “the proposed regulation imposes arbitrary debt-to-income caps. The result will be virtually the same as federal price controls, rewarding low-cost institutions regardless of quality and limiting students’ access to higher-cost institutions.”
Whether it’s through new, powerful state accrediting authority, federal definitions of credit hours, or price controls imposed through gainful employment measures, the Obama Administration appears intent on limiting the growth of the for-profit college sector. But it’s not just the for-profit schools like Capella and DeVry Universities and technical colleges that could be affected.
In a July 30 letter sent to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, former Senator Bill Armstrong, now President of Colorado Christian University, expressed concern that the proposed rules would “subject both public (government owned and operated) colleges and universities and private schools to ‘substantive’ regulation by state government.”
The regulations under consideration by the DOE would have the net result of encumbering student access to higher education and weighing providers down with compliance burdens. Many for-profits could even be forced to close their doors.
During these tough economic times, the last thing the Obama Administration should be doing is creating a bottleneck in the pipeline to employment by limiting access to higher education for working-class families.
Manning summarizes the matter well:
Voluntary accreditation has been in place in the United States for over a hundred years and has handled issues related to the evaluation of quality for most of that time. … What strikes us as curious is that the call for minimum thresholds in matters such as the credit hour and program length runs counter to the country’s expressed interest in increasing, significantly and rapidly, our nation’s attainment in higher education. To meet our national goals for educational attainment and a workforce for the 21st-century economy, higher education is asked—by policy makers, legislators, foundations, opinion leaders—to break out of old molds, seek efficiencies, open doors, reach new populations. Strict accreditation requirements based in 19th-century models don’t seem likely to get us there.
Why are so many British Liberals against school choice?
One of the many ‘storms in a teacup’ at the Liberal Democrat conference has been about school choice. Lib Dem members have successfully passed a motion against Michael Gove’s free schools and several lively fringe debates have been had on the subject. The question is why would any party that purports to be liberal reject the idea of giving parents and schools more freedom?
While we may speculate as to why this is, we should note the existing schools system is both unfair and needlessly bureaucratic. Currently, parents who are not wealthy enough to send their children to private schools, have no choice. The central planners at the LGA’s ‘match’ supply and demand for school places, somehow entrusting in Soviet style economic models which have been laughed out of existence elsewhere. House prices reflect the local schools quality, leading to ‘post code lotteries’ and making a mockery of any claims that the system is comprehensive (not that it should be).
Peter Downes, the Lib Dem councillor who tabled the motion seems to be quite happy with this. He says, “"Academies and free schools are likely to be divisive, costly and unfair. They're in the statute book, on the shelf, and that's where they should stay."
Downes’ evidently relies on the state to magically provide better schools, arguing that the most dangerous element of free schools is "the idea that the principles of the marketplace can be applied to state-funded education". Downes is clearly rejecting the self-evident way forward in providing greater choice, a concept that was first laid down by Andrew Adonis and is now picked up by Gove and the Coalition.
Quite how schools are meant to improve without being subject to the market forces is between Downes and his comrades against the Coalition. No doubt they purport the answer lies in ‘great resources’ (read: more money) for schools.
Without some element of competition or rights to exit from a market (for parents to take their children elsewhere), Britain’s schools will remain in the sclerotic socialist system we have today. Successive ministers in both Labour and Conservative governments have clearly seen that this cannot continue, and have sought the obvious alternative in markets and freedom of choice. The only question is, when will the Lib Dem’s wake up and smell the coffee?
Someone who has voluntarily force-fitted one’s nominally round brain into the square box of government is called a bureaucrat. Bureaucrats who administer the misery of "public education" are known as educrats.
The greatest threat to the educrat is “gun.”
Ever since Columbine educrats have lived in trembling fear of the finger of blame: “you should have known; you should have anticipated; you should have seen the Warning Signs and Done Something!” Now everything is a Warning Sign: a toy gun is a gun, a crayon scribble of a gun is a gun, a finger is a gun, a chicken wing pointed by a child who says “bang” is a gun.
In defense of their comfortable, nominally educated, taxpayer-paid, union-protected, shielded-from-reality world the educrats of American public school warehousing have instituted their own form of Sharia Law. Children are the threat, “gun” is the menace, common sense is the enemy.
Today a seven-year-old Florida boy is half way through his two-year expulsion for accidentally bringing a toy gun to school, and the educrats won't let him return until he undergoes psychiatric evaluation.
Libertarians would call this child abuse, except he's better off being home schooled anyway. So what’s next for America’s public Sharia Law schools?
Thieves still get a hand chopped off occasionally in Taliban Land. Maybe an American child who points a finger at another child and says “bang” should have that digit detached.
Or how about stoning, still a popular pastime in Iran? Maybe every schoolyard in America should have a stoning pit, a depression in the ground encircled by smooth rounded rocks. A kid who brings a pretend pistol to school should be ceremonially stoned to death by all the other little P.S. students. That would teach them not to mess with an educrat.
Ante-natal classes for teen mothers in British schools?
Schools should run ante-natal classes for pregnant pupils, Government advisers said yesterday. The courses would reach out to gymslip mums too embarrassed to see their GP or local clinics, they claimed.
Pupils would be able to skip lessons for the sessions at their schools and sixth-form colleges. Critics lambasted the proposal, saying it would normalise teenage pregnancy and make it more common than ever. Britain already has the highest rates in Western Europe, with more than 41,000 babies born to women under the age of 18 every year. That figure is twice as high as in Germany, three times the level of France and six times that of the Netherlands.
But the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence is advising that schools in areas where teenage pregnancy is rife should hold classes to help young girls deal with labour and motherhood.
Nice cites concerns that pregnant girls are deterred from going to see their GP by the fear of being sneered at by the receptionist or patients in the waiting room.
Teenagers are said to be reluctant to attend locally-run ante-natal classes - held in community centres, clinics or hospitals - because they feel they are being judged by the midwives.
Experts at NICE say that schools in the U.S. have held antenatal classes for years and they have been highly successful in teaching young girls about the ordeal of labour and motherhood.
Rhona Hughes, who chaired the panel behind the guidelines, said: 'We did find examples in the literature of good practice where clinics were held in schools and young women were more likely to access care. 'Teenagers can feel embarrassed going to clinics where there are older women.' She added that the panel had interviewed many young girls who said they had bad experiences going to their GP or antenatal classes and felt they were being judged by the receptionist or midwife.
Although no British schools run antenatal classes, they have been held in classrooms in the U.S. since the early 1990s. Girls are told about labour, given advice on their diet and taught how to breast feed.
Dr Gillian Leng, deputy chief executive of NICE said it would not be appropriate for all schools to run the sessions, only those in authorities with high rates of teenage pregnancy. Areas that may be targeted by the scheme include Lambeth, Lewisham and Southwark, in south London, and Birmingham, Nottingham, Blackpool and Hartlepool.
But Anastasia de Waal, deputy director of the think-tank Civitas, said: 'There simply isn't time for antenatal classes to be held in secondary school. 'It is extremely important that teenage mums have all the opportunity they can and that nothing encroaches on their learning. 'Schools are simply not equipped to provide these services and there isn't room for them.
'We need to address the fact that they feel embarrassed to go to their GP or local antenatal classes - not start providing them at school. There is also the argument that providing antenatal classes at school normalises teenage pregnancy.'
Norman Wells, director of the Family Education Trust, said: 'Schools exist to assist and support parents in the education of their children, not to be the panacea for every social ill. 'The more schools are called on to shoulder the burden of problems created by a permissive society, the more they will lose their focus on imparting knowledge and teaching children to think in a rational and logical way.'
The Reverend Paul Dawson, of Reform, a conservative evangelical movement, said: 'If NICE are going to issue these guidelines they need to ensure that there is enough scope for teachers to educate pupils on other aspects of relationships. 'These include abstinence. Teachers should feel free to be able to teach pupils that at the other end of the scale many people do not have sex before marriage and that such a lifestyle can be very healthy.'
Three-year-olds being labelled bigots by British teachers as 250,000 children accused of racism
Teachers are being forced to report children as young as three to the authorities for using alleged ‘racist’ language, it was claimed last night. Munira Mirza, a senior advisor to London Mayor Boris Johnson, said schools were being made to spy on nursery age youngsters by the Race Relations Act 2000.
More than a quarter of a million children have been accused of racism since it became law, she said. Writing in Prospect magazine, she said: ‘The more we seek to measure racism, the more it seems to grow.
‘Teachers are now required to report incidents of racist abuse among children as young as three to local authorities, resulting in a massive increase of cases and reinforcing the perception that we need an army of experts to manage race relations from cradle to grave. ‘Does this heightened awareness of racism help to stamp it out? Quite the opposite. It creates a climate of suspicion and anxiety.’
The Act compelled 43,000 public authorities, including schools and churches, ‘to promote good relations between persons of different racial groups’. Details of the incidents are logged on databases.
Teachers are allowed to report racism even if the alleged ‘victim’ was not offended or if the child does not understand what they were saying. Freedom of Information replies obtained by civil liberties group the Manifesto Club show that between 2002 and 2009, 280,000 incidents have been reported.
Black children in Britain don't fail due to racism, says black academic
Black children fail at school because they do not concentrate, not because they are the victims of ‘institutional racism’, a leading black academic claims today. Tony Sewell, the son of Caribbean migrants, attacks the view that black pupils are held back by teachers who see them as ‘miniature gangster rappers’.
The former teacher, who runs an educational charity for black children, instead blames poor parenting and the youngsters’ own lax attitude.
In a blistering article for the Left-of- centre magazine Prospect, Dr Sewell says that while it was once true that black pupils were held back by racism, ‘times have changed’. He writes: ‘What we now see in schools is children undermined by poor parenting, peer-group pressure and an inability to be responsible for their own behaviour.
‘They are not subjects of institutional racism. ‘They have failed their GCSEs because they did not do the homework, did not pay attention and were disrespectful to their teachers. ‘Instead of challenging our children, we have given them the discourse of the victim – a sense that the world is against them and they cannot succeed.’
The view that black children are being held back by racism was reinforced by the last Labour government. Labour leadership hopeful Diane Abbott has said that ‘black boys do not have to be too long out of disposable nappies for some teachers to see them as a miniature gangster rappers’.
Mr Sewell – director of the Generating Genius charity and a consultant at Reading University – says that Miss Abbott and researchers imply that white teachers have low expectations of black boys and this is partly why they underachieve.
He admits evidence proves that ‘African-Caribbean boys are still at the bottom of the league table for GCSEs’. They start school at roughly same level as other pupils, but then fall further and further behind their peers.
However, he also writes: ‘I believe black underachievement is due to the low expectations of school leaders, who do not want to be seen as racist and who position black boys as victims.’
In 2008, the Department for Education reported that only 27 per cent of black boys achieve five or more A*-C GCSE grades. African-Caribbean boys are also the group most likely to be excluded from school
MCAS test scores released yesterday show that more Massachusetts schools than ever are failing to measure up to federal achievement standards, with 57 percent out of compliance.
The test scores were announced as officials attempted to focus attention on the unveiling of a program to recognize top-performing schools.
While elementary and middle school pupils at most grade levels showed impressive gains on the math portion of the test — having more students in the top two scoring categories, proficient and advanced — their results in English were mixed. On the high school exams, math scores were flat, and English scores declined slightly.
The uneven results put the state even further behind in meeting the federal benchmarks under the No Child Left Behind Act, which requires annual increases in state standardized test scores. By 2014, all students, including those with learning disabilities and limited fluency in English, must be proficient — possessing a command of grade-level material. It’s a goal many educators and state education officials have criticized as unattainable.
Across the state, 982 elementary, middle and high schools — representing 57 percent of Massachusetts schools — failed to meet the benchmarks, up from 929 last year, according to the preliminary data.
The state also announced that 123 school districts, including 32 independently-run public charter schools, failed to meet test score targets under No Child Left Behind, representing about a third of all districts statewide. Last year, 106 districts and charter schools were identified.
Mitchell Chester, the state’s commissioner for elementary and secondary education, called the growing number of schools out of compliance “inevitable.’’
“A lot of people are questioning these federal targets,’’ Chester said in an interview as he attempted to shore up public confidence in the state’s schools. “This doesn’t mean we are slipping backwards.’’
Under No Child Left Behind, schools and districts are judged on their progress with students overall, as well as on the performance of certain subgroups broken down by race/ethnicity, family-income level, learning disabilities, and other criteria. If a school or one of its subgroups fails to make necessary progress two years in a row, the state designates the school as needing improvement, requiring slight adjustments to programs.
If problems persist for four years, the school or district goes into “corrective action,’’ possibly prompting changes in school leadership and teaching philosophy. At five years, the school is labeled as in need of restructuring, which could lead to a state takeover. This year, 473, almost half of all schools receiving federal designations, were deemed in need of restructuring.
It takes two consecutive years of adequate improvement on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System exams to return to good standing — a feat 62 schools achieved this year.Continued...
The Obama administration intends to make changes to the No Child Left Behind Act, which has been up for reauthorization for more than a year, to develop a more nuanced way of judging performance. The administration wants to move away from the “proficiency’’ benchmark, set under former president George W. Bush, to one that assesses the readiness of students for college or the workplace, but it is unclear when such changes will be made.
With so many Massachusetts schools receiving federal designations, the state this year created a system, under a state law enacted this year, to provide assistance to those that need it the most. As part of that effort, the state identified 35 as underperforming.
Yesterday’s MCAS scores showed that some of Boston’s 12 underperforming schools made gains.
Trotter Elementary saw double-digit increases in overall performance in English, while the Agassiz, John F. Kennedy and Dever elementary schools had double-digit increases in overall math performance, school officials said.
However, the state suppressed scores for Blackstone Elementary School in the South End after Superintendent Carol R. Johnson asked the state last month to investigate the data, officials said.
In an interview yesterday, Johnson said the scores appeared to increase at a rate that was not consistent with other testing data for the school, raising questions about the authenticity of the MCAS scores. “We want to make sure as we develop a baseline for performance that we start with valid information,’’ Johnson said.
It is rare for the state not to release a school’s MCAS scores. Last year, the state suppressed scores for Robert M. Hughes Charter School in Springfield, and an investigation later revealed widespread cheating, prompting the state to shut down the school in June.
Johnson said she did not want to speculate about the reasons behind the spike in scores at Blackstone.
In general on the MCAS, Boston officials say, students often improved at faster rates on the math exam than the state and showed improvement in English.
Yesterday, Chester preferred to keep attention on the positive during a news conference in a classroom of eighth-graders at Eliot K-8 School in Boston’s North End. It was there that Chester announced 187 “Commendation Schools,’’ which includes the Eliot, under a new program to recognize schools making strides in boosting the academic achievement of their students and success in closing achievement gaps between students of different backgrounds.
Chester did not mention the growing number of schools out of compliance with federal standards until reporters questioned him about it after his presentation.
Glenn Koocher, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, said Chester’s decision not to dwell on the number of schools missing federal testing targets shows how little credibility remains in that system.
“The fact that there are so many schools in sanction and testing data is being used as a weapon and not as a tool to improve student achievement is frustrating to a lot of people,’’ he said.
In a statement, Governor Deval Patrick said, “There are so many great success stories in schools across this Commonwealth because of the efforts of administrators, teachers, students, and parents who are united and committed to making every effort to ensure that every child that walks through the door receives a high-quality education.’’
GK Chesterton said `Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.' That is not my favorite Chesterton quote. He also said `A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.' Both are apposite when thinking about contemporary government-run education.
Last year my wife completed a post graduate Diploma in Early Childhood Education. The theme of every unit in this diploma was that the little blighters educate themselves. All you need to do, as an educational facilitator, is to provide them with a rich learning environment. In particular, you shouldn't think of teaching them anything, or of directing their learning in any way. This may harm their self-esteem, curiosity and creativity. Children will absorb the numeracy and literacy skills they need as they need them. Their learning should be self-directed.
Apart from being complete and utter bollocks, what struck me most about this course was how carefully structured it was. By the time you get to post-graduate level, you have a pretty good idea of how to study, and of the gaps in your knowledge. Of course, as Donald Rumsfeld remarked, there are also unknown unknowns - things you don't know you don't know, and this is where a good teacher comes in handy.
But in this course, every student had to read the same articles in the same order, and was expected to come to the same conclusion. Namely, that education works best when it is structured. The lecturer, being a humourless left wing git, saw no irony in this at all.
Post-graduates can be expected to take most of the responsibility for their learning. Kindergarten and primary children cannot. The whole world is unknown unknowns to them. They have no way of knowing what they need to learn, or how to go about learning it. Sadly, most primary teachers in Australian state schools, never having been educated themselves, cling to the romantic ideal of student directed learning.
The one area where this does not seem to apply is political/environmental issues. At KICE (Kangaroo Island Community Education), and at other government schools around the country, students are regularly subjected to emotionally laden, reason-free, questioning forbidden, programmes of indoctrination on matters environmental.
This week's subject is the ghastly consequences of palm oil farming. Empty headed and single-minded guest speakers are inflicted on the students, who are also obliged to watch heart-rending videos of forest clearing followed by pictures of sad looking orang utans and little elephants.
They are then encouraged to act globally and to take action by telling other people what to do. For example, students may wish to write to Australian companies which use palm oil, threatening not use their products unless they cease to do so. Or they may write to the Indonesian ambassador expressing their dismay at Indonesia's apparent disregard for the welfare of its endangered species.
The arrogance is astonishing. As is the complete lack of concern for the families whose livelihoods such actions will destroy.
Students then file home in a bored fashion, leaving a trail of litter, and perhaps bashing a few penguins to death along the way. Believe me, it happens.
The end result is listless and resentful students, whose self-esteem really is damaged because they know very well that they are not achieving or learning anything worthwhile.
But teachers, in a frenzy of rose tinted delusion, return to the staff room to congratulate themselves on what a wonderful job they are doing, oblivious to the consistently appalling behaviour, and equally appalling academic results.
On Monday, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) opened the most expensive school in American history: the $578 million Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools complex. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, the 24-acre complex costs roughly $140,000 per student. Parts of the school were designed to replicate historic buildings on the grounds where the school was built, including the Cocoanut Grove nightclub. In the warped logic that justifies so many government decisions, somehow a nightclub seemed the perfect environment for a student to learn mathematics and history.
The shocking sticker price for the Los Angeles school grabbed headlines across the nation. But in Southern California, at least some teachers weren’t expressing outrage about such wasteful spending on buildings at the expense of students. Less than 48 hours after the opening of LAUSD’s extravagant school structure, members of the United Teachers Los Angeles union were outside the Los Angeles Times building, protesting the newspaper’s recent publication of a database which evaluated teacher performance in the school district.
According to the Times, the online database ranked 6,000 third- through fifth-grade teachers “by their effectiveness in improving students' scores on standardized math and English tests during a seven-year period.” The paper also explained that the “value-added method looks at previous student test performance and estimates how much a teacher added to or subtracted from a student's progress.” Teachers howled that this was unfair, since teachers are “more than test scores.”
The United Teachers Los Angeles pronounced it “the height of journalistic irresponsibility to make public these deeply flawed judgments about a teacher's effectiveness."
Since when is it flawed or irresponsible to demand accountability? When taxpayers pour billions into the public education system every year, doesn’t it make sense to determine whether that money is being spent effectively and efficiently?
One teacher even vented, "The Times has reneged on its mission of telling the truth." Really? It seems like the LA Times is finally living up to its journalistic responsibilities by offering the facts and letting readers decide. Another teacher claimed that some of her peers were “despondent over the rankings.” Is there any consideration of the feelings of students trapped in the classrooms of these “despondent” teachers—the students not being equipped with the skills necessary for a prosperous future?
The teachers shouldn’t be too worried about the Times’ exposé since their union is now defending their shameful ineptness at instructing students.Union protection of its bloated, inefficient bureaucracy has reached ghastly levels in the Golden State. The same unions that are protesting a newspaper reporting on the quality of their members are among the biggest political players in California. One of their key focuses this election year is Proposition 25.
Proposition 25, which will appear on the November ballot, would remove the two-thirds legislative vote requirement for passing a budget—and passing tax increases. Instead, a simple majority of the legislature, or the controlling political party, could pass whatever budget they want without any input from the minority party.
California’s budget is often passed long after its constitutional deadline. In just a few days, the legislature will set a new record for failing to pass a state budget on time. Proposition 25 backers claim that a simple majority vote would ensure the budget is passed on time. But in a legislature dominated by Democrats, Proposition 25 would give the controlling party carte blanche when it comes to feeding the unions and expanding bureaucracy—all at taxpayer expense.
Always eager to guard their more-than-fair-share of the government budget, teachers unions are among the biggest donors to the Yes on Proposition 25 campaign. The California Federation of Teachers donated $1.25 million, California Teachers Association donated $250,000, the California Faculty Association donated $100,000, and the California School Employees Association donated $450,000.
It’s common for teachers unions to throw around huge dollars in political campaigns just to safeguard their interests. But ridding the state constitution of the added taxpayer protections in a two-thirds budget vote would clear the way for unions to get whatever they want—including the kind of wasteful spending found in LAUSD. Keep in mind LAUSD is currently grappling with deficit of $640 million. The $578 million school could have covered almost the entire deficit. Although bond measures financed the school’s construction, such wasteful spending is not uncommon throughout the school system.
Big unions are the biggest hindrance to the education reforms so desperately needed. Bankrupt school districts and the union leeches can keep building their monuments to mediocrity. But eventually, their work product won’t have the education or skills necessary to keep financing such vapid opulence.
Useless degrees: One in three British call centre workers is a graduate
A third of call centre workers are graduates, say researchers. A survey of UK-based call centres showed that 35 per cent of their agents are now educated to degree level - up from 25 per cent last year.
Two in five call centre bosses reported seeing a surge in applications from graduates, particularly over the past 12 months.
The survey, by Hays Contact Centres in conjunction with the Top 50 Call Centres for Customer Service initiative, found that many graduates intend to develop a long-term career in the industry.
The soaring numbers of graduates seeking work in call centres shows the impact of the recession on the graduate jobs market. Many firms are squeezing graduate training programmes while universities are turning out unprecedented numbers.
The Association of Graduate Recruiters, representing leading employers, suggests that nearly 70 graduates are chasing every vacancy.
Call centre starting salaries are usually £12,000 to £18,000. Some graduates can expect to move up to senior marketing or sales roles but others see it as a stop-gap.
Figures issued earlier this year by the Higher Education Statistics Agency showed that nearly 20,000 of last year's graduates - 10 per cent - were unemployed six months after leaving university - up from 8 per cent in 2008.
Australia: Preferential treatment for "alternative" school?
The government giving the preferential treatment is a Leftist one. You know: The "equality" preachers
Rose Park Primary School parents want the Education Minister to investigate if the department deliberately altered a report on a smaller learning facility on the premises that has divided the school community.
The Family Unit, established in 1980, is a Reception to Year 7 "school within a school" that has about 50 students, offering an alternative approach to education based on the Reggio Emilia method.
An independent report last year was supposed to address growing animosity between parents at both schools, the Education Department and principals.
Supporters say the unit provides more space and a better teacher-student ratio than the mainstream school, while its opponents say the unit receives preferential treatment, taking up the two largest teaching spaces, resulting in overcrowding in the rest of the school.
The original report, released under Freedom of Information laws, shows parts of the report - including tables showing the difference in classroom space per student and issues around school zoning - were removed from the versions given to parents. After an uproar from parents, the Ombudsman's office determined the department was required to release the original report.
Parent Terina Verrall said the department had been "dishonest" about withholding information in the report. "We didn't get an independent report, we got a DECS tampered report and we knew that right from the word go," she said. "The real report would have allowed for real discussion."
The issue escalated over the past two years, with the mainstream school's governing council members voting to have the unit moved to another school.
Following consultation with Parkside Primary School in June, that school's governing council formally rejected a bid to relocate the Family Unit to their site.
Education Minister Jay Weatherill admitted the situation "wasn't handled well".
Earlier this month, he announced the unit would remain at Rose Park Primary. However, contact between the two facilities would be minimised and they would be administered separately, with a long-term view to relocating the unit in the future. "I met all of the parent and school groups involved and my decision takes into account all of the concerns raised, including concerns about what was excluded from the report," he said. "I have made my decision and that decision stands."
The drumbeat of Leftist deception goes on. Look at the phrase below: "often isolating black and Latino students in low-performing schools". A more honest phrase would be "which are therefore low-performing schools". A school can only be as good as its students
Public schools in the Boston and Springfield metropolitan areas are among the most segregated in the country, often isolating black and Latino students in low-performing schools, according to a report released today by Northeastern University.
Of the 100 large metropolitan regions examined, the Springfield area ranked second (behind Los Angeles) for the most segregated schools for Latino students, while the Boston area ranked fourth (behind New York) in that same category, according to the study by faculty at the Institute on Urban Health Research at Northeastern University’s Bouvé College of Health Sciences.
Among the most segregated schools for black students, Springfield ranked ninth and Boston ranked 28th.
Nationwide, black students tend to be more highly segregated than their Latino peers, according to one of the report’s authors, although in the two Massachusetts regions studied, the degree of segregation is roughly the same for both groups.
Overall, metropolitan areas in the Northeast and Midwest dominated the rankings for the most segregated schools — the repercussions of segregated housing patterns and centuries-old practices of school districts run mostly by individual cities and towns, rather than by counties, the authors said.
That fragmented approach to public education has great consequences for black and Latino students, who often end up at schools with low achievement, less parental involvement, high rates of absenteeism, and low rates of graduation, according to the report. [They don't "end up" in such schools. Low achievement, less parental involvement, high rates of absenteeism, and low rates of graduation are what the students and their parents do, not what the school does]
In Massachusetts, for instance, all 35 schools the state has declared as underperforming are in urban centers with high black and Latino enrollment and high levels of poverty, while none of the schools are in the largely white suburban or rural towns.
“Many people [in the Northeast and Midwest] have the expectation they can buy into a good school district, entitling them to almost a private level of schooling,’’ said Nancy McArdle, a coauthor of the report, in a telephone interview. “It’s antithetical to the idea of public schools.’’
The report, which will be posted on diversitydata.org, is being released amid a push by President Obama to overhaul the nation’s worst schools and to open more schools using innovative programs to close a stubborn achievement gap between students of different races, ethnicities, and income levels.
Much of that effort has focused on work between the nation’s cities and their respective state education agencies. But the report’s authors add another potential and often overlooked partner to that mix: suburban schools, and the resources they could offer.
Among the report’s recommendations: allow students in failing schools to transfer to higher-performing schools outside their communities; create a student-assignment system that encompasses multiple school districts; supplement existing school systems with regional schools that mix urban and suburban students; or expand voluntary desegregation programs such as Metco, which enables roughly 3,500 students in Boston and Springfield to attend suburban schools.Continued...
The authors also call on state and local leaders to build more affordable housing in the suburbs and reinvest in depressed city neighborhoods to create more demographically diverse communities.
Many of those ideas have the support of some prominent Massachusetts civil rights groups, which have been pushing Boston school officials for several months to consider these approaches as they look to overhaul the way they assign students to schools.
Laura Rotolo, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said it was disappointing that the Boston and Springfield areas ranked so poorly in the study, decades after the cities desegregated their schools and after various pushes by the state to build more affordable housing in the suburbs. “It just shows the work we need to do,’’ Rotolo said. “The schools are extremely segregated, and we have to do something to change that.’’
School districts across the nation have been confused about the extent to which they can use race as a factor in assigning students to schools. That’s because the US Supreme Court three years ago invalidated voluntary desegregation plans in Seattle and Louisville, Ky. The ruling suggested race could not be the basis for assigning students to schools, but civil rights activists have said race can still be one of several factors.
Boston schools Superintendent Carol R. Johnson declined to comment on the report’s recommendations because she had not seen a copy of the report.
More broadly, though, Johnson said that creating more affordable housing is critical, as is continuing to improve urban schools. She noted that high-performing schools in the city, such as Boston Latin, have attracted suburban families to the city. “We certainly want to create integrated communities where students can learn to work with students from different backgrounds,’’ Johnson said.
A spokeswoman for Springfield schools also declined to comment on the report’s recommendations, but said the district is working aggressively to overhaul its schools.
The Northeastern report examined the distribution of students of different races, ethnicities, and income levels in elementary schools across large metropolitan areas, as defined by the federal government.
Areas were then judged on a scale from zero to 100, with the lowest number representing what the report called “no segregation’’ and the highest, “total segregation.’’ Anything above 60 was considered high.
The values represent the share of students of a particular demographic that would have to move to another school to achieve full integration, mirroring the demographic makeup of that metropolitan region.
Metro Boston, under the federal formula, encompasses much of Eastern Massachusetts and two counties in New Hampshire, creating a landscape where student enrollment is 67.4 percent white, 14.5 percent Latino, 9 percent black, and 6.8 percent Asian.
The Boston area scored 70 for Latino students and for black students. The Springfield area scored 73 for Latino students and 75 for black students.
McArdle said using metropolitan regions instead of individual school districts in the study provided “a better indication of the housing market people choose to live in.’’ “The city of Boston doesn’t function in isolation of itself,’’ said McArdle, who coauthored the report with Northeastern faculty Theresa Osypuk and Dolores Acevedo-Garcia.
The report doesn’t offer specific examples of schools in a region to show the divergent demographic mixes. But according to the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, the contrasts are stark.
For instance, at the John F. Kennedy School in Jamaica Plain, which the state declared underperforming this year, 80 percent of the students are Latino.
By contrast, General John Nixon Elementary School in Sudbury, where fifth-graders had the highest English MCAS scores last spring, 88 percent of students are white, according to enrollment data the districts reported to the state last fall.
Even within Boston, demographics can vary widely. Latino students account for 82 percent of enrollment at the William Blackstone School in the South End, while in South Boston, one neighborhood away, whites account for 62 percent of enrollment at the Oliver Hazard Perry School.
“Every parent wants the best for their children,’’ McArdle said. “It is very shortsighted to continue to isolate ourselves into specific communities and focus only on our own community and not look more broadly.’’
American spending on public education, adjusted for inflation, has more than doubled over the last three decades. What did taxpayers get for their money? The average math and reading scores of American 17-year-olds have not improved since the early 1970s according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress long-term trend assessment.
Twice the money. Zero progress.
Yet students in other countries have been improving their test scores. The Program for International Student Assessment 2006 measured the math and science literacy of 15-year-olds in 29 countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The results? American students placed in the bottom quarter in math and in the bottom third in science.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said, "We are lagging the rest of the world, and we are lagging it in pretty substantial ways."
The current public education system is not preparing Americans to succeed in the increasingly competitive global economy. In the U.S., this will lead to growing unemployment rates, a decline in Gross Domestic Product, unsustainable levels of national debt, and reduced military capability.
U.S. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, said last week that the single biggest threat to national security is the national debt. The estimated $600 billion in interest on the national debt in 2012 that American taxpayers will have to pay is "one year's worth of defense budget," Mullin said. He predicted that the defense budget will eventually be cut to facilitate the "wave of debt."
In addition to endangering the U.S.'s economic and national security, low educational attainment also imposes societal and personal costs. Societal costs include higher unemployment, higher crime, lower income tax revenues, and higher social welfare payments. Personal costs include lower lifetime earnings and life expectancy. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, estimated lifetime earnings are about $1.2 million for high school graduates and $2.1 million for college graduates. Also, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reports that life expectancy increases when educational attainment increases.
Those who argue that the solution is more money for public schools have had three decades to test their theory. Increased spending has not led to improvement. American test scores have remained flat since the early 1970s even though per-pupil spending, adjusted for inflation, went from $4,489 in 1970-1971 to $10,041 in 2006-2007--an increase of 124 percent.
American per-pupil spending in 2006 was 41 percent higher than the OECD average of $7,283, and yet American students still placed in the bottom quarter in math and in the bottom third in science among OECD countries.
Clearly, increasing spending further is unlikely to improve test scores. "Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results" is how Einstein defined "insanity." So now that we know what doesn't work, what should we do?
Television reporter John Stossel argued in his ABC News special report "Stupid in America: How We Cheat Our Kids" that the U.S. public education system is a government monopoly, and monopolies usually fail their customers. Stossel concluded that competition and choice can improve education just as it improves everything else.
Without the pressure to compete, monopolies have little incentive to serve customers better. When the U.S. Postal Service was a monopoly, it couldn't deliver packages overnight. But when it had to compete with FedEx and others, then suddenly it could deliver overnight. Competition spurs competitors to innovate and perform better.
Because attempts to achieve substantial reform within the current U.S. public education system have failed for decades, it's time to end the monopoly and develop alternative, competitive systems that give parents the freedom to choose the schools their kids attend regardless of where they live and how much money they make.
School choice empowers parents to remove their kids from failing schools and place them in successful schools. And it gradually forces public schools to improve or risk losing students to better schools.
Embracing policies that give families the freedom to choose the schools their kids attend would not require more money from taxpayers. Instead, it would require the improvement of resource allocation. For example, resources could be more effectively allocated by allowing parents to use their kids' share of public education funding to choose the best schools for their kids.
There is, of course, strong resistance to school choice from the defenders of the status quo in education whose livelihoods are threatened by alternatives that focus on the best interest of kids instead of adults. The preservation of self-interests is to be expected, but how is it affecting the nation?
America has barely been treading water in terms of domestic and international test scores for three decades despite the fact that spending on public education, adjusted for inflation, has more than doubled.
Religious schools have been a major feature of the educational landscape in Australia since British settlement. The first schools in colonial New South Wales were Anglican schools. Despite fluctuating levels of political support and public funding, Catholic schools have survived in large numbers for close to 200 years.
At last count, 1.1 million children (out of a total school population of 3.4 million) were enrolled in non-government schools in Australia. More than 90% of these students were in religious schools.
Over the last two decades, enrolments in non-government schools continued to rise steadily. But more remarkable than the overall growth has been the diversification of religious schools in this period. While the traditional Christian religions remain dominant, their rate of growth has been outpaced by Islamic schools and schools associated with new Christian denominations.
Inevitably, this change in the nature of the non-government school sector has caused disquiet. Some people are worried about the potential negative effects of religious schools on children, such as lower standards of education and religious indoctrination. Others are concerned about the potential negative effects on society, such as social fragmentation and intolerance.
These are all important concerns, but there is little evidence that religious schools are the cause of any of the educational or social ills attributed to them.
Indeed, it is equally plausible to argue that religious schools are an essential part of a free, democratic and pluralist society. A public school system is necessarily secular and therefore cannot make everyone happy. Religious schools can act as an ‘escape valve.’ In the United States, for example, there have been dozens of conflicts between families and public schools over religious principles and that have ended up in court. The resolutions have invariably been unsatisfactory for all parties. In Australia, by contrast, most parents with a religious preference that cannot be accommodated in public schools have the option of choosing a religious school.
All schools should be expected to implement a high quality curriculum and engender in their students a commitment to the values that underpin a harmonious society. At present, there is no reason to believe that religious schools are falling short of these aims.
The above is a press release from the Centre for Independent Studies, dated 17 September. Enquiries to cis@cis.org.au. Snail mail: PO Box 92, St Leonards, NSW, Australia 1590.
20 September, 2010
Students booted for giving teachers Krispy Kremes
Legal team explains principal wants 'Christian' acts halted
A New Mexico school principal who has demanded that a team of students cease their "Christian" acts has suspended three after they gave fresh Krispy Kreme doughnuts with Bible verses to their teachers, according to a complaint from a legal team.
"Some teachers are worried about their students giving them bullets, and this school suspends students over a Bible verse," said Mathew Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel and dean of the Liberty University School of Law. "These students are living their Christian beliefs by showing kindness," he continued. "It is outrageous that the Roswell school officials are mean to these students solely because they are hostile to their Christian faith."
A WND request to the Roswell school district for comment did not generate a response. But according to Liberty Counsel, the action came from Principal Ruben Bolanos, who also was reported to have said he wanted the students to cease their "Christian" acts. "I don't like Christians. All they do is smile at you and then stab you in the back," the legal team's announcement reported the principal said.
The retaliation followed the outreach by the some 25 students who are members of a group called Relentless in Roswell. Liberty Counsel said the students wanted to express their appreciation for their teachers by giving them doughnuts that are not even routinely available in Roswell.
"Since the closest Krispy Kreme shop was in Texas, some of the group drove almost six hours round trip, stayed overnight, got up at 3:00 a.m., filled their car's back seat with fresh doughnuts and got back to school on time to deliver the doughnuts," Liberty Counsel explained.
"When the doughnuts were handed out, a Scripture verse was included," the explanation continued. "One student was immediately sent home and two others were forced to spend a Saturday morning sitting alone in the classroom for four hours as a punishment."
Pastor Troy Smothermon, of the Church on the Move, said, "Our motives were not rebellious. If they were, we would have just bought a box of doughnuts down the street. The whole purpose was to encourage those in the school. We are challenging the constitutionality, but our motive here was to love. Faith without works is dead. We want them to know that we love them and that Christ loves them."
The reaction to the doughnuts is not the first situation that has developed between the school and its students, Liberty Counsel said. There already is a lawsuit pending over the issue of freedom of religion after students distributed abstinence wristbands and plastic models of babies at 12 weeks gestation – to bring attention to the unborn, Liberty Counsel said.
The legal team said in the past, the same student organization has handed out sandwiches, hot chocolate and candy canes to members of the student body and faculty. They also have helped staff with the trash and fellow students with lunch trays, LC said. "They also distributed rocks with affirming words like 'U are wonderful' painted on one side and 'Psalm 139' on the other," the organization's report said.
Liberty Counsel said when the plastic babies were handed out school officials said, "It's time to shut this down. Some people are getting offended."
Yet it was that same morning, Liberty Counsel reported, that one student who had decided to commit suicide over a decision to abort got a model baby with the Scripture "You are fearfully and wonderfully made," and cried and prayed with the students and her life was saved, the report said.
“We are terrorizing ourselves.” So says Fawaz Gerges, professor at the London School of Economics. To him, someone who esteems himself capable of seeing beyond what ordinary mortals see by virtue of the powerful method of “deconstruction,” Americans’ fear of al Qaeda is based on the same kind of fear that motivated us in the 1950s. The “American imagination” has been “reshaped” since 9/11, claims the professor.
On CNN, talking to Fareed Zakaria, on the day after the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the professor concluded, “The terrorism of al Qaeda which no longer exists as . . . it used to be since the 1990s now has replaced the red scare.”
Thus do academics build on the historical lies about the “Red Scare.” See, there is no threat from al Qaeda or any Islamic terrorists, just as there was no threat from the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
These are the lies that are told to students, who then grow up to, not surprisingly, question the threat of Islamic terrorism, some going so far as to become “9/11 truthers,” attributing the attack to the U.S. government.
I saw such lessons being dispensed in 2009 among hundreds of AP history teachers who, after a long day of grading exams, listened to a lecture by Professor Betty Dessants of Shippensburg University. Dessants was one of several historians brought in as part of the evening’s activities. She spoke on the Cold War. Her contribution to the historical research on this period was the theory that the ranch houses that became popular were built as a kind of defense mechanism against this largely imaginary threat.
The history teachers in the audience, for the most part, just nodded along. When I asked Professor Dessants how many people had died at the hands of communists she said she didn’t know.
This is the Howard Zinn school of history, a history of often unsubstantiated ephemera in the service of a grand theory—in Zinn’s case that the U.S. is rotten to the core because it is built on the murderous greed of capitalism. Thus the late history professor’s analysis of the Cold War from his bestseller, A People’s History of the United States:
“When, right after [World War II], the American public, war-weary, seemed to favor demobilization and disarmament, the Truman administration . . . worked to create an atmosphere of crisis and cold war. . . . The Truman administration . . . presented the Soviet Union as not just a rival but an immediate threat.
“In a series of moves abroad and at home, it established a climate of fear—a hysteria about Communism—which would steeply escalate the military budget and stimulate the economy with war-related orders.”
The bestseller status of this piece of propaganda results from the fact that many high school and college students are forced to use it as a textbook, albeit often as a “supplementary” text, as one former AP high school teacher told me.
But the denial of over 100 million deaths by communist regimes is a deliberate rewriting of history that has implications today. The people writing such histories ignore, deny, or minimize deaths of very real people.
Yet, like Zinn, they claim to speak for the “people.” But Zinn, who claimed that, among others, the Yugoslavian “people” welcomed communist rule certainly did not speak for my “people,” the Yugoslavs (specifically Slovenians) buried in unmarked pits for the crime of defending their homeland from communist invasion.
The hallmark of a sociopath is the ability to lie, and to, indeed, make one doubt reality. He will attribute justified fears to irrationality. “It’s all in your head,” he will say.
The sociopath likes to target the emotionally vulnerable and naïve. That’s why so many of the liars about history can be found in schools.
Many of today’s students are too young to remember 9/11. Their school lessons are full of injunctions against “intolerance” and “xenophobia”—fears that kept al Qaeda-inspired Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan on as an Army psychiatrist, in spite of evidence that he had the murderous intentions which he did carry out. Another guest on CNN on 9/12, former White House Homeland Security Advisor Richard Falkenrath, accused Florida pastor Terry Jones of “intolerance and xenophobia.” Former CIA official Bob Baer, worried that the “popular view” of “us against the Islamic world” is “verging on racism.” The language of the academy has entered our governmental institutions. Neither one of these men corrected Gerges’s claims about the “red scare.”
After claiming that 90 percent of al Qaeda members have been wiped out, Gerges came back to his grand theory: “Yet, when I come back to the state of mind, how do you deconstruct a state of mind that basically we, as Americans, we constantly believe we are under imminent threat?”
After saying “We are terrorizing ourselves,” Gerges indeed did reveal his own complicity in the strategy of the jihadists: “The strategy has been to embroil the United States in a greater clash, a big front with the Muslim world, to create a clash of civilization.” Indeed, Professor.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently claimed: "Districts around the country have literally been cutting for five, six, seven years in a row. And, many of them, you know, are through, you know, fat, through flesh and into bone ... ."
Really? They cut spending five to seven consecutive years? Give me a break!
Andrew Coulson, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom, writes that out of 14,000 school districts in the United States, just seven have cut their budgets seven years in a row. How about five years in a row? Just 87. That's a fraction of 1 percent in each case.
Duncan may be pandering to his constituency, or he may actually be fooled by how school districts (and other government agencies) talk about budget cuts. When normal people hear about a budget cut, we assume the amount of money to be spent is less than the previous year's allocation. But that's not what bureaucrats mean.
"They are not comparing current year spending to the previous year's spending," Coulson writes. "What they're doing is comparing the approved current year budget to the budget that they initially dreamed about having."
So if a district got more money than last year but less than it asked for, the administrators consider it a cut. "Back in the real world, a K-12 public education costs four times as much as it did in 1970, adjusting for inflation: $150,000 versus the $38,000 it cost four decades ago (in constant 2009 dollars)," Coulson says.
Taxpayers need to understand this sort thing just to protect themselves from greedy government officials and teachers unions.
It was on the basis of this fear and ignorance that President Obama got Congress to pass a "stimulus" bill this summer that included $10 billion for school districts. The money is needed desperately to save teachers from layoffs, the bill's advocates said. We must do it for the children!
When you look at the facts, the scam is clear. "Over the past 40 years," Coulson writes, "public school employment has risen 10 times faster than enrollment. There are 9 percent more students today, but nearly twice as many public school employees."
But isn't it just common sense that schools would be better if they had more money? As a wise man said, it's not what we don't know that gets us into trouble; it's what we know that isn't so.
Consider the American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland, Calif. It was once a failing school, but now it's one of the best in California. Ben Chavis turned it around without any additional money. His book, "Crazy Like a Fox," tells how.
Chavis' experience exposes the school establishment's lies for what they are. Nearly all of Chavis' students are considered economically disadvantaged (98 percent qualify for free lunches), yet they have the fourth-highest test scores of any school in the state.
"In Oakland this year, on the AP (advanced placement) exam, we had 100 percent of all the blacks and Mexicans in the city of Oakland who passed AP calculus," Chavis said. "There are four high schools, and we're the only ones who had anyone pass AP calc."
Yet Chavis accomplishes this without the "certified" teachers so revered by the educational establishment. His classes are as big as, and sometimes bigger than, public school classes, but only a quarter of his teachers are certified by the state.
Money, he insists, is not the answer. "My buildings are shacks compared to their schools, but my schools are clean, and we'll kick all their asses."
He scoffs at the establishment's solutions to the education problem, such as teacher evaluations.
"I don't do no teacher evaluations. All I do is go into a class, and if the kids ain't working, your ass is fired. (Most principals) sit for hours and say, 'Is he meeting this goal, is he meeting' -- I just go to class, and if the kids are not working ..."
It's time we threw out the "experts" and exposed the schools to real competition by people with common sense.
Qualifications chief attacks 'diseased' British exams system
The article below blames the British system of competing exam providers for a race to the bottom but ignores the pressure from the former Labor government to maximize pass rates at all costs. If government had stressed quality rather than quantity, the boards would have competed in that arena
Schoolchildren are being short-changed by a “corrupt” examinations system, according to a former Government advisor. The creation of multiple exam boards is fuelling unhealthy competition between providers as they effectively make their tests easier to win business from schools, it was claimed.
Mick Waters, a former official at the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, suggested that it was in examiners' interests to help pupils pass to make a profit. The claims are made in a new book – Reinventing Schools, Reforming Teaching – which charts how the education system has been undermined by political and commercial pressures.
Mr Waters, who quit as the QCA’s director of curriculum last year, told researchers: “The system is diseased, almost corrupt. We've got a set of exam bodies who are in a market place.... I've seen people from awarding bodies talk to head teachers implying that their examinations are easier. “Not only that, they provide the text book to help you through it.”
Currently, Britain has multiple examination boards that sell course syllabuses and exam papers to individual schools. Head teachers can choose which syllabuses to follow in qualifications such as A-levels and GCSEs. In many cases, examiners write text books linked to the test syllabus and provide pointers to help teachers maximise pupils’ results.
Although they are vetted by Ofqual, the exams regulator, critics claim that unhealthy competition between boards distorts the education system, with schools opting for tests that produce the highest grades. In the book, Mr Waters accused chief examiners of “insider trading”.
John Bangs, visiting professor at London University’s Institute of Education, and one of the book’s authors, said examiners wrote the “textbooks, as well as the questions, and Ofqual does not have the nerve to regulate them”. “It's a great problem,” he said. “This is a major finding.” He called for the creation of a single examination board. [He would]
Prof Maurice Galton, from Cambridge University, who co-authored the book, said: “If I'm at a board and I've got less people getting As than another board, I'm going to bump my As up because otherwise the schools will look at it and think 'I'll use this board, it's easier to get any A'.”
Australia's absurd new school buildings. A "revolution" all right: A great leap backwards
The Leftist Federal program that produced these absurdities was called "Building the Education Revolution" but the $600,000 school tuckshops are 'unusable'. A big price for a tiny building. You could build two family homes for the same price
SMALL canteens constructed under the federal government's Building the Education Revolution program encourage the provision of pre-packed heat-and-serve food. Critics of the canteens, which are about 24 square metres and cost up to $600,000, say they lack the space needed to prepare fresh food.
The Healthy Kids Association general manager, Jo Gardner, described the buildings as unsuitable for producing healthy food on a mass scale. "The standards being implemented by the state Department of Education and Training in new and refurbished canteens are grossly inadequate," she said.
"They do not meet opportunities for schools to efficiently and effectively deliver fresh food - they have inadequate bench space; they don't have wash-up sinks that are of a commercial nature. The push is very heat-and-serve."
The department has agreed to extend the new canteen being built at Tottenham Central School near Dubbo after parents complained it was unusable.
"The biggest problem with the design is that the preparation space is minimal," the school's Parents and Citizens' Association president, Rick Bennett, said. "The bench space is OK if you are serving pre-packed food like pies and sausage rolls where there is no preparation. But as soon as you need to prepare something like a salad box you're in trouble because of the lack of space."
He also said the lack of serving space meant children would spend most of their lunch hour in the queue rather than running around. "The kids only have a small amount of time for their lunch," he said. "You want as many people serving in the canteens as possible so the kids don't spend their entire lunch break standing in a line waiting to be served. By the time they have eaten, there is no time for them to run around and play."
An Education Department spokesman said the canteens were in line with the department's schools facilities standards.
But Louise Appel, secretary of the Parents and Citizens' Association at Orange Grove Public School, which received the same canteen, said the design was flawed. "They told us that this was the standard design and I would say, 'But read my lips - there is no bench space,' " Ms Appel said. "What sort of standard design for a canteen has no food preparation space?"
The canteen at Orange Grove, in Sydney's inner-west, has also undergone alterations to create more bench space.
How Diversity Punishes Asians, Poor Whites and Lots of Others
When college presidents and academic administrators pay their usual obeisance to "diversity" you know they are talking first and foremost about race. More specifically, they are talking about blacks. A diverse college campus is understood as one that has a student body that -- at a minimum -- is 5 to 7 percent black (i.e., equivalent to roughly half the proportion of blacks in the general population). A college or university that is only one, two, or three percent black would not be considered "diverse" by college administrators regardless of how demographically diverse its student body might be in other ways.
The blacks in question need not be African Americans -- indeed at many of the most competitive colleges today, including many Ivy League schools, an estimated 40-50 percent of those categorized as black are Afro-Caribbean or African immigrants, or the children of such immigrants.
As a secondary meaning "diversity" can also encompass Hispanics, who together with blacks are often subsumed by college administrators and admissions officers under the single race category "underrepresented minorities." Most colleges and universities seeking "diversity" seek a similar proportion of Hispanics in their student body as blacks (since blacks and Hispanics are about equal in number in the general population), though meeting the black diversity goal usually has a much higher priority than meeting the Hispanic one.
Asians, unlike blacks and Hispanics, receive no boost in admissions. Indeed, the opposite is often the case, as the quota-like mentality that leads college administrators to conclude they may have "too many" Asians. Despite the much lower number of Asians in the general high-school population, high-achieving Asian students -- those, for instance, with SAT scores in the high 700s -- are much more numerous than comparably high-achieving blacks and Hispanics, often by a factor of ten or more.
Thinking as they do in racial balancing and racial quota terms, college admissions officers at the most competitive institutions almost always set the bar for admitting Asians far above that for Hispanics and even farther above that for admitting blacks.
"Diversity" came to be so closely associated with race in the wake of the Supreme Court's Bakke decision in 1978. In his decisive opinion, Justice Lewis Powell rejected arguments for racial preferences based on generalized "societal discrimination," social justice, or the contemporary needs of American society as insufficiently weighty to overrule the color-blind imperative of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause. That imperative, however, could be overruled, Powell said, by a university's legitimate concern for the educational benefits of a demographically diverse student body.
Virtually all competitive colleges after Bakke continued with their racial preference policies ("affirmative action"), though after Powell's decision they had to cloak their true meaning and purpose behind a misleading or dishonest rhetoric of "diversity."
Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, a critic of racial preferences, accurately explains the situation: "The raison d'etre for race-specific affirmative action programs," Dershowitz writes, "has simply never been diversity for the sake of education. The checkered history of 'diversity' demonstrates that it was designed largely as a cover to achieve other legally, morally, and politically controversial goals. In recent years, it has been invoked -- especially in the professional schools -- as a clever post facto justification for increasing the number of minority group students in the student body."
While almost all college administrators and college admissions officers at the most elite institutions think in racial balancing and racial quota-like terms when they assemble their student body, they almost always deny this publically in a blizzard of rhetoric about a more far-flung "diversity." Indeed, there is probably no other area where college administrators are more likely to lie or conceal the truth of what they are doing than in the area of admissions and race.
Most elite universities seem to have little interest in diversifying their student bodies when it comes to the numbers of born-again Christians from the Bible belt, students from Appalachia and other rural and small-town areas, people who have served in the U.S. military, those who have grown up on farms or ranches, Mormons, Pentecostals, Jehovah's Witnesses, lower-middle-class Catholics, working class "white ethnics," social and political conservatives, wheelchair users, married students, married students with children, or older students first starting out in college after raising children or spending several years in the workforce.
Students in these categories are often very rare at the more competitive colleges, especially the Ivy League. While these kinds of people would surely add to the diverse viewpoints and life-experiences represented on college campuses, in practice "diversity" on campus is largely a code word for the presence of a substantial proportion of those in the "underrepresented" racial minority groups.
The Diversity Colleges Want
A new study by Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and his colleague Alexandria Radford is a real eye-opener in revealing just what sorts of students highly competitive colleges want -- or don't want -- on their campuses and how they structure their admissions policies to get the kind of "diversity" they seek. The Espenshade/Radford study draws from a new data set, the National Study of College Experience (NSCE), which was gathered from eight highly competitive public and private colleges and universities (entering freshmen SAT scores: 1360). Data was collected on over 245,000 applicants from three separate application years, and over 9,000 enrolled students filled out extensive questionnaires.
Because of confidentiality agreements Espenshade and Radford could not name the institutions but they assure us that their statistical profile shows they fit nicely within the top 50 colleges and universities listed in the U.S. News & World Report ratings.
Consistent with other studies, though in much greater detail, Espenshade and Radford show the substantial admissions boost, particularly at the private colleges in their study, which Hispanic students get over whites, and the enormous advantage over whites given to blacks.
They also show how Asians must do substantially better than whites in order to reap the same probabilities of acceptance to these same highly competitive private colleges. On an "other things equal basis," where adjustments are made for a variety of background factors, being Hispanic conferred an admissions boost over being white (for those who applied in 1997) equivalent to 130 SAT points (out of 1600), while being black rather than white conferred a 310 SAT point advantage. Asians, however, suffered an admissions penalty compared to whites equivalent to 140 SAT points.
The box students checked off on the racial question on their application was thus shown to have an extraordinary effect on a student's chances of gaining admission to the highly competitive private schools in the NSCE database. To have the same chances of gaining admission as a black student with an SAT score of 1100, an Hispanic student otherwise equally matched in background characteristics would have to have a 1230, a white student a 1410, and an Asian student a 1550.
Here the Espenshade/Radford results are consistent with other studies, including those of William Bowen and Derek Bok in their book The Shape of the River, though they go beyond this influential study in showing both the substantial Hispanic admissions advantage and the huge admissions penalty suffered by Asian applicants. Although all highly competitive colleges and universities will deny that they have racial quotas -- either minimum quotas or ceiling quotas -- the huge boosts they give to the lower-achieving black and Hispanic applicants, and the admissions penalties they extract from their higher-achieving Asian applicants, clearly suggest otherwise.
Espenshade and Radford also take up very thoroughly the question of "class based preferences" and what they find clearly shows a general disregard for improving the admission chances of poor and otherwise disadvantaged whites.
Other studies, including a 2005 analysis of nineteen highly selective public and private universities by William Bowen, Martin Kurzweil, and Eugene Tobin, in their 2003 book, Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education, found very little if any advantage in the admissions process accorded to whites from economically or educationally disadvantaged families compared to whites from wealthier or better educated homes.
Espenshade and Radford cite this study and summarize it as follows: "These researchers find that, for non-minority [i.e., white] applicants with the same SAT scores, there is no perceptible difference in admission chances between applicants from families in the bottom income quartile, applicants who would be the first in their families to attend college, and all other (non-minority) applicants from families at higher levels of socioeconomic status. When controls are added for other student and institutional characteristics, these authors find that, on an other-things-equal basis, [white] applicants from low-SES backgrounds, whether defined by family income or parental education, get essentially no break in the admissions process; they fare neither better nor worse than other [white] applicants."
Distressing as many might consider this to be -- since the same institutions that give no special consideration to poor white applicants boast about their commitment to "diversity" and give enormous admissions breaks to blacks, even to those from relatively affluent homes -- Espenshade and Radford in their survey found the actual situation to be much more troubling.
At the private institutions in their study, whites from lower-class backgrounds incurred a huge admissions disadvantage not only in comparison to lower-class minority students, but compared to whites from middle-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds as well. The lower-class whites proved to be all-around losers.
When equally matched for background factors (including SAT scores and high school GPAs), the better-off whites were more than three times as likely to be accepted as the poorest whites (.28 vs. .08 admissions probability). Having money in the family greatly improved a white applicant's admissions chances, lack of money greatly reduced it. The opposite class trend was seen among non-whites, where the poorer the applicant the greater the probability of acceptance when all other factors are taken into account. Class-based affirmative action does exist within the three non-white ethno-racial groupings, but among the whites the groups advanced are those with money.
When lower-class whites are matched with lower-class blacks and other non-whites the degree of the non-white advantage becomes astronomical: lower-class Asian applicants are seven times as likely to be accepted to the competitive private institutions as similarly qualified whites, lower-class Hispanic applicants eight times as likely, and lower-class blacks ten times as likely. These are enormous differences and reflect the fact that lower-class whites were rarely accepted to the private institutions Espenshade and Radford surveyed. Their diversity-enhancement value was obviously rated very low.
Some of the private colleges Espenshade and Radford describe would do well to come clean with their act and admit the truth: "Poor Whites Need Not Apply!"
Besides the bias against lower-class whites, the private colleges in the Espenshade/Radford study seem to display what might be called an urban/Blue State bias against rural and Red State occupations and values. This is most clearly shown in a little remarked statistic in the study's treatment of the admissions advantage of participation in various high school extra-curricular activities. In the competitive private schools surveyed participation in many types of extra-curricular activities -- including community service activities, performing arts activities, and "cultural diversity" activities -- conferred a substantial improvement in an applicant's chances of admission.
But what Espenshade and Radford found in regard to what they call "career-oriented activities" was truly shocking even to this hardened veteran of the campus ideological and cultural wars. Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student's chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis.
The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. "Being an officer or winning awards" for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, "has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions." Excelling in these activities "is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission."
If schoolkids had been told to take part in a Catholic Mass, told that Catholicism was the one true faith and that it permitted women priests and abortion, the heavens would be ringing with Leftist outcry
A Massachusetts school district has apologized to parents after a group of schoolchildren participated in midday Muslim prayers during a field trip to a Boston-area mosque.
The incident occurred in May when a social studies class from Wellesley Middle School toured the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, one of the largest mosques in the Northeast.
Parents were told their children would be learning about the architecture of a mosque and they would be allowed to observe a prayer service. But the students wound up being given a lecture on the Prophet Muhammad, and some boys participated in a midday prayer service.
The field trip was videotaped by a parent whose child was on the trip. At one point, the video shows a spokeswoman for the mosque telling students, “You have to believe in Allah, and Allah is the one God, the only one worthy of worship, all forgiving, all merciful."
The sixth graders were also reportedly told that jihad is a personal spiritual struggle that has nothing to do with holy war, and girls on the field trip were told that Islam is pro-women.
“Islam was actually very advanced in terms of recognizing women’s rights,” an unidentified mosque spokeswoman says in the video. “At the time of the Prophet Muhammad, women were allowed to express their opinions and vote. In this country, women didn’t gain that right until less than a hundred years ago.”
Dennis Hale, a spokesman for Americans for Peace and Tolerance, which has been critical of the mosque, told Fox News Radio that the students were then instructed on how to pray during the midday service.
He said mosque officials separated the group by gender and invited male students to join traditional Muslim prayers. The video shows young boys bowing and prostrating themselves – with their heads touching the floor. At no point during the event did any school teacher or school official intervene.
On Thursday, nearly four months after the incident, the Wellesley School District sent a letter to parents apologizing for what happened.
Politically correct TOY-gun phobia among Florida school authorities
A toy gun "constitutes a weapon"??
Samuel Burgos has fond memories of his friends at school, but he only gets to see them in pictures now. The 8-year-old boy hasn't been in school for a year and will likely miss another year if the Broward County School Board has its way.
Burgos was suspended from school in November after a teacher found a toy gun in his backpack. But when the boy went to register to go back to Pembroke Pines Charter School, he was told he will be expelled for this school year, too, as part of the county's zero tolerance weapons policy.
"He made a mistake, but why the severe punishment? I don't understand that," said Magdiel Burgos, Sam's dad.
School board officials said the rules are quite clear and that the toy gun constituted a weapon. A school board report on the incident mentions that Samuel showed the toy gun to another student and it was capable of firing projectiles. That's all it takes for it to be considered a weapon.
"This is in his backpack and it's a toy. It's not a real gun. It's a toy," said Magdiel Burgos, twirling a plastic gun.
The school board said they would admit Samuel into a correctional school for problem children who have been expelled located in Hallandale Beach. The parents refused and believe their son has already paid for his mistake enough. Samuel has since been home-schooled, but his parents want him back in public school.
"I can't sit here and allow them to send my kid to a school where students have committed actual crimes," Burgos said. "He hasn't committed a crime."
Next week, the family will attend a school board meeting to try and get their son back in class as soon as possible, but that could be after Thanksgiving.
Burgos says his child has been set back emotionally and will probably have to repeat the second grade. He thinks there should be some room to determine that his child didn't bring a real gun to school. "I understand the board is concerned about schools, and as parents we are concerned, too, but they need to work with us," he said.
The school board says it's common sense to know that this kind of item can't be allowed on school campus [Really??] and that responsibility also falls on parents to know what their children have in their backpacks.
British teenagers to pass a high school exam in sex
This is all part of a trend which has seen a record rate of pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases among British teenagers. So-called "education" has just encouraged sexual experimentation among increasingly younger age-groups.
Teenagers will learn how to use a condom and obtain the morning after pill as part of the first GCSE-style qualification in sex. Pupils will be able to gain the equivalent of a D grade under the new course which has been devised to raise awareness of issues surrounding relationships, contraception and sexually transmitted diseases. The Government-funded qualification is being offered in nine schools and colleges for the first time this term with plans to expand it across the country.
Last night, the move sparked outrage among families’ groups who claimed it legitimised sexual promiscuity and failed to make any reference to marriage.
But Suzanne Cant, research manager at the qualifications provider NCFE, which is running the course, said: “Sexual health education should play a part in the curriculum for all young people. “The latest figures show teenage pregnancy rates are falling, but not falling at a fast enough rate to meet Government targets.
Meanwhile, annual diagnoses for sexually-transmitted diseases are already in the hundreds of thousands – and increasing all the time.
“Part of the way to tackle these issues is through education and [the] qualification offers a formal way to assess and certificate learners to help ensure the right messages are being delivered and understood.”
NCFE - which used to stand for Northern Council for Further Education - formally launched the Level 1 award in sexual health awareness this week following official accreditation by Ofqual, the exams regulator. Level 1 examinations are equivalent to low-level GCSEs graded D to G.
The course, which is aimed towards students who are not yet ready to take full GCSEs, and takes just nine hours to teach,asks pupils to give the names of male and female sexual organs, describe two examples of “risky sexual behaviour” and outline two methods of contraception “that would be suitable for a young person”.
Students, who will be encouraged to take the course between the age of 14 and 16, are taught about the age at which someone can access sexual health services “without parental consent”.
Another question asks pupils to outline “two things it’s important to remember when using a condom” and list two places where emergency contraception, such as the morning after pill, may be obtained.
A further section focuses on HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. Pupils are asked how HIV can be transmitted and to outline one possible consequence of not having Chlamydia treated.
Norman Wells, from the Family Education Trust, said: “In spite of its name, this new qualification is more about promoting sexual experimentation and the use of contraception by children than it is about promoting sexual health.
“The only sure way of avoiding sexually transmitted infections is to keep sexual intimacy within a faithful lifelong relationship, yet this course makes no mention of marriage or of commitment and faithfulness. “Instead, the focus is on telling pupils how to use contraceptives and how they can access them behind their parents’ backs. Schools exist to assist and support parents in the education of their children, not to undermine them in this way.”
A spokesman for the Department for Education said: “There are hundreds of qualifications that are accredited by Ofqual for a plethora of different ages, abilities and settings. We rightly trust heads to choose what is best for their pupils."
Most students already receive sex education at secondary school, although Labour dropped plans to make lessons compulsory in primaries earlier this year as part of the Parliamentary “wash-up” before the General Election.
This week, the New York Times advised parents of incoming college freshmen to drop their kids off, “back off,” “walk away,” and “move on” so that their “students can develop independence.” In the article, parents who don’t hop in the car, return home and consider their parenting over are dismissed as “super-involved” or “over-involved” and are described as “Velcro parents,” “Helicopter parents,” or “baby-on-board parents.”
Some colleges join in the derogatory attitude toward parents, going so far as to advise limiting phone calls and text messages. Some provide not-so-subtle indications that parents are not to “meddle.” According to the New York Times, the University of Minnesota holds a separate reception for parents so that their sons and daughters can meet their roommates and negotiate dorm room space without the parents around. Grinnell College has the new students sit on one side of the gymnasium and the parents on the other with all speakers talking to the student side — a symbolic way of putting parents in their place.
These attacks against parenting are another attempt to intimidate parents into surrendering their influence to that of supposedly “superior” intellectuals and professional “educators” who know what’s best for our children. My husband and I spent years on college campuses as professors and as administrators. We saw campus life from the inside. Then, as parents of college students, we saw it from the outside as well.
Certainly, there are over-involved parents living vicariously through their kids’ experiences, but many more parents just “wash their hands” of involvement with their children when they go off to college. My judgment: far too many parents assume that their parenting role ends when college for their child begins. I do not agree that parents are superfluous. Nor do I think kids should be abandoned to flounder in a totally new environment where they are deluged with new worldviews and ideologies. Some students are suddenly cut loose from their anchors in an environment of total freedom without adequate preparation; they move out of a home where there are clear rules and expectations (which stabilize both their conduct and emotions) into a place where there are few rules or expectations for their behavior or conduct.
As I read the New York Times article, I remembered one of my favorite roles as an academic dean. I was given the privilege of giving the keynote address at the evening convocation for students and parents before freshman activities started the next day. Having recently seen our own two children off to college, I could feel the parental uncertainty. My husband and I had given a lot of thought to our new roles as parents of adult children and how to maintain the positive connection and bond of friendship we had developed during the years before our two left for college. We were not going to let our neglect tarnish or erode those bonds with our kids.
Most of the parents I addressed at those orientation sessions proved eager listeners to the following: First, your role as a parent lasts a lifetime. While your role changes dramatically at various stages in your children’s lives, it is important and significant at each stage. You have to learn to be adaptable to those changes, but it is vital that you provide the support that your children need in their college days and provide the guidance that they will ask for when you make it clear that you are still there for them and that you won’t tell them what to do or interfere with their growth into maturity and adulthood. Most of us do not want our children’s first real trip on the high wire of independence to be without a safety net. As the song says, we want to be the “wind beneath their wings.”
As I talked to the parents of incoming freshmen, I wanted them to be particularly alert to three things:
1. Your child is beginning one of the most significant and challenging stages of his or her life. Perhaps for the first time, that child is on his or her own and it is a proverbial “make-or-break” situation. (Hopefully, you have spent the previous 18 years preparing them for this day — emotionally, psychologically, intellectually, and spiritually.) They need to know that you will continue to be there as a parent to provide support and/or guidance as they request it.
2. Over the four years of college or university life, students will make many of the most important decisions of their lives. Wise parents will anticipate the challenges and temptations and prepare their children with the character and arguments that they need to avoid risky and destructive behavior; loving communication and wise counsel can help your child resist temptation and make good decisions.
3. Over the next four years, your child will sit under the influence of a few professors who enjoy tearing down the moral and religious views of their students. For such profs, teaching is a game, and the intellectual seduction of their students is the conquest that makes their teaching challenging. Their agenda is to separate students from their parents, thereby, they hope, removing the influence of traditional, Judeo-Christian values. Wise parents will listen carefully and be ready to help counter such pernicious nonsense.
There is no reason for parents to accede to the condescending and patronizing attitudes of those who believe that parents are superfluous in their children’s lives once they reach college age. Of course a parent’s role must change, but the parental role is still important, and I can attest to the fact that it can be as meaningful, memorable, and significant in the college days and into adulthood as it was during all the previous stages of your child’s life. Nothing is more gratifying to a parent than to see a child become a mature adult — well-adjusted, well-educated, and well-prepared to make their own decisions.
British School breaks with tradition and orders pupils to address teachers by their first names
Not a good way to foster respect!
A school has told its pupils to break with tradition and address their teachers by their first name. Children have been told they should now informally address teachers as part of a term-long trial.
The pupils at Boughton-under-Blean and Dunkirk Primary school in Faversham, Kent have been ordered to abandon using teachers’ surnames with the title of either ‘Mr’, ‘Ms’ or ‘Mrs’ in front of it. Now school bosses say they hope the trial will “enhance the relationship” between the kids and their mentors.
Headteacher Hugh Greenwood, who came up with the idea, said: 'We hope the pupils really take to the concept. 'We think it makes learning a more personal experience and allows teachers to come down to the pupils level. 'Obviously we are just trying it out and if it doesn’t work we will refer back to the traditional custom.'
Now parents at the school, which has over 150 children aged five to 11, have welcomed the trial. Sally Palmer, 35, who has a seven-year-old son at the school, said: 'It’s very strange for the kids to call their teachers by their first names. 'The kids seem to love the idea.'
Another mother of a six-year-old boy at the school said: 'It think it’s a fantastic idea. 'The informality has really helped kids to relax in the classroom and focus on learning. 'My son has been coming home speaking about his teacher called Tom. 'He found it quite imposing calling her teacher Mr or Mrs so this is much better.'
Kevin Rudd and the Labor Party declared the "Education Revolution" at the beginning of 2007. They said it would go through various phases, and spent a lot of treasure on it. By now we should be showing results.
The first part of the revolution was equipment. The government promised a computer on the desk of every student in years 9 to 12. But there isn't. Not even one for every two desks. You couldn't share one between three. The government got its sums wrong and didn't allocate enough money for the back-up and the installation. It illustrates why we need to improve education - ministers need better numeracy standards - and showed this would be a revolution bigger on promise than delivery.
The next phase was to roll the revolution over to buildings. The government announced it was "Building the Education Revolution" with new halls and canteens in every school whether they were wanted or not. This would be revolutionary and "save" the economy by spending about $15 billion.
The BER stimulated a lot of inventive claims for project management fees and inflated building costs. It completed some useful projects, and some useless ones - like the hall at Hastings Public School, which is too small to hold the 39 students, and the canteen at Orange Grove Public School, nice but too small to fit a pie-warmer.
That great revolutionary Josef Stalin claimed that to make an omelette you have to break a few eggs. BER delivered breakages and spillages all over the country. Whether the omelette is worth $15 billion is the question. The BER "stimulus" is still being rolled out, even though we now have an unprecedented mining boom, with interest rates rising.
Julia Gillard says the revolution delivered the My School website that gives information on how students in each school compare with national averages. And that is a good idea. But one website does not a revolution make. If the literacy and numeracy standards showed persistent improvement against historical benchmarks and improvement against other countries, that would be an achievement. If the revolution is about anything, it should be about improving results.
After three years of revolution, it was a surprise that last weekend, when the PM announced her ministry, there was no one described as an education minister. This was once her No.1 priority. Later it was clarified there would be two ministers for education - Chris Evans for tertiary and Peter Garrett for schools - a kind of duumvirate to lead the revolution.
Both men are polite and sensitive. Neither is a fire-breathing reformer. Evans was in charge of stopping the tide of asylum seekers in his last ministerial role. The fact all of the asylum facilities are overflowing gives you some idea of how effective he was and why he had to be moved. And when you talk of ministerial fire it is not effectiveness that comes to mind with Garrett, but insulation batts and house fires. He is lucky to still be a minister.
Their appointment tells us how low a priority the education revolution has become. The sooner it moves out of public consciousness the happier Gillard will be. Don't expect too many more signs to be erected proclaiming the education revolution.
After three years, our Australian revolution is starting to look a bit like Castro's. He's been going 50 years and promises improvement is just around the corner. Cubans like to humour their leader. They know the truth but they keep up the joke. Australians are best advised to do the same. We know the revolution is an expensive fizzer, but we are polite and do not remind our Comrade Leader. She will bury it in her own good time.
The policies of the Australian Green party threaten private schooling
Such policies, if implemented, would be a heavy blow in many country areas. The Green party and the ruling Labor party are now formally in partnership in the Federal government so the threat may well eventuate
BETTER resources for regional education may well be on the national agenda, but new Schools, Early Childhood and Youth Minister Peter Garrett must not allow their delivery to be thwarted by giving in to the Greens, who will deny many young Australians a choice of independent schooling.
While the formal agreement between Julia Gillard and the Greens signed on September 1 makes no mention of education or schools funding, any intrusion of the Greens stance on schools into federal government policy will certainly undermine, for regional Australia, the social and economic sustainability they claim to champion.
Recognising the vital role of the independent schools sector, Prime Minister Gillard earlier this year committed to extending the existing school funding arrangements by 12 months and the capital grants program until 2014. However, to be enacted, this is likely to need the support of the Greens in both houses, putting them at odds with their party's commitment to attack independent schools with a blunt instrument.
According to their website, key planks of the Greens' policies include reducing funding across the board to 2003-04 levels; ending the arrangement for recurrent funding to non-government schools by the end of this year at the latest; and "[ensuring] the viability and diversity of existing public schools is not endangered by the development of new private schools", essentially preventing new independent schools from being set up even if there is a desire for them.
Such ideology makes naive assumptions, in particular about regional Australia and the millions of people who live here.
Negotiations between the three regional independent MPs and the two leading parties that wished to form minority government rightly put regional Australia back in the spotlight. So often overlooked in policy debates, it is a place where more than one-quarter of Australians live, are educated and work. However, regional Australia will suffer if its independent schools are threatened, because educational opportunity and diversity will be narrowed.
Independent schools enable regional children to have access to academic, sporting, cultural, spiritual and social programs that many would otherwise not have. For some, the nearest public secondary school may be hours away, and even then only provide education to Year 10. Most regional boarding schools, often the only option for a child from rural or remote Australia, are run on slim margins, with enrolments influenced mostly by the fickle vagaries of agricultural commodity markets rather than the salary packages of corporate executives.
Already making huge sacrifices for their children, parents who may no longer be able to afford an independent alternative but want a choice for their children will be forced to move from their one-high-school towns to larger centres or the city.
Further, a narrowing of educational choice and diversity will only lessen the attraction of regions to professionals already in short supply. The critical shortage of doctors will be placed on life support, and teachers, regardless of philosophical persuasion, will be harder to find.
Independent schools hold a valued place in regional Australia, not only as economic entities in their own right, but as providers of choice in lifestyle that is so critical to the attractions of living away from the city. Consequently, a threat to independent schools driven by new sympathy for the Greens agenda will have a greater impact in regional Australia than in metropolitan areas.
All this is hardly a recipe for a vibrant, diverse and inclusive regional Australia that can help take population pressures off overcrowded cities.
Educational equity for regional Australia means having equal access to the full breadth of school choices - government, Catholic and independent - and certainty of government funding arrangements is critical for maintaining this.
Depriving regional Australians of such opportunities will only increase social inequity, not help overcome it.
When I was pursuing my teacher certification, nearly all of my education classes stressed that teachers should teach to different learning styles. The most prominent theory of learning styles is the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences, which says that there are nine different kinds of intelligence, including the traditional lingual and logical-mathematical, as well as musical, inter and intrapersonal, and existential, and that people learn best when information is presented to them via their strongest intelligences.
It’s an interesting theory that’s relatively simple to grasp, and it’s not terribly difficult to craft a curriculum around the ideas. Unfortunately, there’s not really any empirical data to show that it — or any of the other learning-style theories — are true. A review of the available literature on learning styles from 2008 found no evidence to support learning-style theories and some evidence that contradicted them. From the study’s abstract:
Our review of the literature disclosed ample evidence that children and adults will, if asked, express preferences about how they prefer information to be presented to them. There is also plentiful evidence arguing that people differ in the degree to which they have some fairly specific aptitudes for different kinds of thinking and for processing different types of information.
However, we found virtually no evidence for the interaction pattern mentioned above, which was judged to be a precondition for validating the educational applications of learning styles. Although the literature on learning styles is enormous, very few studies have even used an experimental methodology capable of testing the validity of learning styles applied to education. Moreover, of those that did use an appropriate method, several found results that flatly contradict the popular meshing hypothesis.
We conclude therefore, that at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general educational practice. Thus, limited education resources would better be devoted to adopting other educational practices that have a strong evidence base, of which there are an increasing number. However, given the lack of methodologically sound studies of learning styles, it would be an error to conclude that all possible versions of learning styles have been tested and found wanting; many have simply not been tested at all. Further research on the use of learning-styles assessment in instruction may in some cases be warranted, but such research needs to be performed appropriately.
So, why does a completely unproven theory dominate teacher training? Part of the answer is that education, like most industries, is subject to fads that seem fascinating and obvious at the time but later prove to be ineffective. However, I think that the government’s near monopoly on schools contributes to the problem.
Because education is dominated by one entity, it is extremely static; therefore, while it may be very difficult for a renegade idea to take hold, once it has been ensconced as revealed truth, it will remain in curricula long after it is proven false.
I don’t know for certain that a more competitive education industry would be less susceptible to incorrect theories, but at the very least it would allow for innovators to come in and demonstrate new and possibly superior methods of teaching. Some will be better and some will be worse, but it is only through that kind of trial and error that we can advance — not by clinging to unproven dogmas.
Merit Pay: A Start toward Making Sure Teachers Follow Their Job Descriptions
Howls of protest are coming from Los Angeles teachers whose evaluations on their effectiveness in raising student test scores have been published in the Los Angeles Times. But that is to be expected, for teachers are among the very few professions who feel that they can write their own job descriptions and evaluations. The statement of one teacher, that she was proud to have ranked “’less effective,’” because that showed that she chose to “’teach to the emotional and academic needs’” of her students was quite telling.
Since when did teachers’ bosses (the citizens) ask them to teach to students’ “emotional needs”? And how are “academic needs” apart from what students can demonstrate on tests: that they have acquired a body of knowledge and set of skills? But teachers have rewritten their own job descriptions under the cloak of “professionalism.”
Furthermore, the emotional needs get mixed up with the “academic needs,” so that teaching becomes a part of manipulating students’ feelings under the cover of “critical thinking.” Not surprisingly, once they are led in a certain direction by emotional pressure, students’ opinions match those of their teachers, now known as “facilitators.”
I saw such arrogance displayed when I spent two long days with social studies teachers at the National Council for the Social Studies annual meeting in Atlanta last November. A theme repeated over and over was how to impart “social justice” lessons in the classroom while officially meeting state mandates. Not once did I hear anyone voice a concern with raising test scores or teaching history and civics objectively to students.
We are told that teachers work very hard, but what was expected of them as demonstrated in a workshop called “TCI strategies on the question, ‘How did change and conflict shape the American West?’” didn’t seem all that difficult.
Following the dominant mantra that the teacher should be “the guide on the side,” rather than the “sage on the stage,” the teacher conducting the demonstration hit the play button on the stereo so eleventh-grade students could listen to the song “Home on the Range” and then speculate in their little groups about the “feelings” of various victims and victimizers.
Another workshop was led by a “shadow senator” from the District of Columbia and an “activist.” They told teachers how to get K-12 students involved with lobbying and street protest for D.C. statehood. You can read my full report here.
But this is the kind of thing that teachers learn in education schools at the undergraduate and graduate level. It was displayed by an education professor from Clayton State University, who responded to a local test-altering scandal in an op-ed, in which she questioned the importance of knowing such things as the dates of the Civil War.
As I learned from perusing her and other education professors’ syllabi, teacher education students are expected not to know the subject matter they are teaching but to think and feel “deeply.” The class requirements consisted largely of journal entries, “response” papers, and “deep” discussions in the classroom.
What most of us would see as a topic for discussion over a couple of margaritas is the basis for certification and then the advanced degrees that catapult teachers into higher salary brackets. The other way to get a pay raise is to just stay on a job that is protected fiercely by the union. Nice work if you can get it.
Merit pay alone will not right a topsy-turvy system. As in politics, we need more citizen activism. There needs to be much more oversight of curricula. Teachers themselves should be tested on the subjects they teach, for studies show that their knowledge translates into student success. We should take advantage of technology—not the attention-inhibiting, expensive razzle-dazzle “learning” programs—but cameras in the classroom. In addition to being able to view classrooms on tape, citizens should be invited to sit in on classes and evaluate.
Teachers unions will object loudly, citing such concerns as privacy, the First Amendment, “professional standards,” etc. But other employees know that even their email correspondence on the job is subject to scrutiny by employers and that their raises are based on performance. Why should it be any different for teachers?
Middle-class families could go to the back of the queue under explosive plans to tear up the schools admissions code.
Education Secretary Michael Gove is proposing to allow academies and a new generation of 'free schools' to select pupils on the basis of their family finances, with the poorest being given priority.
They would be allowed to discriminate in favour of pupils who qualify for free school meals - those whose household income, including benefits, is below £16,000 per year.
It is hoped that this would bring a halt to 'selection by mortgage' in areas where admissions are determined chiefly by the distance between home and school, meaning parents who can afford to buy a home nearby gain an advantage.
But it is likely to trigger a backlash from Right-wing conservative MPs and the party's traditional middle-class supporters, who are already angry that the coalition Government has ruled out any return to selection by ability.
Academies already take a higher proportion of children on free school meals than the national average, partly because under the previous Labour government they were set up in areas of social disadvantage.
However, charities including Barnardo's argue that fewer pupils from poor homes get into England's best schools because their parents are often less able to navigate the admission system.
Mr Gove's proposal will be seen as an attempt to appease Liberal Democrat members of the coalition, who have pushed existing plans to boost funding for underprivileged children. The Education Secretary believes the change, which will require legislation, will provide a vital boost for social mobility.
Sources close to Mr Gove stressed that any change would not be 'prescriptive', and schools would simply be permitted to admit children entitled to free school meals in preference to others if they wished to do so.
Mr Gove envisages the introduction of new 'free schools', run by charities, business, or even groups of parents, which specialise in admitting disadvantaged children and get more taxpayers' cash for doing so.
A source close to the Education Secretary said: 'This could actually help middle-class families, because at the moment there are parts of the country where the schools are totally useless and children who are struggling are causing discipline issues and other problems.
'The central aim of the Government's education policy is making opportunity more equal. We have one of the most segregated and stratified education systems in the world and social mobility went backwards under Labour. 'We want to emulate the success of charter schools in America which explicitly target their attention on poorer children.'
But Margaret Morrissey, founder of the parents' lobby group Parents Outloud, warned that the rule change smacked of social engineering and would be seen as 'unacceptable' by many. She said it was becoming ever more difficult for children to get into their preferred schools, even if they had siblings already there.
'Parents who work hard and do everything they should do will get shunted to the bottom of the list,' she said. 'If the Government thinks this is the fair and decent thing to do, it isn't. This assumes every family on free school meals needs help and support, which is patronising. Not many people can pay tens of thousands of pounds to buy houses in catchment areas, and fewer and fewer people are in a position to do so.'
Some grammar schools have already indicated they wish to see the admissions code relaxed to allow them to take into account the social background of applicants. But Robert Mccartney, chairman of the National Grammar Schools Association, warned such a move would lead to more discrimination.
He called on the coalition to allow more schools to select pupils by ability as the fairest admissions method, saying: 'I fervently believe that a working-class child in Britain in 2010 should have exactly the same opportunity I had in 1948 to go to grammar school. Everyone accepts selection was the greatest engine of social mobility.
'The conservatives are rowing back on education. They are playing the socio-economic card which is disguising the real defects in our system. 'This policy would be discrimination of a kind. Children from whatever background with a good result on a selective test would be discriminated against.'
But Dr Lee Elliot Major, director of research at the Sutton Trust, an education charity set up to promote social mobility, said: 'We think this is a good idea. It's good for social mobility if you can have balanced intakes. 'All of our studies show the top-performing schools are unrepresentative of their local communities.'
In the mid 1960s, education policy took a wrong turn, away from America’s founding principles. That was when President Lyndon B. Johnson, as a part of his War on Poverty, created the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA). It was the first major federal foray into local schools.
But the Constitution doesn’t provide for a federal role in education, and public schools had traditionally been under the jurisdiction of local authorities.
What’s more, Washington’s intervention seemed to bring out the worst in education governance: State officials became the middlemen to administer federal funding and bureaucratic bloat followed. Staff at state education agencies doubled in the five years after ESEA became law.
In 1965, ESEA was about 30 pages long. Today ESEA is known as No Child Left Behind, and its prescriptions for American schools run on for almost 600 pages. After multiple reauthorizations, the law has accumulated program after program to intervene in everything from English as a second language to after-school care. Meanwhile, federal education spending has tripled, while student achievement has generally stagnated.
How can we steer a course back toward our founding principles in education? The first step is to send dollars and decision-making authority out of Washington and back to states, localities, and ultimately, parents.
That’s why Heritage analysts have developed an education policy proposal that would allow states to consolidate funding from dozens of federal education programs–cutting bureaucracy by eliminating multiple program applications–and direct the funding toward local education priorities. Members of Congress have adopted the plan as the conservative alternative to No Child Left Behind, known as “A-PLUS.”
A critical element of the plan is its shift in accountability. In most education policy discussions, accountability means answering up the bureaucratic chain of command to Washington. But real accountability answers to parents and other taxpayers. Real accountability provides transparency for expenditures and academic results, showing parents their children’s progress and taxpayers their return on investment.
To continue in this path of reform, state and local policy should allow money to follow students to the educational setting of their parents’ choice. Freeing parents to shape their children’s education according to their needs in a setting that supports the family’s character-forming role will not only take American education back to the Founders’ ideals. It will also equip us for the future far better than the centralized factory model of education of decades past.
Indians and Chinese do best in the British school system
Pupils from ethnic minorities match or outshine white British children in exams at age 16 despite lagging behind at five, a study shows today. School league tables may encourage teachers to pay greater attention to pupils from black and Asian backgrounds, the research found.
It also suggested that peer pressure may influence how well different groups work at their studies.
The researchers, from University College London, said the achievement of ethnic minority pupils was an ‘amazing success story’. Many struggle with English when they start school but they catch up with their white British counterparts or even overtake them as their language skills improve.
The study also found that league tables give teachers an incentive to focus on pupils on the borderline between D and C grades at GCSE, because the system rewards schools for ensuring pupils achieve at least five passes at grade C or above.
Black and Asian pupils are more likely than white British pupils to form part of this borderline group, and may therefore benefit from greater attention. For the study, published today in the Economic Journal, researchers analysed exam results for nearly 500,000 pupils.
They found that, at the ages of three and five, white British children outperformed their ethnic minority counterparts in tests of vocabulary and making patterns. At seven, in English and maths tests, all ethnic minority groups with the exception of Chinese pupils were behind white British youngsters.
But by the end of compulsory schooling, when youngsters take GCSEs, Bangladeshi, Pakistani and black pupils from outside the Caribbean had caught up with their white British classmates, while Indian and Chinese pupils had overtaken them.
Only black Caribbean pupils remained slightly behind white British youngsters. The study found that improvements in language skills as ethnic minority pupils move through school was the biggest reason for closing the gap.
Among Indians, the share of native English speakers was just one in five, the study said.
But it also suggested that ethnic minority parents choose better secondary than primary schools, perhaps because they become more adept at negotiating the school admissions system.
Professor Christian Dustmann, one of the study’s authors and director of the Centre for Research and Analysis on Migration, called for further research into the effects of pupil peer groups on attainment. ‘We don’t really understand the dynamics of peer groups within a school, and how within a school individuals sort into different groups,’ he said.
I knew my girl wasn't dyslexic - So I took her out of class and brought her up to speed myself, says British mother
A disrupted classroom environment was the problem
Lesha Chaplin-park, 36, a PR consultant from Stafford, refused to accept her daughter Georgia, now ten, was dyslexic when her school blamed the fact she had fallen behind on the condition. Lesha home-schooled Georgia instead, and after one year she was back at school and top of the class. Lesha says:
Teachers were all too quick to stick a label on my daughter and put her in a box. Was it for extra funding, or just so they didn't have to address the problem directly? all I know is that when I was told Georgia was dyslexic, I knew she wasn't - and I've been proved right.
Georgia was eight when her school decided she had dyslexia. she had never been great with her spelling, but her problems stemmed from the fact that she was in a class with a couple of naughty boys who demanded all the teacher's attention, and, being a quiet kid, she simply got left behind.
Her confidence took a knock and she got to the point where she'd rather not bother at all than get things wrong.
Towards the end of Year 2, the class teacher took me to one side and said Georgia wasn't quite up to speed and they would keep an eye on her. They assured me that if there was a problem they would pick it up the following year, and started talking about all the extra help available for her dyslexia. But as far as I was concerned, she didn't have dyslexia.
Then they sent home a glowing report at the end of Year 3, in which no problems were mentioned at all. I started to lose faith in the school and the mixed messages they were sending out.
As far as I was concerned, she didn't have dyslexia...I started to lose faith in the school and the mixed messages they were sending out. When I was at school, I remember children with learning difficulties being disruptive in class and doing anything they could to be thrown out of the classroom rather than have to read in front of other pupils and be shown up.
It seemed as if teachers were so anxious not to let that happen these days that they would stick labels on children - they were dyslexic, autistic or had aDhD - it felt like political correctness gone mad.
When they approached my ex-husband separately and spelled out Georgia's supposed problems again, that sealed for me. I decided I had three options: I could send Georgia back after the holidays and hope for the best, try to find her new school, or take her out of class for year and bring her up to speed myself. I went for the latter option and decided to go with the home tutoring.
It wasn't an easy decision, but I was four months pregnant with my son Luca, who's now 20 months old, and I work freelance from home, so I was in position at least to try.
I was assessed by my local home education division within the council and was surprised to discover I had to spend only 45 minutes a day teaching Georgia to give her the same level of attention as a full day in a class of 35 pupils.
I made sure she was up and ready for 9am every day, and I did everything could to make her education come alive.
For example, when we studied the Great Fire of London, I took her to Pudding Lane, where it had started, and then she had to write it up afterwards.
When she made a lot of spelling mistakes, I would put her work in the bin, send her away with a dictionary and tell her to bring it back to me only when it was her absolute best. I had time to do that rather than a teacher who would just tell her to do better next time. With my one-to-one tuition, I could drive it home that she had to do her best to succeed.
It worked, and Georgia regained her confidence. she's started at middle school now, having being out of the classroom for whole year. She's in all the top sets and it was realised she isn't dyslexic at all. I'm thrilled I had the opportunity to home-school my daughter, but I think schools have to look differently at children who are struggling and not be so quick to stick them in a box.
"Green" insanity over fruit-bat invasion of Australian school
There are millions of these creatures so there is no way that they are "endangered" -- and what is wrong with chasing them away?
Fed-up teachers at a northern NSW school claim they are being told to stop ringing the school bell, not hold sport days and plan different class times so they do not upset an influx of 20,000 flying foxes.
Staff at Maclean High School say their school has been taken over by the noisy animals and are so upset that they plan to hold a stop-work meeting on Friday. They say bat droppings, which students then spread throughout classrooms, have made the school a health and safety risk.
Maclean High teacher and NSW Teachers Federation representative John Ambrose said the foul smell and screeching by the bats forced teachers to close windows - making classrooms "unbearable" and learning difficult.
"The kids are put off ... and the smell is just repulsive," he said. "The smell is, particularly in wet weather, just foul and the car park and carpets are just splattered with droppings and, let me tell you, they are not steam cleaned every day; they are cleaned once a year."
But attempts to move the bats have so far been unsuccessful. The NSW Department of Education, which removed bats 10 years ago, needs a licence and federal government approval to remove them.
Mr Ambrose said the federal government had since spent about $30,000 to form a committee [How useless can you get?] to advise the school on how to approach the problem.
He said the initial recommendations, which are yet to be formally accepted, tell the school "to work around the bats". "They want us to timetable our classes differently, they don't want us to do sporting events, they don't want us to ring our bell, they want us to minimise our voices so we don't disturb the bats," he said.
"And I understand all DET [Department of Education and Training] can do, and they have been great, is put a sprinkler in a tree. "But this is the health and wellbeing of students at risk here." He said students previously walked out of classrooms in a stop-work organised by the school's parent committee.
An Education Department spokesman said it was "working hard to resolve the flying foxes issue". "We have installed air-conditioners in classrooms and built covered walkways to help protect students and staff," he said.
"We have made application to the state and Commonwealth agencies for the further removal of some trees and tree limbs which could harbour flying foxes near the school. We are awaiting the outcome of this application. "The department has been advised of the potential for a stop-work meeting. However, this is yet to be confirmed by staff at the school. We have not been formally advised of a stop-work meeting."
A highly disturbing phenomenon is rising in our public school system today with hardly a peep of protest from parents and from our society at large: students are being force-fed a curious and bizarre narrative that presents Islam in a glowing — and historically mangled — light, while Western civilization and the Judeo-Christian tradition are demonized and smeared. The latest example can be found in New York’s statewide high school Regents exam where students will find points deducted from their grade if they don't obediently regurgitate the Party-Line given to them. [1]
Some of the test's questions are based on specific readings from A World History: A Cultural Approach by Daniel Roselle, including this troublesome lesson: "Wherever they went, the Moslems brought with them their love of art, beauty and learning. From about the eighth to the eleventh century, their culture was superior in many ways to that of western [sic] Christendom." Elsewhere, students learn from Roselle how, under Christian rule, "idols, temples and other material evidences of paganism [were] destroyed." The text also marvels at how, after being conquered by Muslims, the Spanish city of Cordoba’s "streets were solidly paved," unlike in Paris, and lamps were set up. At the same time, the author makes pains to point out, "there was not a single public lamp in London!"
The lesson for impressionable children taking this exam is clear: Islam is historically tolerant, progressive, and admirable, whereas modern extremism has more in common with Christianity. Islamic scholar Andrew Bostom described [2] the teaching as a "grotesque distortion of historical reality," leaving students ignorant of how "the jihad ravages…wreaked havoc--massacre, pillage, enslavement, and deportation--upon culturally more advanced civilizations."
The exam also includes a reading from John Esposito, a Muslim Brotherhood apologist [3] who appeared as a witness for the defense in the trial of the Holy Land Foundation [4] (HLF) in 2008. The HLF was shut down for being a Brotherhood-constructed front to finance Hamas. He's even promoted the extremist Brotherhood theologian, Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi. [5] He also co-authored a book with Azzam Tamimi, who has said, [6] "Do not call them suicide bombers, call them shuhada [martyrs]…[The Israelis] have guns, we have the human bomb. We love death, they love life."
The particular question based on Esposito's writing asked students about Islam’s expansion into Africa. A “correct” answer did not involve anything about forced conversion or aggression. In fact, this historical fact is considered incorrect by the exam’s standards. Answers such as: "merchants were agents of Islamization; [Islam was spread] by religious leaders forcing their views on isolated societies; [and] there was conflict between traditional priests and Muslim men of religion" are all unacceptable.
Unfortunately, the New York State exam isn't a fluke case that can be ignored. There are numerous cases where school textbooks are biased in favor of Islam over Christianity. For example, [7] in one 2008 book titled Global History and Geography: The Growth of Civilization, the core belief of Christianity is summarized as, "…his [Jesus'] apostles claimed that they had seen and talked with him. They believed that Jesus was indeed the Messiah and had risen from the dead, or been resurrected." On Islam, it says simply "Muhammad was the messenger of Allah."
In another 2008 textbook titled World History, it is written that "After the death of Jesus, his followers proclaimed that he had risen from death and had appeared to him. They believed Jesus to be the Messiah (anointed one)…" When that same book discusses Islam, it states "The revelations of Allah (God) to Muhammad are written down in the Quran, or holy book of Islam."
In a third textbook from 2007 titled The Western Heritage, the basis for the New Testatment is that "[t]he authors of the Gospels believed Jesus was the son of God…" But the text sounds more certain of the Koran's credibility, stating "[Muhammad] began to receive revelations from the angel Gabriel, who recited God's word to him at irregular intervals."
Gilbert T. Stewall, director of the American Textbook Council, reviewed ten junior and high school textbooks over two years and concluded [8] in 2008 that popular textbooks did not mention that the 9/11 terrorists considered themselves Muslims or that jihad and Shariah law have violent and oppressive applications. The textbooks even advocated policy, diagnosing terrorism as a symptom of poverty, ignorance, and anger over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Stewall also found that Islam's doctrines received significantly more attention than Christianity, and its “scientific” and “cultural” achievements are praised while Christian transgressions, such as anti-Semitism, are explored at length. One book calls [9] the Crusades "religious wars launched against Muslims by European Christians" but characterizes the Islamic offensives as the "building" of an empire. Another text says non-Muslims converted to Islam because they "were attracted by Islam's message of equality and hope for salvation" without even mentioning forced conversion.
Another study [10] of 28 textbooks by the Institute for Jewish & Community Research found 500 faulty passages being used to teach students. The researchers found a heavy bias against Israel and a promotion of the school of thought that U.S. support for the country is the root cause of terrorism. One of the authors said they found an inclination to be "disrespectful towards Christianity, and rather than represent Islam in an objective way, [the passages] tend to glorify it."
Robert Spencer of JihadWatch.org told FrontPage that this latest case is part of a pattern caused by "multiculturalist ethos, which in theory posits that all cultures are equal, but in practice holds all non-Western cultures superior to Judeo-Christian culture."
"The producers of this material are embarrassed by Western culture, which they've been conditioned to believe is responsible for all the evils in the world. Islam is non-Western and even actively anti-Western, and so it is above reproach," Spencer said.
Thus, we see how the admirable desire to promote religious tolerance when put into the hands of the Left clearly crosses into a promotion of Islam and a degradation of Judeo-Christian tradition and culture. And so, in many cases, this also extends beyond teaching from a biased textbook.
In May, a 14-year-old student at a Roman Catholic school in the United Kingdom was given [11] an unexcused absence on her record after her mother refused to let her join a class trip to a mosque where she'd be forced to dress as a Muslim. When the school was unable to provide supervision for her daughter, the mother kept her home and complained to school officials. In a letter addressed to the mother, the school head said the trip was "as compulsory as a geography field trip."
"It's like they are saying she is playing truant for not wearing a head scarf. If the trip had been without the leggings and the headscarf, that would have been fine but I wasn't having my daughter dressed in the Muslim way," the mother said. The school refused to back down and left the unexcused absence on the girl's record. One can only imagine the furor that would have erupted had it been a Muslim student being forced to attend a synagogue or church.
Spencer warns that the biased teaching has implications not only for students' education, but also for the country's security.
"Whole generations of students are being taught to despise their own culture and civilizational heritage. Why, then, should they bother to defend it?" he asked.
The authors of these textbooks and the schools that continue to use them after being informed of their content are making a conscious decision to promote a glowing image of Islam at the expense of historical accuracy and fairness. The texts defame the Judea-Christian tradition for the sake of promoting cultural relativism and advancing leftist policy viewpoints about the causes of Islamic terrorism. And that's not education; it’s indoctrination.
Up to 750,000 'special needs' pupils in Britain are just badly taught
Schools have wrongly labelled as many as 750,000 children as having special needs to cover up poor teaching, a damning report warns today. They are diagnosing conditions such as 'behavioural , emotional and social problems' to massage unfavourable league table ratings, according to inspectors.
They found that 1.7million pupils in England were classed as having special educational needs in January, just over one in five. But, declares Ofsted, almost half of these have simply been poorly taught. In some schools, a 'culture of excuses' means that pupils making slow progress are automatically classed as having special needs.
In other cases, pupils have ended up with learning or behavioural problems after being failed by poor literacy and numeracy teaching early in their school career.
Inspectors also visited a school where pupils were categorised as having special needs simply because their fathers were away fighting in Afghanistan.
Inspectors found that some local authorities appear to offer incentives to give such labels to children as some types of educational need bring in extra funds.
Exam results are also adjusted to take account of the number of pupils with special needs. This can have a 'positive influence' on their league table rankings, Ofsted found.
Schools are, meanwhile, under pressure from 'articulate middle-class parents' who lobby for such diagnoses to ensure extra support for their children, such as personal tuition and extra time in exams.
'The term "special educational needs" is used too widely,' said the report. 'Around half the schools and early years provision visited used low attainment and relatively slow progress as their principal indicators. 'Inspectors saw schools that identified pupils as having special needs when, in fact, their needs were no different from most other pupils. 'They were under-achieving but this was sometimes simply because teaching was not good enough and expectations of pupil were too low.
'A conclusion that may be drawn is that some pupils are being wrongly identified as having special needs and that relatively expensive additional provision is being used to make up for poor teaching and pastoral support.' Christine Gilbert
Christine Gilbert, the chief inspector of schools, said: 'Schools are identifying children and young people as having special needs when they need essentially better teaching and better pastoral support.' In contrast, parents of children with the greatest needs or disabilities must endure the troublesome 'statementing' process. Statements are legal documents outlining the support to which children are entitled. But Ofsted found that, even when parents succeed in obtaining one, there was no guarantee of appropriate or good provision.
Those with the severest needs - 2.7 per cent of all primary and secondary pupils - have written statements. This is down slightly from 3 per cent in 2003. But the proportion of all pupils classed as having special needs without statements rose from 14 per cent in 2003 to 18.2 per cent this year.
As many as half of these, or approximately 750,000, 'would not be identified as having special educational needs if schools focused on improving teaching and learning for all, with individual goals for improvement,' Ofsted suggested.
Pupils from poor backgrounds or who regularly play truant or who were disruptive were more likely to be given the label. In one case, 14 and 15-year-olds who were 'demotivated' about taking their GCSEs were put on the special needs register so the school could justify bringing in 'mentors' to help them.
Janet Thompson, an Ofsted inspector and the report's author, said: 'Too much is being identified as being additional and different, rather than "this is the group of youngsters we are providing education for and this is the wide range of needs that we can meet".
'We did find examples of young people identified as having behavioural, emotional and social difficulties who, if you unpicked the reasons for that, were actually around inability to read and write.'
NSW High School students think their education is irrelevant
HSC students in New South Wales have slammed the English curriculum, saying it isn't relevant to their lives and should no longer be compulsory. They want the course to give more emphasis to grammar and spelling and help prepare them for their working life.
Pupils who sat last year's HSC complained to the Board of Studies about the advanced English test and also the maths exams, saying they were too difficult.
About one in six students surveyed after last year's HSC said the exams were not a fair test and 18 per cent believed there were too many assessment tasks. An exit poll of 3300 students found the number who believed the HSC exams were a fair test fell three percentage points on 2008 to 69 per cent.
This year's HSC candidates said teachers were thoroughly preparing them for the exams but even the highest level English courses could be made more relevant to their future working lives.
Daniel Taha, of Delany College at Granville in Sydney's west, who will sit the exam this year, said he had difficulty in understanding the relevance of some texts to life. "There isn't an emphasis on grammar," Daniel, 17, said. "There's a big focus on content and so many students can end up losing the fundamentals.
"My teachers are really good at revising those fundamentals and also seeing that we are using vocabulary relevant to the advanced course." His classmate Marian Prasad, 17, also questioned the relevance of some material in English Advanced, and said it was more beneficial to students intending to study literature at tertiary level. "I would like to see more on communication so that we can be articulate in the workplace," she said.
The poll results reveal students' feelings about the strengths and weaknesses of the HSC as about 70,000 prepare to sit their final school exams next month.
Complaints were received about the Studies of Religion paper which had to be stopped for an hour at one school over concerns it contained questions not based on the syllabus. Two-thirds of the students who sat the exam later said it had not been a fair test.
Some students at a Sydney school began crying over an unexpected question they believed had not been covered during their course of study. Officials ordered a break of an hour while the students composed themselves. After the exam, 100 complaints were made to the Board of Studies.
A report prepared by the board after the exit survey said about 480 students made "generally positive" comments about their HSC experience, while 160 were negative. Less than half of the candidates said the Mathematics paper was a fair test.
Mass exodus of experienced teachers in South Australia
And probably similar elsewhere. Schools today are a much less pleasant working environment than they once were
NEARLY a third of the state's public school teachers aged 45-plus will retire within five years, raising concerns schools will face grave staff shortages, particularly in country areas.
The University of Adelaide's Career Intentions Survey of more than 3000 public teachers aged 45 and over, found high schools would be hardest hit. Nearly 38 per cent of secondary teachers who responded to the survey said they planned to leave by 2015. The teachers union said serious staff shortages in rural areas already existed and that extensive recruitment programs needed to be put in place to keep teaching graduates from leaving the state.
The 2010 annual report by the Teachers Registration Board found there are 15,948 registered teachers aged 45-60, however, not all may be in teaching positions. The national average retirement age of teachers is 58.
Australian Education Union SA branch vice president David Smith said the large number of retiring teachers would add to the severe relief teacher shortages in regional areas such as Port Augusta and in subject specialist roles such as maths, science and technology.
Mr Smith cited the changes to the South Australian Certificate of Education and the national curriculum as a contributor to older educators wanting to leave the workforce early.
An AEU survey last week showed 84 per cent of educators believed the new SACE reforms would cause "excessive workloads". The report by the university's Australian Institute of Social Research also found:
MORE than half of the teachers aged over 55 intend to retire within five years.
RETIREMENT of preschool teachers and junior primary teachers is expected to peak in ten years.
TWO-THIRDS indicated an interest in casual employment after retirement.
There are 311 full time teaching students who started full-time studies this year at the University of Adelaide, 2807 full-time teaching students at UniSA and 612 at Flinders.
Education Minister Jay Weatherill said the department's teacher recruitment strategy, which was announced last month, was aimed at attracting enthusiastic young people into the profession.
Australia gives them the opportunity to realize their potential.
The claim below that the students concerned do well because they are "middle class" may have some truth but not much. The Vietnamese in particular are the children of desperate "boat people" refugees from Communist terror
The best performing school in the state, James Ruse Agricultural High School, is also the selective school with the most students from a migrant background. New figures obtained under freedom of information laws show that 95.2 per cent of students list a language background other than English in their entry application. Only 41 students from an English-speaking background are studying at the school - an average of seven in each year.
Children of migrants fill almost 80 per cent of the places offered at the state's top 10 selective high schools, which are all ranked in the top 20 HSC performers. On average only 20 per cent (or 320 students each year) are from an English-speaking background.
The dominant cultural group is Chinese, with the most applicants and the highest success rate in the entry test. Last year, 2361 applicants were from a Chinese background and 1242 were successful.
The second most represented group was Vietnamese followed by Korean. In total, 3912 students were awarded a selective school place last year, with 5516 applicants from a non-English speaking background - 42 per cent (1828) of whom were successful.
The co-director of the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash University, Bob Birrell, said the successful students largely represented middle- to upper-middle-class families from Asia who put a heavy emphasis on education and professional achievement.
He said selective schools were not providing assistance to the vast majority of families. "In NSW we are entrenching advantage within one particular ethnic group. If the NSW government was serious about equal opportunity, it would put some geographical boundaries to ensure better access to [top] schools."
A specialist in schools systems from the University of Melbourne, Richard Teese, said that the pooling of high achievers in selective and private school systems had raised the performance bar beyond the reach of students in mainstream schools. "When you pool resources like that you multiply their impact and you give the students who have access to that distinctive advantages over everybody else," Professor Teese said.
"You are setting up a situation in which you [create] extremes of advantage and extremes of disadvantage. If you took those students out of those hot-house environments they would still do well. But by combining their resources you multiply their advantage. It is a zero-sum game: some win, but others must lose."
Relationship Between Religious Practice and Education
Available research compiled by the Family Research Council demonstrates that religious practice in the home has a significant positive effect on a child's level of academic achievement.
According to Religious Practice and Educational Attainment, a synthesis paper produced by Family Research Council Senior Fellow and Director of the Marriage & Religion Research Institute (MARRI) Dr. Pat Fagan, "Education is widely recognized as the way to maintain the well-being of those born into the middle class. It is also a powerful tool to raise individuals out of poverty. If religious practice were to have a significantly positive role in education, then the practice of religion would have profound implications for world economies and societies." The paper details both the direct and the indirect effects of religion in the home on educational accomplishment.
Religious practice directly affects a student's ability to perform. Students involved in religious activities have higher GPAs by 14.4 percent than those not involved, and spend more time on their homework. Additionally, religion is one of few readily accessible institutions for lower-income families, making its effect on children's academic success particularly significant. Religious activity remains important in higher education, where over 75 percent of students who become more religious during their college years perform above average.
Student success is also affected indirectly by religion, through the various "pathways" that Fagan details in this paper. The pathways include both internal, personal dynamics and external, communal networks.
On a personal level, religious practice assists in internalizing norms that encourage academic attainment, in developing work habits and high personal expectations of achievement, and in reducing behavioral risks.
The paper also details the external pathways through which religious practice at home enhances scholastic performance, one being that internalized norms that encourage achievement are taught and reinforced through family interaction. The company of religious peers encourages academic focus while discouraging risky behavior. Churches and religious schools offer community and solidarity, supplementing sometimes-sparse student resources and offering mentorship. Planned religious extracurricular activities have the added benefit of eliminating unstructured "hanging out," which, in abundance, is correlated with poor academic performance.
Judged by all the billions of dollars now flowing into "education reform," it appears that Washington, and especially the Obama administration, is obsessed with improving academic achievement (see, for example, here). The billions are certainly real enough, but the intent is just the opposite.
Rhetoric aside, the Obama administration, like Bush II's before it, is profoundly opposed to brainpower. Our "commitment" to academic excellence is a cruel joke -- we love stupidity and hate smart kids. Tellingly, not even "conservatives" who bemoan America's educational decline will admit this awkward reality -- they, too, are passengers on this reform gravy train heading to the bottom.
Consider a small item that appeared in a blog regarding the Jacob Javits Talented and Education Act, an Act whose title suggests helping young Einsteins and junior Keplers become America's future scientists and engineers. The program has always been financially uncertain, even occasionally canceled, and the current plan was to roll its $7.5-million annual appropriation into the Institute for Education Sciences, where no guarantee exists that the funds would go for high achievers.
Still, it might be argued that since super-smart kids are few in number and hardly require lavish facilities, even $7.5 million would help. This is a truly embarrassing lie that sheds enormous light on how Washington regards America's brainpower.
First, compare the proposed $7.5 million to the $11.5 billion that the national government spent in fiscal 2010 for disabled school-aged children. Given this staggering ratio, a visiting Martian might conclude that American schools consisted of a huge mass of disabled youngsters and an infinitesimal handful of smart ones. If we include all the other multi-billion-dollar programs targeting the least able, e.g., Head Start ($7.23 billion in 2010) and Title 1 ($13 billion that is now part of No Child Left Behind), one would never guess that the intellectually gifted actually exist (by definition 5% of all students). Imagine if a private firm embraced this grossly upside-down investment strategy. Our overseas rivals are probably convulsing with laughter.
Second, the Javits program, title aside, is not targeting smart kids -- just the reverse. It attempts to uncover gifted children among minorities conspicuously absent in traditional, test-driven gifted programs. This uplift-the-bottom mission is explicit:
"The major emphasis of the program is on serving students traditionally underrepresented in gifted and talented programs, particularly economically disadvantaged, limited English proficient (LEP), and disabled students, to help reduce the serious gap in achievement among certain groups of students at the highest levels of achievement."
This needle-in-a-haystack commitment is taken seriously, though evidence of any successes is scarce or nonexistent. In 2006, for example, Page, AZ received $340,000 for "Buried Treasure," a project that sought to uncover gifted children equally across the school district's demography -- i.e., gifted quotas. Meanwhile, Denver, CO got $123,000 for "Take Five," which involves coordinating efforts among multiple government agencies and university faculty to increase the number of gifted children from low-income and/or minority groups. Iowa educators received $319,000 to help the "twice exceptional child" -- that is, the youngster who is both intellectually talented and learning disabled. Countless similar grants to uncover disadvantaged students who might be gifted have been awarded to schools in Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Texas, and Wyoming.
Third, not content to deprive smart kids of federal money, Washington, beginning with George W. Bush but continuing with Obama, is forcing states to starve their already puny gifted programs. This is accomplished not by outright prohibitions on helping smart kids; that would be too obvious.
Rather, Washington's mega-billion-dollar bribes coerce states to uplift the bottom, including closing racial gaps, if they want to keep the money flowing, and since Washington provides no financial incentives to help brainy kids, gifted programs are cannibalized (documented here). So putting Young Einstein back into Math 1 is perfectly rational for cash-starved school districts. The only losers are the poor (and probably white or Asian) parents of intellectually talented kids, a constituency with no heft in today's political battles.
This carnage began with Bush's No Child Left Behind and continues unabated. In 2002, Michigan aid for the gifted fell from $4 million a year to $250,000. In Illinois, funding collapsed from $19 million per year to zero, while New York also dropped to zero from $14 million. Oregon's commitment likewise dropped to zero after years of funding. In Connecticut, one in four school districts abandoned gifted programs altogether. In Missouri, the state subsidy for gifted went from 75% to 58% of local outlays. By 2006, eight states offered nothing, while another six states spend less than $500,000 -- not even a pittance in today's educational world.
Finally, the education establishment loathes programs for the gifted (see, for example, here). These classes are uniformly attacked as elitist, exclusionary, racially segregated, and, oddly, subverting the education of less talented students -- as if education were a zero-sum game, so if a smart student advances, a less able student necessarily falls behind. Many professional educators even dispute the very idea of some people being smarter than others.
Others flat-out lie. Carolyn Callahan, who heads up the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented, claims that blacks and Hispanics are excluded from gifted programs since they lack adequate pre-schooling and decent nutrition (somebody should tell her about Head Start, food stamps, and subsidized school meals).
Even erstwhile champions of gifted education embrace the egalitarian fantasy. Del Siegle, the president of the National Association for Gifted Children, called for modifying No Child Left Behind at the group's national convention so as to provide more help for minority gifted children. If we include ACLU lawsuits attacking gifted programs for their lack of diversity, it's a miracle that any still exist.
What permits the U.S. to maintain its current intellectual edge is that it imports brains almost as heavily as it imports oil. Visit any top research university (or Silicon Valley) and observe students in the hard sciences who are disproportionally Asian, Russian, or Indian immigrants, or the children of those recently arrived (for example, see here).
In 2006, 35% of all Ph.D.s went to foreign-born researchers, but non-citizens earned 43% of the doctorates in science and engineering and 70% of the Ph.D.s in electrical, civil, and industrial/mechanical engineering. In other engineering fields plus math, computer science, and physics, the figure was "only" 50%. Among university science and engineering faculty, 19% are born overseas; in engineering, this figure was a little more than a third. The Kaufman Foundation tracks this "foreign" contribution to American industry, and it is indisputable that we survive thanks to imported brains (here).
Like foreign oil, this cannot last. China and Japan now try to keep top scientific talent home, and our European rivals, Australia and New Zealand, are actively recruiting those who once automatically came to the U.S. In a decade or so, the homegrown talent may have to suffice, and all the wages of neglect will come due. Will today's low achievers save us in 2030? Perhaps only a miracle, such as civil strife in China, will restore the flow of brains, much as German refugees in the late 1930s reinvigorated American science.
To invoke an old cliché, with friends of academic excellence like Bush II and Obama, who needs enemies?
Spending a childhood wrapped in cotton wool is no preparation for adult life, argues Toby Young
When I think of some of the things I got up to as child, I shudder with horror. At the age of 12, for instance, I decided it would be fun to take a sailing boat out into the Atlantic. It was fun, too, until the boat capsized. Then there was the time, aged 14, that I "borrowed" the 400cc motorcycle belonging to my sister's boyfriend. As the needle of the speedometer passed 100 mph, I remember thinking that I should probably be wearing a helmet.
When Michael Gove called for a return to a "Dangerous Book for Boys" culture in England's schools I don't suppose he had joy-riding in mind. But these sorts of adventures undoubtedly proved valuable experiences on the road to maturity. According to the Education Secretary, risk-averse teachers and litigious parents have led to children being brought up in an over-protective environment. "We need to change our bubble-wrapped culture," he said yesterday.
So is the Health and Safety Executive going to be added to the flames in the bonfire of the quangocrats? Unfortunately not. But Lord Young of Graffham has been asked to review health and safety legislation to see if it can be made less restrictive. One suggestion is that claimants in compensation cases would need to prove reckless endangerment instead of just negligence in order to receive a payout.
At the moment, the amount of red tape teachers have to wade through in preparation for a school trip of any kind is ludicrous. A ghastly official document entitled "Standards for LEAs in Overseeing Educational Visits" includes 93 rules and regulations covering everything from "non-licensable adventure activities" to "having a plan B pre-assessed in case Plan A has become too hazardous".
Then there's the fact that "educational-visits co-ordinators" are obliged not to discriminate against disabled pupils when arranging trips. The Disability Rights Commission has produced no fewer than two codes of practice relating to this. (Are two enough? Why not 20? Can't be too careful about this sort of thing.)
In light of this, perhaps it's not surprising that the last official "school trip" my seven-year-old daughter went on was to the local branch of Pizza Express. I'm not making that up. Happily, no one choked to death on a slice of quattro formaggi.
One of the most powerful arguments against this degree of caution is that it leaves children unable to assess risk and that, in turn, leads to reckless behaviour. According to Dr Amanda Gummer, a psychologist who advises the British Toy & Hobby Association, a completely safe childhood is actually more dangerous than one containing its fair share of bumps and scrapes.
"Children who have all elements of danger removed from their lives grow up to think they are invincible," she says. "This doesn't just affect the accidents they might have when riding a bike or exploring a river, but it has a knock-on effect in terms of drug culture and gang violence." I'm not entirely convinced by this. It amounts to saying that the reason children shouldn't be cocooned in cotton wool is because it's less risky than exposing them to danger.
Surely, the best way of tackling the culture of health and safety in schools is not to appeal to parents' risk aversion but to challenge it. I want my children to grow up to be confident, happy adults, not cautious little wet noodles who daren't say boo to a goose. That means venturing a little further afield on school trips than the nearest fast-food restaurant.
I'm hardly alone in this. A survey of over 2,000 parents of primary school children commissioned by Play England found that three-quarters of them thought schools were too concerned with health and safety. We need to dismantle the whole edifice of mollycoddling rules and regulations so our children are free to play proper, old-fashioned games even if they involve risk of injury. How can we expect them to stick up for what they believe in as adults if they're not allowed to play British Bulldog in the playground?
Of course, Michael Gove won't find this easy, not least because Britain is no longer a sovereign state. Many of the "elf and safety" rules are enforced by the European Union rather than the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. For instance, article two of the First Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights states: "No person shall be denied the right to an education." That may make it possible for the parent of a wheelchair-bound child to sue a school that organises an activity he or she can't participate in, depending on how broadly the word "education" is interpreted.
Nevertheless, we need to do as much as we can. As things stand, the absurd over-protectiveness of our schools is in danger of creating a nation of milksops.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie does it again. I almost felt sorry (almost) for Marie Corfield, an elementary school teacher who stood up at a question-and-answer session with the governor and demanded to know how his reforms would help teachers since his budget cuts had resulted in so many lay-offs among the selfless pedagogues that populate New Jersey’s public schools. “We have some of the best schools in the country,” quoth la Corfield, “and you have done nothing but lambaste us.”
Pardon us while we dab away the tears.
When the governor began to respond, Ms. Corfield rolled her eyes and acted like one of her pupils taunting a classmate. That was when Gov. Christie delivered one of his classic put-downs. “If you want to put on a show then just sit down. But if you want to have a respectful discussion then let me answer your question.”
Yikes. That alone was worth the price of admission but what followed is a script that anyone who cares about the tsunami of public debt that is poised to wash over America should hearken to carefully. Christie didn’t “lambaste” teachers, he said, he lambasted the teachers’ union, especially its leaders. Why were so many teachers laid off in New Jersey? Because when the governor called upon teachers to take a one-year pay freeze and contribute 1.5% — one-and a half percent! — of their salaries to the cost of their health care (full-family medical, dental, and vision coverage, by the way), the union leaders said: “No way. Not a penny.” Result: nearly a billion-dollar shortfall in the budget, which necessitated scads of layoffs. (Had Gov. Christie’s proposal been accepted, the state would have saved more than $700,000,000.) “So who’s really to blame?” he asked: the governor or the intransigent teachers unions?
“We have to get realistic about telling people the truth,” Christie said, a sentiment that is gaining currency all across the country — not, of course, among the political class that actually governs us: no, Christie is a rare exception in that cohort, but among the vast majority of ordinary American that imperative is more and more the order of the day.
Here’s the clip. Do watch to the end. The governor’s response when Ms Corfield comes back to complain about his “tone” is not to be missed. (Remember when a union official sent around an email suggesting people pray for the governor’s death?)
("Sociopath" is the euphemism for "psychopath". It's very misleading. They are usually very skilled socially. It's their mentation that is defective: Lack of empathy, lack of foresight, indifference to suffering in others, feelings of personal grandiosity etc.)
It was 9/11 that finally convinced me that those who rule the academy are sociopaths.
When around 2:00 p.m. I finally pulled away from revising and checked my email, I learned that the University of Georgia had sent everybody home at noon. When I called the campus for a scheduled appointment I was told that we had been attacked.
War, I thought. Pearl Harbor.
But no such thing to my colleagues who immediately flooded the discussion listserv with political analyses about U.S. imperialism and calls for support of some Afghan women’s revolutionary group. A graduate student whose relatives were hurt at the Pentagon pleaded with the radicals to hold off on the political analyses. The predictable missives about the First Amendment flew forth as well as insults directed at the poor woman. A colleague told me about spending an entire class period explaining to freshmen that the Crusades were the reason they “hate us.” Bright yellow announcements of forums on “Understanding Islam” popped up on campus, as they did all over the country.
As Americans jumped to their deaths from burning skyscrapers, the academics, like Ward Churchill, in their ivory towers, began penning analyses of “chickens coming home to roost.”
Others were a little more subtle and presented the event as “spectacle,” as a kind of aesthetic display of the downfall of Western imperialism. The Twin Towers were huge phallic symbols, displays of “masculinist” arrogance.
The privileged professors continue to present the event this way as I learned at the last conference of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, where “Critical Plenary Speaker” Professor Anne McClintock called the U.S. a “paranoid empire.” To McClintock [PDF], writing from the safety of her own ivory tower in Madison, Wisconsin, “the 9/11 attacks came as a dazzling solution, both to the enemy deficit and the problem of legitimacy. . . .”
Now thanks to a generation groomed to hate America we have voted in an America-hating president. Nine years later, on land where body parts of victims are still being found, we’ve got an imam wanting to build a super mosque funded by terrorist-linked groups. The president supports him.
The free-speech advocates are nowhere to be found to defend a minister who wants to burn Korans in protest.
The yellow posters dotting Park Hall were symbols of what was to come.
We continue to teach about the Holocaust, but fail to mention the large percentage of educated “intellectuals” who ran the show.
So I was intrigued last weekend during the Decatur book festival (where booths for communists and peace-loving Muslims had multiplied) by an author of a book on that topic. He named names, crimes, and academic degrees. But he linked this development to the persecution of “liberals.”
I asked the author if he knew anything about the intellectuals’ reactions to 9/11. He did not. I don’t think it’s a stretch of an analogy to link those in white coats who did practice runs for gassing Jews on handicapped children with the sociopaths who think of Americans leaping to their deaths as an “aesthetic” experience or of fear as being “paranoid.”
The psychological literature shows a link between overindulged children with narcissism and sociopathy later in life. The tenured radicals are aging children whose privilege insulates them from the struggles and realities of everyday life. These are people who do not have to run into burning and exploding buildings.
The reaction to 9/11 could have been predicted. The pampered professors have been acting this way for decades.
They “organize” communities they have no stake in. They call police “pigs” because they don’t need them to stop the drug pushers, thieves, and rapists around them. They inspire riots because they don’t have to live in the ruined neighborhoods. They can favor affirmative action because they’re the ones doing the hiring. They never have to live with the consequences of their own “solutions.”
These are the people who populate the Obama administration. Can anybody else see a historical parallel?
History under threat: British pupils receive just 38 hours of lessons at secondary school
History is 'disappearing' from state secondary schools because head teachers no longer value the subject, a survey has found. Teenagers are receiving as few as 38 history lessons during their entire secondary education as schools downgrade the subject in favour of trendy 'themed' teaching.
Hundreds of schools no longer teach history as a stand alone subject to 11 and 12-year-olds, instead offering 'integrated' topic-based humanities or social science courses, according to research by the Historical Association.
The trend emerged ahead of an expected blueprint from Education Secretary Michael Gove for boosting traditional subjects such as history. He will launch a review of the curriculum later this year with a view to ensuring children leave school with core knowledge, including British and world history.
And he will also flesh out plans for a new English Baccalaureate, which will be awarded to pupils who gain five good GCSEs in English, maths, one science, one humanities subject and one language.
But the Historical Association study, based on returns from 600 teachers, found that heads increasingly fail to see history as worthwhile. One history teacher at a comprehensive said: 'We are disappearing. Integrated humanities is the way our senior management team wants to go, and they see us as awkward, backward obstacles if we suggest subjects like history are valuable in their own right.'
Another warned: 'The history department is feeling that we shall disappear into a mix of 'thinking skills' and 'vocational pathways' which do not seem to recognise the contribution that history can make to developing young learners.'
Growing numbers of secondaries are compressing three years' of history study into just two years, usually during pupils' second year. The practice was uncovered in 10 per cent of secondaries in 2010 - up from five per cent last year.
Since growing numbers of schools are offering generic humanities or social science courses for the first of these two years, some teenagers are receiving just 38 hours of distinct history lessons a year, taught by a specialist. Some 31 per cent of schools - and 55 per cent of flagship academies - merged history with other subjects to form generic humanities courses in 2010. A year earlier, the figure was 28 per cent.
In some schools, children are banned from taking history GCSEs in case they fail and damage the school's league table position.
Dr Richard Harris, the chair of the Historical Association's secondary education committee who led the study, told the Times Educational Supplement: 'The Government must make a decision about what children are entitled to do - we think this should be at least three years of history teaching by a specialist.'
Gateway Pundit, via Glenn Reynolds, presents another story of suppression of free speech by liberals:
School officials at Palm Beach State College kicked members of the Young America's Foundation off campus after they saw anti-Obama literature at their table.
There is much more to the story, as reported by the Orlando Political Press:
On Tuesday September 7, 2010 at around 11:00am one Palm Beach State College (PBSC) student and two Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) members, state chairman Daniel P. Diaz and state vice chairman Eddie Shaffer, were shut down and had campus police called on them after tabling and recruiting during club rush at the College. The PBSC student, Christina Beattie, had received prior permission from college administrator Olivia Ford-Morris to promote her organization on campus via telephone and email communication.
On the day of club rush, officials approached the group and after seeing information about the organization and its ideals criticizing Barack Obama's economic policy. Ms. Ford-Morris was visibly disturbed by the material presented, published by the Heritage Foundation, criticizing President Obama's administration. College officials then called the campus police to assure the group left campus. Ms. Ford-Morris denied having ever talked to Ms. Beattie about giving permission to the organization to be a part of PBSC club rush.
This reminds me of an episode years ago, when Scott and I were just becoming politically active. There was a freshman orientation at the University of Minnesota, and campus organizations were invited to set up booths and pass out literature to solicit incoming freshmen to join. The Young Republicans had a booth and passed out anti-Clinton literature--it seems like only yesterday!
Students who were running the event disapproved of the presence of conservatives, ordered the Republicans out and confiscated their literature. Their obviously illegal action was backed up by the then-Dean of Students, who wrote a rather astonishing letter to the effect that because the University of Minnesota is devoted to diversity, there is no room there for Republicans. Seriously. (BTW, it is a reasonable guess that most of the tax money that supports the University of Minnesota is paid by Republicans.)
Our friend Peter Swanson, at that time the President of the Republican group at the U of M, came to Scott and me, and we represented the college Republicans in pursuing claims arising out of the obvious infringement of their First Amendment rights. We won hands down, and one of the remedies we negotiated was that the head of the Minneapolis campus of the University of Minnesota was required to attend First Amendment sensitivity training at the hands of a law school professor.
We have fond memories of that occasion, but the underlying reality is chilling. I really don't think most liberals have any respect for free speech as such, and if they had the opportunity, they would shut us all up or throw us in jail.
The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is in a bind. The Tuesday after Labor Day is usually when school starts for schoolchildren in Los Angeles. But not this year. Due to budget cuts, LAUSD could not open most of its school’s doors. This latest development is in direct contrast to the bailout bill that had $10 billion earmarked to bail out schools who were facing budget cuts and layoffs. Wasn’t this the point of this bill that HAD to be passed in an emergency House session? Who is getting bailed out? What was the point?
Spending is not the problem. In 2008, LAUSD budgeted nearly $30,000 per student. That is a staggering amount, especially when you consider that less than half the kids graduate. Nationally, we spend about $600 Billion on education. That’s 27 cents of every dollar, compared to 8 cents of every dollar for Medicaid. Part of the problem is that 80% of the school district’s operating budget is consumed by teacher salaries and benefits that last a lifetime. According to the LAUSD web page, a 1% cut can save $40 million.
This is a trend that will continue until our broken education system is repaired. Heritage has written extensively on education and what can be done to fix it. The National Education Association (the teachers union) wrote an article blaming a funding crisis for the layoffs, but failed to mention their unwillingness to work with the county to help solve the crisis. For parents practicing school choice and attending charter schools in Los Angeles, the LA Times had this to say:
And students in nearly 200 independently run charter schools are starting whenever school administrators want them to.
Australia: Another incompetent teacher -- dangerously so
When you make classrooms such stressful environments that only dummies or desperates would take a teaching job, this is the sort of result you have to expect. The damage wrought by the Left-inspired destruction of discipline is immense
TASMANIAN taxpayers could be up for millions in compensation if any of the high school students involved in a dodgy science experiment contract a potentially lethal blood virus.
It comes as the State Government yesterday refused to confirm whether the Dover District High School teacher who took blood samples from 18 students using the same needle had a science degree. The Mercury reports a recent report by the Tasmanian Auditor-General found that just 51 per cent of a sample group of science teachers had a university science degree.
Five per cent of teachers taking science classes had no science knowledge and were simply teaching the subject because "there was a shortage of science staff" and 10 per cent were physical education teachers with a Human Movement degree which included some science-related content.
It has also been revealed that the blood experiment is not within the Tasmanian science curriculum.
The students and their families now have a nervous six-month wait as they are tested to ensure they have not contracted the blood-borne viruses hepatitis B, hepatitis C or HIV.
During the experiment the teacher used the same needle to collect the samples from the 18 students to test blood pH levels, and dipped it each time in methylated spirits. Medical authorities say this would not have been sufficient to disinfect it.
Australian Lawyers Alliance director Greg Barns said the State Government could face a multi-million-dollar lawsuit if any of the students test positive to a blood-borne virus.
"The State Government stands to face a massive prosecution here and we are talking millions," said Mr Barns, also a Mercury columnist. "Essentially you are looking at the medical expenses of the child for the rest of their life, damage as a result of a loss of income for the rest of their life and the psychological damage that has been caused to them."
Charter school operators are receiving separate but unequal treatment from the L.A. school district.
The Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools cluster, scheduled to open this fall on the site of the former Ambassador Hotel, was built at a cost of $578 million, or nearly $140,000 per student seat. It is without question the most expensive public school ever built in the Los Angeles Unified School District, and quite possibly the most expensive public school in the country.
The project's astronomical cost raises a question about whether the school district is using resources efficiently. It also raises issues of fairness.
Proposition 39, which was passed by voters in 2000, requires school districts to provide charter schools with facilities that are reasonably equivalent to those of other schools in the district. About 60,000 students in L.A. Unified have opted to attend charter schools. But administrators have in no way tried to meet the "reasonably equivalent" standard.
Take the new school at the Ambassador site: It will consist of several small, independent schools sharing facilities such as playing fields and auditoriums. But will any of those small schools be a charter? Not a chance.
When charter schools manage to get funding to build their own schools independent of the district, they do so for far less money than the LAUSD does. Recently, the Alliance for College Ready-Public Schools broke ground on a facility within sight of the Watts Towers that will serve 550 students and will cost $8.8 million. That is $16,000 per student seat, or one-ninth the cost of the Ambassador site project.
And the Alliance site is no exception. Over the past several years, Green Dot built seven charter schools in the vicinity of the RFK Community School, and it spent less than $85 million for all of them. Those schools currently serve about 4,300 students, which means they were built for under $20,000 per student seat.
If the district had given the $578 million it spent on one school to charter schools, we would have created many more seats for students, and the seats would have been in schools that are providing great results for kids and their families.
Not only does the district overspend on the schools it builds; it consistently denies dozens of charter schools equitable use of its existing facilities. Each year, as required by Proposition 39, charter schools submit applications for space in LAUSD schools. But while some charters have been granted adequate facilities in the district's existing schools, many have to rent their own space, which takes about 13% of their general funds on average.
This year, under Proposition 39, 81 of the 163 charter schools in the LAUSD applied to the district for facilities. About half received offers, but in our view the offers were not compliant with the law. Not only were none of the offers for space in the lavish new schools like Robert F. Kennedy, which were built at huge taxpayer expense, some were for far too little space — they would have housed only a portion of the students attending the charter. Other offers would have required schools to move far from their existing locations. As a result, my organization — the California Charter School Assn. — has filed a lawsuit against the LAUSD accusing it of failing to live up to the law.
Charter students deserve better, particularly when the schools many of them attend are making great strides in academic achievement in Los Angeles. The LAUSD has every reason to help charter schools grow, because that would help parents gain more faith in local public schools. As more families see the successes our schools are having, the charter movement will continue to grow, and the need for facilities will continue to expand. The LAUSD needs to work in partnership with the charters instead of treating our students as second-class citizens.
A school has become the first in the country to contract out its teaching to India. Ashmount Primary in north London is using call centre-style staff more than 4,000 miles away to lead mathematics lessons for 11-year-olds. The service – which costs £12 an hour for each pupil – is being used as a cheaper alternative to employing one-to-one tutors for children falling behind in the subject. A private tutor in the capital normally costs around £40 an hour, it was claimed.
Academics said the move could be expanded to other schools nationally but warned that it risked undermining teaching standards.
The service – run by the firm BrightSpark Education – involves each pupil logging on to a special website and talking to a tutor via a headset. Children complete work on their computer that can be checked remotely by the Indian teacher.
The Islington primary school is currently using the technology with half of its final year pupils, with plans to offer it to nine and 10-year-olds. The school had been approached by the company to pilot the system.
Rebecca Stacey, assistant head teacher, told the Times Educational Supplement that the service had made a significant difference to her pupils’ grasp of maths. “We intend to roll it out so the whole of Year 6 is using it and perhaps down to Years 4 and 5,” she said. “We try to keep every pupil with the same tutor. The kids really enjoy it. It is a different way of approaching the subject with children who might find it harder to engage with maths.”
The school told the TES that it was far cheaper than paying £40 an hour to hire private tutors to teach maths to pupils falling behind in the subject.
Dylan Wiliam, director of London University’s Institute of Education, said such a system could work for more schools, but warned of potential dangers. “It will depend on how good their English is,” he said. “They will also need to understand the cultural conventions of this country. For example, long division is laid out differently in different countries. “Having said that, I am sure that this will become commonplace in time. If brain surgery can now be done remotely, why not maths teaching?”
He added: “As with many things in education, it¹s not a silly idea, but as we have discovered in recent years, a lot of things that appeared to be good ideas at the time turn out to be useless, or worse.”
The system was devised by a British-based entrepreneur, Tom Hooper, who employs 100 Indian-based tutors full time. All are maths graduates with teaching experience who are required to undergo security checks.
“I was a tutor myself to make a bit of extra money when I was at university and after I graduated,” he said. “But paying for additional tuition can be very expensive, in London you can be spending up to £40 an hour.” He added: “So it just seemed to make sense when I thought of providing live learning online, which could be flexible and engaging.”
All of the tutors are trained in the English mathematics curriculum.
Fewer British students 'will take residential degrees'
Traditional university courses could become the preserve of an elite as growing numbers of students take on-line degrees, according to a report. Three-year residential degrees are likely to be limited to undergraduates at top research universities because of public spending restrictions, it was claimed.
The study by Universities UK, which represents vice-chancellors, suggests the emergence of a two-tier higher education system in the future as universities struggle to accommodate large numbers of new students.
The conclusions – published to coincide with the group’s annual conference on Wednesday – come weeks after record numbers of students were rejected from university. As many as 180,000 applicants failed to get on to degree courses this summer following a huge rise in applications combined with an effective freeze on new places.
This week, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development warned that the UK had slipped from third to 15th in a global league table for the number of graduates being produced in each country.
Prof Geoffrey Crossick, vice-chancellor of the University of London, said the current system of delivering higher education was “no longer financially sustainable”. In a UUK report, he said the number of flexible courses – including part-time study, on-the-job training and internet-based qualifications – would “explode” in the future.
This would lead to a drop in the proportion of students taking full-time degrees and living in traditional student accommodation, he said, an experience that was likely to be limited to those at top universities.
“Fundamental rethinking will be needed in a world where the proportion of those who experience higher education in the traditional fashion will decline, where the range of alternatives will explode, and where the variety of providers will grow with it,” said his report. “There will remain a core of comprehensive, primarily residential and (most of them) research-based universities, but for the rest new markets and new business models will make them seem increasingly different.” It added: "Higher education as a life-course stage will narrow to just one part of the population who experience it."
David Willetts, the Universities Minister, has already called for more students to consider apprenticeships as an alternative to university.
And the Open University, which runs courses on-line, has seen applications for degrees soar by around a third this year.
Prof Crossick said ministers would have to allow more private universities to receive state-funded students to accommodate the growing numbers of young people seeking to complete alternative degree courses.
More on the Higher Education Price Bubble and Failure of Reforms at K-12
“New Houses were built in every direction; an illusory prosperity shone over the land, and so dazzled the eyes of the whole nation, that none could see the dark cloud on the horizon announcing the storm that was too rapidly approaching.” -- Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
It wasn’t that long ago that I was having lunch with the father of a friend at Mory’s, the venerable dining club at Yale, and he said to me: “Do you realize, Roger, that tuition at Yale next year will be $10,000? Ten-thousand dollars.” We paused for a moment over the Golden Buck to savor this enormous sum.
Ten-thousand dollars per annum was indeed a tidy sum. It is still is. But if you hope to join the Whiffenpoofs next year, it’s going to cost someone at least $52,900.
Exactly who is going to be presented with that tab depends on a number of factors, some of which I’ll mention in a moment. But first let’s step back and ask this embarrassing question: Is it worth it?
Is four years at Yale (or Harvard, Princeton, or any other “competitive” college) worth $53,000 x 4 plus annual tuition increases for a grand total (assuming you are entering right now) of roughly a quarter of a million dollars?
This is a question that, to the consternation of academic administrators, more and more parents — not to mention responsible teenagers — are asking themselves.
I took my epigraph from Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, a remorseless anatomy of financial “bubbles” from the Mississippi Scheme and South Sea Bubble to Tulipomania in 17th-century Holland and beyond. “At last, . . . the more prudent began to see that this folly could not last forever. . . . It was seen that somebody must lose fearfully in the end.”
Glenn Reynolds, a lawyer and genius loci of the Instapundit blog, has for many months been been cataloguing signs of the higher education bubble. Writing recently in the Washington Examiner, Reynolds explained the process:
“The buyers think what they’re buying will appreciate in value, making them rich in the future. The product grows more and more elaborate, and more and more expensive, but the expense is offset by cheap credit provided by sellers eager to encourage buyers to buy.
Buyers see that everyone else is taking on mounds of debt, and so are more comfortable when they do so themselves; besides, for a generation, the value of what they’re buying has gone up steadily. What could go wrong? Everything continues smoothly until, at some point, it doesn’t.”
Have we reached that point in higher education? Over at Instapundit, Reynolds recently linked to an illuminating article at “TaxProf Blog” which includes this illuminating chart comparing the rise in housing prices with college tuition since 1978.
Paul Caron, the TaxProf himself, observes that “the housing bubble resulted from about a 4-time increase in home prices between 1978 and 2006, and college tuition has now increased by more than twice that amount since 1978 — it’s gone up by more than a factor of ten times.” Bottom line? “The college tuition bubble makes the housing price bubble seem pretty lame by comparison.”
We all know what happened — what is still happening — with the housing bubble. Must we fear — rather, may we hope — that the same thing will happen in higher education? “Bubbles burst,” Reynolds observes, “when people catch on, and there’s some evidence that people are beginning to catch on.” He tells the story of the poor — and “poor” is the mot juste — girl who graduated from some name school with a degree in Women’s Studies and Religious Studies and debt of $100,000. That’s about 3 times her current annual income. Her monthly payments for student loans are nearly a third of her take-home pay. Has she caught on?
The sad answer is, probably not. For one thing, anyone who majors in “Women’s Studies” — the pseudo-discipline to end all pseudo-disciplines — may be presumed to be securely insulated from reality.
Nevertheless, Reynolds is right: there are many signs that the natives are restless. There has been a flurry of interest in alternative, internet-based “universities” — I’ve been approached about participating in one such venture myself. Some of these are free, others charge a small fraction of what traditional colleges charge. There is widespread, if still largely anecdotal, evidence that parents and alumni are increasingly disenchanted with the sort of education on offer at most institutions. As I wrote in a piece for The New Criterion a few years ago,
“Many parents are alarmed, rightly so, at the spectacle of their children going off to college one year and coming back the next having jettisoned every moral, religious, social, and political scruple that they had been brought up to believe. Why should parents fund the moral de-civilization of their children at the hands of tenured antinomians? Why should alumni generously support an alma mater whose political and educational principles nourish a world view that is not simply different from but diametrically opposed to the one they endorse? Why should trustees preside over an institution whose faculty systematically repudiates the pedagogical mission they, as trustees, have committed themselves to uphold?”
Just imagine the sorts of sub-literate, ideologically charged nonsense that Women’s Studies debtor was battened on in her classes! The Australian philosopher David Stove, commenting on the Faculty of Arts at Sydney University, formulated a diagnosis that applies to the teaching of the humanities of most Western universities: It is, Stove wrote, a “disaster-area, and not of the merely passive kind, like a bombed building, or an area that has been flooded. It is the active kind, like a badly-leaking nuclear reactor, or an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in cattle.”
There are incipient signs that a Great Recoiling from this intellectual disaster is beginning to form. It will be greatly aided by the economic disaster in which the institutional life of universities is embedded. “Why,” hard-working parents will ask themselves, “does it cost more than $50,000 a year to send Johnny to college.” Leave aside the question of what it is that Johnny is and isn’t learning in those ivy-covered walls. Why does his four-year furlough from the real world cost so much? One reason, of course, is that Johnny, assuming his parents are paying full freight, is paying not only for his own tuition: he is also helping to foot the bill for Ahmed, Juan, and Harriet down the hall. Colleges routinely boast about their generous financial aid packages, how they provide assistance for some large percentage of students, etc. What they don’t mention is the fact that parents who scrimp and save to come up with the tuition are in effect subsidizing the others. How do you suppose Johnny’s parents feel about that?
There are many other aspects to the Higher Education Bubble. Charles Murray touched on some of them in his devastating critique of “educational romanticism” in The New Criterion and in his book Real Education. Too many people go to college; Garrison Keillor has it wrong: half of all children are below average; we need more and better vocational schools, on the one hand, and colleges that cater to the academically gifted, on the other.
I’ve cast a skeptical eye on the educational establishment at least since the first edition of my book Tenured Radicals was published twenty years ago (pick up the new, third edition here). I long ago sadly concluded that revulsion at the intellectual and moral depravity of higher education would never be sufficient to bring about radical change. Combined with the vivid impetus of economic panic, however, the bubble may just inflate so suddenly that, at long last, it bursts. As summer ends and we prepare to send the children back to school, I find it a gratifying daydream with which to conjure.
Racist attack on white boy by Muslim gang at British school
Every playground tiff should be investigated for elements of racism, a report has recommended. The warning follows a hammer attack by an Asian [Pakistani] gang on a 15-year-old white boy on his school’s tennis courts which left the victim with brain damage. Henry Webster’s skull was fractured when he was punched, kicked and hit with a claw hammer by a group calling themselves the Asian Invaders. They left him for dead.
A serious case review of events surrounding the attack found that his school had failed to tackle escalating racial tensions between Asian and white teenagers – even after a riot on the playing fields. It warned that schools should record the ethnicity of bullies and victims and act if a pattern of racism arises, including liaising more closely with police.
According to the review, Ridgeway School in Wroughton, Wiltshire, did not prepare for the arrival of a ‘significant number’ of British Asian students in September 2005 – less than two months after the 7/7 Tube and bus bombings in London. Some problems between white and British Asian pupils were not recognised as racist by the school, near Swindon.
Henry had agreed to fight ‘one on one’ with an Asian boy to end the harassment he thought he and his friends were experiencing. But he was ambushed by a group of youths and young men in January 2007.
The attack led to the 2008 conviction of seven young men for wounding Henry with intent to cause him grievous bodily harm.Six more were convicted of conspiracy.
Henry, now 18, still suffers short-term memory loss. He had accused the school of failing to discipline Asian pupils who abused or intimidated their white classmates.
Last year, his family launched a High Court challenge claiming the school had been negligent, failed to maintain proper discipline or deal with racial tension. The school denied liability. But in February, Mr Justice Nicol rejected their claims and said the school did not breach its duty to take reasonable care to keep Henry reasonably safe while on its premises.
Following his ruling, the Swindon Local Safeguarding Children Board commissioned a serious case review. It found that not only should playground bullying be monitored for racism, but schools should also appoint ‘different race’ mentors for new pupils to help them settle in.
And teachers should consult parents about whether their approaches to religious and cultural requirements are ‘continuously appropriate’.
But Henry’s mother, Liz, 47, said the review confirmed her belief that his school was responsible for the assault. She criticised the report as a ‘whitewash’. ‘Whilst Henry has been the primary victim, we are – and always have been – of the firm belief that this school also let down the young Asian pupils who were eventually prosecuted. They have been criminalised and demonised.
‘Had their integration been properly handled we are certain this attack would not have happened. All anybody needed to do was simple community work – to get the Asian kids playing football with the white kids, or any kind of integration. Let’s hope every teacher in this country examines why this happened.’
The school said: ‘We have noted the recommendations and we always look to improve our practice and will continue to ensure our community which remained incredibly strong after the incident, continues to do so.’
Guidance recommends schools report all bullying. Schools nationwide will not be forced to adopt the 32 recommendations from the Swindon LSCB.
Selective classes based on ability are best for dim kids too
Says Harry Mount. I am not sure what he thinks the end result for the dim ones should be however. Should they spend more years at school or be satisfied to finish school without any qualifications or skills? -- JR
Normally, I rate Frank Field for his unsentimental attitude to the problems of the welfare state and the education system. This time, though, I fundamentally disagree with him. Field is suggesting that children who fail exams should be kept back, to repeat the school year until they pass them.
I’m all for being tough on children, but this one just won’t work. Some of them are so stupid that they’ll never catch up with their peers; and so they’ll be consigned to a strange, sad future – like something out of a Roald Dahl short story, where they keep on ageing while younger and younger children join them every new school year.
However stupid, or clever, you are, it’s vital to be educated alongside people who are your age. At my school, you could be “accelerated” by a year if you passed an exam in your first term. It was fine, academically speaking – the bright children did better than the dimmer ones, despite being a year younger. But what was the point of throwing us together with children who were a year older – a big difference in your teenage years. The gap in sophistication immediately threw up communication barriers, particularly with girls who were only a year older but seemed like they’d been sent from the adult world to terrify us callow boys.
The answer is the obvious one, the one that state schools still shy away from: a combination of selection on entry and streaming. Dim children may fail their exams but they will be kept among their contemporaries and won’t feel the inadequacy of being left behind. Bright children can flourish, unashamed to work hard, spurring each other on to better intellectual performance.
Throw in good teachers and you have all you need for an excellent education. Surely wise Frank Field can see the sense in this?
The article below is a bit on the paranoid side but there is some truth in it -- JR
An article at the privacy rights website Pogo Was Right (“U.S. Schools: Grooming Students for a Surveillance State,” August 28) argues that schools are “grooming youth to passively accept a surveillance state where they have no expectation of privacy anywhere.” Privacy violations include “surveilling students in their bedrooms via webcam … random drug or locker searches, strip-searching … lowering the standard for searching students to ‘reasonable suspicion’ from ‘probable cause,’ [and] disciplining students for conduct outside of school hours …”
“No expectation of privacy anywhere” is becoming literally true. The schools are grooming kids not only for the public surveillance state, but also for the private surveillance states of their employers. By the time the human resources graduate from twelve years of factory processing, they will accept it as normal to be kept under constant surveillance — “for your own safety,” of course — by authority figures. But they won’t just accept it from Homeland Security (“if you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear”). They’ll also accept as “normal” a work situation in which an employer can make them pee in cups at any time, without notice, or track their online behavior even when they’re away from work.
This is just part of what rogue educator John Taylor Gatto calls the “real curriculum” of public education (“The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher,” 1992). The real curriculum includes the lesson that the way to advancement, in any area of life, is to find out what will please the authority figure behind the desk, then do it. It includes the lesson that the important tasks in life are those assigned to us by authority figures — the schoolteacher, the college instructor, the boss — and that self-assigned tasks in pursuit of our own goals are to be trivialized as “hobbies” or “recreation.”
“Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. … Good people wait for an expert to tell them what to do. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned.”
Or as Ivan Illich put it in “Deschooling Society,” learning is a commodity properly dispensed by qualified professionals in bureaucratic institutions called “schools.”
The real curriculum includes the lesson that everything we say or do will go on a “permanent record,” which — if we display insufficient deference to authority today — will follow us like the mark of Cain for the rest of our lives and cause us to be blacklisted from opportunities for advancement by the authority figures we encounter in the future.
The public schools teach the lesson that tasks do not carry their own internal logic or rhythm. People are not more productive when they can organize their own time around the tasks they’re performing, and pursue the task without interruption until they reach a natural stopping place. Rather, the work day is most efficiently broken up into time blocks of an hour or so, punctuated by meetings and interruptions. This carries with it the lesson of indifference:
“I teach children not to care about anything too much, even though they want to make it appear that they do. … I do it by demanding that they become totally involved in my lessons. … But when the bell rings I insist that they stop whatever it is that we’ve been working on and proceed quickly to the next work station. They must turn on and off like a light switch. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of. … Indeed, the lesson of the bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world that can no longer offer important work to do.”
In short, the public schools are charged with the task of producing human resources who are docile, obedient and compliant, ready to be used as inputs by the dominant institutions in our society. Their purpose is to condition human beings to the kinds of behavior that the major centers of power in our society require to function.
The good news is, they’re not very good at it. The quality control department wasn’t working too well in my case, obviously. The people tasked with churning out uncritical and obedient human resources, in most cases, are about as competent as the people running all the other large bureaucratic hierarchies — i.e., not very. The contradiction between what they tell us and what our own lying eyes tell us, between what they tell us this week and next week, is enough to produce endless glitches in the Matrix.
Children learn more quickly if the brightest are prevented from putting their hands up
I would have thought some version of this was normal teaching practice anyway. I know that when I was a kid, teachers would call on me only if nobody else knew the answer. I would just smile and the teacher would know that I knew. Not in mathematics, though. That was the one subject that did not come easily to me. Amusing therefore that my son is a mathematician -- JR
Schoolchildren learn more quickly if the brightest and most confident are prevented from putting up their hands, according to a teaching expert. Those who are less willing to answer teachers' questions rapidly switch off when a minority dominate, according to Professor Dylan Wiliam, deputy director of the Institute of Education at London University.
He is pioneering an alternative technique in which all children in a class are made to answer questions, by writing their answers on small white boards they are given. They then reveal their answers simultaneously to the teacher. A variation is to ask all the children to answer a 'yes or no' question posed by a teacher, by holding their thumbs up or down.
Prof Dylan tried out his approach on a class of 13-year-olds at Hertswood school in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire.
He will outline his educational theories in two, one-hour BBC2 programmes to be aired later this month, called The Classroom Experiment. He told The Sunday Times that the children and teachers "hated it at the beginning".
He said: "The kids who were used to having a quiet time were rattled at having to do something; the ones who were used to showing off to the teacher were upset."
Prof Dylan also advocates not telling children their marks, but only what they got right and wrong, and holding physical education classes at the start of every day "to get the blood flowing".
Cambridge has been named the best university in the world in an international league table. The ancient institution has become the first British university to top the QS World University Rankings which measure research quality, graduate employment and teaching standards.
It was named above Harvard as the American institution was removed from the number one spot for the first time since the league table was published in 2004.
According to figures, four British universities, including University College London, Oxford and Imperial College London, appear in the top 10 and 19 are in the top 100. Only the United States had more top-ranked universities than Britain.
John O’ Leary, executive member of the table’s advisory board, said: “UK universities have had an exceptionally good year. Not only does Cambridge top the ranking for the first time, but there are more UK institutions than ever before in the top 100 and 200.”
For the second year running, UCL was named above Oxford in the league table.
The rankings are created following a survey of 13,000 academics and 5,000 employers. They are also based on the number of international students at each university, faculty sizes and the number of research citations.
A separate university league table – created by Times Higher Education magazine – is released later this month
Flush With Union Cash, DC Mayoral Candidate Vincent Gray Looks to Roll Back DC School Reform
The fight for the Democratic mayoral nominee in Washington DC encapsulates the national struggle for education reform. On one side you have Mayor Adrian Fenty and his appointed School Chancellor Michelle Rhee, true reformers who took on the teachers unions in hopes of improving DC’s schools.
On the other side you have Fenty’s primary opponent, Vincent Gray. Gray is your typical big city politician. He ran a dirty campaign that mischaracterized and demonized Fenty’s term, he’s owned by special interest groups (see teachers unions), and will only pay lip service to reform, something DC desperately needs.
For decades, Washington DC’s public schools were the laughingstock of the country, consistently ranking near the bottom in every education metric. Fed-up with the status quo, Fenty appointed Michelle Rhee as Chancellor of Washington’s schools giving her free rein to battle the self-serving teachers unions and implement reforms she deemed essential. So, did it work? How does DC’s education system compare to other cities, now?
A new study by AEI’s Rick Hess examines “which of thirty major U.S. cities have cultivated a healthy environment for school reform to flourish.” Hess found that DC’s education environment now ranks second in a study of major US cities, largely due to Mayor Fenty and Michelle Rhee’s reforms.
Reform is painful; Fenty bruised some egos in the process making a lot of powerful enemies. Hess writes, “Survey respondents report that Mayor Adrian Fenty is the only municipal leader willing to expend extensive political capital to advance education reform.”
Gray has capitalized on union antipathy towards Fenty and formed alliances with DC’s biggest labor unions, receiving endorsements from:
AFSCME, AFGE, AFL-CIO Washington Labor Council, Carpenter's Union, Fraternal Order of Police, Fraternal Order of Police-Department of Corrections, Fraternal Order of Police District of Columbia Lodge #1, Firefighters Local 36, Gertrude Stein Club, , National Association of Government Employees, National Association of Social Workers, Nurses Union, Teamsters Local Union 639, Teamsters Local 689.”
No wonder Fenty is trailing in the polls, all of DC’s power players have united against the mayor. Most depressing is that Michelle Rhee announced she would leave if Gray is elected; their views are incompatible--Rhee is focused on giving DC’s poorest students chance to succeed, Gray is concerned with protecting teachers unions.
Carried across the finish line by union money, Gray’s election could well nullify the education gains Fenty and Rhee made over the past three years--the last thing DC needs.
British exams to be brought in line with world's toughest tests
Wake me up when it happens -- JR
Examinations will be toughened up to meet standards set in other countries such as Singapore, South Korea and China, according to the Coalition. Ofqual, the exams regulator, will be ordered to gather test papers from some of the world’s most respected education systems and benchmark domestic qualifications against them.
It is likely to lead to a dramatic rise in the standards teenagers will be expected to meet to gain good grades in A-levels and GCSEs.
The announcement comes amid fears that exams are becoming too easy and failing to keep pace with those in other countries. This summer almost three-in-10 A-levels were graded at least an A and the number of Cs awarded at GCSE increased for the 22nd year in a row.
Speaking on Monday, Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, said action would be taken to “restore confidence” to the examinations system. This includes an overhaul of Ofqual, the watchdog established by Labour to vet standards in school and college tests. It comes just weeks after the regulator admitted that this year’s GCSE science papers were too easy.
Mr Gove said: “Last month the exams regulator Ofqual acknowledged that the GCSE science exams were not set at a high enough standard. I’ve been saying this for years. “But the previous Government chose to ignore my warnings and they defended a status quo that was in their interest but was actively damaging the education of hundreds of thousands of children a year."
He said the creation of a “more assertive” qualifications regulator, with the power to order exam boards to toughen up their tests, was “critical to restoring confidence in our exams system”. “We will legislate to strengthen Ofqual and give a new regulator the powers they need to enforce rigorous standard," he said.
“We will ask Ofqual to report on how our exams compare with those in other countries so we can measure the questions our 11, 16 and 18 year olds sit against those sat by their contemporaries in India, China, Singapore, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
“Our young people will increasingly be competing for jobs and university places on a global level and we can’t afford to have our young people sitting exams which aren’t competitive with the world’s best.”
The move forms part of a sweeping overhaul of the exams system. As revealed yesterday, the Coalition will also introduce a school leaving certificate to tackle a decline in the number of pupils studying subjects such as languages and science in secondary schools.
An English Baccalaureate will be awarded to pupils who gain five A* to C grade GCSEs in English, maths, a science, a foreign language and one humanities subject. At the same time, panels of academics, exam boards and learned societies will be asked to script A-level syllabuses and test papers to restore rigour to the education system.
There is nothing wrong with exercise and kids run around naturally if allowed -- which they often are not in schools today -- but trying to dictate to parents and take over the parental role sounds a bit too much like the Hitler Youth to me
VICTORIAN primary school students are standing up in class for half an hour a day in a radical plan to beat childhood obesity. And they're having "activity breaks" to get them moving between classes.
Students are also set homework tasks such as going for a walk with mum and dad, and are being urged to reduce their time in front of the TV.
The pilot plan, involving 30 grade 3 classes from state schools, gives some students tokens that will restrict their TV viewing. If they go beyond their allocated time, the TV automatically turns off.
The Transform-Us! program, involving 750 students aged eight and nine, started four weeks ago and is being run by the Education Department and Deakin University.
Behavioural scientist Professor Jo Salmon from the university said the goal was not just to get kids moving more at school, but at home as well. This means parents are given information about healthy living such as the location of local walking trails and sports tracks, and encouragement to help restrict TV and computer use at home. "It's not about being a TV Nazi, but resetting and changing some habits such as kids watching whatever is on TV rather than actively choosing programs they want to watch," Prof Salmon said.
Children are given four 30-minute TV tokens each day and if they attempt to watch more, the TV turns off using smart card technology.
It comes as a Victorian Parliament committee is investigating the role schools can play in helping children lead healthier lives.
Prof Salmon said the school-based program, involving standing-up lessons, "was not about kids running amok in class, but getting them moving instead of sitting during the day". "We're not taking away the three Rs and making kids do more PE. We are modifying academic lessons to get them moving more," she said. "Sitting all day long isn't normal for kids. "If you stand rather than sit, there's evidence your brain works better and evidence that kids have better short-term recall of lessons."
Prof Salmon said teachers had been "very supportive and enthusiastic" but the response from parents had been "varied".
Gail McHardy, executive officer of Parents Victoria, said schools needed a balance between activity and academic study. "The focus always seems to be on sedentary kids, but a lot of kids are very active, and sometimes parents worry their kids do too much activity, not too little," she said. "We have to be realistic about what teachers can achieve."
Angela Conway, policy consultant from Pro-family Perspectives, said she liked the idea of kids standing in some classes. But she warned that schools should not encroach too much on family time. "It's good to educate and encourage, but schools should not prescribe what families do in private," she said.
The L.A. Times has been publishing a great series about how the city's schools have been dropping the ball on education. Specifically, the Times points out that the L.A. schools district has had at its disposal stats that could have helped it to engineer a better education policy for its students but has ignored these stats. Why have they ignored these stats? Fear of unions.
The Times has a database of the effectiveness of nearly 6,000 L.A. area teachers. These findings, the Times informs us, were based on a method called "value-added analysis. It is a method that is beginning to be used to rank teachers and help administrators design a more effective education for kids all across the country.
The Times also says that the L.A. school administrators had this info all along and never used it. Why would that be? (my bold below)
L.A. Unified has had the underlying data for years but has chosen not to analyze it in this way, partly in anticipation of union opposition. After The Times' initial report this month showed wide disparities among elementary school teachers, even in the same schools, the district moved to use value-added analysis to guide teacher training and began discussions with the teachers union about incorporating data on student progress into teacher evaluations.
That's right, fear of the recalcitrant unions that are more interested in making sure that teachers are unaccountable and cannot be questioned. Unions that are more interested in fat pensions and rich benefits and are less interested in the education of our kids.
It just goes to show that the ideals of former teacher union bigwig Albert Shanker are still ruling the roost in our system of mis-education. In 1985 Shanker said:
"When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children." -- Albert Shanker, former president American Federation of Teachers
And now our school systems and administrators are cowering in the face of teachers unions instead of sticking up for our children.
Chicago district thinks that quantity will substitute for quality
In an effort to extend what is one of the nation's shortest school days, Chicago Public Schools plans to add 90 minutes to the schedules of 15 elementary schools using online courses and nonteachers, sources said.
By employing nonteachers at a minimal cost to oversee the students, the district can save money and get around the teachers' contract, which limits the length of the school day. Mayor Richard Daley has scheduled an announcement about the "Additional Learning Opportunities" pilot program at Walsh Elementary School in the Pilsen neighborhood. School officials declined to comment on the initiative.
The program's cost is expected to exceed $10 million, the majority of which will be spent on capital improvements like technological infrastructure, wiring and broadband, a source said. Five schools will begin the program this fall, and another 10 are expected to begin in the second semester. If the program proves successful, it could be expanded to all schools, a source said.
The extra time will be tacked on to the end of the school day. The block will be divided between math and reading, with a short break for a snack and recess, a source said. Much of the cost of the program will be covered by federal economic stimulus money, a source said.
The initiative is unpopular with leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union, who view the effort as a way to undermine their contract with the city schools. Because mostly nonteachers will be used to staff the initiative, the district will not have to pay union wages. Many of those who will oversee the classrooms will likely be either after-school providers or community partners.
"I'm not against anything that helps children," said Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union. "If this is more drill and kill (testing,) then I am totally against it.
"But if it's a way to keep schools open longer and engage parents and the community, I am for it," Lewis added. "I just want to make sure that (kids) are engaged and excited and they're enjoying learning."
The district already has a stable of online initiatives, including high school credit recovery programs and summer school courses to help students advance. More than 4,000 students gained credits through online summer school, officials have said.
But the new initiative is the product of a separate online pilot program the district launched last year, which provided online math courses to certain elementary school students. In those schools, students were encouraged — but not required — to attend extended school hours. District officials say math scores increased dramatically as a result of the online classes.
Nationally, online learning is a white-hot education trend. More than a million students engaged in online learning in the 2008 school year, an almost 50 percent increase over 2006, according to the Sloan Consortium, a group of organizations that support online education.
While there is limited research regarding the effectiveness of online schools, what is out there is largely positive. In some cases, research has shown that online learning can be better than face-to-face instruction.
British bureaucrats oppose crackdown on "Mickey Mouse" degrees
Civil servants who allocate billions of pounds to university teaching are secretly opposing moves which would ban spending on “Mickey Mouse” degree courses.
A far cry from the conventional humanities and sciences, a modern university education can involve studying subjects like pop music, puppetry, or the unorthodox combination of "waste management with dance".
An analysis of courses available through the university clearing system has disclosed that while most traditional courses are now full up, there are empty places in scores of "eccentric" degree courses. Education experts said it was unfortunate that such courses appeared to be proliferating at a time when school-leavers with good grades could not get places in core academic subjects.
The Sunday Telegraph has learned that officials who allocate billions of pounds to university teaching are secretly opposing moves which would allow spending on such courses to be cut back.
Civil servants at the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) want to avoid a debate over whether to change laws which currently prohibit ministers from instructing them to award money for "particular courses of study".
When approached by this newspaper with questions about unconventional degree courses, the agency accidentally released copies of internal emails which had been exchanged between its officials as they discussed how to respond to the questions.
An email from Toby West-Taylor, the agency's head of funding, which was intended only for colleagues, said: "The risk in highlighting this to a journalist at a time when a new HE [higher education] Bill could be on the horizon, is that it might prompt a lobby for there to be change to such sound legislation."
The funding agency even referred to the questionable degree subjects in a derogative way, with one of the accidentally-released emails carrying the subject heading "Response to The Sunday Telegraph on Mickey Mouse courses." This newspaper did not use that phrase when posing the questions.
Following the revelations, David Willetts, the universities minister, predicted the end of "odd" courses as students face up to the new economic climate.
The clearing system, by which candidates who failed to get into their chosen university or college try and get places on other undersubscribed courses, began more than a fortnight ago. Yet despite record demand for places at top universities, hundreds of places are still available in less well known higher education institutions, many of them offering unconventional courses.
Northampton University initially had 250 places available through the clearing system, including such courses as Third World Development with Pop Music, Dance with Equine Studies and joint honours in Waste Management and Dance.
The clearing web-site also invites school-leavers to consider a Tournament Golf foundation degree at Duchy College in Camborne, Cornwall. The two-year course offers students the chance to "improve your tournament golf skills", and its admissions requirements indicate: "No handicap is definitive but the guide parameters are +5 to 3."
A spokeswoman for the college said: "The innovative programme gives young talented golfers the opportunity to chase their dreams whilst having the safety net of a UK university qualification to fall back on."
Glyndwr University, in Wrexham, still had 15 places available on its BSc (Hons) in Equestrian Psychology, which "investigates the unique partnership between horse and rider".
Subjects which were on offer through clearing at the start of last week, but which filled up during the week, included a degree course in Australian Studies, a joint honours degree in Criminology and Pop Music Production, and another combining Geology and Popular Culture.
Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said: "It seems that many universities are going for the lowest common denominator just to get bums on seats and maximise their funding. "It seems crazy that youngsters are getting good grades in serious subjects at A-level and then being denied places, while these sort of courses are proliferating." He added: "The Secretary of State is the person democratically responsible and should be able to change things if necessary, and the law should be changed to allow him to do that."
Unprecedented demand for university and college degrees this year has left an estimated 150,000 students without a place.
Mr Willetts said: "In tough times I suspect some of these more eccentric courses, which date from the excesses of the dying days of the Labour government, will disappear because students see they are not a route into a well-paid career. "Some of them sound like very odd courses indeed.
"I think the way forward is providing students with better information about the employment outcomes from individual course at individual universities."
Farnborough College of Technology still had places available last week on its two-year foundation degree in Holistic Therapies. But if applicants find that course to be full they could turn to Warwickshire College which is offering Beauty Therapies Management, Hairdressing Management and Spa Management courses.
Writtle College in Chelmsford, Essex, offers a foundation degree in Professional Floristry which covers the "practical and theoretical aspects of floral design". There is still one place available on a three-year degree in Theatre Practice: Puppetry at London's Central School of Speech and Drama.
Jessica Bowles, the course tutor, said: "The major leads in War Horse [the successful West End play] are all from Central's Puppetry course. This leads to very concrete career opportunities."
A spokesman for the HEFCE, which allocates £4.6 billion a year for university teaching and £1.6 billion for research, said: "Universities have the discretion to spend the money according to their own priorities. "We don't stipulate which subjects universities should teach and which they should not teach. That is a matter for them. They have to make their own decisions on their own mission and their own goals."
Although the HEFCE has introduced priority funding for subjects such as sciences and modern languages, the freedom granted to universities meant that less-conventional degrees still receive funding even at a time of budget cutbacks.
When Northampton's Dance with Equine Studies was pointed out to the funding council spokesman, he said: "You are talking about some pretty out-lying courses. "They are regulated through the Quality Assurance Agency and what we can do is try to steer the sector into offering subjects that employers might value more than others.
"We do not count unfilled places in our funding allocations. If institutions cannot fill places in clearing they have the flexibility to provide additional places on other courses provided they keep within the funding agreements with us."
Asked about the use of the "Mickey Mouse" phrase, the HEFCE spokesman said: "Our use of 'Mickey Mouse' is pretty indefensible. I think the use of that phrase was a mistake, but it's a fair cop."
The bad news is, Tennessee's lottery scholarship program is losing tens of millions of dollars a year. The good news is, at least it's not losing hundreds of millions of dollars, as originally feared.
Even so, the state is preparing for painful cutbacks in the popular merit-based college scholarship program, which offsets the cost of tuition at Tennessee colleges and universities for an estimated 100,000 students a year.
Tennessee college tuition goes up every year, and the prospect of losing any part of the lottery scholarship alarms parents such as Kim Lewis, a Nashville mother of three whose 15-year-old twins are rapidly approaching college age.
"The HOPE scholarship is the only thing that keeps us from tearing our hair out," joked Lewis, who doesn't even like to think about what happens when her 12-year-old also enters college and she and her husband will be putting three kids through school at once.
"Tell them not to touch the HOPE," she said, passing her marching orders along to the legislature. "Tell them to cut something else, but families really rely on that tuition money being there."
The cost of the lottery scholarship programs has tripled since it launched in 2004 as a pilot program only for college freshmen and sophomores. The program expenditures reached almost $302 million this year and could jump by $8 million next year.
For Belmont junior Nick Kirk, the HOPE scholarship has meant the difference between living on campus and commuting an hour each way from his home in Fairview. HOPE scholarships cover about 62 percent of tuition for students at public universities and about 20 percent of the tuition at the average private college in Tennessee. For Kirk, the scholarship offsets the steep cost of room, board and college fees.
"It was definitely worth the hard work in high school to earn the HOPE scholarship," said Kirk, a biology major with a dual minor in chemistry and music. "You don't realize how expensive things are going to be. The HOPE is definitely a good thing."
AdvancED, a national and international education accreditation organization, plans to send a team to Wake County this fall to review planned changes to the public school system's student assignment policy.
The group sent a letter to Wake County Public School System Interim Superintendent Donna Hargens on July 28 outlining concerns and questions raised in a complaint filed in March.
School system spokesman Michael Evans said the original complaint was filed by Rev. William Barber, president of the state chapter of the NAACP.
Barber has been the leader of a vocal opposition to the school board's decision earlier this year to do away with a policy that assigns students to schools based on socio-economics.
He and others fear that ending the longstanding policy in favor for one that places students in schools closer to their homes will lead to re-segregation, high teacher turnover and poor students receiving a lower quality of education than their economically advantaged counterparts.
Five of the school board's nine members disagree and believe the move will help improve test scores and give parents more chances to be involved in their students' education.
In other words, since we can't stop you from undoing all the crap we did over the years, then we are going to try and bully you into stepping back.
Look, we the people have spoken and we want real solutions not more spreading of the disease. We wanted and voted in a school board that will do just that. The new head of the board stated that they will continue to proceed on the new policy regardless of the ongoing disruptions and protests.
British children let down by failing schools, says CBI
Thousands of teenagers are still being “let down” by failing schools despite record investment in education under Labour, according to business leaders. In a damning final judgment on the previous government’s education record, employers said a 120 per cent rise in the amount of money spent on schools had “not delivered the returns” needed to drive the British economy.
The Confederation of British Industry warned that serious concerns still surrounded school leavers’ lack of literacy and numeracy skills combined with the relatively low number of teenagers studying vital science and maths subjects to a high standard.
Too many teenagers also entered the workplace lacking basic employability skills, such as the ability to analyse evidence, communicate with colleagues and solve problems, it claimed.
The conclusions were made in a report published to coincide with the start of the first full school year under the new Conservative-led Government.
The CBI, which represents some 240,000 British businesses, praised the Coalition’s reforms, including the expansion of independent academies, but insisted “much more” was needed to improve the education system.
It called for ministers to allow profit-making companies to take over the running of the worst schools to turnaround chronic under-performance.
New rules should also be introduced to teach a broad set of employability skills as well as encouraging the best students to take separate GCSEs in biology, chemistry and physics, it said.
Susan Anderson, CBI director of public services and education, said progress had been made over the last 13 years but “significant challenges remain”. “Too many school leavers leave education without the skills, knowledge and attitude to work [that] employers are looking for,” she said. “And too many of these young people are being let down by persistent underperformance of the education system through attending failing or coasting schools. “The link between a disadvantaged background and poor educational achievement remains too clear.”
The report said Government spending on education had more than doubled to £60 billion a year between 1996 and 2008, delivering better GCSE results and a drop in the number of schools placed in special measures by Ofsted.
This summer, almost a quarter of GCSE entries were graded an A in the 22nd straight year-on-year rise, while A-level results also soared to a record high. But the CBI said that looking “past the headline GCSE and A-level results” revealed a “more complex and concerning picture of the UK’s education system”. It said half of all 16-year-olds failed to gain at least five good GCSEs, including English and maths, last year.
Almost 250 secondary schools failed to hit the basic GCSE targets designed to ensure 30 per cent of pupils gain five A* to C grades in 2009, it said, and the UK has the third highest number of 16- to 24-year-olds not in education, employment or training in the developed world.
The CBI also said that many children lacked skills such as self-management, customer awareness, problem solving and basic communication, suggesting that schools prioritised the regurgitation of “facts” over the application of knowledge. "The decade of spending on education has not delivered the returns expected or needed,” said the study. “Neither has it delivered significant change in the systems and structures which might drive future improvement."
Back in the classroom after a year-long sabbatical, I’m realizing how much I missed the direct interaction with students. For me, nothing compares to those moments when the light of understanding comes on in my students or when they face a challenge to things long taken for granted. Their faces almost proclaim that they are seeing the world in a fundamentally different way. One of the most powerful ways we can elicit those reactions — and call into question the largely statist worldview they bring to college — is to challenge what they think they know about history. There may be no more important thing for classical liberals to do than to offer counter-narratives to standard historical stories.
I’m doing this in two different classes this semester. The more historical of the two is a senior seminar on the Great Depression, which I’m teaching for the second time. (The syllabus is here). We started the class last week by walking through what I like to call the “High School History” version of the Great Depression. This is the version in which laissez-faire capitalism caused the stock market crash and Herbert Hoover stood around doing nothing (committed lover of laissez-faire that he was), allowing the crash to become a depression. Of course this version also tells us that FDR and the New Deal saved us from utter chaos and that our entry into World War II finally pulled us out of the Depression.
The students nod quietly as I repeat this narrative, only to look a little shocked when I then say, “Every piece of that story is wrong and we’re going to explore why over the course of the semester.”
In the world of liberal arts we like to talk about throwing students out of their comfort zones. That feeling of disequilibrium is the first step toward learning. And it’s one of the most powerful moments one can have in the classroom. But it’s also crucial for helping anyone, not just students, understand the classical-liberal framework.
Understanding the Present
Getting a better understanding of the history, especially of major events like the Great Depression, is so important because historical narratives and interpretations fuel our understanding of current events and how to respond to them. Just think of the ways in which the High School History version of the Great Depression has informed the national discussion of the current recession. If one really believes that story, it’s a small step to applying the same narrative to today’s situation and to believing that capitalism failed and more government is the answer.
The other course is comparative economics. We started by talking about how the West grew rich (and reading Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdzell’s wonderful book by that name). In the opening chapter, Rosenberg and Birdzell offer nine different commonly believed reasons the West grew rich, including three that are staples of the contemporary college curriculum: exploitation, colonialism/imperialism, and slavery.
My students who have studied First-Third World relationships in other courses nod their heads quietly until I start to explore the counterevidence Rosenberg and Birdzell offer. It’s hard to argue exploitation, they point out, when the real wages of labor have steadily risen over the last 200 years and capitalists have more or less willingly paid them. As for the other two, they offer examples of western countries that were colonial powers but did not get rich and other countries that had no colonies but did get rich. As for slavery, they make the same point: Some slave societies did not get rich, and some rich countries did not have slaves. The bottom line of their first chapter is that none of these “standard” explanations seem reliable. They argue instead that it was the unique institutions of the West (private property, limited government, freedom of thought and exchange) that generated our prosperity.
This unmasking of history is not just powerful in the college classroom; it should be one of the key ways we classical liberals make our arguments and try to persuade anyone of our views. Arguing theory is fine, but many who disagree with us often trot out historical examples they believe undermine the theory. Those examples are usually wrong, but to show it, classical liberals must have a good command of history and be prepared to offer a different narrative of the event in question. I submit that at the bottom of most disagreements with classical liberalism lies a bad reading of history.
If we want to change people’s minds, we’re going to have to start by challenging their reading of history. Learning that history is among the most important things classical liberals can do.
Scary news from California's Contra Costa County — school officials there have reportedly decided to track some preschoolers with RFID chips, thanks to a federal grant supplying the funding.
According to a story from the Associated Press, the students will wear a jersey at school that has the RFID tag attached. The tag will track the children's movements and collect other data, like if the child has eaten or not. According to a Contra Costa County official, this is a cost-savings move, as teachers used to have to manually keep track of a child's attendance and meal schedule.
But of course, an RFID chip allows for far more than that minimal record-keeping. Instead, it provides the potential for nearly constant monitoring of a child's physical location. If readings are taken often enough, you could create an extraordinarily detailed portrait of a child's school day — one that's easy to imagine being misused, particularly as the chips substitute for direct adult monitoring and judgment.
If RFID records show a child moving around a lot, could she be tagged as hyper-active? If he doesn't move around a lot, could he get a reputation for laziness? How long will this data and the conclusions rightly or wrongly drawn from it be stored in these children's school records? Can parents opt-out of this invasive tracking? How many other federal grants are underwriting programs like these?
These are questions that desperately need answers. California is in the middle of a terrible budget crunch, but the solution is not federally funded surveillance of children who are too young to understand the implications.
No room at British schools for many of the 2010 baby boomers
As thousands more are taught in makeshift class rooms
Hundreds of children have no primary school place with term already started as the recent baby boom triggers an admissions crisis. Thousands of other children are having to be taught in makeshift classrooms because of the overspill, which has been further increased by a recession-fuelled exodus from fee-paying private schools.
Councils in many parts of the country, including London and Birmingham, say applications for places are still being received. Yet even some parents who applied in good time have yet to be allocated a school for their child.
Brent, in North West London, for example, has 210 four-year-olds still without a reception class place but only 24 vacancies in schools. The council is preparing to offer places in children's centres if necessary.
Between them, councils including Ealing, Tower Hamlets, Haringey, Merton, Havering, Camden and Hammersmith and Fulham - all in London - as well as Kingston-upon-Thames in Greater London and Birmingham have hundreds of pupils yet to be placed: many of them late applicants.
Meanwhile officials in Newham, South East London, are considering putting four classes in a church hall following a sharp rise in children seeking places this year.
Hundreds of other schools across the country are using temporary prefabricated buildings on their own sites to accommodate additional pupils or are starting to construct permanent new classrooms.
In Hampshire, a school known for its eco-credentials, St Bede's Primary, in Winchester, is seeking to concrete over a pond to accommodate a temporary classroom to cope with soaring pupil numbers. Meanwhile, in Brighton, temporary classrooms are being purchased at a cost of £125,000 each.
In Leicestershire, Lady Jane Grey Primary, in Groby, gained emergency planning consent for a temporary classroom on its site. Head Michael Fitzgerald said: 'The school is facing a very difficult situation - there isn't a spare cupboard in the building.'
Leeds is increasing capacity at 16 primaries from this month while in Bristol, six schools are gaining 22 temporary classrooms. Birmingham is expanding nine schools to create an extra 330 places this month. It will need an additional 3,000 by 2020.
In many areas, schools have agreed to accept 'bulge' classes - an extra reception class which continues through the school. They are meant to be a one-off but some schools have already taken them for two or three years running.
The Coalition has acknowledged the shortage of primary places is now 'critical' and claims the previous Labour government failed to make adequate preparations for the extra pupils despite warnings. More than 1,000 primary schools have closed since 1999 amid accusations some areas have taken a 'short term' view of likely demand.
Education Secretary Michael Gove plans to move cash from frozen secondary school building projects into providing primary places.
But the Mail's survey of local education authorities reveals that many schools need huge sums of money to meet future demand. A spokesman for Kingston warned it would need as much as £70million.
Official figures show the number of babies born in 2006 - and now starting school - was the highest since 1993, with birth rates expected to continue to rise at least until 2018.
Latest projections suggest that primary school pupil numbers will rise by more than 500,000 in just eight years to 4,526,000, reaching their highest level since the 1970s.
The equivalent of more than 2,000 extra primary schools will be needed to cope, at a time of severe public spending cuts.
While classes for children in the first two years of school are limited in law to 30, teaching groups for older primary pupils could balloon as staff are diverted to teach the new influx of pupils.
In the meantime, pupils caught up in the crisis face being taught in overcrowded classes or travelling miles to their nearest school, and being split from siblings.
In Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, mothers had to mount a campaign to win an extra reception class at a popular school after being offered schools up to five miles away.
For profit’s growing market share — market segmentation
In my last rant, I briefly mentioned the for-profit higher education sector’s enrollment growth at the expense of mainstream nonprofit and public education sectors in recent years. The references cited were not public relations’ hype from the for-profit sector’s lobbyists. The sources were the College Board and the National Center for Education Statistics— two of the higher education community’s most reliable objective data sources.
Loss of market share means loss of tuition revenue at time when it has become harder to rely upon federal and state largess. The non-profit establishment’s consternation over market share loss is understandable. Their response is not. The private non-profit and public higher education cabal with its mainstream higher education press allies have been gloating over the ethically suspect recruitment practices revealed by the GAO’s undercover secret shopper investigation. While some of the for-profit sector’s growth may be linked to questionable recruiting practices, this is also true for some of the not-for-profit institutions. The counterproductive character assassination of for-profit colleges in Congress and mainstream higher education press we are now witnessing, only serves to divert public attention from the from the more likely underlying cause of this growing shift in market preference.
The vast majority of the students electing to enroll in for-profit higher education institutions are not the gullible mass of willing victims that the non-profit higher education partisans imply. Rather they are perceptive consumers, who know what they want in educational programs and are willing to pay for the services and conveniences. Too often their needs are unrecognized at nearby public and non-profit privates.
My economist hero, Thomas Sowell has long noted that traditional higher education institutions are managed for the benefit of the administrators and faculty and not the students. Their programs are too often conceived and delivered for the convenience of the provider institution’s employees and not its customers.
College students are no longer that homogeneous cohort of 18 to 22 year olds pursuing their post-secondary education fulltime. The post-secondary market is heterogeneous. For example, data from the 2005 Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE) shows that a student at a U.S. institution of higher education is as likely to be in her 30s, taking care of dependents and working full-time as she is to be 19, in a sorority, getting financial assistance from the parental unit, and taking 15 credit hours a semester. More recent CCSSE report MAKING CONNECTIONS: Dimensions of Student Engagement states, “Most community college students are enrolled part-time. Many students, even full-time students, work nearly full-time. Thus, many community college students take classes at night and online.”
The American ideal of a post-secondary education for every citizen who may benefit must be pursued with imagination and flexibly. The for-profits have gotten right. Give them credit for serving student needs that have been too often ignored by the mainstream higher education.
MAKING grammar fun is the ambition of Adelaide musician Shaun McNicholas, whose Apostrophe Song has become an internet sensation. Mr McNicholas wrote the Apostrophe Song when he was involved in teaching professional English and was amazed to see the film-clip race up the charts once it was posted on the internet by English writer and comedian Stephen Fry. Thousands of people have now watched the catchy song on YouTube.
Mr McNicholas now hopes to sell the accompanying iPhone application which he developed with Adelaide's Enabled Solutions. "It is a helpful and fun little tool to help people use grammar correctly," he said. The application enables people to check the rules for using apostrophes instantly.
Mr McNicholas said he was encouraging students and teachers to write their own versions of the song, which he would post on his website, coolrules.com. He is also developing other grammar programs on subject-verb agreement, the semicolon and parts of speech.
Quarter of British primary schools have no male teachers: Fears over vanishing role models as trend worsens
More than a quarter of primary schools do not have a single male teacher, following a long- term decline in their numbers, official figures reveal today. Staff rooms at 4,700 primaries are solely populated by women - 150 more than last year.
And just one man under the age of 25 works in a state-run nursery anywhere in England, the statistics show. The trend has triggered warnings that rising numbers of boys are having little or no contact with an adult male before they reach secondary school.
And with the number of male secondary school teachers also dwindling, some could go through their entire education without being taught by a man. The figures also fuel fears of rising misbehaviour among disaffected teenage boys whose lives lack male authority figures.
Statistics released today by the General Teaching Council show that only 125,361 of 502,562 registered teachers are men - just 25 per cent - with the vast majority working in secondary schools and further education.
Two decades ago, men made up four in ten teachers. In primary schools, in 2009/10, male teachers made up just 12.5 per cent of staff, compared with 13 per cent the previous year. Some 4,700 primaries in England - 28 per cent - have no male teacher or head teacher, up from 27 per cent in 2008/09. Six secondaries have no male teachers.
The decline is thought to be linked to the attractions of other graduate jobs as well as fears over allegations of inappropriate behaviour and society's 'paranoia' concerning paedophiles.
The recession is eventually expected to lead to an increase in the number of men applying to become teachers. But experts warned that men also faced barriers to being accepted on teacher training courses - possibly because most recruiters are women.
Professor John Howson, a recruitment expert and director of Education Data Surveys, warned: 'Colleges are converting fewer male applicants into people on courses than for women.' He added that there are still elements in society which do not 'fully appreciate that men can look after younger children'.
'We probably hit a level of paranoia about four or five years ago - the question is whether we are doing enough to overcome it. 'I'm even more concerned that we are haemorrhaging men in secondary schools. We are losing men at a faster rate at secondary level than primary. 'Where do the boys' male role models come from?' he asked.
The GTC figures also show that only 44 men work in state nurseries, with just one - Jamie Wilson, 23, of Merseyside - in the under-25 age bracket.
Not so much the teachers as those who teach the teachers and those who represent the teachers
No matter which societal problem we place under the microscope, the search for a solution… or the absence thereof… always takes us back to what it is that our people know and understand. It all comes back to the public schools, teachers unions, colleges and universities.
When people cannot properly read, write, and speak the English language, they are unable to take full advantage of the freedoms that are available to them. When people are inadequately schooled in mathematics and the sciences, they are unable to participate in the advancement of science and technology and it will be difficult for them to find a niche in a highly technological world. When people fail to understand the lessons of history, they are unable to make the political judgments necessary to avoid the mistakes of the past. When people have inadequate knowledge of politics and the workings of government, they are unable to make the political decisions necessary to advance the cause of freedom. And when people have an inadequate grasp of basic economics they are unable to properly assess the impact of taxes, savings, profits, and investments.
In all of these areas of physical and intellectual endeavor, our public education system is by far our greatest failing.
In an August 11, 2010 article for Townhall.com, titled “The Left’s Special-Interest Human Shields,” columnist Michelle Malkin gives us a clue as to why our public education system is the greatest failure among all our public institutions. Clearly, what has always been an important, necessary, and highly respected profession, has been transformed into just another cesspool of leftist union activism, just another mindless, lemming-like subsidiary of the Democratic Party.
Malkin’s attitude toward schoolteachers is not unlike that of most Americans. She says, “I have nothing against public-school teachers. My mother was one. My children are taught by some of the best in the nation. And over the years, I’ve reported on valiant battles between rank-and-file educators in government schools and their fat, bloated union leaders, who’ve transformed their professional organizations into wholly owned Democratic subsidiaries. My opposition to the so-called “Edujobs” bill stems not from meanness but from compassion for millions of dues-paying school employees being used as special-interest human shields.”
Looking into the faces of the teachers at your local public elementary school or high school… the “micro” view of public education… is not the same as taking a “macro” view of the teaching profession. Malkin quotes the DC-based Labor Union Report as saying that, in 2009, the National Education Association (NEA) “raked in a whopping $355,334,165 in ‘dues and agency fees’ from (mostly) teachers around the country.” And although the NEA spent close to $11 million more than it took in, it did not short-change the political parasites who rely on it for their sustenance. The NEA still found it possible to pour $50 million into “political activities and lobbying” for exclusively left-wing and partisan Democratic causes and candidates.
So, if excellence in education is not the first priority of the teachers union, what do they see as their top priority? The NEA’s retiring top lawyer, Bob Chanin, spoke to delegates at the NEA annual meeting in July. He made no bones about what is the union’s top priority. He said:
“Despite what some among us would like to believe, it is not because of our creative ideas. It is not because of the merit of our positions. It is not because we care about children, and it is not because we have a vision of a great public school for every child. NEA and its affiliates are effective advocates because we have power. And we have power because there are more than 3.2 million people who are willing to pay us hundreds of millions of dollars in dues each year, because they believe that we are the unions that can most effectively represent them, the unions that can protect their rights and advance their interests as education employees. . . .
“This is not to say that the concern of NEA and its affiliates with closing achievement gaps, reducing dropout rates, improving teacher quality and the like are unimportant or inappropriate. To the contrary. These are the goals that guide the work we do. But they need not and must not be achieved at the expense of due process, employee rights, and collective bargaining. That simply is too high a price to pay.”
Talk about upside-down priorities. As Barack Obama’s personal hero, Saul Alinsky, has said, teacher organizers must commit to a “singleness of purpose.” Not serving the needs of parents and children, but serving the “ability to build a (political) power base.” That they have done.
The Democratic Party is comprised of (in order of importance) teachers unions (NEA and AFT), trial lawyers, public employee unions, blue collar unions (AFL-CIO), radical environmentalists, minorities (blacks and Hispanics), service employee unions (SEIU), organized street agitators (ACORN), radical feminists, gays, lesbians, and the gender-confused community.
Yet, in spite of the fact that public school teachers are now ranked as the most politically powerful special interest in the nation, and in spite of the fact that we as a nation spend more on public education per pupil than any other industrialized nation, we find that among high school students in the 30 richest nations, U.S. students rank 17th in their knowledge of the sciences and 24th in their knowledge of mathematics. Clearly, our public education system is failing to prepare our children to compete in a highly technological world. It is our weakest link. It is the anchor on our Ship of State.
Hurricane Katrina destroyed more than just buildings. Left with scarce resources and personnel, local government in New Orleans became weak and ineffective in the aftermath of the flooding. Five years later, the rebuilding of New Orleans is far from complete, but reformers can point to at least one major accomplishment: a new school system built around charter schools and parental choice.
As a recent Newsweek article explains in some detail, Louisiana established the Recovery School District (RSD) to replace the old school system in New Orleans. Eschewing centralized control, RSD officials created a plethora of charter schools throughout the city, offering far more choices to parents than they had pre-Katrina.
Charter schools receive public funding but are allowed to operate without the regulatory burden faced by ordinary public schools. They have more leeway to experiment with different teaching methods, curriculum content, disciplinary procedures, and levels of parental involvement. If enrollment is any indication, New Orleans parents appreciate the choices. Over 60 percent of the city’s students attended a charter school last year.
A rigorous evaluation of charter school impacts has yet to be conducted in New Orleans, but a recent report by the U.S. Department of Education gives us a good idea of how charter schools perform nationally. To ensure a fair evaluation, the report’s authors used a natural experiment: They compared students who attended oversubscribed charter schools through a lottery with students who lost the lottery and were denied entrance. (This method is the “gold standard” for school evaluation.)
The results are unambiguous. By large margins, parents are more satisfied with charter schools—and with the academic and social development of their children who attend—than are public school parents. For example, charter schools were rated “excellent” by 85 percent of parents, while non-charter schools received the “excellent” rating by just 37 percent of parents.
The people of New Orleans are the latest to benefit from an extensive system of charter schools, but it should not take a natural disaster to make that option available. As more states and localities nationwide adopt school choice, the more satisfied parents will be.
British teachers’ fear of discipline holds back their pupils
A change in schools' culture is needed if bad behaviour is to be eradicated
Today, we publish the disturbing story of David Roy, a science teacher in a comprehensive in Blackpool who was sacked after he tried to impose a modicum of discipline in his classroom. An industrial tribunal has now ruled that he was unfairly dismissed and he has won compensation from the school that sacked him. But the whole charade should never have happened to begin with.
That it did so is an indictment of the terrible state into which some schools have fallen. The head teacher who believed that it was her duty to sack Mr Roy did so without hearing his version of what had happened. She accepted, with little further investigation, the allegations made by three children, who claimed they had been shouted at, or grabbed, or in some way maltreated. In following such an unfair procedure, she was doing no more than complying with what many within the state system seem to believe is “best practice”: uncritically accepting charges made by pupils and assuming the teacher’s guilt.
The result is, effectively, a charter for bad behaviour. On average, secondary school teachers lose 50 minutes of teaching time each day because of unruly and aggressive pupils, who feel they have a licence to misbehave without the threat of sanctions. This lack of discipline does not just hurt those pupils who want to learn: those who are most damaged by it are the disruptive pupils themselves. As their unacceptable behaviour is not curtailed, they never learn the elementary social skills essential for succeeding in life, never mind anything that could be described as academic knowledge. The chaos caused by this failure to impose discipline has blighted, and continues to blight, the prospects of thousands of children.
Pupils need to be in an environment where the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour is clear and unambiguous, and where the consequences for crossing the boundary are instant and undesirable. This problem cannot be fixed by legislation, for it is not so much the result of teachers not being legally permitted to discipline pupils – they are – but rather a collective failure of judgment on the part of some elements in the teaching profession.
What is required is not a change in the law but a change in the culture, one that gives teachers the benefit of the doubt and restores their authority within the classroom. This is starting to happen, as some of the new academies demonstrate – but not fast enough. Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, is right to have high hopes of his new schools. But he also needs to find a way to erase the deep‑seated hostility to discipline that still holds sway in so much of Britain’s education system.
A beautiful example of true belief in action crossed my desk recently from the alumni magazine of my own alma mater, Columbia University. Written by the director of Columbia’s Institute for Learning Technologies, a bureau at Teachers College, this mailing informed graduates that the education division now regarded itself as bound by "a contract with posterity." Something in the tone warned me against dismissing this as customary institutional gas. Seconds later I learned, with some shock, that Teachers College felt obligated to take a commanding role in "maintaining the planet." The next extension of this strange idea was even more pointed. Teachers College now interpreted its mandate, I was told, as one compelling it "to distribute itself all over the world and to teach every day, 24 hours a day."
To gain perspective, try to imagine the University of Berlin undertaking to distribute itself among the fifty American states, to be present in this foreign land twenty-four hours a day, swimming in the minds of Mormon children in Utah and Baptist children in Georgia. Any university intending to become global like some nanny creature spawned in Bacon’s ghastly utopia, New Atlantis, is no longer simply in the business of education. Columbia Teachers College had become an aggressive evangelist by its own announcement, an institution of true belief selling an unfathomable doctrine. I held its declaration in my hand for a while after I read it. Thinking.
Let me underline what you just heard. Picture some U.N. thought police dragging reluctant Serbs to a loudspeaker to listen to Teachers College rant. Most of us have no frame of reference in which to fit such a picture. Narcosis in the face of true belief is a principal reason the disease progressed so far through the medium of forced schooling without provoking much major opposition. Only after a million homeschooling families and an equal number of religiously oriented private-school families emerged from their sleep to reclaim their children from the government in the 1970s and 1980s, in direct response to an epoch of flagrant social experimentation in government schools, did true belief find ruts in its road.
Columbia, where I took an undergraduate degree, is the last agency I would want maintaining my planet. For decades it was a major New York slumlord indifferent to maintaining its own neighborhood, a territory much smaller than the globe. Columbia has been a legendary bad neighbor to the community for the forty years I’ve lived near my alma mater. So much for its qualifications as Planetary Guardian. Its second boast is even more ominous – I mean that goal of intervening in mental life "all over the world," teaching "every day, 24 hours a day." Teaching what? Shouldn’t we ask? Our trouble in recognizing true belief is that it wears a reasonable face in modern times.
A Lofty, Somewhat Inhuman Vision
Take a case reported by the Public Agenda Foundation which produced the first-ever survey of educational views held by teachers college professors. To their surprise, the authors discovered that the majority of nine hundred randomly selected professors of education interviewed did not regard a teacher’s struggle to maintain an orderly classroom or to cope with disruptive students as major problems! The education faculty was generally unwilling to attend to these matters seriously in their work, believing that widespread alarm among parents stemming from worry that graduates couldn’t spell, couldn’t count accurately, couldn’t sustain attention, couldn’t write grammatically (or write at all) was only caused by views of life "outmoded and mistaken."
While 92 percent of the public thinks basic reading, writing, and math competency is "absolutely essential" (according to an earlier study by Public Agenda), education professors did not agree. In the matter of mental arithmetic, which a large majority of ordinary people, including some schoolteachers, consider very important, about 60 percent of education professors think cheap calculators make that goal obsolete.
The word passion appears more than once in the report from which these data are drawn, as in the following passage:
"Education professors speak with passionate idealism about their own, sometimes lofty, vision of education and the mission of teacher education programs. The passion translates into ambitious and highly-evolved expectations for future teachers, expectations that often differ dramatically from those of parents and teachers now in the classroom. "The soul of a teacher is what should be passed on from teacher to teacher," a Boston professor said with some intensity. "You have to have that soul to be a good teacher."
It’s not my intention at this moment to recruit you to one or another side of this debate, but only to hold you by the back of the neck as Uncle Bud (who you’ll meet up ahead) once held mine and point out that this vehicle has no brake pedal – ordinary parents and students have no way to escape this passion. Twist and turn as they might, they will be subject to any erotic curiosity inspired love arouses. In the harem of true belief, there is scant refuge from the sultan’s lusty gaze.
Rain Forest Algebra
In the summer of 1997, a Democratic senator stood on the floor of the Senate denouncing the spread of what he called "wacko algebra"; one widely distributed math text referred to in that speech did not ask a question requiring algebraic knowledge until page 107. What replaced the boredom of symbolic calculation were discussions of the role of zoos in community life, or excursions to visit the fascinating Dogon tribe of West Africa. Whatever your own personal attitude toward "rain forest algebra," as it was snidely labeled, you would be hard-pressed not to admit one thing: its problems are almost computation-free. Whether you find the mathematical side of social issues relevant or not isn’t in question. Your attention should be fixed on the existence of minds, nominally in charge of number enlightenment for your children, which consider a private agenda more important than numbers.
One week last spring, the entire math homework in fifth grade at middle-class P.S. 87 on the Upper West Side of Manhattan consisted of two questions:
1. Historians estimate that when Columbus landed on what is now the island of Hati [this is the spelling in the question] there were 250,000 people living there. In two years this number had dropped to 125,000. What fraction of the people who had been living in Hati when Columbus arrived remained? Why do you think the Arawaks died?
2. In 1515 there were only 50,000 Arawaks left alive. In 1550 there were 500. If the same number of people died each year, approximately how many people would have died each year? In 1550 what percentage of the original population was left alive? How do you feel about this?
Tom Loveless, professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, has no doubt that National Council of Teachers of Mathematics standards have deliberately de-emphasized math skills, and he knows precisely how it was done. But like other vigorous dissenters who have tried to arrest the elimination of critical intellect in children, he adduces no motive for the awesome project which has worked so well up to now. Loveless believes that the "real reform project has begun: writing standards that declare the mathematics children will learn." He may be right, but I am not so sanguine.
The BBC asked “Should British pupils give up studying French?” However, the key issue isn’t whether or not children should be learning French, but the fact that schools are encouraging children to take easier subjects so that the school scores well on the league tables. Crucially this is not always to the advantage of the children, especially if they plan to apply to elite universities.
Independent schools tend not to do this because their reputation requires that they take greater interest in their pupils. In contrast, many state schools are taking the easy way out. Without radical reform of the education system, the government will only be able to choose between the blunt tools of either compulsion or league tables. Both have undesirable unintended consequences.
Others in the article echo my point. For example, the language learning expert Paul Noble states that "the core reason is because pupils know French is difficult to pass, and difficult to get something out of it”, while Michel Monsauret, attache for education at the French Embassy in London, points out that subjects such as religious studies are on the increase because they are perceived to be easier. Mr Monsauret correctly states that “languages are taught more extensively at private schools in the UK, and their pupils go on to dominate places at Oxbridge and the other best universities."
Predictably the National University of Teachers (NUT) is appalled: “The policy drift on modern foreign languages is unforgivable”. Children, according to the NUT, aren’t adequately equipped for life in a global society. A bit rich coming from an organization set up to protect the interests of teachers even when against the benefits to parents and children; an organization that is the biggest impediment to reform. Asking the NUT what is best for children is like asking a turkey what should be eaten at Christmas – the goose will always be cooked.
Whether one’s child should be taught French, German, Cantonese or Chamicuro should be solely that of the parents. Of course, they will be limited by what is being offered, which is an argument for a dynamic and competitive system – one driven by the free market, not bureaucratic oversight. That learning a language involves no literature shows how bankrupt the teaching is many of our schools. As such, the lamentations of Aida Edemariam and others are frankly irrelevant.
The teaching of French – or lack of it – is symbolic of the wider failure of bureaucratic control of the education.
British schoolboys 'being held back by women teachers' as gender stereotypes are reinforced in the classroom
Women teachers are holding back boys by reprimanding them for typically male behaviour, according to a study out today. They are reinforcing stereotypes that boys are ‘silly’ in class, refuse to ‘sit nicely like the girls’ and are more likely to indulge in ‘schoolboy pranks’.
Women teachers may also unwittingly perpetuate low expectations of boys’ academic achievement and encourage girls to work harder by letting them think they are cleverer.
Schools should avoid dividing pupils into ability groups because the practice often results in girls dominating the higher-achieving tables, concluded the Kent University research.
The study of primary schools in the county suggests that under-performance among boys in most national exams could be linked to lower expectations.
The research mainly implicates women teachers, since nearly 90 per cent of primary school teachers are female. It warned that school staff find boys’ play, such as wielding toy guns, ‘particularly challenging and difficult’. Boys are punished and urged to conform to a more feminine style of play instead of being taught how to play responsibly with their preferred toys.
Bonny Hartley, the study’s lead author, said: ‘By seven or eight years old, children of both genders believe that boys are less focused, able, and successful than girls – and think that adults endorse this stereotype. There are signs that these expectations have the potential to become self-fulfilling in influencing children’s actual conduct and achievement.’
Girls as young as four think they are cleverer, try harder and are better behaved than equivalent boys, her study found. By the age of seven and eight, boys also believe that their female classmates are more likely have these qualities.
For the study, 238 children aged four to ten were presented with a series of scenarios such as ‘this child is really clever’ and ‘this child always finishes their work’. They were then asked to point to a picture of a boy or a girl to say which they thought was being talked about.
The findings show that from the first year of school girls said their sex was more likely to record better conduct and achievement. From the age of eight, boys were also more likely to say that girls had better performance, motivation and effort, self-control and conduct.
In the second part of the study – being presented today at the British Educational Research Association annual conference at Warwick University – the children were asked if adults believed boys or girls were cleverer and better behaved.
From an early age, girls believe grown-ups think girls have better conduct and achievement. Boys develop the same beliefs around the age of eight.
The study drew no distinction between the beliefs and classroom practices of male and female teachers. Further research by the same team will consider the specific gender stereotypes held by teachers.
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.
Many newspaper articles are reproduced in full on this blog despite copyright claims attached to them. I believe that such reproductions here are protected by the "fair use" provisions of copyright law. Fair use is a legal doctrine that recognises that the monopoly rights protected by copyright laws are not absolute. The doctrine holds that, when someone uses a creative work in way that does not hurt the market for the original work and advances a public purpose - such as education or scholarship - it might be considered "fair" and not infringing.
