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31 January, 2008

Gay Policy in Brit Schools Announced

As a timely warmup to next month's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History Month celebration, the British Department of Children, Schools and Families has issued a new policy to combat homophobia in the education system. Homosexuality apparently now is considered a race and homophobia is racism.

Announced today by Schools Secretary Ed Balls, the new policy includes the following:

1) Teachers don't assume that students have a "mum and dad,"

2) Teachers indoctrinate students on the idea of same-sex couple,

3) "Parents" should replace "mum and dad" in correspondence to students' homes,

4) Classes on marriage should include civil unions and gay adoption rights,

5) Children who call classmates "gay" are to be tagged as racists under the zero tolerance crackdown.

More.




THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT EMBRACE OF McDONALDS

Below are two responses to a story I covered yesterday

Realistic education priorities

The online forums were afire. "Thought this was an early April Fool... McEducation... lowering standards... glad I have left the UK... how on earth can a qualification in basic shift management at mcdonalds which will involve taking payment, flipping burgers and making children obese be equilavent [sic] to an a level?"

It doesn't take much to rile the education harrumphers, but their barks are directed up the wrong tree this time. They'd do better to join the outcry against the sneaky plan to close village schools. For, of all the educational faffs and fiddles we have suffered, the latest is the most sensible. This is the decision to let companies - starting with Flybe, Network Rail and McDonald's - award nationally accepted qualifications, of GCSE and A-level standard, to those they train.

The harrumphers should calm down. This is about teaching employees: nobody is suggesting that schools will promptly offer their best and brightest a chance to do A2 burger-flipping instead of Further Maths. Given that you can already get national vocational qualifications from a holiday pottery course or a scuba-diving week, it is not so big a jump.

Note also that the body that is ceding this tiny bit of power is the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), which some may mischievously argue does not boast an immaculate track record itself. It is responsible for accrediting exams and regulating awarding bodies, and quite apart from the dog's breakfast of AS/A2 levels and the scandals of doctored A-level results, we have had plenty of concerns about its fiefdom. There have been questions about coursework marking, leaked papers, howlers embedded in questions and unqualified teachers working as markers. It is perfectly well known in the education world that large numbers of GCSE and even A-level papers are marked at high speed by people who are not specialists in the subject, and that when schools appeal against grades, one in four GCSEs and one in ten A levels prove to have been wrongly assessed. Some of the multiple-choice questions have also been dumber and more agenda-laden than would be tolerated by anyone struggling for profits in a real marketplace.

I would rather my offspring could name safe cooking temperatures for burgers or maintenance intervals for rails than merely decode questions like this one from a GCSE physics paper. A newspaper cutting is shown saying: "A recent report said that children under the age of 9 should not use mobile phones except in emergencies"; and the question is: "Below which age is it recommended that children use a mobile phone in emergencies only?" Doh!

I am not out to rubbish the QCA and exam boards. Plenty of good work is done and properly marked. I am just pointing out that hard-headed training executives with beady-eyed shareholders may prove more focused than some exam boards. If a failure in your pupils' procedures and understanding causes rails to break or customers to keel over with E.coli, expensive trouble ensues. Whereas if an Eng Lit exam goes dumb and trendy or a history paper is marked by someone who only knows the set answers, it doesn't create real-life chaos. Or not right away.

In other words, a McQualification, Rail-Level or FlybeCertificate might be more respected than some of the subjects and examiners that already have the blessing of the QCA. This might not be exactly the message that Gordon Brown wants us to take from the initiative, but it might cheer up the doubters.

Academically capable children will (if properly guided by their schools, which is another story) always go for more universal and theoretical academic subjects. Meanwhile, the crying need of drifting youth is to learn things that they can associate with real pay, responsibility and results. There have always been young people who longed to get out of the schoolroom's vapouring cloud of formulae and theories and lists. Some became apprentices, some took menial jobs and after looking around with sharp ambitious eyes simply worked their way up. Others hated their first jobs, yet learnt routine and thoroughness from them and carried them into a better field. I was probably classifiable as academic, but when I started my first dream job as a BBC studio manager, I mainly used the skills I had acquired as a barmaid. Not those that got me D in Latin.

The fact is, some thrive better in work than school. We all know children who groaned through A levels - or dropped out - only to find new vigour in a job. I can think of one right now who, to his parents' consternation, abandoned the sixth form after a period of feeling constantly ill and tired, took a counter job in a bank and is now being rigorously trained, forming high ambitions, and feeling physically well.

But workplace training - with allied certificates and grades - does matter. It removes the dead-end quality from a job, proves that the employer believes in you and, incidentally, reduces the likelihood that supervisors' strictures will be wetly interpreted as "bullying" or victimisation. Equally, in an uncertain economic world it matters that workplace qualifications should be portable.

Professor Alan Smithers of Buckingham University (itself, ironically, a private company that gives highly valued degrees) has cast doubt on the idea that the new qualifications will be valid outside the company that gives them. He fears that employees might get "locked in" to McFlybeRail. I doubt it. Business people may not be saintly educationists, but they are practical. They'll soon get to know which of their rivals' certificated staff are worth poaching.

Source




Flipping burgers taught me more than A levels

Anyone who believes that a McDonald's A level is an easy option should come to the Friar Street branch on the third day of the Reading Festival. I worked there for two summers during my sixth form. It was dirty and tiring, at times humiliating, but it taught me more about how to work and how to deal with people than all my A levels combined.

On festival days the first order of battle was to secure the toilets. Two employees were posted at each door where, mustering all the authority of their checked shirt and golden arches hat, they collected receipts before letting people use the lavatory. A third employee policed the cubicles themselves: no alcohol, no sex and no drugs. By evening the latter would be relaxed to just Class A substances. Meanwhile the kitchen was frying a burger a second, struggling to cope with the demands of the nation's rockers. Under those conditions if you slacked off, or decided that a task was beneath you, you were out of a job.

McDonald's should not just be allowed to give out A levels, they should become a full degree-accrediting body. It is not that I do not value my A levels. Intellectually, they were thrilling. It is just that, in contrast to my Saturday job in McDonald's, it would be difficult to argue that they were useful. At sixth form I studied maths, maths and extra maths, with a little bit of English for balance. Such a rigorous grounding in the foundations of calculus prepared me for my degree, an advanced grounding in the foundations of calculus, and then perhaps for a master's. But I didn't do a master's. The ability to shovel s***, whether literally (the day the plumbing broke, my worst McDonald's shift) or metaphorically, is, however, a skill that stays with me to this day.

Source




Australia: Bigoted far-Left educational "resource"

Hate-speech against those evil white people again

A taxpayer-funded program suggests Barbie may be Italian and asks whether she likes Spider-Man in a bizarre bid to tackle racism in childcare centres. But the move may have backfired with the radical blueprint telling teachers the Government itself is a racist institution run by white Anglo-Saxon men. The federally funded childcare resource warns early childhood teachers to be wary of "government policy" that expect "all cultures to conform to a white Anglo Australian way of living".

The book even compares citizenship to the White Australia Policy and attacks the Australian Government whose policies have "been formulated by political parties who historically and even today are in the majority white Christian Anglo middle class men". "Like the White Australia Policy, current government policies of 'citizenship' set out an official framework of what it is to be Australian," it reads.

The 'Exploring Multiculturalism, Anti-Bias and Social Justice in Children's Services' project is funded by the Federal Government and put out by Children's Services Central, a network of children service bodies in NSW. Designed to assist early childcare workers in NSW, the document gives advice on dealing with racism.

It comes after The Daily Telegraph revealed the State Government has funded an anti-racism program in a NSW pre-school for the first time. The pilot scheme at the Auburn Long Day Care Centre involves teaching children the national anthems of different countries and celebrating ethnic festivals such as Chinese New Year and Muslim holidays.

In contrast, the wacky teaching resource uses the Cronulla riots as a case study in an anti-racism lesson entitled "All the Lebs Are Bad Guys". Excerpts from another lesson relays a conversation about Barbie's ethnic origins between a group of young children from different cultural backgrounds.

A spokeswoman for federal Early Childhood Parliamentary Secretary Maxine McKew did not comment on whether the Government would consider withdrawing the resource.

Source





30 January, 2008

Locking a nation into permanent childhood

By Vin Suprynowicz

A letter-writer recently objected that I used great libertarian Rose Wilder Lane as a "sole source" for the fact that American schooling was taken over, in the late 19th century, by statists enamored of the Prussian compulsion model, aiming to create a docile peasant class by crippling the American intellect -- making reading seem real hard, for starters, by replacing the old system in which delighted kids learned to combine the sounds of the Roman letters, with a perverted "whole word" method better suited to decoding hieroglyphics.

In July 1991, John Taylor Gatto, New York's Teacher of the Year, quit, saying he was tired of working for an institution that crippled the ability of children to learn. He explained why in an essay published that month in The Wall Street Journal. Let's look at that essay, and see if we can find our "second source":

"Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history," Mr. Gatto begins. "It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.

"Socrates foresaw if teaching became a formal profession, something like this would happen. Professional interest is served by making what is easy to do seem hard; by subordinating the laity to the priesthood. School is too vital a jobs-project, contract giver and protector of the social order to allow itself to be 're-formed.' It has political allies to guard its marches, that's why reforms come and go without changing much. ...

"David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are 13, you can't tell which one learned first -- the five-year spread means nothing at all. But in school I label Rachel 'learning disabled' and slow David down a bit, too. For a paycheck, I adjust David to depend on me to tell him when to go and stop. He won't outgrow that dependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, 'special education' fodder. She'll be locked in her place forever. "In 30 years of teaching kids rich and poor I almost never met a learning disabled child; hardly ever met a gifted and talented one either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths. ..."

These are not the words of some sour-grapes loser who "couldn't make it" as a teacher. Testimonials from Gatto's former students fill a whole book. Citing the 1993 National Adult Literacy Survey, Gatto in his book "Underground History of American Education," reports only 3.5 percent of Americans are literate enough today "to do traditional college study, a level 30 percent of all U.S. high school students reached in 1940, and which 30 percent of secondary students in other developed countries can reach today." This month, that majority is choosing our presidential candidates based on who looks better on TV.

"During the post-Civil War period, childhood was extended about four years," Gatto's research shows. "Later, a special label was created to describe very old children. It was called adolescence, a phenomenon hitherto unknown to the human race." This "infantalization" continues, as "Child labor laws were extended to cover more and more kinds of work, the age of school leaving set higher and higher. ..."

"After I spoke in Nashville, a mother named Debbie pressed a handwritten note on me which I read on the airplane to Binghamton, New York," Gatto continues: 'We started to see Brandon flounder in the first grade, hives, depression, he cried every night after he asked his father, "Is tomorrow school, too?" In second grade the physical stress became apparent. The teacher pronounced his problem Attention Deficit Syndrome. My happy, bouncy child was now looked at as a medical problem, by us as well as the school. 'A doctor, a psychiatrist, and a school authority all determined he did have this affliction. Medication was stressed along with behavior modification. If it was suspected that Brandon had not been medicated he was sent home. My square peg needed a bit of whittling to fit their round hole. ...

'I cried as I watched my parenting choices stripped away. My ignorance of options allowed Brandon to be medicated through second grade. The tears and hives continued another full year until I couldn't stand it. I began to homeschool Brandon. It was his salvation. No more pills, tears, or hives. He is thriving. He never cries now and does his work eagerly.' "

You can read John Taylor Gatto's entire "Underground History of American Education," detailing just how Mann and Dewey and their gang imposed on us a Prussian system of coercive schooling, so ill-suited to a free people, at www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/.

Source




A rather stunning move from the British Left

Anything to minimize academic knowlewdge and critical thinking, I guess

McDonald’s and other big businesses will award their own qualifications equal to GCSEs, A levels and degrees, in subjects such as fast-food restaurant management, the Government will announce today. Network Rail, Flybe and McDonald’s will become the first companies to be given such powers by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA). Gordon Brown will announce the move today as he seeks to regain the initiative over the issue of the unskilled unemployed from the Conservatives. “The biggest barrier to full employment now is not the shortage of jobs, but the shortage of skills among the unemployed and inactive,” he will say.

The QCA announcement gives the three companies official “awarding body” status, allowing them to confer nationally accredited certificates. The qualifications will not be finalised or fully endorsed until the autumn, but some trials are beginning this month. McDonald’s will train employees for a certificate in basic shift management, recognised by the QCA as equal to an A level. Trainees will learn about the day-to-day running of a restaurant, including finance, hygiene and human resources.

The budget airline Flybe will be able to award certificates up to the equivalent of degree level. Its airline trainer programme will confer qualifications from level 2 (GCSE at A*-C) to level 4 (degree) on its cabin and engineering staff.

Network Rail will introduce track engineering qualifications as high as PhD (level 8), covering technical issues and health and safety. It said its entire 33,000-strong workforce would take the course eventually, as well as contractors. Most trainees would receive certificates at level 2 and level 3. The company was criticised for its standards of track maintenance in a report into the Cumbrian train crash last February in which an elderly passenger was killed. It described the failures of Network Rail’s maintenance operation, with some track inspectors having lapsed accreditation, meaning that they were not certified to carry out such work.

Critics question the worth of “McGCSEs”, claiming that they could devalue academic qualifications and casting doubt on whether they would be recognised outside the companies concerned. Educational experts said that it would become increasingly common for private institutions to award qualifications, rather than it being the preserve of publicly funded colleges and universities. In September a private outfit, BPP College, became the first allowed to award law and business degrees. John Denham, the Universities Secretary, wants to introduce the scheme in companies in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. He said: “This is an important step towards ending the old divisions between company training schemes and national qualifications, something that will benefit employees, employers and the country as a whole.”

The move was welcomed by business leaders. John Cridland, the CBI’s deputy director-general, said: “Today marks a significant milestone on the road to reforming qualifications so that they better reflect the skills employers and employees need.”

But Professor Alan Smithers, the director of the centre for education and employment research at the University of Buckingham, cast doubts on the validity of such qualifications outside the companies in question. He said: “Employees may find they are locked into that business because these awards don't have credibility outside the company, like GCSEs, A levels or NVQs do. The qualifications would be more valuable to holders if they were awarded by an independent body.”

Source




Australia: Setting standards in schools

The details are not ideal but more attention to standards is welcome -- and long overdue



CHILDREN will be taught essential subjects such as English, Maths and Science no matter where they are enrolled in the state when they start a new school year today. The Bligh Government yesterday unveiled details of its new "essential learnings" program, aimed at ensuring greater consistency in the subjects Queensland children are taught. The program, which cost more than $8 million to develop, will specify what all students need to know and be able to do at key points in their school lives.

Other milestones for the state's school sector this year include the first full intake of prep children and the introduction of the Queensland Certificate of Education for senior students. Premier Anna Bligh said the program would especially benefit the thousands of students and a quarter of the state's teachers who change schools every year. It will specify the things that all students - whether they go to public or private school - need to learn and will be assessed on.

For example, under the new system, students at the end of Year 5 would be expected to know about the colonisation of Australia including the concept of terra nullius [Leftist crap. The doctine of terra nullius had never been heard of when Australia was colonized by the British], the basics of physics and biology and how to read a map. By the end of Year 7, they would be expected to understand how gravity affects the Earth and other planets, the different roles of local, state and national governments and how to represent and compare data in pie charts and graphs.

The new program will use an "A to E" system of reporting and assessment, where an "A" means a student has demonstrated a comprehensive understanding of a subject and "E" means they have only a basic knowledge of concepts and facts related to a subject.

Ms Bligh said the program heralded a "new era" in school education in Queensland. Education Minister Rod Welford said it still allowed schools the flexibility to organise their curriculum while setting out those things all students needed to learn.

About 480,000 students are expected to enrol in government primary, secondary and special schools this year, while the Catholic and independent student body in Queensland is expected to number about 220,000. About 54,000 children will enrol on the first full intake of prep. Mr Welford will also introduce a scheme which requires all primary school children to take part in physical activities for at least an average of 30 minutes a day.

Source





29 January, 2008

Arizona Illegals Denied In-State Tuition

(Phoenix, Arizona) I almost became weepy after reading this soap-opera reporting by the New York Times. It's the boo-hoo story about Mexicans and other foreigners not getting cut-rate tuition and financial aid because of Arizona Proposition 300.

One of several recent immigration statutes passed by Arizona voters and legislators frustrated by federal inaction, the law also prohibits in-state tuition for illegal immigrants. Administrators at several campuses fear that the provision has priced some out of their classes, particularly at the state's popular community colleges.

The worry is that illegal aliens won't be able to afford a college education without financial aid and in-state tuition. Apparently some students are even thinking of returning to Mexico for college but, "It's expensive going to school in Mexico," said one student.

And now the option of sneaking into the U.S. to get a cut-rate education is being denied by Prop. 300. "I see it as a very cruel law," said Teresa Guerra, a student at Phoenix College.

It's difficult to comprehend the attitude of the illegals and their supporters. Apparently, the U.S. is viewed as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and people from any country who successfully jump the border are automatically entitled to all the benefits of being American citizens. Jumping the border is a criminal act. Giving benefits for a criminal act doesn't make sense.




Backing the Wrong Horse: How Private Schools Are Good for the Poor

Last fall the High-Level Plenary Meet-ing of the UN General Assembly brought together more than 170 heads of state-"the largest gathering of world leaders in his-tory"-to review progress toward the Millennium Devel-opment Goals. It was, we were told, "a once-in-a-gen-eration opportunity to take bold decisions," a "defining moment in history" when "we must be ambitious." One of the internation-ally agreed-on development goals the heads of state reviewed was the achieve-ment of universal primary education by 2015. The UN was not happy with progress. There are still officially more than 115 million children out of school, it reported, of which 80 percent are in sub? Saharan Africa and Southern Asia. But even for those lucky enough to be in school, things are not good: "Most poor children who attend primary school in the developing world learn shockingly little," the UN reported.

Something had to be done. Fortunately, the UN could call on Jeffrey D. Sachs, special adviser on the Mil-lennium Development Goals to Secretary-General Kofi Annan and author of The End of Poverty. He's also director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He proposed as the way forward "Quick Wins," which have "very high potential short-term impact" and that "can be immediately implemented." Top of his list is "Eliminating school fees," to be achieved "no later than the end of 2006," funded through increased international donor aid. To the UN it's as obvious as motherhood and apple pie.

But the UN's "Quick Wins" are backing the wrong horse. For the past two and a half years I've been directing and conduct-ing research in sub-Saharan Africa (Kenya, Nigeria, and Ghana) and Asia (India and China). And what I've found is a remarkable and apparently hitherto unnoticed revolution in education, led by the poor themselves. Across the developing world the poor are eschewing free disturbed by its low quality and lack of accountability. Meanwhile, educational entrepre-neurs from the poor communities themselves set up affordable private schools to cater to the unfulfilled demand.

Take Kibera, in Nairobi, Kenya, reportedly the largest slum in Africa, where half a million people live in mud-walled, corrugated iron-roofed huts that huddle along the old Uganda Railway. Kenya is one of the UN's showcase examples of the virtues of introducing free basic education. Free Primary Education (FPE) was introduced in Kenya in January 2003, with a $55 million donation from the World Bank-apparently the largest straight grant that it has given to any area of social serv-ices. The world has been impressed by the outcomes: Former President Bill Clinton told an American prime-time television audience that the person he most want-ed to meet was President Kibaki of Kenya, "because he has abolished school fees," which "would affect more lives than any president had done or would ever do." The British chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, visiting Olympic Primary School, one of the five gov-ernment schools located on the out-skirts of Kibera, told the gathered crowds that British parents gave their full sup-port to their tax money being used to support FPE. Everyone-including Sir Bob Geldof and Bono-raves on about how an additional 1.3 million children are now enrolled in primary school in Kenya. All these children, the accepted wisdom goes, have been saved from ignorance by the benevolence of the international community-which must give $7 billion to $8 billion per year more so that other countries can emulate Kenya's success.

The accepted wisdom, however, is entirely wrong. It ignores the remarkable reality that the poor in Africa have not been waiting helplessly for the munificence of pop stars and Western politicians to ensure that their children get a decent education. The reality is that private schools for the poor have emerged in huge numbers in some of the most impoverished slums in Africa and southern Asia. They are catering to a majority of poor children, and outperforming their government counter-parts, for a fraction of the cost.

I went to Kibera to see for myself, with a hunch that the headline success story might be concealing some-thing. In India I had seen that the poor were not at all happy with the government schools-a recent study had shown that when researchers called unannounced on government schools for the poor, only in half was there any teaching going on at all-and so were leaving in huge numbers to go to private schools set up by local entrepreneurs charging very low fees. Would Kenya be any different? Although the education minister told me that in his country private schools were for the rich, not the poor, and so I was misguided in my quest, I perse-vered and went to the slums. It was one of Nairobi's two rainy seasons. The mud tracks of Kibera were mud baths. I picked my way with care.

Within a few minutes, I found what I was looking for. A signboard proclaimed "Makina Primary School" outside a two-story rickety tin building. Inside a cramped office Jane Yavetsi, the school proprietor, was keen to tell her story: "Free education is a big problem," she said. Since its introduction, her enroll-ment had declined from 500 to 300, and now she doesn't know how she will pay the rent on her buildings. Many parents have opted to stay, but it is the wealthier of her poor parents who have taken their children away, and they were the ones who paid their fees on time. Her school fees are about 200 Kenyan shillings (about $2.80) per month. But for the poorest children, including 50 orphans, she offers free education. She founded the school ten years ago and has been through many difficulties. But now she feels crestfallen: "With free education, I am being hit very hard."

Jane's wasn't the only private school in Kibera. Right next door was another, and then just down from her, opposite each other on the railway tracks, were two more. Inspired by what I had found, I recruited a local research team, led by James Shikwati of the Inter-Region Economic Network (IREN), and searched every muddy street and alleyway looking for schools. In total we found 76 private schools, enrolling over 12,000 students. In the five government schools serving Kibera, there were a total of about 8,000 children-but half were from the middle-class suburbs. The private schools, it turned out, even after free public education, were still serving a large majority of the poor slum children.

Was Jane's experience typical since the introduction of free primary education? Most of the 70- odd private-school owners in Kibera reported sharply declining enrollment since the introduction of FPE. Many, however, were reporting that parents had at first taken their children away, but were now bringing them back-because they hadn't liked what they'd found in the government schools. We also found the ex-managers of 35 private schools that had closed since FPE was introduced, 25 of whom said that it was FPE that had led to their demise. Calculating the net decline in private-school enrollment, it turned out that there were many, many more children who had left the private schools than the 3,300 reported to have entered the government schools on Kibera's periphery and who were part of the much celebrated one million-plus supposedly newly enrolled in education.

In other words, the headlined increase in numbers of enrolled children was fictitious: the net impact of FPE was at best precisely the same number of children enrolled in primary school-only that some had trans-ferred from private to government schools.

I discussed these findings with senior government, World Bank, and other aid officials. They were sur-prised by the number of private schools I had found. But, they said, if children had transferred from private to state schools, then this was good: "No one believes that the private schools offer quality education," I was told. British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Commission for Africa agrees: conceding that mushrooming private schools exist in some unspecified parts of sub-Saharan Africa, it reports that they "are without adequate state regulation and are of a low quality."

But why would parents be as foolhardy to pay to send their children to schools of such low quality? One school owner in a similar situation in Ghana, where we later conducted the research, challenged me when I observed that her school building was little more than a corrugated iron roof on rickety poles and that the gov-ernment school, just a few hundred yards away, was a smart, proper brick building. "Educa-tion is not about buildings," she scolded. "What matters is what is in the teacher's heart. In our hearts, we love the children and do our best for them." She left it open, when probed, what the teachers in the government school felt in their hearts toward the poor children.

Exploring further in Kenya, my team and I spoke to parents, some of whom had taken their children to the "free" government schools, but had been disillusioned by what they found and returned to the private schools. Their reasons were straight-forward: in the government schools class sizes had increased dramatically and teachers couldn't cope with 100 or more pupils, five times the number in the private-school classes. Parents compared notes when their children came home from school and saw that in the state schools pupil notebooks remained unmarked for weeks; they contrasted this with the detailed atten-tion given to all children's work in the private schools. They heard tales from their children of how teachers came to the state school and did their knitting or fell asleep. One summed up the situation succinctly: "If you go to a market and are offered free fruit and vegetables, they will be rotten. If you want fresh fruit and veg, you have to pay for them."

Perhaps these poor parents are misguided. Certainly that's what officials believe. But are they right? We test-ed 3,000 children, roughly half from the Nairobi slums and half from the government schools on the periphery, using standardized tests in math, English, and Kiswahili. We tested the chil-dren's and their teachers' IQs and gave questionnaires to pupils, their parents, teachers, and school managers so that we could control for all relevant back-ground variables. Although the gov-ernment schools served the privileged middle classes as well as the slum chil-dren, the private schools-serving only slum children-outperformed the government schools in mathemat-ics and Kiswahili, although the latter had a slight advantage in English. But English would be picked up by privi-leged children through television and interaction with parents. When we statistically controlled for all relevant background variables, the private schools outperformed the government schoolchildren in all three subjects.

But there was a further twist. The private schools outperformed the government schools for considerably lower cost. Even if we ignore the massive costs of the government bureaucracy and focus just on the classroom level, we find the private schools are doing better for about a third of teacher-salary costs: the average month-ly teacher salary in government schools was Ksh. 11,080 ($155) compared to Ksh. 3,735 ($52) in the private schools.

Free primary education in Kenya, a showcase exam-ple of the UN's "Quick Wins" strategy, has simply transferred children from private schools, where they got a good deal, closely supervised by parents, with teachers who turn up and teach, to state schools, where they are being dramatically let down. One parent was clear what the solution was: "We do not want our children to go to a state school. The government offered free education. Why didn't it give us the money instead and let us choose where to send our children?" For this parent, a voucher system was the obvious way forward, putting her right back in control.

Much more here




LA teacher battles opponent tougher than gangs

Migdia Chinea, a Cuban-American screenwriter and actress who has writing credits for the TV series "The Incredible Hulk" and "Superboy," recently documented how she was attacked and injured by students while she served as a substitute teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Now she's reporting that the students who attacked her, body-slammed her to the floor in front of witnesses who documented the attack, and left her with a concussion and possibly long-term injuries were the easy ones to deal with; the system that is supposed to provide care for injuries on the job is a harder opponent to beat. "Despite my being injured by students while working, with a teacher as a witness and a police report, Sedgwick, the LAUSD's insurance has not yet 'accepted' my disability claim, and perhaps won't pay in the end, until a deposition is taken three months from now. Meantime, as a woman alone, I wonder how am I going meet my financial responsibilities without incurring further debt?" Chinea told WND. "How am I going to pay my mortgage and eat?" she asked.

In an earlier commentary for WND, she described how, as a UCLA-educated graduate with a "Googleable" career as a professional screenwriter, economic conditions forced her to seek employment as a substitute teacher in order to obtain health insurance benefits. She described the violence in the L.A. schools, how there was no teaching at the school to which she was assigned, only "confinement." She told of the classrooms being left in shreds, teaching materials stolen, vandalism to her car, and the verbal and physical assaults.

One such school, she said, "is surrounded by criminal street gangs and is widely considered one of the most dangerous campuses in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The South Side Village Boys, South Side Watts Varrio Grape, Grape Street Crips, East Side Village Bloods, Hacienda Bloods, Circle City Piru and Bounty Hunters street gangs all claim turf in that area, and frequent flare-ups of gang violence are common."

She also told about being hurt on the job, with witnesses and a police report that documented the circumstances. "On Oct. 5, 2007, at another notorious middle school, I was deliberately body-slammed on the head by two to three large young men in a P.E. class of 53 students, while another teacher (someone I had never met before) was decent enough to give a formal declaration to school and police authorities of what he had witnessed. I sustained a concussion and sciatica nerve damage as a result of this personal attack intended to 'terrorize [me].' I have memory lapses and continued head and leg pain. I'm told by the local police that this sort of physical abuse on teachers occurs with disturbing regularity. The LAUSD case nurse assigned to my case labeled my attack 'boys will be boys.'" she wrote.

In going through the process of seeking to have her medical claim paid and her injuries addressed by a district that lists local police station telephone numbers on its website, she has discovered something even worse than a body-slam. The district for which she worked, and left her injured, is the one deciding on her treatment and ultimate disability, since the school district is exempt from state-mandated worker's compensation requirements and provides its own coverage.

"I've been told by another teacher (still working as such) who has been through this hell, that LAUSD will be willing to 'kill me' to protect and cover-up their corruption - which is, in turn, not reported nor investigated by the press. I have reported this 'murderous intent or potential' to the LAPD and I'm supposed to get a call from their organized crime unit - but not so far," she told WND. "Meanwhile, the LAUSD continues to call me three times every morning and as I hear the names of the schools to which they wish to send me to 'substitute,' they're the worst schools in the district. Therefore, I believe they want to finish me off," she said.

Officials with the school district declined to answer messages left by WND requesting a comment on Chinea's allegations. The district now is being run by David L. Brewer III, who was appointed a little over a year ago to replace former Colorado Gov. Roy Romer, who ran the district for several years. She also reported that neither school officials nor the school district's physician will have a conversation with her, even though she's continue to try to obtain information about her situation, including an unanswered e-mail just days ago.

The district had her "released" to return to work, but the doctor who made the decision didn't notify her, then "refused my phone calls," she said. "I have requested a meeting with the LAUSD Board of Education, to no avail. I have asked them to, please, explain to me what constitutes an 'act of violence' because only a small percentage of teachers who are seriously assaulted qualify under their own definition. But there's no response," she said.

"On Jan. 5, 2008, the same day that the city held a conference hailing a citywide drop in crime, an L.A. Times columnist wrote that 60 LAUSD schools were vandalized while grim-faced teachers swept up the mess," she continued. "To be in this situation, after having achieved certain things and pulled myself up by my bootstraps and have my own home, is horrible," she told WND.

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28 January, 2008

Universities overproduce Ph.Ds

College students are getting a raw deal, a recent New York report asserted. The problem is they're taking too many classes from part-time, or adjunct, professors. But that same report unwittingly revealed something about how higher education is more culpable than it likes to admit when it comes to creating the problem.

The issue is a huge one in higher education far beyond New York, with about half of the nation's college faculty now on part-time contracts. Adjuncts are cheaper for colleges, but they often lack the time and resources for focused teaching, and research shows students' performance suffers if they are taught by part-timers too often. In its report last month, a 30-member commission called for New York's state (SUNY) and city (CUNY) systems to alleviate the over reliance on adjuncts by hiring 2,000 more full-time faculty for their 87 campuses. But just one page away, the report also called for adding at least 4,000 new doctoral students.

There's a connection between those numbers that deserves more attention. In many fields, there are already too many Ph.Ds awarded for the full-time academic posts available, creating a surplus of likely jobseekers. That pool becomes adjuncts, who command wages and benefits so low that universities find them irresistible hires. "It's not uncommon to have a disconnect like this in higher education, in which people are both concerned about the difficult career prospects being faced by recent Ph.D. graduates and concerned there aren't enough Ph.D. students," said Michael Teitelbaum, of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The ideas, he said, "often don't get connected. It's puzzling."

Adds Jeff Crane, an adjunct who teaches two art courses at SUNY-New Paltz: "There's this tendency to turn a blind eye to things like that and not make those kinds of equations."

Of course, some adjuncts have other jobs and like working part-time. But many are adjuncts by necessity. Crane, an artist, says he likes working part-time so he can paint, but thinks he should be paid equitably. He earns about $5,200 per semester for teaching two courses. The national average for full-time assistant professors is about $60,000, and $100,000 once they get tenure. Crane says many of his colleagues work mostly for the health insurance, which, unlike many places, New Paltz offers to adjuncts.

Teitelbaum is quick to point out New York may have good reasons to add doctoral students. They will help improve the state's standing in the research sector, and of course, many may find work in the private sector. But if they come seeking full-time professorial jobs, some will be disappointed.

It's well known that jobs in, say, philosophy, are rare. Even at the very top doctoral programs, only one in 10 who start will end up teaching at an elite research university, according to Brian Leiter, whose blog "Philosophical Gourmet" tracks the field. In fields like history, recent numbers show the market improving, and there will be more jobs as baby boomers retire. But some fields like American and European history still have such a surplus that even community colleges now commonly look only at candidates with a doctoral degree.

It's not just humanities. Groups such as the Business Roundtable have grabbed headlines with urgent warnings about the need to ramp up production of American scientists. In fact, Teitelbaum testified to Congress last year, there is no evidence of a shortage of scientists and engineers - particularly on the Ph.D. track. In the life sciences, the U.S. is awarding twice as many doctorates as two decades ago, but has no more faculty jobs, according to one recent study that prompted the journal Nature to editorialize that "too many graduate schools may be preparing too many students." A 1998 National Research Council made much the same warning.

Nonetheless, universities keep flooding the academic pipeline. The latest federal data show about 45,600 Ph.Ds were awarded in 2005-2006, 5.1 percent higher than the year before. It was the fourth straight increase and tied for the highest percentage gain since 1971.

Faculty like having graduate students around. They're good intellectual companions, and they bolster a professor's research efforts. Particularly in the sciences, they also often come with funding from sources such as the National Institutes of Health, which doubled its budget between 1998 and 2003. But funding usually leads to more slots for graduate students, not for professors. That's why the percentage of science Ph.D.s moving on to "post-docs" (temporary university posts where they do research while continuing to apply for faculty jobs) is surging - from 43 percent to 70 percent in physics, for instance, in just a few years.

Of course, universities could cut back on using adjuncts and pony up for better wages and more full-time jobs. Some, like Rutgers in New Jersey, have agreed to add tenure-track positions, and the American Federation of Teachers is pushing for legislation in 11 states to require more teaching come from full-timers. But with universities already under fire for skyrocketing prices, it's probably unrealistic to expect most will pay more than the going rate for a captive labor pool.

Saying "no" to students definitely isn't easy. If education is good, it seems to follow more is better. And when qualified students come to a university - particularly a public one - it can be hard to justify refusing them the education they say they want. But if public universities (and really that means legislatures and taxpayers) won't pony up for more full-time faculty, higher education will have to take more responsibility for its role in creating the oversupply problem. "We have flooded the labor market with Ph.Ds who can't get jobs doing what they've been trained to do," said Cat Warren, a North Carolina State English professor and state American Association of University Professors leader, who recently gave a talk to graduate students at nearby Duke warning them to be realistic. "I think we have to think very hard about that."

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Researchers' Assessment of NCLB Shows Need for Improvement

With the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act looming on the horizon this year, the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles (CRP/PDC) at UCLA's Graduate School of Education & Information Studies recently completed a collection of essays containing several critiques of the law as well as proscriptions for change.

CRP/PDC K-12 senior researcher Gail L. Sunderman edited the 280-page book, titled Holding NCLB Accountable: Achieving Accountability, Equity, and School Reform, which was published by Corwin Press. "We not only looked at the problems with No Child Left Behind, but we came up with ways to make it better," says Sunderman, the project director on a five-year CRP/PDC study examining implementation of the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act and the co-author of NCLB Meets School Realities: Lessons from the Field. "It's time to reauthorize the bill, so we kind of geared the book toward coming up with research-based ideas of what needs to be addressed and what needs to be done to improve the law."

The essays were written by several noted education scholars, including Stanford University's Linda Darling-Hammond; Robert Linn of the University of Colorado; Johns Hopkins University's Robert Balfanz and Nettie Legters; Boston College's Walter Haney; Goodwin Liu of the University of California, Berkeley; and Russell Rumberger of the University of California, Santa Barbara. The collection analyzes the law's accountability and assessment system, the capacities of states to implement the law, and the impact of school reform.

Harvard University's Daniel Koretz asserts that the accountability system is not research based. "We know far too little about how to hold schools accountable for improving student performance," says the testing expert. Jaekyung Lee, an associate professor of education at the State University of New York at Buffalo, compared the nation's report card - the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) - to state assessment results. He found that, since the implementation of the law in 2001, federal accountability measures have not improved educational levels and narrowed achievement disparities. "Based on the NAEP, there are no systemic indications of improving the average achievement and narrowing the gap after NCLB," Lee says.

Three researchers from Harvard - Michael Kieffer, Nonie Lesaux and Catherine Snow - revealed what needs to be done in terms of adequately assessing English-language learners. And Mindy Kornhaber of Pennsylvania State University described how to develop a system of multiple measures. "What we have now basically relies on standardized assessment," Sunderman says.

In terms of school reform, the researchers found that many of the law's measures - such as the definition of highly qualified teachers, the design of testing and accountability regulations, and the reliance on mandates - actually retard school reform and have made it even more difficult for high schools serving low-income students to do their jobs.

In the section on the capacity of states to implement the law, Sunderman and CRP/PDC co-director Gary Orfield wrote in a chapter together about how states are responding to problems they are having due to their limitations, and University of California, Berkeley's Heinrich Mintrop looked at the ability of states to intervene in low-performing schools. "He finds that states are able to intervene in about 2 to 4 percent of the total number of schools in a state," Sunderman says. "And, if you compare that to the percentage of schools being identified as low performing under the No Child Left Behind Act, there are a lot more."

Some of the prescriptions that the researchers presented include: the creation of a fair accountability system that informs the goals of students and improves instruction; the adequate support of low-performing schools and districts; and the complementing of in-school reform in low-income schools with out-of-school reform of housing, poverty, and health care.

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Australian parents make big sacrifices to avoid government schools

HALF the Australian parents who send their children to private school are finding it a financial strain, and one in 10 families spend more than half their take-home pay on their children's education. Research has also found that about a third of parents who send their children to independent (private) and Catholic schools allocate more than 15percent of their household income to their children's education. Close to 12percent of parents with children at independent schools, and 1.3percent of Catholic school parents, reserve up to half their income for school fees, the report, commissioned by BankWest, found. Some parents - Catholic school (4percent) and private (1.3percent) - dedicate between 50 and 75percent of their household income to school fees.

The report said that 53percent of independent school parents and 47percent of Catholic school parents found paying for their children's education was financially tough. A BankWest spokeswoman said the survey dispelled the myth that only the well-off were educating their children at private schools. Figures show more than 369,000 students attended private schools in NSW in 2006. About 739,000 students attend public schools.

The report found that the average cost of sending a child to an independent school was $14,201 a year, more than double that of Catholic schools. It also found that, on average, independent school parents spend an extra $2300 a year on uniforms, extracurricular activities, textbooks and stationery. Parents had to find $1600 for Catholic schools and $1200 for public schools.

Executive director of the Council of Catholic School Parents Danielle Cronin said she was not surprised by the research, and that while Catholic schools tried to keep fees down, they were a strain on some families. "I think Catholic schools have a very diverse population in terms of socio-economic statistics," she said. "I believe that Catholic schools probably aren't enrolling financially needy families simply because the fees are prohibitive, even though some of the fees are quite low compared to independent schools."

In the report, parents cited the standard of education, discipline, better academic record and resources as the main reasons for sending their children to private schools. They also said the better focus on social values, networking opportunities for their children when entering the workforce, religious education and social opportunities for the parents were important.

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27 January, 2008

Vouchers not enough

A rigorous curriculum is more important

Looking back from today's vantage point, it is clear that the school choice movement has been very good for the disadvantaged. Public and privately funded voucher programs have liberated hundreds of thousands of poor minority children from failing public schools. The movement has also reshaped the education debate. Not only vouchers, but also charter schools, tuition tax credits, mayoral control, and other reforms are now on the table as alternatives to bureaucratic, special-interest-choked big-city school systems.

Yet social-change movements need to be attentive to the facts on the ground. Recent developments in both public and Catholic schools suggest that markets in education may not be a panacea-and that we should reexamine the direction of school reform. One such development: taxpayer-funded voucher programs for poor children, long considered by many of us to be the most promising of education reforms, have hit a wall. In 2002, after a decade of organizing by school choice activists, only two programs existed: one in Milwaukee, the other in Cleveland, allowing 17,000 poor students to attend private (mostly Catholic) schools. That year, in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, the Supreme Court ruled that limited voucher programs involving religious schools were compatible with the First Amendment's establishment clause. The 5-4 decision seemed like school choice's Magna Carta. But the legal victory has led to few real gains. Today, fewer than 25,000 students-compared with a nationwide public school enrollment of 50 million-receive tax-funded vouchers, with a tiny Washington, D.C., program joining those of the other two cities.

Voucher prospects have also dimmed because of the Catholic schools' deepening financial crisis. Without an abundant supply of good, low-cost urban Catholic schools to receive voucher students, voucher programs will have a hard time getting off the ground, let alone succeeding. But cash-strapped Catholic Church officials are closing the Church's inner-city schools at an accelerating rate [see "Save the Catholic Schools!," Spring 2007]. With just one Catholic high school left in all of Detroit, for instance, where would the city's disadvantaged students use vouchers even if they had them?

But sadly-and this is a second development that reformers must face up to-the evidence is pretty meager that competition from vouchers is making public schools better. When I reported on the Milwaukee voucher experiment in 1999, some early indicators suggested that competition was having just that effect. Members of Milwaukee's school board, for example, said that voucher schools had prompted new reforms in the public school system, including modifying the seniority provisions of the teachers' contract and allowing principals more discretion in hiring. A few public schools began offering phonics-based reading instruction in the early grades, the method used in neighboring Catholic schools. Milwaukee public schools' test scores also improved-and did so most dramatically in those schools under the greatest threat of losing students to vouchers, according to a study by Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby.

Unfortunately, the gains fizzled. Fifteen years into the most expansive school choice program tried in any urban school district in the country, Milwaukee's public schools still suffer from low achievement and miserable graduation rates, with test scores flattening in recent years. Violence and disorder throughout the system seem as serious as ever. Most voucher students are still benefiting, true; but no "Milwaukee miracle," no transformation of the public schools, has taken place. One of the Milwaukee voucher program's founders, African-American educator Howard Fuller, recently told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "I think that any honest assessment would have to say that there hasn't been the deep, wholesale improvement in MPS [Milwaukee Public Schools] that we would have thought." And the lead author of one of the Milwaukee voucher studies, Harvard political scientist Paul Peterson, told me: "The research on school choice programs clearly shows that low-income students benefit academically. It's less clear that the presence of choice in a community motivates public schools to improve."

What should we do about these new realities? Obviously, private scholarship programs ought to keep helping poor families find alternatives to failing public schools. And we can still hope that some legislature, somewhere in America, will vote for another voucher plan, or generous tuition tax credits, before more Catholic schools close. But does the school choice movement have a realistic Plan B for the millions of urban students who will remain stuck in terrible public schools?

According to Hoxby and Peterson, perhaps the two most respected school choice scholars in the country, no such plan is necessary. In their view, the best hope for education improvement continues to be a maximum degree of parental choice-vouchers if possible, but also charter schools and tuition tax credits-plus merit-pay schemes for teachers and accountability systems that distinguish productive from unproductive school principals.

That "incentivist" outlook remains dominant within school reform circles. But a challenge from what one could call "instructionists"-those who believe that curriculum change and good teaching are essential to improving schools-is growing, as a unique public debate sponsored by the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education revealed. Founded in 1999, the Koret Task Force represents a national all-star team of education reform scholars.

While the arguments about school choice and markets swirled during the past 15 years, both Ravitch and Hirsch wrote landmark books (Left Back and The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them, respectively) on how the nation's education schools have built an "impregnable fortress" (Hirsch's words) of wrong ideas and ineffective classroom practices that teachers then carry into America's schools, almost guaranteeing failure, especially for poor minority children. Hirsch's book didn't just argue this; it proved it conclusively, to my mind, offering an extraordinary tour d'horizon of all the evidence about instructional methods that cognitive neuroscience had discovered.

If Hoxby and Peterson were right in asserting that markets were enough to fix our education woes, then the ed schools wouldn't be the disasters that Hirsch, Ravitch, and others have exposed. Unlike the government-run K-12 schools, the country's 1,500 ed schools represent an almost perfect system of choice, markets, and competition. Anyone interested in becoming a teacher is completely free to apply to any ed school that he or she wants. The ed schools, in turn, compete for students by offering competitive prices and-theoretically-attractive educational "products" (curricula and courses). Yet the schools are uniformly awful, the products the same dreary progressive claptrap.

A few years ago, the National Council on Teacher Quality, a mainstream public education advocacy group, surveyed the nation's ed schools and found that almost all elementary education classes disdained phonics and scientific reading. If the invisible hand is a surefire way to improve curriculum and instruction, as the incentivists insist, why does almost every teacher-in-training have to read the works of leftists Paolo Freire, Jonathan Kozol, and William Ayers-but usually nothing by, say, Hirsch or Ravitch?

For a good explanation, look to the concept of ideological hegemony, usually associated with the sociological Left. Instead of competition and diversity in the education schools, we confront what Hirsch calls the "thoughtworld" of teacher training, which operates like a Soviet-style regime suppressing alternative perspectives. Professors who dare to break with the ideological monopoly-who look to reading science or, say, embrace a core knowledge approach-won't get tenure, or get hired in the first place. The teachers they train thus wind up indoctrinated with the same pedagogical dogma whether they attend New York University's school of education or Humboldt State's. Those who put their faith in the power of markets to improve schools must at least show how their theory can account for the stubborn persistence of the thoughtworld.

Instead, we increasingly find the theory of educational competition detaching itself from its original school choice moorings and taking a new form. Vouchers may have stalled, but it's possible-or so many school reformers and education officials now assure us-to create the conditions for vigorous market competition within public school systems, with the same beneficent effects that were supposed to flow from a pure choice program.

Nowhere has this new philosophy of reform been more enthusiastically embraced than in the New York City school district under the control of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and schools chancellor Joel Klein. Gotham's schools are surging ahead with a host of market incentives, including models derived from the business world. Many of the country's major education foundations and philanthropies have boosted New York as the flagship school system for such market innovations, helping to spread the incentivist gospel nationally. Disciples of Klein have taken over the school systems in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and Bloomberg's fellow billionaires Eli Broad and Bill Gates are about to launch a $60 million ad campaign to push the market approach during the presidential election season.

Don't get me wrong: market-style reforms are sometimes just what's necessary in the public schools. Over the past decade, for instance, I often called attention in City Journal to the destructively restrictive provisions in the New York City teachers' contract, which forced principals to hire teachers based solely on seniority, and I felt vindicated when negotiations between the Bloomberg administration and the United Federation of Teachers eliminated the seniority clause and created an open-market hiring system. Similarly, the teachers' lockstep salary schedule, based on seniority and accumulating useless additional education credits, is a counterproductive way to compensate the system's most important employees. The schools need a flexible salary structure that realistically reflects supply and demand in the teacher labor market.

Unfortunately, the Bloomberg administration and its supporters are pushing markets and competition in the public schools far beyond where the evidence leads. Everything in the system now has a price. Principals can get cash bonuses of as much as $50,000 by raising their schools' test scores; teachers in a few hundred schools now (and hundreds more later) can take home an extra $3,000 if the student scores in their schools improve; parents get money for showing up at parent-teacher conferences; their kids get money or-just what they need-cell phones for passing tests.

Much of this scaffolding of cash incentives (and career-ending penalties) rests on a rather shaky base: the state's highly unreliable reading and math tests in grades three through eight, plus the even more unreliable high school Regents exams, which have been dumbed down so that schools will avoid federal sanctions under the No Child Left Behind act. In the past, the tests have also been prone to cheating scandals. Expect more cheating as the stakes for success and failure rise.

While confidently putting their seal of approval on this market system, the mayor and chancellor appear to be agnostic on what actually works in the classroom. They've shown no interest, for example, in two decades' worth of scientific research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health that proves that teaching phonics and phonemic awareness is crucial to getting kids to read in the early grades. They have blithely retained a fuzzy math program, Everyday Math, despite a consensus of university math professors judging it inadequate. Indeed, Bloomberg and Klein have abjured all responsibility for curriculum and instruction and placed their bets entirely on choice, markets, and accountability.

But the new reliance on markets hasn't prevented special interests from hijacking the curriculum. One such interest is the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project-led by Lucy Calkins, the doyenne of the whole-language reading approach, which postulates that all children can learn to read and write naturally, with just some guidance from teachers, and that direct phonics instruction is a form of child abuse. Calkins's enterprise has more than $10 million in Department of Education contracts to guide reading and writing instruction in most of the city's elementary schools, even though no solid evidence supports her methodology. This may explain why, on the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests-widely regarded as a gold standard for educational assessment-Gotham students showed no improvement in fourth- and eighth-grade reading from 2003 to 2007, while the city of Atlanta, which hasn't staked everything on market incentives, has shown significant reading improvement.

One wonders why so many in the school reform movement and in the business community celebrate New York City's recent record on education. Is it merely because they hear the words "choice," "markets," and "competition" and think that all is well? If so, they're mistaken. The primal scene of all education reform is the classroom. If the teacher isn't doing the right thing, all the cash incentives in the world won't make a difference.

Those in the school reform movement seeking a case of truly spectacular academic improvement should look to Massachusetts, where something close to an education miracle has occurred. In the past several years, Massachusetts has improved more than almost every other state on the NAEP tests. In 2007, it scored first in the nation in fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading. The state's average scale scores on all four tests have also improved at far higher rates than most other states have seen over the past 15 years.

The improvement had nothing to do with market incentives. Massachusetts has no vouchers, no tuition tax credits, very few charter schools, and no market incentives for principals and teachers. The state owes its amazing improvement in student performance to a few key former education leaders, including state education board chairman John Silber, assistant commissioner Sandra Stotsky, and board member (and Manhattan Institute fellow) Abigail Thernstrom. Starting a decade ago, these instructionists pushed the state's board of education to mandate a rigorous curriculum for all grades, created demanding tests linked to the curriculum standards, and insisted that all high school graduates pass a comprehensive exit exam. In its English Language Arts curriculum framework, the board even dared to say that reading instruction in the early grades should include systematic and explicit phonics. Now a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas, Stotsky sums up: "The lesson from Massachusetts is that a strong content-based curriculum, together with upgraded certification regulations and teacher licensure tests that require teacher preparation programs to address that content, can be the best recipe for improving students' academic achievement."

The Massachusetts miracle doesn't prove that a standard curriculum and a focus on effective instruction will always produce academic progress. Nor does the flawed New York City experiment in competition mean that we should cast aside all market incentives in education. But what has transpired in these two places provides an important lesson: education reformers ought to resist unreflective support for elegant-sounding theories, derived from the study of economic activity, that don't produce verifiable results in the classroom. After all, children's lives are at stake.

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Britain: Parents using desperate measures to get kids into a good school

Parents who pretend that they have Christian beliefs in order to win places in church schools are doing the best for their children, David Cameron believes. The Tory leader refuses to criticise the "middle-class parents with sharp elbows". Asked for his views on the families accused of playing the system, he says: "I think it's good for parents who want the best for their kids. I don't blame anyone who tries to get their children into a good school. Most people are doing so because it has an ethos and culture. I believe in active citizens." Mr Cameron will learn this year whether his own daughter has won a place at a state-funded Church of England school in Kensington, West London.

This month The Times reported a surge in late baptisms into the Catholic Church, further evidence that some parents may be finding religion at a convenient moment in their children's education. Fears that middle-class parents are adopting religion to get their children into popular schools have led some Labour MPs to call for an end to the expansion of faith schools.

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Georgia schools to pay students to study

Sounds rather pathetic

Learning is supposed to be its own reward, but when that doesn't work, should students get paid to do it? That's the question two Georgia schools are asking in a 15-week pilot program that is paying high-schoolers struggling in math and science $8 an hour to attend study hall for four hours a week. The privately funded "Learn & Earn" initiative, an idea from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, is touted as the first of its kind in the state and one of a few similar programs nationwide. "We want to try something new," said Jackie Cushman, Gingrich's daughter and co-founder of the group funding the initiative. "We're trying to figure out what works. Is it the answer? No. Is it a possible idea that might work? Yes."

Forty students at Bear Creek Middle School and Creekside High School, both in the Atlanta suburb of Fairburn, began participating in the program Tuesday. The eighth- and 11th-graders chosen had to be underperforming in math and science, and many are eligible for free or reduced-cost lunches. The hope is that the bribes will boost students' motivation to learn, attend class and get better grades. Aside from the hourly wage, eighth-graders will get a $75 bonus, and 11th-graders $125, if they improve their math and science grades to a B and achieve certain test scores. For the older kids, that adds up to $605 for a semester of studying.

Cushman said the initiative is aimed at math and science because many student struggle in those subjects even if they excel in others.

The offer could help poor students who need the money and otherwise might choose a minimum-wage job over studying, said Jerome Morris, an associate professor at the University of Georgia's College of Education. He also noted that parents who have the means to reward their children for performing well in school have done so for decades. "Poor families just can't do that," Morris said. "They have to tell their children, 'You have to go to school just to learn.'"

The director of a private center aimed at improving motivation, however, said plying kids with cash is a desperate move by school officials. "They have not figured out a way to self-motivate these kids," said Peter A. Spevak, director of the Center for Applied Motivation in Washington, D.C. "What really drives a person is the desire to do well and the good feeling you have after doing your best every day." Paying children to learn may work in the short term, but before long, the luster could wear off and they may look to up the ante, Spevak said. Ultimately, it could become a losing game. "When you take the money away, assuming it has been effective, people sometimes get angry or disillusioned," he said. "They may start to wonder where the next prize is coming from."

The $60,000 initiative is being funded by Atlanta businessman Charles Loudermilk, founder of Aaron Rents, through the Learning Makes a Difference Foundation Inc., an Atlanta-based nonprofit that funds innovative education programs and was founded by Gingrich's daughters.

Alexis Yarger, one of the Fairburn program's participants, is eager to try anything to improve her grades. The 16-year-old Creekside junior plans to attend Spelman College, and says that although she's doing OK in science, "Math is not my best." Yarger, who has a part-time job at Burger King, said she was interested in the program even before she heard about the financial incentives. She would have taken part even without the money, she said, but her father said the cash doesn't hurt. "It's a good motivational tactic," Anthony Yarger said. "Whether it's a dollar or a candy bar, if it's helpful, I support it."

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26 January, 2008

Polar Fiction: More MLA nonsense

Assuming the verifiable truth of global warming, some academics wish to circumvent the climate change debate and start teaching college students about importance of combatting this imminent disaster.

Just as some environmentalists have co-opted the polar bear as a symbol for the predicted ecological crisis, Britt Rusert, a doctoral candidate at Duke University, visualizes polar exploration literature as a new outlet for this discourse: "How, I wonder, might such a polar canon help us conceptualize and historicize ecological crises, specifically the master discourse of global warming and their contemporary moments?," she told a Modern Language Association (MLA) audience this December.

She believes that "polar fiction is a potentially exciting place" to "certify climate change." "What new types of inquiry could be activated...pedagogically to new environmental reality?," she said.

The panel's title, "Rethinking Polar Fictions in an Age of Inconvenient Truth," insinuates a desire to revise history to include "evidence" of global warming. Similarly, Rusert denied the anachronisms of her approach, telling the audience that "American literature shows, in many ways, climate change is nothing new." No historical revisionism is necessary to advance the climate change agenda.

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More corruption of what is supposed to be education

The holiday season can be filled with surprises. Of course, when it comes to the public school system, those surprises aren't always wrapped with colorful ribbons. One morning a few weeks ago, I got a frantic call from my 14-year old daughter from school. "Mom, can you bring in some canned food?" she frantically inquired. "What for?" I asked. "It's for English class. We get 10 bonus points for bringing in canned food for the poor." "What???!!" "Please Mom. I can really use the extra credit!" "I can't believe this."

So what do I do? I hate this on so many levels, but all the other students will be doing it and getting the advantage of the bonus points for something that does absolutely nothing to develop the English skills I pray my daughter is somehow acquiring in this system. So I resentfully and begrudgingly dig out some canned food out of my pantry and run on over to the Junior High building like some kind of hoop-jumping sheeple.

Of course, I immediately shoot off an email to teacher and ask if it is true that the students have been offered extra credit in Honors English class for bringing in cans of food. She confirms unapologetically that it is true. But don't worry, she responds to an additional email of clarification and complaint, 10 bonus points doesn't really amount to much in the whole grade. Then why offer it at all? Because she can, because she gets away with it, and it allows her to manipulate her students into doing what she wants with her all-powerful grade-giving authority (my response, not hers.) Later I find out that my daughter's friend's math teacher offers extra credit to the math class, also for bringing in cans of food.

Why does this bother me so much? Is it really such a big deal? Before we write this off as a fairly innocuous and forgettable act of poor judgment by a few misguided school teachers, let's take a look at what our young minds have learned from this lesson.

First the teacher asks them to please bring in canned food for the poor. Her request goes ignored, and she is annoyed that the students can be so thoughtless of others this holiday season when they themselves have so much. So if they are not going to do the right thing on their own, she is going to offer them a bribe to do the "right" thing. After all, that is how morality is learned, right? Not through reason or from ones parents, but through bribes! She is going to offer to lift their grades in English in exchange for them doing something good for the community!

So the students learn that there are ways to game the system. Don't do something because it's right or good. If you hold out long enough, someone will offer you something in return, which completely changes the nature of your so-called "donation." Now you have made a purchase - some cans for some bonus points. What could be easier or more clearly in one's self interest? And you learn that you can get credit for something, namely English class, without actually performing anything at all in that area. You can get ahead in life not by getting good at something and acquiring skills that add value, but by doing something completely unrelated for someone in power.

You learn not to differentiate between charity and service, bribery and extortion, the quid pro quo. You learn that people in power can get you to do things that you don't really want to do through manipulation and misuse of that power.

You learn to lose respect for "educators", and by association, anyone trying to teach anything. If this is what education is, let's just get it over with as quickly as possible and with as little effort as necessary, and please, don't ask me to learn anything unless you can prove to me that there's really something in it for me in the end. Because we all know it's just a game, and it's really just wasting my time. And indeed it is.

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UK POLICE WANT TO FIND CAMPUS EXTREMISTS

British police have offered to train university staff to spot extremists operating on campus despite complaints from Muslim students that they could be unfairly targeted, a government document said Tuesday. Lecturers have been urged to scrutinize both students and invited speakers for signs they could be involved in radicalizing young people, according to new government guidelines.

Bill Rammell, the higher education minister, published advice to universities Tuesday on tackling extremism, requesting institutions share information on suspected radical speakers. "There is a real and serious threat, and we must all take responsibility for protecting ourselves," Rammell said. Al-Qaida influenced terrorism was the government's primary concern, he said, warning schools of the threat posed by far-right groups, animal-rights activists, anti-Semitic or anti-Islamic speakers.

Rammell said he believed some controversial speakers should be allowed to appear at universities, to allow moderate academics to debunk their claims through debate. "We prize academic freedom and freedom of speech as ends in themselves and as the most effective way of challenging the views which we may find abhorrent but that remain within the law," he said. But staff should compile details of speakers they fear may be exhorting students to violence - even in meetings held off campus - and share their concerns with counterparts, Rammell recommended.

British government security officials said Tuesday that radicalization is now much less likely to take place in mosques or formal settings, but instead in homes, gyms or at meetings on the fringes of campus. Jonathan Evans, head of the domestic spy agency MI5, warned in November that there is evidence extremists are grooming children and teenagers for attacks against Britain.

But some students and staff argue that Rammell's guidelines could lead to the victimization of Muslim students. "There is no evidence to suggest that Muslim students at university are particularly vulnerable to radicalization," said Faisal Hanjra of the Federation of Student Islamic Societies in the United Kingdom and Ireland. "Nor is there any evidence to suggest that university campuses are hotbeds of extremist activity." Sally Hunt, general secretary of academic labor organization University and College Union, said university staff should not be expected to police their students. "No student should ever think they are being spied on and no staff member should ever be pressurized into treating any group of students differently from another," she said.

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Milwaukee Parental Choice Program Under Attack

Wisconsin state Rep. Fred Kessler (D-Milwaukee) is pushing a proposal to oust 7,000 students from the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP)--the nation's oldest and most successful school voucher program.

In a January 7 memorandum to legislative colleagues, Kessler said the purpose of his idea was to decrease enrollment in the voucher program by 40 percent. He says the MPCP has created a "funding inequity" in Milwaukee that could be alleviated by kicking students out of the program and returning the subsequent "savings" to Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS). According to an analysis by School Choice Wisconsin, Kessler is calling for:

1) All teachers in schools of choice to hold bachelor's degrees from accredited colleges or universities. A bill passed in 2005 to lift the cap on enrollment in the MPCP imposed independent accreditation requirements on all participating schools.

2) All voucher recipients to take the same tests as MPS students, with the results "given to MPS for publication." The 2005 measure requires all MPCP schools to "administer a recognized test of their choosing" to measure student proficiency and allows for independent research that will produce reliable comparisons between MPCP and MPS students using MPS tests.

3) Parents applying for vouchers to submit tax returns as proof of eligibility. This requirement is already met by the MPCP.

4) Voucher payments not to exceed tuition charged to non-voucher students. Under current law, the maximum voucher payment is $6,501 per child. Schools that spend less per pupil receive less money. MPS spends $11,000 per pupil.

5) Schools of choice to admit special-needs siblings of students already enrolled. Schools participating in the MPCP already are prohibited from discriminating against special-needs students. The only information private schools can use to determine voucher eligibility is household income and residency.

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25 January, 2008

"Homeschooling" at college level

Online colleges are a logical extension of homeschooling. You work at home still and they offer a chance to get out from under the conventional educational system. But how good are they? How do you tell a good one from a diploma mill?

There is now an organization that gathers together a heap of information on each one and publishes an annual ranking of them all. See here for the latest rankings.

For each college, they gather data for eight different metrics: acceptance rate, financial aid, graduation rate, peer Web citations, retention rate, scholarly citations, student-faculty ratio, and years accredited. The overall ranking ranks each college by its average ranking for each metric for which data was available.




Controversy Over School-Targeted Advertising Forces McDonald's to Abandon Promotions for Honor Students in Florida

It's just the usual Mac-hatred

McDonald's has decided to stop sponsoring Happy Meals as rewards for children with good grades and attendance records in elementary schools in Seminole County, Fla. The "food prize" program, as it was called, for students of the Seminole County Public Schools in kindergarten through fifth grade was sponsored by the owners of the McDonald's restaurants in Seminole County. The decision to end the promotions for the program, appearing on children's report-card jackets, came from executives at McDonald's, the NY Times reports.

The sponsorship, between the restaurant owners and the Seminole County school board, drew national and international attention amid an outcry over childhood obesity and junk food diets because a fast-food chain was tying its products to academic performance. It also generated controversy because McDonald's had agreed to curb its advertising to children in schools, reports Times columnist Stuart Elliott.

The decision was made "because we believe the focus should be on the importance of a good education," William Whitman, senior director for communications and public affairs at McDonald's, said last week. "McDonald's, not the school district, will cover the cost to reprint the report-card jackets," he added, and "remove our trademarks," he told the Times. The reward program, called Made the Grade, will continue, Whitman said, because the local restaurant owners agreed in September that it would run through the current school year.

The sponsorship became known last month when a parent complained about it to an activist organization, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. The parent, Susan Pagan, was upset about the promotion on her daughter's report-card jacket. The jacket showed Ronald McDonald, the company's mascot for children; its Golden Arches logo; and Happy Meal menu items like Chicken McNuggets.

"Check your grades," the jacket advised. "Reward yourself with a Happy Meal from McDonald's." Because of the attention the complaint drew, the school district said last month that it would review the appropriateness of the jackets in the spring when making plans for the 2008-9 year.

Susan Linn, director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, said Thursday that she was pleased with the end of the report-card advertising. "In the absence of needed government regulation to protect schoolchildren from predatory companies like McDonald's," she told the Times, "the burden is on parents to be vigilant about exploitative marketing aimed at children."

Source

A good comment on the above below:

Exploitive? Advertising a reward for hard work exploits children? How did thinking get so twisted? We should thank McDonalds for giving away some of its profits to help motivate kids to do better. Don't worry about children being exposed to advertising - advertising is the basis of our country's success as a consumer economy. Advertising is key to our great standard of living. So what if school children get some free McNuggets for getting good grades? Kids are going to see advertising their entire lives.




Schools now bad for boys

Boys and girls should be educated in separate classes because their brains are hard-wired to learn in different ways, a controversial book says. Too many schools are creating an environment that is "toxic" to boys, turning them off learning and leaving them quite unprepared for adult life, according to Leonard Sax, a family doctor and research psychologist from Washington DC.

For the past decade parents and teachers have become worried increasingly about boys, who are now routinely outperformed by girls at every level and who show growing levels of disaffection and lack of motivation.

In his book Boys Adrift, Dr Sax argues that this yawning gender gap is the result of innately differently learning styles of boys and girls, and that most classrooms play to the strengths of girls. "In the co-educational classroom so many of the choices we make are to the advantage of girls, but disadvantage boys," he said. "The fact that girls are doing well is not the problem. The problem is, why can't their brothers do as well?"

Dr Sax, founder of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education in the United States, believes the answer lies in subtle, but important differences in the brains of boys and girls. "Until ten years ago, people said that boys are spatial and girls are verbal. That's nonsense. There is not much difference in how girls and boys think, but there are differences in how they see and hear," he told The Times at the start of a lecture tour of boys' schools in Britain.

Boys, for example, do not hear as well as girls. So a female teacher with a soft voice may believe that a boy who is not paying attention is playing up, when actually he cannot hear her properly. Her reaction may be to discipline him. But Dr Sax says that she would get better results by speaking louder and moving purposefully around the classroom. Boys' eyes also respond better to movement and direction, while girls' eyes are more affected by colour and texture. Asked to draw, five-year-old girls produce flowers, pets and people. Boys will draw a car crash, but may be reproached by teachers for producing something that is "not nice".

Similarly, he says, although most girls can sit still from a young age, most boys need to be active to discover their own pace. "Asking a five-year-old to sit still and read and write is something that many girls can do, but many boys can't. I have visited more than 200 schools. This is what I hear the teachers saying, `Jason, why are you standing?', `Gerard, are you making a buzzing noise?', `Robert, can you stop tapping?', `Look at Emily, she's sitting still and is good'. "The message that boys are getting from the age of 5 is that doing what the teacher wants is unmasculine," Dr Sax says.

One result, Dr Sax believes, is the overdiagnosis of attention deficit disorder among boys who are considered inattentive by teachers. Parents and doctors are tempted to treat this with medication, when simply putting them in a boyfriendly classroom would be far more effective.

The failure of schools to understand why gender matters means that boys very often switch off from learning from an early age and never re-engage. Long after their sisters have gone to university, they are still trapped at home suffering from "failure to launch" into adult life. The solution, Dr Sax believes, lies in single-sex education provided by teachers trained to understand the differences in brain function between boys and girls. "Let boys tap the table. Let them jump up from their seat when asked to spell a word. It won't disturb the boy next to them. Girls are bothered by extraneous noise levels 10 to 40 times lower than the levels that bother men. Girls are aware of what is going on around them. Boys are oblivious," Dr Sax says.

When such these methods were used in single-sex classes in Florida, pass rates for primary school fourth-grade boys (Year Three in Britain) rose from 55 per cent to 85 per cent.

Source




Government Schooling is Welfare

I wonder if I'll ever get to a point where I'm no longer burdened with trying to convince people that government - the State - is force. It is not voluntaryism. It is coercion. It is violence, pure and simple.

For example, if you want to send your kids to a government school, you are asking to have other people - non-parents - threatened with violence if they don't pay for what should be your responsibility. When you get a bill in the mail from the State, and you ignore it, chances are, men with guns will be knocking your door. If you try resisting their demands, they can use violent force - even lethal force, if necessary - to ensure your compliance.

And don't give me this, "I pay taxes too!" crap. All things equal, a parent pays less taxes, while consuming more government services.

Let's say me, a non-parent, and Sally Singlemom both make $40,000 year in income. When tax time comes around, not only does she get to file in a more favorable status - the "Head of Household" designation grants a larger standard deduction than does "Single" (about 7700 vs. about 5300) - but she also gets an extra exemption for her child (another 3300 per child), plus the child tax credit (up to $1000 per kid). And don't even get me started on the "Earned Income Tax Credit", which is just a wealth transfer mechanism.

The net result is not only that Sally's taxable income adjusted downward much more than mine, her tax obligation is credited by virtue of the fact that she has a kid. So she is paying less in taxes, while at the same time demanding more of the system we are both forced to pay into. That's a pretty sweet deal...for her.

So, for all you parents out there who send your children to government schools, show some respect for those individuals who are being forced to subsidize your lack of personal responsibility. Don't try to mask your willingness to steal from others by spouting off pious platitudes and false moral arguments about "the greater good", the importance of education, and "the poor". It's theft and you know it.

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24 January, 2008

On morality in literature

Comment from an Australian educationist

Is there a place for popular culture, represented by films, text messages, internet chat rooms and computer games, in the English classroom, alongside great literature? Mark Howie, the vice-president of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English, believes there is. At the Senate inquiry into standards in education, Howie argued that "given the realities of the modern world (where) students are engaged with visual and electronic text every day", English teachers have to "fmd ways in the curriculum of bringing the two together".

I beg to differ: literature, especially the enduring classics associated with the Western tradition, must be given pre-eminent status, but that does not mean I do not understand the appeal of pop culture.

When I was growing up in the 1960s, every boy in my street in the working-class Melbourne suburb of Broadmeadows, including me, had a hoard of comic books ranging from the Phantom, Superman and Spider-Man to Batman and Wonder Woman. By the time I reached high school, my taste in entertainment had developed to include James Bond, Modesty Blaise and television series such as The Samurai and endless episodes of Bandstand. On Saturday afternoons I caught up with the heroic exploits of larger-than-life western heroes such as the Cisco Kid and John Wayne and classic films including Ben Hur, The 300 Spartans and Cleopatra.

The funny thing was, none of this found its way into the classroom. At Broady High, English with Mr Clayton and Mr Mackie involved Australian and English poetry, Dickens, Lawson and Shakespeare, and learning how to parse and precis and to write properly structured essays. Thankfully, I also found my way into a reading group organised by the local Anglican minister, who introduced us to books such as Erich Fromm's The Fear of Freedom and The Art of Loving, Konrad Lorenz's On Aggression as well as Plato.

Rather than the tyranny of relevance, where education relates to the world of the student, my teachers saw their role as challenging us by providing an alternative to the often materialistic and superficial cultures in which we lived. The reality is that for many of us, growing up in a housing commission [welfare] estate surrounded by a wasteland of brick and cement, often with violent, alcoholic parents, the transformative and healing power of literature provided a gateway into an imaginative world without which life may have been intolerable. Literature not only provided an escape from the often empty and repetitive day-to-day routine, it also introduced us to an unknown world of ideas, ethical dilemmas and human emotions in an insightful and compelling way.

That literature, at its best, is far superior to popular culture represented by Neighbours, Big Brother, text messages or the ego-driven, self-centred drivel found on MySpace and Facebook should be self-evident. While the texts that constitute the literary canon are re-evaluated over time, the truth is that enduring works such as Euripides' Medea, Shakespeare's King Lear and Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard deal with emotions and predicaments in a profoundly sensitive way, unlike Neighbours or Jean-Claude Van Damme's action movies.

As Bruno Bettelheim and Joseph Campbell point out in discussing the importance of myths, fables and legends, literature deals with the types of heroes and archetypes that are essential for emotional and psychological wellbeing and maturity. Literature is also special in the way language is employed. American academic Louise Rosenblatt points to the unique quality of literature when she differentiates between what she terms an efferent and an aesthetic response.

The skills required to read an Ikea manual are totally different to those needed to read T. S. Eliot's poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The first is concerned with reading in its most literal guise: to understand information as quickly and easily as possible. But reading that requires what Coleridge termed a "willing suspension of disbelief" allows a reader to enter a world that has the power to shock and to awe, and which can speak to one's inner self.

In To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch explains to his daughter the importance of understanding and sympathising with those around us by using the metaphor of standing in somebody's shoes. Literature, unlike texts in a more general sense, is unique in its ability to engender the ability to empathise with others. While the humanising quality of literature cannot be guaranteed, the reality is that in entering into the life of characters, feeling their joy and suffering, and following their exploits and travails, one is made to lose one's sense of self and to value the worth of others.

Literature is essentially moral in focus, unlike utilitarian texts produced for commercial or entertainment reasons. It is wrong to suggest literature provides simplistic answers to complex ethical dilemmas, but fables such as The Iliad, children's stories including C. S. Lewis's Narnia books and more recent works by Patrick White and David Malouf address issues related to right and wrong and what constitutes a good life.

Contemporary approaches to English are driven by a mantra of change. Arguments in favour of dealing with new technologies, including the internet and computer games, are couched in terms of looking to the future and accommodating the demands of the information-driven 21st century. What this ignores is Eliot's point that continuity is as important as change. As such, the knowledge, understanding and wisdom represented by our literary heritage is essential in giving students an understanding of the present and the ability to deal with the future.

Eliot argues that the need is: "To maintain the continuity of our culture - and neither continuity, nor respect for the past, implies standing still. More than ever, we look to education today to preserve us from the error of pure contemporaneity. We look to institutions of education to maintain a knowledge and understanding of the past."

The article above by KEVIN DONNELLY appeared in the "The Australian" on January 19, 2008




Australia: Dumbed down teaching degrees in firing line

Even a Leftist government is perturbed! But you almost have to be a dummy to want to take up teaching in today's chaotic government schools

A SLIDE in the entry standards for students training to be teachers in Queensland universities has prompted a threat from the Bligh Government to refuse to recognise an education degree as an automatic qualification into the state's school system. Education Minister Rod Welford accused some universities of "desperation" by continuing to lower the academic bar school-leavers have to clear to be accepted in to a teaching degree course.

He said that, if the slide continued, education authorities might need to introduce extra testing and screening measures for graduates wanting to become teachers so professional standards were maintained. "I'm growing increasingly concerned at the desperation by some universities to fill their quotas by allowing what appear to be underperforming students attempting to become teachers," Mr Welford said.

He was responding to an analysis of education degrees on offer in Queensland this year, which showed that several universities were accepting some students with an OP score as low as 19 [where a top score is 1] into their teacher-training courses. The analysis of course information held by the Queensland Tertiary Admissions Centre showed that it is commonplace for universities - particularly regional institutions - to offer education degree courses to school-leavers with an OP of 17 or lower.

Mr Welford said these institutions were doing a disservice to teaching as a career choice. "My fear is that by going lower and lower in the OP scale the universities are damaging the professional standing of teaching," he said. "If it's too easy to get into, people don't see it as the highly significant and noble profession that it is."

While minimum entry levels have fallen at some universities, teaching continues to attract high achievers. Mr Welford said many students with ordinary OP scores did end up being outstanding teachers, and not everyone with an exceptional academic record at school necessarily made a good teacher. But, he said, the approach of some universities to their teaching courses was "more about bums on seats than it is about quality teaching". He said it was important to ensure universities produced education graduates who were "capable and successful students". "Otherwise we will reach the point where education systems and departments will simply not be able to recognise a degree alone as a qualification for entry as a school teacher."

But university administrators defended the lowering of cut-offs for teaching degrees, insisting academic attainment was not the only indicator of to who would make a good teacher. University of Southern Queensland Dean of Education Nita Temmerman said it was important the state's teachers were made up of the best and brightest but that an OP score was "only one indicator of achievement". USQ has an OP cut-off of 19 for most of its education-degree courses, but Professor Temmerman said that once in a degree course, students with ordinary OP scores regularly did better than their more academically gifted counterparts. "Kids with an OP of 16 have outperformed academically kids that have come in with an OP2," she said.

Professor Toni Downes of the Australian Council of Deans of Education, said academic rank was an important factor for trainee teachers but not to the exclusion of other qualities in students. "What parents want most is for teachers to be passionate and committed about their childrens' education," she said. "I never graduate somebody who I would not be proud to have teach my children."

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Congress Is Getting Closer to Higher Education Reauthorization

The U.S. House Education and Labor Committee has voted unanimously to approve legislation to reauthorize federal higher education programs for the next five years. The bill includes dozens of new federal programs and new financial reporting requirements for colleges and universities. The U.S. Senate approved a similar higher education reauthorization package in summer 2007. The College Opportunity and Affordability Act (H.R. 4137), which the House panel approved in November, will create new programs, increase authorization levels for certain aid programs, and implement new federal regulations to require colleges and universities to report financial information and tuition prices.

Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-CA), the ranking Republican on the committee, pointed to the new financial disclosure requirements as a key reason he and other Republicans supported the legislation. “The federal government invests billions in higher education each year to ensure that all Americans are able to pursue a college education and the benefits that come with it. In exchange for that support, these institutions should be held to account for their cost increases,” McKeon explained. “If we provide a federal investment without accountability, students and taxpayers will be on the losing end of the equation,” McKeon said. “Sunshine is not the only solution, but it is a critical first step.”

Dr. Richard Vedder, a distinguished economics professor at Ohio University and director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, says the legislation does not go nearly far enough in making college more affordable and could cause additional problems. “The best thing I can say about the House bill on higher education is that it is not as bad as I thought it might be, and that there seems to be a bipartisan concern about soaring costs for attending college,” Vedder said. “The bill makes some modest but positive moves in the direction of promoting greater transparency in college operations.” Vedder called the regulations designed to contain college cost increases “well-intended and even mildly innovative,” but he warned they could create new problems, such as increased student fees, other non-tuition cost hikes, and possibly increased government control of higher education institutions.

McKeon likewise expressed concern about components of the legislation that will expand federal involvement in higher education. “The new programs created in this bill are symptomatic of the larger tendency by Congress to fund any and every program with an inviting name--never mind whether the federal government has any business intervening in these areas in the first place,” McKeon said. “Both parties need to take a step back and realize that when we create new federal programs, we may be worsening the very problems we’re trying to solve.”

But McKeon says the reforms initiated by the new legislation are worth the expansion of federal involvement. “While I am deeply troubled by the number of new programs created by this bill,” McKeon said, “I am mindful that it contains a number of positive reforms that will benefit students, parents, and taxpayers, and, taken as a whole, I believe its positives outweigh the negatives.”

Vedder argues more fundamental reforms are needed to address the problem of ever-increasing college tuition costs and falling college productivity. “We need to start weaning students and institutions from massive government support that invites inefficiency, rent-seeking, and a loss of intellectual independence,” Vedder said. “A good place to start would be to end institutional subsidies and concentrate support on vouchers to students--but only those with very significant financial need.”

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Turning teachers into spies and snitches

UK schools minister Jim Knight wants teachers to monitor their pupils' every antic and the behaviour of their parents. We should give his proposals a big red cross.

By 2010, all secondary schools in England will enable parents to obtain daily class reports on their child’s every move at school. Each pupil’s attendance, behaviour and academic performance will be put online by 2012, allowing parents to check their progress daily. Apparently, the idea could end parents’ evenings, with teachers instead providing daily updates on ‘real-time’ reporting systems. The schools minister, Jim Knight, insists that the daily reports ‘should not add to staff workloads’ (1). One thing is for sure – pupils, teachers and especially parents are all set to lose out by such creeping surveillance.

Although a necessary and useful feature of the school diary, annual school reports on all the pupils you teach are inevitably time-consuming. So how daily school reports on a child’s ‘achievement, progress, attendance, behaviour and special needs’ would not add to a teacher’s workload is never properly explained. More worryingly, daily reports could also be used as a further disciplinary threat against teachers in the same way that a failure to keep existing school records already is. The existence of such a scheme will also contribute to classroom disruption, as pupils will be more preoccupied by the content of a daily report than the content of a textbook.

A daily report will also erode further any space that a pupil needs away from the prying eyes of mum and dad. It is only in exceptional circumstances that parents need to be informed by the school about poor behaviour or lack-of-progress issues. A recording of every slightly cheeky comment, minor disruption or wind-up with other pupils will be counterproductive because it will inevitably undermine the development of a good working relationship with teachers. It will also undermine a teacher’s authority even further in the classroom, as they will be perceived as babysitters merely keeping an eye on kids for their parents, rather than getting on with the job of teaching knowledge and understanding. And far from creating a climate that develops mature behaviour in children, it is likely to have the opposite effect.

It is a fact of life that adolescents can be obnoxious and mean to teachers and each other. Teenagers only grow out of playground spite when they begin to have an awareness of how their actions impinge on others. That awareness can only develop via the push-and-pull of the classroom and the schoolyard. It cannot be magically switched on via a stern email home. Indeed, school pupils develop a ‘conscience’ when they’re aware they have transgressed the ‘acceptable’ boundaries that have developed between teachers and among their peers. If every minor action automatically results in a parental ticking off, pupils will never develop the skill to judge how they behave in situations outside the home. The result is to infantalise teenagers even further and, even more alarmingly, the measures will put parents on almost the same level, too.

Tucked away in the blather about ‘improving parents’ access to detailed information about their children’, Jim Knight let slip that ‘schools could also monitor how often parents checked their child’s progress’. The idea of schools monitoring parents monitoring teachers’ reports monitoring their children’s behaviour seems like something dreamt up by the Stasi in Stalinist East Germany. The obvious and creepily threatening implication here is that parents must be snooped on by schools in order to check that they’re acting as ‘responsible’ parents. As it happens, the vast majority of parents have an in-built radar regarding whether their children are progressing well or not at school and care deeply about their welfare. When they are concerned, they will simply phone up or visit the school to enquire accordingly. How dare the government imply otherwise and that it is somehow up to local education authorities to coerce parents into showing ‘concern’ about their child’s education?

Already a number of measures are in place that reveal deep contempt for parents. Increasingly, parents have to sign homework sheets to show that they’ve checked their children’s work. And in September 2007, Ed Balls gave headteachers the power to obtain parenting orders forcing them to keep their expelled children indoors and off the streets. A failure to do so could lead to prosecution, a £1,000 fine and a criminal record (2). Although the online reports are only in their initial stages, it is inevitable that they will come equipped with some draconian log-in code in the future. Is it too fanciful to suggest that a child could be suspended or expelled if parents ‘fail’ to check out the daily ‘progress’ reports? Or that fixed penalty notices could be served up by local judges if parents don’t comply with the measures?

As an indicator of where the wind is blowing on social control, it was very significant this week that while the police’s pay rise was shunned, secondary school teachers received theirs – with a bit more than expected on top. Clearly, if teachers are expected to be both social workers to children and state snoopers on parents, the government has to make sure it’s in their best interests to do so.

Leaving aside the huge waste of teachers’ time and efforts involved in this ridiculous and pernicious measure, it will also socialise future generations to see routine surveillance as normal, while tightly binding parents to the state in ways that might prove impossible to log-off from.

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23 January, 2008

Why is Public Education Failing?

Children are coming out of school dumb because they aren't taught academics. They have, instead, become experiments in behavior modification

It's a fact. Most of today's school children can barely read or write. They can't perform math problems without a calculator. They barely know who the Founding Fathers were and know even less of their achievements. Most can't tell you the name of the President of the United States. It's pure and simple; today's children aren't coming out of school with an academic education.

Colleges know it. They have to set up remedial courses for incoming freshmen just to prepare them for classes. Parents know it. Their children grow dumber everyday. The politicians say they know it. They hold hearings to grill education "experts," and they hold high-powered education "summits" to debate and discuss the "problem." And they keep coming up with more federal programs and dictate more standards and spend more taxpayer dollars to fix the problem. But the problem continues to explode. Why?

Frankly, any parent can find the answer simply by looking through their child's textbooks or taking a close look at the classroom structures that their children are forced to endure. That's just what I'm going to do for you and when I'm through, see if you still wonder why there is an education crisis. And ask yourselves why all the politicians, with huge staffs to do their bidding, can't seem to find the problem.

Restructuring the Classroom

It comes under many names; block scheduling, group learning, cooperative learning. It's all part of a radical change in the way children are handled in the classroom. Children are paired with others for group grades. Individual achievement is de-emphasized. Under block scheduling a number of subjects are tied together in one long class. For example, math, science, health and physical education have been combined in one school. Children are supposed to learn these skills by working on class projects, such as launching an imaginary rocket to the Moon.

Presumably when faced with various problems in building their rocket, students will seek out the necessary information. They'll need math to calculate the projectory, science to find where the Moon is and health to know what to feed the astronauts. Obviously health is for astronaut training. Children are not instructed on how to do the math calculations or how to find the information they need. They are to find it for themselves. And children who can't keep up are to be helped along by other children in their group. It's called "kids helping kids." That's why teachers are now called "facilitators."

"Cooperative learning" is nothing more than a classroom-management technique that provides a convenient hiding place for bad teachers and under-achieving students. The student who doesn't care to learn, or has failed to grasp a concept, allows the rest of the group to do the work and yet gets the same grade.

What students coming out of such classes cannot do is perform math problems, recite multiplication tables, conjugate a verb or structure a sentence. Random facts picked up in the rush to complete a project do not supply the proper base or structure to understand a subject.

Math

Perhaps the most bizarre of all of the school restructuring programs is mathematics. Math is an exact science, loaded with absolutes. There can be no way to question that certain numbers add up to specific totals. Geometric statements and reasons must lead to absolute conclusions. Instead, today we get "fuzzy" Math. Of course they don't call it that.

As ED Watch explains, "Fuzzy" math's names are Everyday Math, Connected Math, Integrated Math, Math Expressions, Constructive Math, NCTM Math, Standards-based Math, Chicago Math, and Investigations, to name a few. Fuzzy Math means students won't master math: addition, subtraction, multiplications and division. Instead, Fuzzy Math teaches students to "appreciate" math, but they can't solve the problems. Instead, they are to come up with their own ideas about how to compute. Here's how nuts it can get. A parent wrote the following letter to explain the everyday horrors of "Everyday Math."

Everyday Math was being used in our school district. My son brought home a multiplication worksheet on estimating. He had 'estimated' that 9x9=81, and the teacher marked it wrong. I met with her and defended my child's answer. The teacher opened her book and read to me that the purpose of the exercise was not to get the right answer, but was to teach the kids to estimate. The correct answer was 100: kids were to round each 9 up to a 10. (The teacher did not seem to know that 81 was the product, as her answer book did not state the same.)

Children are not taught to memorize multiplication tables. Those who promote this concept believe that memorization is bad. Instead, children, they say, should be taught to "discover" multiplication. Students, they say, learn to multiply over several years by "thinking about math."

Social, political, multicultural and especially environmental issues are rampant in the new math programs and textbooks. One such math text is blatant. Dispersed throughout the eighth grade textbooks are short, half-page blocks of text under the heading "SAVE PLANET EARTH." One of the sections describes the benefits of recycling aluminum cans and tells students, "how you can help."

In many of these textbooks there is literally no math. Instead there are lessons asking children to list "threats to animals," including destruction of habitat, poisons and hunting. The book contains short lessons in multiculturalism under the recurring heading "Cultural Kaleidoscope." These things are simply political propaganda and are there for one purpose - behavior modification. It's not Math. Parents are now paying outside tutors to teach their children real Math - after they have been forced to sit in classrooms for eight hours a day being force-fed someone's political agenda.

English, Reading and Literature

Conjugate a verb? Diagram a sentence? Learn to spell? This is language class. We have more relevant things to learn. In a seventh grade language arts class in Prince William County, Virginia, children are given a test entitled, "What makes you good friendship material." Children are to circle "yes," "no" or "maybe" to questions like, "Am I someone who is trusting of others; likes to have close personal friends; is able to influence others; enjoys sharing with others; can keep a secret? If you answered yes to most of these then you are really good friendship material. If not, you need to work on yourself."

One book being used in classes is called The Book of Questions. Designed around situation ethics, the authors openly admit that "this book is designed to challenge attitudes, values and beliefs." Again behavior modification - not academics - is the root of this exercise. Here are a couple of sample questions from the book of Questions:

(1) On an airplane you are talking pleasantly to a stranger of average appearance. Unexpectedly, the person offers you $10,000 for one night of sex. Knowing that there is no danger and that payment is certain, would you accept the offer?

(2) A cave-in occurs while you and a stranger are in a concrete room deep in a mineshaft. Before the phone goes dead, you learn that the entire mine is sealed off and the air hole being drilled will not reach you for 30 hours. If you both take sleeping pills from the medicine chest, the oxygen will last for only 20 hours. Both of you can't survive; alone one of you might. After you both realize this, the stranger takes several sleeping pills and says it's in God's hands and falls asleep. You have a pistol; what do you do?

And so it goes, in Geography where, instead of looking for Colorado on a map, children are instructed to make a "Me" map to psychologically profile the children. In Civics, instead of learning how the government runs and of the great checks and balances that the Founding Fathers installed to protect our liberties, children are taught how to be "global citizens" under the UN's Declaration on Human Rights." In Health classes children are taught about Mother Earth - Gaia - with lessons on the Sierra Club as heroes.

Children are coming out of school dumb because they aren't taught academics. They have, instead, become experiments in behavior modification to prepare them to be citizens of a global village. The fault lies with the U.S. Congress, which now dictates curriculum and perpetuates the Department of Education, from which all of these evils flow.

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Britain too now has ghetto schools

Airport-style metal detectors could soon be fitted in hundreds of secondary schools in an effort to deter pupils from carrying knives. Details of the initiative emerged as Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, admitted she would feel unsafe walking alone in London at night. Police are investigating a series of stabbings this month and Gordon Brown has expressed his alarm about "out of control" gangs of teenagers on the streets. More than three-quarters of knife crime is committed by 12- to 20-year-olds. The metal detector plan will be a key element in a new government action plan on violent crime next month.

Although the initiative carries disturbing echoes of some US cities, where high-school pupils are routinely scanned for weapons, head teachers said it could help to tackle violence in high-crime areas.

Ms Smith said schools could "build on" schemes by the British Transport Police to install metal detectors in busy railway stations. "I think it is a good idea if we look at the ways in which, in some schools, it might be appropriate to use search arches," she told BBC1's The Andrew Marr Show. "I want young people to know it doesn't make them safer to carry a knife - it actually makes them more likely to be a victim." It is understood the use of metal detectors will be encouraged in schools in cities worst affected by knife crime, such as London, Birmingham and Liverpool.

John Dunford, general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association, said: "There are schools serving areas where knife crime is high in the community and it is right these schools take measures to protect pupils." Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrats' home affairs spokesman, said: "It is sad school scanners are necessary to stop a small minority of young people from carrying knives. But the number of high-profile stabbings at or outside schools in hot-spot areas for gangs means this is a sensible precaution."

Ms Smith also confirmed the Government was looking at whether alcohol was being sold too cheaply by supermarkets following the murder of Gary Newlove, the Warrington man killed by a group of drunken teenagers. "I think we need to look at whether or not both pricing and promotion is having an impact," she said.

Asked if she would feel safe walking in a deprived area such as Hackney at midnight, Ms Smith said: "Well, no, but I don't think I'd ever have done. You know, I would never have done that at any point of my life." She was also asked whether she would feel at risk in a more affluent district such as Chelsea. She replied: "Well, I wouldn't walk around at midnight and I'm fortunate that I don't have to do that."

David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, said: "This is an astonishing admission. It is shameful you can walk the streets of New York, Tokyo, Paris and Berlin safely at night, but not the streets of London."

Next month's violent crime action plan is expected to set out moves to increase the numbers of searches by police of suspected troublemakers and make more use of CCTV to catch them on tape.

Metal detectors are still relatively rare and hugely controversial in US schools, but they have been used, particularly in rougher inner-city neighbourhoods, for at least 20 years with some success. Reliable statistics are hard to gather, but studies down the years suggest that about 10 per cent of US schools use metal detectors - either the door-frame style commonly found in courts and other sensitive public buildings, or hand-held ones that school officials are able to use at their own discretion. The proportion is much higher in urban areas - particularly Chicago, which installed detectors in every middle and high school a few years ago.

Some detectors were installed in response to the 1999 Columbine High School shootings and other widely publicised killings. But for the most part schools decide the issue on their own criteria. A 1992 study in Oklahoma suggested metal detectors had helped cut the number of weapons being brought into schools by more than half, and helped cut violent crimes by about 35 per cent.

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German Homeschooling Family Flees to England After Mayor Attempts to Seize Children

A German family has fled to safe haven in the United Kingdom after the mayor of their town attempted to have their children seized and put into state custody for the crime of homeschooling according to WorldNetDaily (WND). WND reports that officials with Netzwerk-Bildungsfreiheit, a German homeschooling advocacy group, said that Klaus and Kathrin Landahl and their five children, "are in safety in England. They reached Dover on Saturday midnight."

The Landahl family was preparing to leave the country and had deregistered themselves as German citizens, when the Mayor of Altensteig filed a lawsuit with the local family court demanding it intervene and take custody away from the Landahls. A spokesman for the advocacy group told WND, "As the mayor knows that the family wants to leave Germany and that they have deregistered, his attempt is that the family court takes custody away in a so-called . (preliminary warrant) which means that custody can be taken away without a hearing [for] the parents."

He added also that in the Landahl case, not only were the authorities seeking to usurp the parents' right to decide their children's education, but also their right "to determine the place of abode," an action more in line with Soviet-era East Germany. The Landahls were in the process of moving into a rented apartment abroad when the court served them with a legal notice of the lawsuit.

Joel Thornton, President of the International Human Rights Group, which advocate for homeschoolers in Germany, told LifeSiteNews.com that the report from Netzwerk-Bildungsfreiheit is troubling since, "German government officials are willing to violate their own procedures to take the custody of children from the parents for nothing more than homeschooling. Were there criminal activity going on that was being avoided it would be understandable, however the system would probably not be so quick to act."

It is outrageous that children would be separated from their parents over this issue. The German courts need to move to protect the well being of their families from such severe government action," Thornton said. "Every parent in the world, not just homeschool parents, should be outraged that their rights are trampled by the Mayor of this town", he said. "Parents should express their outrage to the Mayor by email and let him know that this is not acceptable behavior in civilized countries."

The local court has not issued a final ruling in the case, but ever since Germany's Supreme Court ruled in favour of the state against homeschooling last fall, most families have found safety to exist in flight. WND reports that this week a Bavarian man identifying himself as "Mathew" sent this message: "This morning we received a call from the German ministry of education. Tomorrow (Wednesday) morning they will send the police to our home and take Josia (6), Lou Ann (10) and Aileen (13) by force, to the public school."

According to "Matthew," the government was emboldened by the high court's decision, and since then it has increased substantially its persecution of homeschooling families. "If we do not comply the government will ultimately revoke our rights as parents and take custody of our children," he said.

Another family said they were escaping Germany after their lawyer concluded that "only jail and loss of custody are left" as penalties from the government. "We are leaving Germany for now, and our children and my husband Tilman have already given up their permanent residence in Germany," said a note from Dagmar Neubronner. "I will maintain my permanent residence in Bremen because I am the bearer of our small publishing house." "It is hard to leave everything behind, especially our tomcat (a neighbor will take care of him), our relatives and friends and choirs and music ensembles and sports teams, our house and garden - our town and our country."

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22 January, 2008

Starry-eyed Canadian childcare experiment goes badly awry

There is no substitute for a loving home. Comment below from Australian educationist, Steve Biddulph

A large Canadian policy experiment provides a lesson that might save us much grief in Australia. In 2000 the province of Quebec, populous and progressive, took the bold step of providing universal day care right down to newborn babies, at a cost to parents of $5 a day. It was a well-intentioned attempt to come to terms with a large increase in the number of families where both parents were working, which had almost doubled in 30 years.

Three economists, Michael Baker, Jonathan Gruber and Kevin Milligan, seized the chance to evaluate what happened in real time. They had the rest of Canada as a control group, and a large study in place tracking children across the country to provide detailed data on their development. What they found was astonishingly clear cut in a field usually littered with carefully worded reservations and ideologically filtered reporting. The scheme was a disaster.

Evaluated in economic terms, it did not pay for itself; the tax gains from increased workforce participation (the workforce grew by 7.7 per cent) did not make up for the cost of the exercise. Also the system crowded out informal and family forms of care, so that many people simply switched the kind of care they used to take advantage of the massive subsidies.

But the human cost was the most significant. There were marked declines in child wellbeing; on measures of hyperactivity, inattention, aggressiveness, motor skills, social skills and child illness, children were significantly worse off than their peers who remained at home.

The family suffered, too: parent-child relationships deteriorated on all measured dimensions. There was a significant increase in depression rates among mothers and a deterioration in couple relationships among affected parents. None of these changes was minor. The hyperactivity increases were in a range of 17 to 44 per cent; the skills decline was between 8 and 21 per cent; childhood illnesses rose by 400 per cent. The study is littered with adjectives researchers are usually careful to avoid: strong, marked, negative, robust, striking. Yet it did echo, though more strongly, similar findings in the United States, Britain and Europe.

The Quebec policy did so many things right. It mandated many improvements, increasing from one-third to two-thirds the proportion of carers with tertiary qualifications. It supplanted private profit-making centres or took them over, a measure known to increase care quality. It also included and trained in-home carers, or family day carers, as we call them. Yet still the outcomes were dire.

In Australia, Labor has promised a mix of possible measures. It will build 260 non-profit community-run centres, tilting us towards the European model. Yet it will continue the large subsidies that are paid directly to private providers. (Canadian MPs are so horrified by the corporate chain profit model of child care that dominates in Australia that there is legislation proceeding to ban public money being given to such companies.)

The evidence points to only one possible solution: paid parental leave. When Sweden introduced this 15 years ago, babies and under-twos almost disappeared from its day-care system. This was despite it being acknowledged as the best system in the world, costing 2 per cent of gross domestic product (Labor's new measures will bring our expenditure up to 0.4 per cent).

In Britain, the policy of the former prime minister, Tony Blair, of building vast numbers of centres has proved an expensive mistake: a younger generation of parents is choosing to stay home and one-fifth of British nursery places stand empty. Under pressure from parents and child development experts, Britain has now introduced paid parental leave.

There is a way through the minefield. More community centres are needed. Corporate handouts, as the child-care subsidy has sadly often proved to be, could be better spent to help all parents have a real choice. In the end, paid parental leave is the most equitable way and the best value for money. It is certainly the best for babies. Love, after all, can't be bought.

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Education sex imbalance

It may show that men have been quicker to realize the low value of college education these days. The writer below just assumes that such education will continue to be as valuable as it once was

Suppose you could memorize only a single demographic number and you set about choosing the one with the most far-reaching implications for change in America. You could do worse than 1.5. Of course, there are plenty of possibilities: the birth rate, the teen-pregnancy or illegitimacy rate, the percentage of the population that is white or foreign-born, the percentage of elderly. But unpack 1.5 and you have the makings of a social inversion: a turning upside down of the male-dominated order that Americans have taken for granted since -- well, since forever.

The number 1.5 is, in this case, a ratio. According to projections by the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2017 half again as many women as men will earn bachelor's degrees. In the early 1990s, six women graduated from college for every five men who did so; today, the ratio is about 4-to-3. A decade from now, it will be 3-to-2 -- and rising, on current trends. What does this mean? And what's going on? Neither question is easy to answer. But start with the second.

A college degree used to be a rarity: a mark of privileged or professional status. As recently as 1950, fewer than half of Americans even finished high school, let alone went on to college. Surprisingly, in the early decades of the last century, college attendees were as likely to be female as male. As the economists Claudia Goldin, Lawrence F. Katz, and Ilyana Kuziemko note in a fascinating 2006 article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, things changed dramatically beginning in the 1930s. Men poured into universities, first to escape Depression-era unemployment, later with the help of the G.I. Bill, then to escape Vietnam. Above all, men were responding rationally to a labor market that paid a rising premium for advanced education. By 1957, three men took home a college diploma for every two women who did.

That imbalance defined the world in which all but the youngest of today's adults grew up. The education gap bolstered the presumption that men would dominate the professions and other elite careers; that men would boss women, instead of the other way around; that men, with their college-turbocharged earning power, would be the primary breadwinners; that, educationally speaking, men could expect to marry down.

Chapter 3 of the 20th-century story is as welcome as it is well known. Feminism, family planning (in the form of birth control, especially the Pill), and a meritocratic labor market opened not just jobs but careers to women, who streamed into the workforce and formed two-earner families. Expecting to work -- and also, as divorce rates soared, worrying about having to support themselves -- women also streamed to college. By about 1980, the gender gap in college enrollment had vanished. Young women had reached educational parity, with the promise of social parity not far behind.

The puzzle is what happened next. In the 1990s, the pattern changed again, but the surprise involved men. The wage premium for a college degree continued to rise smartly. Women responded just as economic theory predicts that rational actors would: Their college attendance rates kept climbing because the more they learned, the more they earned. Men, however, ignored what the market was telling them: Their college attendance and completion rates barely rose. Why? "That's the big mystery," says Gary Burtless, an economist at the Brookings Institution.

Whatever the reason, the result was a new educational gender gap, this time favoring women. There is little sign that it will close: Projections by the National Center for Education Statistics show a 22 percent increase in female college enrollment between 2005 and 2016, compared with only a 10 percent increase for men.

In 2006, according to the Census Bureau, about 27 million American men held a college degree; so did about 27 million American women. This is a tipping point, however, not an equilibrium, because male college graduates tend to be old, and female graduates tend to be young. Among people age 65 and older, men are much more likely than women to be college-educated. Middle-aged men and women are at parity. Among young adults ages 25 to 34 years old, the college gap favors women almost as lopsidedly as it favors men among their grandparents' generation.

In other words, today's young people already live in a world where, among their peers, women are better educated than men. As the grandparents die off, every year the country's college-educated population will become more feminized. In a couple of decades, America's educational elite will be as disproportionately female as it once was male.

Perhaps men will wake up, smell the coffee, and rush off to college in greater numbers. Or perhaps the labor market will undergo a sea change and the premium on education will stop rising and start falling. As of now, however, both of those reversals appear far-fetched. Men might -- certainly should, and hopefully will -- raise their college attendance rates, but the likely effect would be to narrow the gap with women, not close it, much less flip it.

Meanwhile, millions of semiskilled workers in developing countries are entering an increasingly globalized labor market, which all but guarantees a rise in the relative premium commanded by a college diploma.

So what we are talking about, in all likelihood, is an America where women are better educated than men and where education matters more than ever. Put those facts together, and you get some implications worth pondering.

In 1978, when I was a freshman in college, I met a woman who told me she was in law. "Oh," I said, "you're a secretary?" Her gentle but mortifying reply: "No, I'm a lawyer." Few of today's young people can even imagine making that kind of faux pas. According to census data, a higher share of women than men already work in management and professional jobs (37 percent versus 31 percent, in 2005).

Look for that gap to widen. A generation from now, the female lawyer with her male assistant will be the cliche. Look for women to outnumber men in many elite professions, and potentially in the political system that the professions feed. (The election of a female president is a question of when, not whether.)

Women's superior education will increase their earning power relative to men's, and on average they will be marrying down, educationally speaking. A third of today's college-bound 12-year-old girls can expect to "settle" for a mate without a university diploma. But women will not stop wanting to be hands-on moms.

For families, this will pose a dilemma. Women will have a comparative advantage at both parenting and breadwinning. Many women will want to take time off for child-rearing, but the cost of keeping a college-educated mom at home while a high-school-educated dad works will be high, often prohibitive.

Look, then, for rising pressure on government to provide new parental subsidies and child care programs, and on employers to provide more flextime and home-office options -- among various efforts to help women do it all. Look, too, for a cascading series of psychological and emotional adjustments as American society tilts, for the first time, toward matriarchy. What happens to male self-esteem when men are No. 2 (and not necessarily trying harder)? When more men work for women than the other way around?

Some of these adjustments will have international dimensions. Goldin, Katz, and Kuziemko note, "Almost all countries in the OECD" -- the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of advanced industrial countries -- "now have more women than men in college and have had a growing gender gap among undergraduates that favors women." Yet much of the developing world, especially the Muslim world, remains predominantly patriarchal.

Many tradition-minded cultures in the Middle East, Africa, and parts of Asia already regard the Western economic and social model as emasculating. Radical Islam, in particular, abhors feminism. As the United States and Europe continue to feminize, will the anti-modern backlash, already deeply problematic in the Muslim world, intensify? As sex roles and expectations diverge, might hostility and misunderstanding mount between the West and the rest?

No, men are not about to disappear into underclass status. They will not become mothers anytime soon, and they will not stop secreting testosterone. Men's ambition will ensure ample male representation at the very top of the social order, where CEOs, senators, Nobelists, and software wunderkinds dwell. Women will not rule men. But they will lead. Think about this: Not only do girls study harder and get better grades than boys; high school girls now take more math and science than do high school boys. If there is a "weaker sex," it isn't female.

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21 January, 2008

Virtual schools threatened by court ruling

An attack on homeschooling by teachers succeeds

Seventh-grader Marcy Thompson cried when she heard that a court had ordered the state to stop funding the virtual school she has attended for the last five years. The ruling, the first of its kind in the U.S., placed the Wisconsin Virtual Academy at the center of a national policy debate after critics raised a key question: Do virtual schools amount to little more than home schooling at taxpayer expense? School districts across the country are closely watching the case, which could force the academy to close and help determine the future of online education.

"It's a great education option for lots and lots and lots of people, and they need to save it," said Marcy, who is among more than 90,000 students from kindergarten through high school enrolled in virtual schools nationwide.

Virtual schools operate in 18 states, according to the North American Council for Online Learning, a trade association based in Virginia. Supporters say the schools are a godsend for parents who prefer that their children learn from home. But opponents, including the nation's largest teachers' union, insist the cyber charter schools drain money from traditional schools.

Marcy, 12, was home schooled through second grade, then began attending virtual classes in third grade.

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DE-PAUL SHOULD REINSTATE TOM KLOCEK

In Addition to Depriving Him of His 1st Amendment Rights this "University" Betrays its Once Catholic Heritage.

Founded in 1898, DePaul University holds itself out as America's largest Catholic University. Named for St. Vincent de Paul, who established the Congregation of the Mission (known as the Vincentians), the motto of the university is "Viam sapientiae monstrabo tibi". It's from Proverbs meaning, "I will show you the way of wisdom.".

Sometimes, I wonder if DePaul maintains its "Catholic" identity simply to retain tax exempt status. The classrooms and offices of the university have been almost completely denuded of crucifixes and religious artwork of any kind. After my time at DePaul, all that remains is inoffensive and nondescript representations of the saint making him appear unidentifiable.

Few of my old classmates express any loyalty to DePaul as our alma mater. Most who were graduate students described it as the most "secularized" of all of the Catholic schools they attended. For that reason, their affection and gift dollars generally go elsewhere. One local jurist, now serving in the criminal court, told me DePaul did not rate highly with him. Others told me its relationship to them is simply "cash and carry." You pay your tuition, pass your classes, take your degree and get out at the earliest possible moment.

It is difficult to imagine the reaction of the hardworking Catholic immigrants, who sacrificed from their meager earnings to help build DePaul from the ground up, if they could see it now. It hosted a recent "Out There" diversity conference for lesbian, gay, bisexual, "queer" and transgender communities, severely criticized by Cardinal Francis George. Fr. Dennis Holtschneider, the president of DePaul, defended the controversial decision to hold the conference along with the decision to permit the play "The Vagina Monologues" to be staged on campus. And that's not all. Including these items: Consider two of the other intriguing off campus conferences recommended to DePaul students which were advertised as opportunities for diversity education on the DePaul University web site:

1) "Queering the Church" Conference

"Queering the Church" conference asks this question, `Can the Church Be Queered, and if it can, how?' The conference's format is panel Discussion between pastoral and practical theologians, systematic theologians, and critical theorists The synopsis describes it this way. "What happens to the church when it is queered, where queering as a verb can denote a rethinking of sexual identities as well as a challenging of normative understandings of ecclesiology and liturgy? Can a queering of theology do more than critique and deconstruct traditional church structures, practices, performances, and self-understandings by pointing the way forward to the renewal of the church by suggesting new, more liberating and truthful structures, practices, performances, and self-understandings?"

2) "Let's Talk About Sex."

An organization of the school known as "SisterSong" proclaims itself as "proud to present our 2007 National Conference entitled `Let's Talk about Sex.' It continues: " To be held in Chicago and hosted by African American Women Evolving. Why?: Since the right to have sex is a topic rarely discussed when addressing reproductive health and rights issues, The organization "SisterSong" believes that sexual prohibitions are not only promoted by moral conservatives in this country, but also by reproductive rights advocates who fail to promote a sex-positive culture. We believe that sex for procreation or sexual pleasure is a human right, and we are striving to create a pro-sex space for the pro-choice movement. This four-day conference will include workshops and plenaries on topics such as birth control, senior sexuality, STDs, microbicides, gynecological health and wellness, erotica, militarism, and more, all through a reproductive justice lens. There will also be a special track of workshops designed by and for young women and teens."

There has been a necessary abridgment of the above to meet the requirements of a family website.

3. The Injustice to Tom Klocek.

During 2004, Thomas E. Klocek, an adjunct professor at the School of New Learning, engaged in a lively discussion with students distributing literature outside of a cafeteria. The students were members of two groups, Students for Justice in Palestine and United Muslims Moving Ahead. The literature repeated various anti-Semitic claims that Israel ought to cede its territory to the Palestinians under the theory of the so called right of return. When Klocek disagreed with the students, one compared the Israeli treatment of Palestinians to the atrocities committed by Hitler and the Nazis. Subsequently, several of the students complained about Klocek to DePaul officials and launched a smear campaign describing him as a bigoted individual on account of his support for Israel.

In the upside down logic of Dean Susanne Gumbleton, Klocek, who was not in a classroom when the incident occurred, was disciplined for disagreeing with the students distributing the inflammatory literature. He was suspended with pay for the duration of the semester on September 24, 2004 by Gumbleton and advised that he would have to submit an apology to the students and he would have to consent to having his lectures monitored in order to continue teaching at DePaul in the future. Klocek objected to this treatment as a violation of his academic freedom and unsuccessfully sought to obtain a formal hearing on the allegations conducted by DePaul. When Gumbleton granted an interview to the student newspaper which justified the decision and omitted to include any meaningful references to Klocek's side of the story.

Klocek filed suit in the circuit court seeking redress for wrongful termination and defamation. The wrongful termination count was dismissed, the defamation suit continues. Klocek's mistreatment at the hands of university administrators has made the case extremely noteworthy in academia.. Free speech advocacy groups have championed his cause and DePaul finds itself defending anti-Semitic student extremists while persecuting a highly regarded Catholic faculty member who defended the traditions of the West and Israel.

DePaul has maintained a posture of official silence on this issue but in correspondence, Holtschneider backs Gumbleton and criticizes Klocek for suing the university. DePaul has repeatedly attempted to have the case dismissed, but thus far judges have refused to strike the defamation count of Klocek's complaint. I can understand the official silence of the university. It needs to continue the local news blackout. Reason: the more he Klocek case is known, the worse DePaul looks. In her own way, Dean Gumbleton treats this injustice not unlike the Islamic world where diversity and multiculturalism are not discouraged. How long the local news blackout will continue is unknown. But some day a spotlight will be shone on the anti-intellectualism of DePaul in this case. When that occurs, the lawsuit will be ended and a freshly reinvigorated university administration will reinstate Tom Klocek.

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Australian kids get distorted and inadequate history lessons

By Christopher Bantick

As we begin to think about celebrating Australia Day, the armbands will be dusted off. There will be the black armbands of shame over European colonisation, and the white armbands triumphantly boasting the nation's achievements won from a hostile land. The symbols of armbands illustrate how increasingly divisive Australian history has become, whether this is the protracted battle of the "history wars", where interpretations of indigenous ownership and colonial occupation have been raging, or the "culture wars" between previous prime minister John Howard's view of the past and Labor's.

Now with Labor in power, a new front has opened over how history is to be taught. While Labor has agreed with the Howard view of the need for a national curriculum, the critical question is: What will it contain? Australian history has become so contentious and politicised that it no longer is a subject of content and commonly agreed facts. Instead, it has morphed into an ideological minefield. Those who lose out are the kids.

Am I overstating the case? Consider this. In New South Wales schools, children as young as eight have been taught, from a government-approved textbook and distributed to NSW schools, the Sorry Song. The song. written by Kerry Fletcher in 1998 for Sorry Day festivities, contains the following words: "If we can't say sorry, to the people from this land, sing, sing loud, break through the silence, sing sorry across this land. We cry, we cry, their children were stolen, now no one knows why."

This is one example where a broad and well-rounded representation of the past has been sacrificed for an ideological position or, more bluntly, the indoctrination of eight-year-olds.

An uncomfortable reality is that there are many children in Queensland classrooms who know little history. They would fail the citizenship test on knowledge about Australia's past and society. Why? They have no factual basis. The assumption is otherwise. As then-immigration minister Kevin Andrews said in May last year: "It is the sort of thing you would expect someone who goes through school in Australia would know by the end of secondary school, and probably in some instances by the end of primary school." Wrong!

But it has not taken federal Labor long to take the high ground over history in the classroom. Where Howard wanted all Year 9 and 10 students to undertake a compulsory and factually-driven Australian history course measured out in a series of milestones, federal Labor has other plans, as Education Minister Julia Gillard indicated through a spokeswoman last week. "Australian history is a critical part of the curriculum and should be included in all years of schooling, not just for a few years in secondary school. The government will work co-operatively with the States and territories through Labor's national curriculum board to implemenmt a rigorous content-based national history curriculum for all Australian students from kindergarten to Year 12."

There is a little word missing here: facts. Moreover, there is no mention of another: chronology. The Labor take on the past sounds like the states will write their own content under broad national guidelines. It is conceivable that students will be receiving- at the whim of teachers and schools - content that although fitting a broad sense of a national curriculum has little national coherence.

Moreover research has consistently shown that children learn most successfully when they can see sequential links and associations. The British Inspectorate of Schools charged with monitoring standards, Ofsted, had this to say last year about students studying topics in isolation. "Children do not understand the chronology of what they have studied and cannot make links between important historical events."

The omission of a factual emphasis and stated chronology in the Labor plan, and let's keep in mind facts are different to content, is at odds with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's preferred position. In July last year, the then-leader of the opposition said: "Our young kids just need to be introduced to the facts in our history and facts in our society and then later on as they move through high school they can start rnaking up their own minds about what is right and wrong."

This view would seem at variance with his deputy Gillard's ideas and, curiously, squares with the Howard attempt to ground children in factual knowledge about the past. The moot point is: What will Labor's national history curriculum include? Children should be taught about their past free from ideological positions and political spin - a point Gregory Melleuish, Associate Professor of Politics at the University of Wollongong, noted in August: "In recent times there has been a move to consider history in political rather than professional terms. Many professional historians are more interested in serving political causes than historical ones."

Moreover, evidence shows that children don't want the politics. The History Teachers Association of NSW, in a submission to a Senate inquiry into school standards in July, noted students do not like politics in the classroom, or indigenous history. HTA executive officer Louise Zarmati said: 'This is a somewhat delicate subject but they don't like the indigenous part of Australian history. The feedback I get is that they are not prepared to wear the guilt. I think it sparks a lot of racism."

The fact is that Australian children are effectively being disenfranchised from knowing about their past while governments bicker about the politics of history. It is a sad indictment on the education system that many grandparents know more about Australian hisdtory than their children and certainly their grandchildren. That is something to worry about.

The article above appeared in the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" on January 20, 2008





20 January, 2008

Foolish academic elitism

There is more than an echo of that arch patrician, Lady Ludlow, in the scathing criticism being directed against the internet and its unlimited diet of free information. She it was, in the BBC's delectable serialisation of Mrs Gaskell's Cranford, who dismissed the notion that the lower classes should be given access to education. Teaching them to read, she said, would simply distract them from saying their prayers and serving the landed gentry.

Today it is the University of Google that stands accused of purveying the new socialism by offering equality of information to everyone. Modern students, say the critics, are being handed unlimited supplies of dubious facts from online sources such as Wikipedia, without the means of distinguishing between the good and the bad. Because they no longer have to sift through books and carry out their own research, the students' sense of curiosity has been blunted. The internet provides "white bread for the mind" and it is breeding a generation of dullards.

Let them read books, commands the impressively named Professor Tara Brabazon, of the University of Brighton where she is Professor of Media Studies. She says that she has banned her own students from using Wikipedia or Google as research sources, and insists they read printed texts only. In a lecture, she argues that only thus will we produce the critical thinkers that the nation needs.

I fear the professor is blaming the messenger rather than the message. It is not the uneven quality of facts found on the internet that is to blame for uninquiring minds, it is the way they have been taught to think - and the way their written work is marked.

I doubt if there is any difference between the undergraduates of my generation, who crammed for exams by creaming off selected quotes from recommended texts and then learning them by rote, and those of today who download convenient passages from Wikipedia. The difference lies in the use they make of the material. If they are encouraged to believe that predigested information is an end in itself, and if they are then given high marks for the result, they will simply conclude that that is the outcome that society requires of them.

If, on the other hand, they learn that they have a gateway to knowledge unprecedented in the history of man, and that this opens up access to sources of information that they might never have glimpsed as they struggled with poorly equipped libraries unhelpful staff and unimaginative lecturers, then they will realise that, far from blunting curiosity, it sharpens it.

Academics like Professor Brabazon reveal a Ludlow-like snobbery towards Wikipedia that is becoming ever harder to justify as the site itself improves. A year ago, the Encyclopaedia Britannica was outraged when the magazine Nature carried out a comparison between it and Wikipedia, and concluded that the service offered by the two were more or less on a par (Britannica had 2.9 minor errors per article, Wikipedia had 3.9).

The difference today is likely to be even less, because Wikipedia can correct itself so swiftly. That it is open to outside contributors of uncertain quality is part of its nature. But precisely because of this, there are thousands of eagle eyes ready to pounce on errors of fact or interpretation. Vandal editing - the deliberate distortion of facts by people known in the trade as "sockpuppets" - is now routinely detected, and particularly vulnerable pages are protected from interference.

Of course, there is always the risk of inaccurate information. But is any dictionary, encyclopaedia or historical work immune from it? Should I trust Macaulay's error-littered, Whig-biased History of England simply because it is bound in leather and will take a trip to the library to find? Is the New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography to be relied on because it has 60 volumes and a worldwide reputation, or should I listen to the detractors who have found errors in its entries for Jane Austen, Florence Nightingale and George V? And is the Britannica quite as magisterial as its title suggests?

I did a quick test on my own, looking up Nancy Mitford (I'm a fan) and judging the results on time and accuracy. Wikipedia gave me four pages of almost 100 per cent accurate information (I rang her niece, Emma Tennant, who spotted one small error), together with 33 links to related characters and a 16-line bibliography suggesting further reading. I got the whole lot in ten seconds.

The Britannica required a 20-minute trip to my nearest library. It gave me 350 words and a bibliography with one entry (Harold Acton's memoir). The online version offered the chance of signing up to a 30-day free trial, but still required my credit card details, replete with reassurances about taking my privacy "very seriously" - always a worrying sign. The DNB provided by far the best and fullest entry (but so it should). However, a month's subscription costs 29.35 pounds, and a year will set you back 195 pounds plus VAT. [sales tax]

What Professor Brabazon and cohorts of internet critics appear to be advocating is that those who require reliable information - the academic term is "peer-reviewed" - should be made either to work for it, or to pay for it. Curiosity, it seems, can only be stimulated by trawling library shelves or by shelling out substantial amounts of money.

The rest of us must fall back on the poor man's legacy, the internet, where we will encounter trivia, inaccuracy and lazy opinions lazily received. It's a useful caricature, of course, for those whose business it is to maintain a two-tiered society. But it suggests that not much has changed since the Church railed against men like Wycliffe and Tyndale who had the temerity to translate the Bible from Latin into English and thus allow it to be read by the great unwashed.

Source




British mathematics education dumbed down

An advanced form of the maths A-level should be introduced to attract the prodigies who are not stretched by the current qualifications, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority said yesterday. Some 60% of teachers they questioned for their latest report on A-level maths said the qualifications had got easier since reforms in 2004. Teachers said pupils were increasingly re-taking units to improve their marks and that there was a wide perception that some options were easier than others. The report says: "Most teachers also felt that the two optional units do not provide sufficient 'stretch' for the most able students."

It concludes that the options for the QCA were to accept that only a small clever core of students should do maths, or that the A-level should be separated from the further maths A-level which should stretch the most able. A spokesman said they would be investigating how to improve the further A-level. The current A-level was introduced in 2004 in response to a crisis in recruitment after earlier reforms in 2000 prompted a decline. Since 2004 the number of candidates has increased by around 14%.

Ken Boston, chief executive of the QCA, said that maths A-level was among the most challenging to design because of the range of ability among pupils. "There is a far greater range of achievement in mathematics (and the related discipline of physics) among young people than any in other subject in the curriculum, except perhaps music. While there are some 14 year olds still struggling with basic arithmetic, there are some young people who are pushing at the frontiers of advanced mathematics, and destined for brilliant careers. And in the broad span between the two, there is an extraordinary range of differentiated performance. Mathematics is a nationally important priority."

The schools minister Jim Knight said the new A-levels being piloted would better reflect academic excellent through the new A* grade. "Let's be clear. A-level maths is not easy. It is a rigorous and challenging qualification. "Changes made to the curriculum in 2004 made it more accessible - for example by allowing combinations such as statistics and mechanics, while retaining core mathematical content and protecting intellectual rigour. "These changes also overcame problems with the transition from GCSE without reducing the level of difficulty, and were made after extensive consultation with the mathematics community.

"Right now, plans are in place to stretch the brightest candidates even further. The new A-level, which is being piloted, will stretch the most able candidates with more open ended, less structured questions and the A* grade will ensure that exceptional attainment is recognised and students are better prepared than ever before to study maths at university."

Source




Australia: Anger at kindergarten sex lessons

The usual Leftist attempt to debauch children in the name of "education"

A PARENT has complained her five-year-old daughter was taught sex education at a school in Hobart and revealed she was assaulted by two boys in her class just after the visit from Family Planning. The claims have prompted calls for the course only to be taught with parental consent. The parent, who did not want to be named, said her kindergarten child had come home and "said the word vagina". "I was shocked," she said. "They were taught what a penis and a vagina was, which I don't think they should in kinder. "I told the principal if I had known anything like that was going to happen, I would have kept my kids at home all week."

The parent said her child told her about the alleged assault when she put her to bed that night. "That's when she told me that two boys in her class had put their hands down her pants, and she said she bashed them," the mother said. "She said it happened in the dolly corner. "There were three adults in the room and 16 kids and no one saw it. She said she did tell the teacher, but the teacher seems to think she did not tell."

Pembroke Labor MLC Allison Ritchie said the allegation would be investigated. "I have had an undertaking from the Education Minister's office that this incident will be fully investigated," she said. Ms Ritchie said she had also heard complaints from people delivering the course, who had turned up to a school in the North-West only to find parental consent had not been sought. She said the children were part of a protective behaviours course.

The complaint parent said her six-year-old and nine-year-old children had all been put through the course. "I never knew it was happening until they all came home and said," she said. "I don't think they should do it at that age, maybe Grade 6 or Grade 7, not kinder and prep. "But the principal said the Government said it was compulsory for kids to learn about their bodies at that age. "They told me that it was Family Planning, they came in to talk to the kids about their bodies, who could touch them and who could not."

Ms Ritchie said all schools should ensure that parents had the opportunity to give their consent and view the content of such courses. "Parents should absolutely be able to opt out," she said. "It is not compulsory for every child. "You might say I am happy for my Grade 7 child to participate, but not my kinder child." Ms Ritchie said most schools were doing the right thing and gaining consent.

Source





19 January, 2008

Leftists trying to destroy Britain's remaining good schools

They have given up on improving bad schools because they know from experience that it cannot be done. So they want to destroy the good schools by busing in the problem children that any sane parent would want to avoid. Fortunately, the government is not so far going along with that -- as it realizes how unpopular that would be

Middle-class parents obsessed with Ofsted reports and league tables are colonising the best primary schools, forcing poorer children into failing schools and ruining their chances in life, researchers claim. The Cambridge Primary Review – the biggest study of primary schools for decades – recommends that catchment areas should be scrapped because only wealthy parents can afford to buy houses next to the best primaries. Instead, oversubscribed schools would use a lottery system.

The research, by Stephen Machin and Sandra McNally, from the University of London, found that admissions procedures exacerbated inequalities. Their report said: “Some aspects of primary education are geared in favour of helping higher income groups. Current admissions policies favour parents who not only know how to use published information about school standards such as Ofsted inspections and performance tables but can also afford to choose exactly where to live. “Prohibiting schools from discriminating on the basis of residence would do much to level the playing field in terms of educational opportunities. It would reduce the large inequalities that appear later in terms of wages and intergenerational mobility.”

The report said that a person’s success in the labour market was influenced by his or her primary education. It said: “Differences in educational progress start very early, widen as children age and lead to substantial differences in later attainment levels.” Dr McNally told The Times that schools should be banned from choosing pupils according to where they live. “They could still give preferential treatment to siblings of pupils already at the school, but then there should be a lottery system,” she said. “That was adopted in the whole of Brighton & Hove as a fairer system. Quite how far children could be bussed to other schools would need to be worked out, but the local authority could organise some help with that. It’s a really vital area and an obvious way of making things fairer.” She admitted that scrapping catchment areas would upset a lot of people, “particularly those who had bought houses near schools”.

The report also criticised the market-based approach to education, backed by successive governments, which encourages competition between schools. “Choice and competition may exacerbate educational inequalities,” it said. “The inability to exercise choice can lead to educational segregation, with children from disadvantaged families having to make do with the schools that more advantaged parents do not want to send their children to. “Schools are not like businesses: they do not close down when they no longer make a profit.”

John Dunford, of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “There’s strong evidence that collaboration between schools raises standards, whereas excessive competition and market-based policies create polarisation, which makes the task of some schools particularly difficult.”

Another report for the review studied the history of primary education. It found that 100 years ago schools “played down intellectual aims and put more stress on practical activities, particularly those required by an industrious and unselfish workforce”.

Jim Knight, the Schools Minister, said: “Of course, all children should attend a good school and have the opportunity to secure the best jobs in later life, regardless of their background. That is precisely why we have introduced the new statutory School Admissions Code. Catchment areas must reflect the broader local community and must not exclude particular areas to penalise low income families. A ban would undermine the right of schools and councils to decide their own admissions policies – and there is no way parents will support this.”

Source




More putting propaganda before real education in schools

'No Name-Calling' Campaign Coming to Nation's Schools

Thousands of American schools are expected to take part in the fifth annual "No Name-Calling Week," a homosexual advocacy group announced on Monday. The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) said the campaign is aimed at children in grades 5-8, and the group offers additional lesson plans for earlier grades. "No Name-Calling Week, Jan. 21-25, is an annual week of educational activities aimed at ending name-calling of all kinds and providing schools with the tools and inspiration to launch an on-going dialogue about ways to eliminate bullying in their communities," GLSEN said in a news release.

"No Name-Calling Week offers schools an opportunity to engage students about the importance of treating one another with respect," said Dr. Eliza Byard, GLSEN's interim executive director. "Unfortunately, far too many students experience the negative impact of name-calling, bullying and harassment. Through proactive educational interventions like No Name-Calling Week, schools can make a difference in the safety of all of their students," Byard said.

GLSEN said No Name-Calling Week was inspired by the young adult novel "The Misfits," by James Howe. The book tells the story of four best friends "trying to survive the seventh grade in the face of all too frequent name-calling, bullying and harassment."

GLSEN said its No Name-Calling Week Coalition partners include Simon & Schuster Children's Publishers, the National Association of Secondary School Principals, the National Association of Elementary School Principals, Girl Scouts of the USA, the National School Boards Association and the National Education Association.

In the run-up to No Name-Calling Week, GLSEN sponsored a "Creative Expression Contest," asking students ages 5-15 to "illustrate what name-calling means to them through artistic expression such as poetry, artwork or music."

On its Web site, GLSEN says it "envisions a future in which every child learns to respect and accept all people, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity/expression."

The GLSEN Web site offers a guide for students who want to start "gay-straight alliances" or similar clubs at their schools. And the group also organizes an annual "Day of Silence" in schools, when some students and faculty members remain mute to "protest the oppression of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth."

In previous years, conservative groups have criticized any attempt to publicize or advocate the homosexual lifestyle in the nation's schools.

Source




Hopelessly bureaucratized government schools failing to educate India's poor

With the dew just rising from the fields, dozens of children streamed into the two-room school in this small, poor village, tucking used rice sacks under their arms to use as makeshift chairs. So many children streamed in that the newly appointed head teacher, Rashid Hassan, pored through attendance books for the first two hours of class and complained bitterly. He had no idea who belonged in which grade. There was no way he could teach. Another teacher arrived 90 minutes late. A third did not show up. The most senior teacher, the only one with a teaching degree, was believed to be on official government duty preparing voter registration cards. No one could quite recall when he had last taught.

"When they get older, they'll curse their teachers," said Arnab Ghosh, 26, a social worker trying to help the government improve its schools, as he stared at clusters of children sitting on the grass outside. "They'll say, 'We came every day and we learned nothing.' "

Sixty years after independence, with 40 percent of its population under 18, India is now confronting the perils of its failure to educate its citizens, notably the poor. More Indian children are in school than ever before, but the quality of public schools like this one has sunk to spectacularly low levels, as government schools have become reserves of children at the very bottom of India's social ladder. The children in this school come from the poorest of families - those who could not afford to send away their young to private schools elsewhere, as do most Indian families with any means.

India has long had a legacy of weak schooling for its young, even as it has promoted high-quality government-financed universities. But if in the past a largely poor and agrarian nation could afford to leave millions of its people illiterate, that is no longer the case. Not only has the roaring economy run into a shortage of skilled labor, but also the nation's many new roads, phones and television sets have fueled new ambitions for economic advancement among its people - and new expectations for schools to help them achieve it.

That they remain ill equipped to do so is clearly illustrated by an annual survey, conducted by Pratham, the organization for which Ghosh works. The latest survey, conducted across 16,000 villages in 2007 and released Wednesday, found that while many more children were sitting in class, vast numbers of them could not read, write or perform basic arithmetic, to say nothing of those who were not in school at all. Among children in fifth grade, 4 out of 10 could not read text at the second grade level, and 7 out of 10 could not subtract. The results reflected a slight improvement in reading from 2006 and a slight decline in arithmetic; together they underscored one of the most worrying gaps in India's prospects for continued growth.

Education experts debate the reasons for failure. Some point out that children of illiterate parents are less likely to get help at home; the Pratham survey shows that the child of a literate woman performs better at school. Others blame longstanding neglect, insufficient public financing and accountability, and a lack of motivation among some teachers to pay special attention to poor children from lower castes. "Education is a long-term investment," said Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission and the government's top policy czar. "We have neglected it, in my view quite criminally, for an enormously long period of time."

Arguments aside, India is today engaged in an epic experiment to uplift its schools. Along the way lie many hurdles, and Ghosh, on his visits to villages like this one, encounters them all. The aides who were hired to draw more village children into school complain that they have not received money to buy educational materials. Or the school has stopped serving lunch even though sacks of rice are piled in the classroom. Or parents agree to enroll their son in school, but know that they will soon send the child away to work. Or worst of all, from Ghosh's perspective, all these stick-thin, bright-eyed children trickle into school every morning and take back so little. "They're coming with some hope of getting something," Ghosh muttered. "It's our fault we can't give them anything."

Even here, the kind of place from which millions of uneducated men and women have traditionally migrated to cities for work, an appetite for education has begun to set in. An educated person would not only be more likely to fetch a good job, parents here reasoned, but also less likely to be cheated in a bad one. "I want my children to do something, to advance themselves," is how Muhammad Alam Ansari put it. "To do that they must study."

Education in the new India has become a crucial marker of inequality. Among the poorest 20 percent of the population, half are illiterate, and barely 2 percent graduate from high school, according to government data. By contrast, among the richest 20 percent of the population, nearly half are high school graduates and only 2 percent are illiterate.

Just as important, at a time when only one in 10 college-age Indians actually go to college, higher education has become the most effective way to scale the golden ladder of the new economy. A recent study by two economists based in Delhi found that between 1993-94 and 2004-05, college graduates enjoyed pay raises of 11 percent every year, and illiterates saw their pay rise by roughly 8.5 percent, though from a miserably low base; here in Bihar State, for instance, a day laborer makes barely more than a dollar a day. "The link between getting your children prepared and being part of this big, changing India is certainly there in everyone's minds," said Rukmini Banerji, the research director of Pratham. "The question is: what's the best way to get there, how much to do, what to do? As a country, I think we are trying to figure this out." She added, "If we wait another 5 or 10 years, you are going to lose millions of children."

India has lately begun investing in education. Public spending on schools has steadily increased over the last few years, and the government now proposes to triple its financing commitment over the next five years. At present, education spending is about 4 percent of the gross domestic product. Every village with more than 1,000 residents has a primary school. There is money for free lunch every day.

Even a state like Bihar, which had an estimated population of 83 million in 2001 and where schools are in particularly bad shape, the scale of the effort is staggering. In the last year or so, 100,000 new teachers have been hired. Unemployed villagers are paid to recruit children who have never been to school. A village education committee has been created, in theory to keep the school and its principal accountable to the community. And buckets of money have been thrown at education, to buy swings and benches, to paint classrooms, even to put up fences around the campus to keep children from running away.

And yet, as Lahtora shows, good intentions can become terribly complicated on the ground. At the moment, the village was not lacking for money for its school. The state had committed $15,000 to construct a new school building, $900 for a new kitchen and another $400 for new school benches. But only some of the money had arrived, so no construction had started, and the school committee chairman said he was not sure how much local officials might demand in bribes. The chairman's friend from a neighboring village said $750 had been demanded of his village committee in exchange for building permits.

The chairman here also happens to be the head teacher's uncle, making the idea of accountability additionally complicated. One parent told Ghosh that their complaints fell on deaf ears: The teachers were connected to powerful people in the community. It is a common refrain in a country where teaching jobs are a powerful instrument of political patronage. The school's drinking-water tap had stopped working long ago, like 30 percent of schools nationwide, according to the Pratham survey. Despite the extra money, the toilet was broken, as was the case in nearly half of all schools nationwide. Thankfully, there was a heap of rice in one corner of the classroom, provisions for the savory rice porridge that acts as one of the main draws of government schools. Except that Hassan, the head teacher, said the rice was not officially reflected in his books, and therefore he had not served lunch for the last week. What about the money that comes from the state to buy eggs and other provisions for lunch, Ghosh asked? That too remained unspent, Hassan explained, because there was no rice to serve them with - at least not in his record books.

(Analysts of government antipoverty programs say rice can be a tempting side income for unscrupulous school officials; food meant for the poor in general, though not at this particular village school, is sometimes found diverted and sold on the private market, though one of the brighter findings of the Pratham survey was that free meals were served in over 90 percent of schools.)

Ghosh went from befuddled to exasperated. "You have rice. You have money. You prefer that kids don't eat?" he asked. Hassan shook his head. He said he could only cook what rice was in his records, or cook this rice if a senior government officer instructed him to do so. Ghosh went on to point out that one of the aides had shown up more than an hour late, and then with a crying baby in her arms. Two teachers were altogether absent. Even Hassan, Ghosh added, had pulled up a half-hour late. "You're the head of this school," Ghosh told him. "Only you can improve this school." Hassan fired back: "What are you talking about? For the last 25 years this school wasn't running at all."

Ghosh could not dispute that. There were times when the school doors did not open. One father, an agricultural laborer, said he had tried a few times to enroll his children but gave up after the former principal demanded money. Many parents in this largely Muslim village chose Islamic schools because they were seen to offer better discipline. Others saw no need to send their children to school at all.

Ghosh, too, went to government schools, in a small town in neighboring West Bengal state, which is only slightly better off than here. But if he dared skip class, he recalled, he would be thrashed by his father, a public school principal. The children of this village, he knew, would not be so lucky. "When I first started coming here," Ghosh recalled, parents "would ask me, 'What are you going to give me? Your porridge isn't enough. Because if I send my child to herd a buffalo, at least he'll make three rupees.' " Three rupees is less than 10 cents.

One morning Ghosh reached the mud-and-thatch compound of Mohammed Zakir, a migrant laborer who goes to work in Delhi each year. Zakir's son, Farooq, about 10 years old, was going to school for the first time this week. And as Zakir saw it, that was fine until Farooq turned 14, the legal age for employment, when he too would have to go work in Delhi. Keeping children in school through their teenage years, the father said flatly, was not a luxury the family could afford. Walking out of the Zakir family compound, Ghosh looked utterly worn out. "If I don't get this child in school," he said, "then his child in turn won't go to school."

Source





18 January, 2008

Stupid California textbook says Islamic 'jihad' means doing good works

How come nobody told Osama bin Laden that? Or are we looking at an unacknowledged Islamic definition of "good" being slipped in? I suspect we are

An Islamic "jihad" is an effort by Muslims to convince "others to take up worthy causes, such as funding medical research," according to a textbook that is being used for junior high age students in California and other states. And even at its most violent, "jihad" simply is Muslims fighting "to protect themselves from those who would do them harm," says the "History Alive! The Medieval World and Beyond" book published by Teachers' Curriculum Institute.

But a parent whose child has been handed the text in a Sacramento district is accusing the publisher of a pro-Muslim bias to the point that Islamic theology has been incorporated into the public school teachings. "It makes an attempt to seem like an egalitarian world history book, but on closer inspection you find that seven (not all are titled so) of the chapters deal with Islam or Muslim subjects," wrote the parent, whose name was being withheld, in a letter to WND.

"The upsetting part is not only do they go into the history (which would be acceptable) but also the teaching of Islam," she said. "This book does not really go into Christianity or the teachings of Christ, nor does it address religious doctrine elsewhere to the degree it does Islam."

She said the book's one page referencing Jews "is only to convey that they were tortured by Crusaders to get them to convert to 'Christianity.' (It fails to mention that the biggest persecutors of Jews throughout history and still today are Arab Muslims). It gives four other one-liner references to the Jews being blamed for the plagues and problems in the land. It does not talk about the Jews as making a significant impact on the culture at large." "How can the writers of this text get away with this?" she asked.

Bert Bower, founder of TCI, said not only did his company have experts review the book, but the state of California also reviewed it, and has approved it for use in public schools. He said the company tries to move history out from between the covers of a textbook and into students' minds, and that is how the book was developed. "Keep in mind when looking at this particular book scholars from all over California (reviewed it)," he said. "We have our own scholars who created the program, California scholars look at the program and makes sure [it] is accurate."

One of those experts who contributed to the text, according to the American Textbook Council, which released a scathing indictment of the project, is Ayad Al-Qazzaz. "Al-Qazzaz is a Muslim apologist, a frequent speaker in Northern California school districts promoting Islam and Arab causes," the ATC review said. "Al-Qazzaz also co-wrote AWAIR's 'Arab World Notebook.' AWAIR stands for Arab World and Islamic Resources, an opaque, proselytizing 'non-profit organization' that conducts teacher workshops and sells supplementary materials to schools."

The textbook council, an independent national research group set up in 1989 to review history and social studies texts in public schools, quoted directly from the book to provide evidence of its bias.

The word jihad means "to strive." Jihad represents the human struggle to overcome difficulties and do things that would be pleasing to God. Muslims strive to respond positively to personal difficulties as well as worldly challenges. For instance, they might work to become better people, reform society, or correct injustice.

Jihad has always been an important Islamic concept. One hadith, or account of Muhammad, tells about the prophet's return from a battle. He declared that he and his men had carried out the "lesser jihad," the external struggle against oppression. The "greater jihad," he said, was the fight against evil within oneself. Examples of the greater jihad include working hard for a goal, giving up a bad habit, getting an education, or obeying your parents when you may not want to.

Another hadith says that Muslims should fulfill jihad with the heart, tongue, and hand. Muslims use the heart in their struggle to resist evil. The tongue may convince others to take up worthy causes, such as funding medical research. Hands may perform good works and correct wrongs.

Sometimes, however, jihad becomes a physical struggle. The Quran tells Muslims to fight to protect themselves from those who would do them harm or to right a terrible wrong. Early Muslims considered their efforts to protect their territory and extend their rule over other regions to be a form of jihad. However, the Quran forbade Muslims to force others to convert to Islam. So, non-Muslims who came under Muslim rule were allowed to practice their faiths."

The council, in describing the text as a book written by "dictation from Islamic sources," said such passages "should put speculation to rest about what California's seventh-grade students may learn about Islam. At the very least, the passages are incomplete. More precisely, they are dishonest."

Such passages fail to explain "the essentially religious nature of the subject," the council said. "It ignores any challenge to international security and western-style law. The treatment is lyrical and loaded, echoing the language recommended by Islamist consultants."

The Sacramento parent said she became suspicious because of the school's decision to send a copy of the book home with her son and he started describing how it would teach students to write in Arabic. A review left her even more worried. "I was disturbed probably the greatest portion of this book is about Islam. It goes into the doctrine of Islam in detail," she said. "There are 35 chapters. Out of those, I counted at least seven [that focus] on Islam." She said she looked at the publication's list of contributors, and found the name of Ayad Al-Qazzaz, whom she'd had herself for a class on Middle Eastern studies. "That was a big flag for me," she said.

WND previously has reported on the influence of Islamic "consultants" on public school texts in the United States, as well as how other schools have included the "Five Pillars of Islam" among their required courses.

The parent said she just wanted people to know of the agenda being taught. "After seeing Al-Qazzaz as one of the main contributors I began to put two and two together . about the extra book coming home only in this class and I questioned where this book's money source came from - I still do not know," she said. "I am very troubled that in the name of tolerance and educating American children about the Muslim empire in history they get away with giving beginning Islamic teaching which may cause many to perhaps one day become Muslims," she said. "My son tells me that the students will even be using calligraphy to copy parts of the Quran in Arabic as an enrichment activity."

The ATC's second excerpt from the book dealt with the definition of sharia law. "For example, the Quran tells women to 'not display their beauty.' For this reason, Muslim women usually wear different forms of modest dress. Most women cover their arms and legs. Many also wear scarves over the hair," the book said.

Bower said Christianity is addressed in chapters 3, 6, 31 and 32 of the book, including descriptions of the Crusades, while the company's website shows an entire unit called, "The Rise of Islam," including chapters on the Arabian peninsula, "The Prophet Muhammad," "The Teachings of Islam," "Contributions of Muslims to World Civilizations," and "From the Crusades to the Rise of New Muslim Empires."

The recommendations included that "students learn about the beliefs and practices of Islam" and "learn about the life of Muhammad and the rise and expansion of Muslim rule."

Bower said the textbook is the answer to the demands in today's society for a "multicultural" education, and he said whenever some historical subjects are taught, there's always controversy. He cited the internment of Japanese people in the United States during World War II as an example. His company's book, he said, "really gives students multiple perspectives." But he also said he wasn't aware of any agenda held by any contributors to the book, including Al-Qazzaz. "I'll have to look into that," he said. He said about one-third of California's districts use the book, and so do thousands of other districts across the country.

If a parent objects to the agenda in the book, he said, "it's up to them to make a decision, do they want to have the kids opt out of this part. It's their local decision to do so. But in this age isn't it important for us, for our students to know as much about as many different religions as possible?"

Others may agree that students need to know about the world in which they live, but the TCI book is not the right one to teach them. According to a report from William J. Bennetta at the Textbook League, officials in Scottsdale, Ariz., tested the book, and ultimately rejected it after parents rallied to complain. "Students who took a 7th-grade social students course . were subject to gross, prolonged indoctrination in Islam," he wrote. "Much of the indoctrination was delivered in a corrupt school book titled 'History Alive! The Medieval World and Beyond,' produced by [TCI]," he said. "The writers of [the book], by relentlessly presenting Muslim religious tales and religious beliefs as matters of historical fact, have striven hard to induce students to embrace Islam."

He wrote that the indoctrination is "concentrated in chapters 8 and 9. This material consists overwhelmingly of Islamic religious propaganda. It includes blatant preaching as well as deceptive claims and extensive fraudulent narratives dealing with the beginnings of Islam, the life of Muhammad, and the inception of the Quran. These claims and narratives are disguised as accounts of history. They actually are restatements of Muslim fables and superstitions."

Bennetta also noted that the book exhibits contempt for Judaism and Christianity. "For example, In a passage in chapter 9, the TCI writers convey the lesson that a religious view held by Muslims is important, but views held by Jews and Christians are unworthy of consideration." Even the level of scholarly work is deficient, he continued. "They teach, in chapter 9, that if someone encounters some antiquated hearsay and jots it down, the hearsay becomes 'written evidence' of historical happenings."

In an Internet posting about the Scottsdale use of the text, Janie White, a parent in the district, reported the book included "fake history" along with "Islamic religious proselytizing and indoctrination techniques."

Officials with the Sacramento school district declined to respond to WND requests for comment about the book and its use. Al-Qazzaz, who teaches at Cal State-Sacramento, has explained in other Internet postings "greater jihad" is to become better Muslims and "lesser jihad" is to fight against Islam's enemies.

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NJ college tries to enforce allegiance to a politically correct ethics code

Bergen Community College wants to require students and staff to pledge to "embrace and celebrate differing perspectives" and help the "less fortunate," but some faculty members and free speech advocates say the oath is unconstitutional and smacks of political correctness run amok.

A proposed "responsibility code" was drafted as a response to what school administrators say is a rise in "uncivil" behavior -- including the use of language that is demeaning to women and minorities -- on the Paramus campus.

But critics say the pledge is far too broad. Faculty leaders shown a draft of the code this week vowed Thursday to fight its adoption. "It's unenforceable. Forget the faculty signing this," said Peter Helff, president of the faculty union.

Professor George Cronk, a professor of philosophy and religion who also is an attorney, said the code is an attack on freedom of conscience. "It asks you to pledge things that no rational person would. You can't require people to respect one another. ... There are some views that don't deserve respect," he said, citing ideologies such as fascism.

A spokeswoman for a national group that champions free speech on campus said the pledge seems extreme. "A public school has no right to reach into students' minds and tell them what to think," said Samantha Harris, spokeswoman for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Similar policies have been struck down by the courts.

Harris said colleges can aspire to ideals but they can't stifle their students' freedom of expression and conscience. "A public university can't mandate civility," she said. "It's a popular type of censorship on campus and one that often flies under the radar."

The so-called civility movement has gained momentum on campuses during the last decade and many, including most in New Jersey, have included statements on civility in student handbooks. Those statements generally express schools' inclusiveness and tolerance for other viewpoints. (Schools, including Bergen, have separate codes of conduct dealing with unlawful behavior, plagiarism and cheating.) Bergen would have been the first school in the state to require students to agree to such a specific code of civility.

Bergen's president, R. Jeremiah Ryan, said last month he hoped to implement the code during the upcoming semester and a spokeswoman for the college said earlier this week that the code would be mandatory. "The pledge would not be optional," Susan Baechtel, a college spokeswoman, said Wednesday. "If you don't agree, it is President Ryan's vision that you cannot attend the school." She said students who violated the code would be subject to judiciary hearings now reserved for offenses such as assault.

But after hearing from faculty, administrators on Thursday were backing off a bit. Ryan said the proposal was a starting point for discussion with faculty and students, and that the college, ultimately, may opt for an "aspirational" statement as opposed to a code.

Concepts such as tolerance and respect -- unlike legally defined behaviors such as harassment and defamation -- are too broad and legally undefined and have been struck down by the court, Harris said.

A federal magistrate in November barred the University of California from enforcing its civility standard, saying it was an unconstitutional restriction on speech because it had been used to investigate or discipline students, such as the College Republicans whose members stomped on two flags bearing the name of Allah during an anti-terrorism rally at San Francisco State last year.

Opponents of speech codes argue that some of the important movements of our time -- such as civil rights -- were considered uncivil by those in power. "Impassioned speech is not always polite or civil," said Harris.

Requiring students to make a pledge seems over the top considering that the courts have ruled that even the Pledge of Allegiance can't be legally required, Harris said. "It's crossing a line. A public university cannot mandate students' attitudes." But Baechtel, from Bergen, said the school was working to "balance First Amendment rights with a need to bring civility into an institution."

College administrators say they've seen an uptick in bad behavior on campus. "Students are acting out in really uncivil ways," Ryan said. "Classroom faculty say in the last two years it has really ratcheted up. The high schools tell us the same things." The word "uncivil" seems almost genteel when talking about the some of the behavior. At Bergen, faculty hear loud and obscene conversations in hallways and even classrooms, and there have been a few instances of racist graffiti. A student upset with her grade threatened to break a teacher's face.

The problems are not unique to the Paramus school. Officials at Rutgers University had to apologize for football fans who heckled the Navy team with obscenities, and William Paterson University began a campaign to dissuade students from using racial epithets.

WPU addresses the issue in its orientation and student code of conduct. Two years ago, the school also put together an online workshop for teachers on managing disruptive students in the classroom.

Karen Pennington, vice president for student development and campus life at Montclair State University, said civility codes can be tricky. "The difficulty is that civility codes or statements often are seen as pushing a point of view ... when people are trying to do just the opposite," she said. "The difficult thing is trying to decide how far you push in making people feel secure on campus without making another group feel oppressed." Montclair has a statement but "it's really not part of our code, it's a framework ... it calls for an atmosphere of understanding. But it's not a pledge we hold people to."

Judiciary proceedings against students accused of disruptive and destructive behavior at Bergen -- from verbal and physical assaults to graffiti -- spiked to 125 incidents in 2007. The number is still relatively small considering there are 15,000 students at Bergen, "but the trend line is up and we're concerned about that," Ryan said. "The instances have been a wake-up call and we have to make it a learning experience," Ryan said.

Charles Bordogna, who runs a diversity program on campus, said policies such as the proposed code are a start. "We want to be going beyond the word 'tolerance' to respecting individuals for who they are."

But Helff, who heads the faculty, said the code was a "knee-jerk reaction. "I've been there 38 years and I've never sworn to embrace anybody," said Helff. "Next I'll have to be nice to administrators?"

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British educationist criticizes Google

Perish the thought that people might get information from popular rather than "authorized" sources!

Google is "white bread for the mind", and the internet is producing a generation of students who survive on a diet of unreliable information, a professor of media studies will claim this week. In her inaugural lecture at the University of Brighton, Tara Brabazon will urge teachers at all levels of the education system to equip students with the skills they need to interpret and sift through information gleaned from the internet. She believes that easy access to information has dulled students' sense of curiosity and is stifling debate. She claims that many undergraduates arrive at university unable to discriminate between anecdotal and unsubstantiated material posted on the internet.

"I call this type of education `the University of Google'. "Google offers easy answers to difficult questions. But students do not know how to tell if they come from serious, refereed work or are merely composed of shallow ideas, superficial surfing and fleeting commitments. "Google is filling, but it does not necessarily offer nutritional content," she said.

Professor Brabazon, who has been teaching in universities for 18 years, said that the heavy reliance on the internet in universities had the effect of "flattening expertise" because every piece of information was given the same credibility by users. Professor Brabazon's concerns echo the author Andrew Keen's criticisms of online amateurism. In his book The Cult of the Amateur, Keen says: "To-day's media is shattering the world into a billion personalised truths, each seemingly equally valid and worthwhile."

Professor Brabazon said: "I've taught all through the digitisation of education. It's fascinating to see how students have changed. We can no longer assume that students arrive at university, knowing what to read and knowing what standards are required of the material that they do read." "Students live in an age of information, but what they lack is correct information. They turn to Wikipedia unquestioningly for information. Why wouldn't they - it's there," she said.

Professor Brabazon does not blame schools for students' cut-and-paste attitude to study. Nor is she critical of students individually. With libraries in decline, diminishing stocks of books and fewer librarians, media platforms such as Google made perfect sense. The trick was to learn how to use them properly. "We need to teach our students the interpretative skills first before we teach them the technological skills. Students must be trained to be dynamic and critical thinkers rather than drifting to the first site returned through Google," she said.

Her own students are banned from using Wikipedia or Google as research tools in their first year of study, but instead are provided with 200 extracts from peer-reviewed printed texts at the beginning of the year, supplemented by printed extracts from eight to nine texts for individual pieces of work. "I want students to experience the pages and the print as much as the digitisation and the pixels - both are fine but I want students to have both - not one or the other, not a cheap solution," she said.

There have been concerns about students plagiarising from the internet and the growth of a new online "coursework industry", in which web-sites produce tailor-made essays, some selling for up to 1,000 pounds each.

Wikipedia, containing millions of articles contributed by users was founded in 2001. It has been criticised for being riddled with inaccuracies and nonsense. Even one of its own founders, Larry Sanger, described it as "broken beyond repair" before leaving the site last year. Google is the dominant search engine on the internet. It uses a formula designed to place the most relevant content at the top of its listings. But a multimillion-pound industry has grown up around manipulating Google rankings through a process called "search engine optimisation".

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17 January, 2008

Stupid attack on home-schoolers by the NYT

Post below lifted from Taranto. See the original for links. Note further that even if the circumstances were as the NYT would have us believe, one would have to compare the death-rate among homeschooled children with the death-rate among government-schooled children. I don't think there is any doubt about how THAT would pan out!

Four girls in the District of Columbia were allegedly murdered last year, and a New York Times news story suggests the root cause is . . . home schooling? Here's how the report begins:

Ten states and the District of Columbia, where Banita M. Jacks was charged on Thursday with four counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of her four daughters, have no regulations regarding home schooling, not even the requirement that families notify the authorities that they are educating their children at home.

The lack of supervision of the home-schooling process, some experts say, may have made it easier last year for Ms. Jacks to withdraw her children from school and the prying eyes of teachers, social workers and other professionals who otherwise might have detected signs of abuse and neglect of the girls. Instead, the children, ages 5 to 17, slipped through the cracks in multiple systems, including social services, education and law enforcement. Their decomposed bodies were discovered earlier this week by United States marshals serving eviction papers on the troubled family.

The absence of any home-schooling regulations in Washington is largely the result of advocacy and litigation by the Home School Legal Defense Association.

The report goes on to concede that "for sure, the fact that Ms. Jacks's children last attended school in March in no way accounts for their deaths." The home-schooling link looks even more tenuous when you look at the Washington Post account of the case. On Sunday, the Post reports, Mayor Adrian Fenty fired six child-welfare workers, saying they "just didn't do their job." It turns out that the girls' absence from school was noted at the time:

The girls were killed sometime in late spring or summer, authorities believe. But they were alive when a school social worker, with growing alarm, tried to get child welfare workers to look in on the family. . . . "From what I could see, the home did not appear clean," the social worker, Kathy Lopes, said in a call to police April 30. "The children did not appear clean, and it seems that the mother is suffering from some mental illness and she is holding all of the children in the home hostage."

Lopes first visited the Jacks home April 27, after Brittany Jacks, 16, missed 33 days of school and no one answered a phone at the house. "The parent was home. She wouldn't open the door, but we saw young children inside the house," Lopes said to a hotline worker at the city's Child and Family Services Agency. "Her oldest daughter, who is our student, was at home. She wouldn't let us see her." The operator took the information and reminded Lopes, who was clearly distraught that she could not talk to Brittany, that Jacks did not have to let her inside the home. . . .

Although a social worker made at least two visits to Jacks's home, in the 4200 block of Sixth Street SE, no one answered the door to the rowhouse either time. Less than three weeks later, Child and Family Services staff members closed the case after receiving an unconfirmed report that the family had moved to Maryland.

The Post also has a timeline of Jacks's contacts with various city agencies--five of them in all. It does appear as if Lopes, the school social worker, was the only bureaucrat who took any real interest in the girls' well-being. But this was true even under the district's laissez-faire regime for home schooling, and it's hard to see how the sort of regulations the Times reporter implicitly advocates would have helped.

For the sake of argument, though, let's assume that stricter home-schooling regulations would have some beneficial impact in terms of protecting children from abuse. This would come at the cost of burdening thousands of legitimate home-schooling families, the overwhelming majority of which are not abusive, by intruding into their very homes.

Whether this trade-off would be worth it is a legitimate topic for debate. But it's worth noting that the Times usually has little patience for those who value safety over privacy, as, for example, in the case of wiretapping terrorists. Are home schoolers more of a menace than al Qaeda?




Britain trying to discourage academic education

Probably a good thing on the whole. A British academic education these days is mostly Leftist indoctrination

Teachers are to be banned from encouraging their pupils to study A levels rather than the Government's controversial new vocational diploma qualifications under legislation that is going through Parliament. A clause in the Education and Skills Bill, to be debated in Parliament today, says that schools will be forbidden from "unduly promoting any particular options" to teenagers seeking advice on courses.

The move has been criticised by academics, who say that the Government is desperate for the diplomas to succeed at all costs. Others fear that the new and "impartial" mortgage-style advice will not be in the best interests of pupils as teachers unconvinced of the worth of the diplomas will be unable to pass on their concerns to either them or their parents.

The qualifications are designed to end the divide between vocational and academic learning and will be offered at some schools from September and across England and Wales by 2013. Ministers are promoting diplomas as the "jewel in the crown" of the education system. Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, recently said that they would become the "qualification of choice" and refused to confirm that A levels would survive beyond a review in 2013.

However, the diplomas programme has been met with concern and caution by many employers and universities, with some yet to declare that they will accept them. Teachers are equally uncertain how they will work in practice. Academics, union leaders and educational experts said last night that the clause in the Bill puts schools and teachers in an impossible position.

Alan Smithers, Professor of Education at the University of Buckingham, said that it undermined teachers, who were in the best position to give advice to pupils. He said: "It seems this is inhibiting teachers in their professional practice, [and it] could be connected with a drive to push diplomas at all costs. They will be valuable ladders from school to work - but not an attractive option for all pupils."

Steve Sinnott, the general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: "If there is a major educational reform, then the professional judgment of teachers has to be trusted. You can't put a set of restrictions in there about their judgment."

The first 14 diplomas covered subjects such as hair and beauty, travel and tourism. But the latest wave, announced in October, includes languages, humanities and science - apparently to appeal to middle-class parents and traditional universities. Some subjects, such as engineering, appear destined to succeed, with at least seven universities saying that they will accept it as an entry qualification for relevant degree courses.

Diplomas will come in three levels. The Government has said that top marks in the advanced diploma will be worth more than three A levels. However, a survey suggested that fewer than four in ten university admissions officers saw them as a "good alternative" to A levels. In November, the Nuffield review said the introduction of diplomas had been rushed and that middle-class families would continue to favour traditional courses. A report published yesterday by the Policy Exchange think-tank said they were being launched with an ambitious, complex and expensive design, and an uncertain future.

Julia Neal, the president of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said: "What we don't know is exactly how universities are going to approach diplomas. Technically, they will have the same currency as A levels, but only time will tell." Ann Hodgson, of the University of London Institute of Education, served on the Tomlinson committee, whose report led to the latest reform. "I think teachers will be put in a difficult position," she said. "It's very important that they give full information about the diplomas, and what they are likely to lead to."

A spokeswoman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said the Government wanted pupils to have advice on the range of available options: "It is not about promoting one option over another, since it is up to individual pupils to decide the best route for themselves, in discussion with their parents and teachers."

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Australian teachers back merit-based pay

Overwhelming support has emerged among the nation's teachers for merit-based pay, with a majority believing wages should be pegged to competence and qualifications. A national survey of 13,000 teachers, almost a third of the profession, found that two in three believe schools have difficulty retaining staff. Of that group, 70 per cent believe paying more to the most competent and those with extra qualifications would help stem the exodus.

While teacher unions have argued strenuously against the idea of linking pay to students' results, the survey reveals one in four supports higher pay for teachers whose students achieve specified goals. The study, commissioned by the federal Education Department, comes before the national conference of the Australian Education Union in Sydney today, which is expected to criticise the Rudd Government's education revolution for focusing too narrowly on technology.

The union's incoming federal president, Angelo Gavrielatos, in his opening address today is expected to call for literacy and numeracy to be the foundation of the Government's education policy. Mr Gavrielatos will call on the Government to invest $2.9 billion to develop a comprehensive literacy and numeracy strategy that covers students from early childhood throughout the school years.

The $2.9 billion identified by Mr Gavrielatos was nominated in a report last year commissioned by the federal, state and territory education ministers as the annual amount in additional funds required for government schools to meet national standards. Mr Gavrielatos will outline key factors that must underpin a national literacy and numeracy strategy, including a "curriculum guarantee" that every student will have access to a rich, rigorous and rewarding curriculum.

Other factors are smaller classes to allow more individual attention to student needs; competitive salaries to attract and retain teachers; a large investment in indigenous education; and expanded early childhood services, with an increase in the number of hours of preschool from the 15 hours a week for every four-year-old promised by the Government to 20 hours a week.

Mr Gavrielatos's speech echoes the findings of a survey conducted for the AEU which found that more than four in five people believe an education revolution can happen only if the federal Government invests substantially more in public education. The survey of 600 people across the nation, conducted last week by Essential Media Communications, a research and communication company that handles public relations for the AEU, also found that education was an important factor in winning votes from the Howard government at the election. About 60 per cent of people who switched their vote from the Coalition to Labor said the Howard government's neglect of public education was an important factor in determining their vote. About 70 per cent said investing more to recruit and retain the best teachers, and increasing national literacy and numeracy standards, was very important for improving education, while 63 per cent nominated investing more in public schools to lower class sizes and deliver more individual attention to students.

Mr Gavrielatos, the national president-elect of the AEU, starts his term at the end of the month, replacing Pat Byrne, who has been on leave since November. Mr Gavrielatos is a former languages teacher, is fluent in Indonesian and was previously the deputy president of the NSW Teachers Federation and deputy national president of the AEU.

The federal survey, conducted by the Australian Council for Educational Research and the Australian College of Educators, identifies chronic teaching shortages across the nation, and in a broader range of specialist areas than previously reported. Despite a glut of primary school teachers graduating from universities, about one in 10 primary school principals had at least one unfilled vacancy throughout 2006, equating to about 1300 jobs. In high schools, the biggest shortage is among maths teachers, with 10 per cent of schools unable to fill a job at the beginning of 2006, rising to 13 per cent by the end of the year. Almost one in five schools readvertised the same job throughout that year. About 11 per cent of high schools couldn't find a science teacher, 6 per cent couldn't find an English teacher and 5 per cent struggled to get a languages teacher. To cope with shortages, the most common action by principals is to have a teacher from outside the speciality teach the class but many schools tend to drop the subject.

The survey underlines the lack of a competitive pay structure for the teaching profession, with three-quarters of principals reporting the majority of teachers are paid according to an incremental pay scale with progression largely based on years of service. The most common strategies nominated to retain teachers are smaller class sizes, fewer student management issues, a more positive public image of teachers and more support staff.

In a statement released yesterday, Education Minister Julia Gillard said the report highlighted the urgent need to implement the Rudd Government's education revolution and ensure every high school student could participate effectively in a digital world. She said the findings highlighted that teachers and principals saw computer technology as a vital learning tool, and the need for more professional learning for teachers, especially in the use of computers in school learning. Two-thirds of teachers nominated making more effective use of computers in student learning as the area of greatest need for professional learning.

Mr Gavrielatos said Ms Gillard's statements had overemphasised some aspects of the report to skim over other matters of "deeper significance and deeper concern". These included measures nominated to attract and retain teachers, such as more support staff, smaller class sizes, higher pay and fewer changes imposed on schools.

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16 January, 2008

Britain: Rise in school leaving age to 18 'ill-conceived'

PLANS by the government to force young people to stay in education or training until they are 18 have been attacked by one of the country's leading educationists as "ill-conceived" and likely to have an "overwhelmingly negative effect". According to a pamphlet by Alison Wolf, professor of public sector management at King's College London, the policy promoted by Ed Balls, the children's secretary, will infringe civil liberties and wreck the market for youth employment while providing qualifications that have "little or no market value".

"It is one of the most ill-thought-out pieces of education legislation I have ever seen," said Wolf. "I find it very hard to find any redeeming features." Her pamphlet, published today by the Policy Exchange think tank, comes as the government prepares for a second reading in the Commons tomorrow of the bill to introduce the new "participation age".

It has also emerged that a report commissioned by the government and released without publicity has found little evidence from overseas that forcing people to stay in school or training until 18 has any benefit. "Unfortunately, it was not possible to find any direct evidence of the impact of introducing a system of compulsory education or training to the age of 18," says the review, commissioned by the Department for Children, Schools and Families. From 2015 all teenagers will have to stay at school or in training until they are 18. Those in jobs will have to take time off to train.

Other criticism has been raised because the bill does not exempt pregnant or disabled teenagers, those in the armed forces or those training to become professional athletes. "Gap" years taken by many youngsters could also be severely hit.

Balls said yesterday: "This is about extending opportunity to all young people and making sure we can succeed in the global economy." It is understood the Tories, who had previously called the policy a "gimmick", plan to abstain in the Commons. They hope to introduce amendments to remove provisions such as taking teenagers through the courts if they fail to attend training. Michael Gove, the shadow children's secretary, said: "The government's own report has outlined a series of problems with keeping children in education against their will . . . We will work with the government to improve this legislation."

But Balls said: "If the Tories sit on their hands and abstain, they will prove the Conservative party still believes in educational opportunity only for some and not for all."

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British independent schools reject charity rules

Britain's leading public schools have rejected as unworkable regulations that would force them to open their doors to pupils from poor families. The Charity Commission will publish guidance this week on what the nation's 2,500 private schools must do to satisfy new laws requiring that they prove their "public benefit" in order to retain their charitable status, worth 100 million pounds in tax breaks each year. In submissions to the commission, seen by The Times, some of Britain's best-known independent schools said that draft proposals issued last year insisting that poor students "must be able to benefit" from private schools would place an unfair burden on fee-paying parents and could threaten the existence of many schools.

Jonathan Shephard, the chief executive of the Independent Schools Council, saidit had managed to force "substantial changes" in the guidance. Eton College accused the commission of employing "flawed reasoning" in arguing that the relief on public funds that independent schools provide by educating children for whom the State would otherwise have to pay provided proportionately less benefit to poor families, who pay less tax. Andrew Wynn, the bursar of Eton, wrote: "We would not seek to argue that relief of public funds is enough on its own, but we would argue that such relief is a significant matter - many of our parents are very conscious of paying twice - and is not something that should become underrated on the basis of flawed reasoning."

Rugby School, whose annual fees for boarders are 24,915 pounds, accused the commission of deliberately creating difficulties for independent schools. Gary Lydiatt, its bursar, wrote: "As drafted, the guidance suggests that without addressing the provision of services to individuals on low incomes, the public benefit test would not be met. While this is not an issue for Rugby, it could cause significant problems for other schools. "It is essential to accept that most independent schools have to charge for the services that they provide. Unless independent schools are able to do this, it is inevitable that many will close and the benefits that they provide will be lost."

Harrow School accused the commission of misinterpreting charity law. Nick Shryane, its bursar, wrote: "The phrase `must be able to benefit' should be replaced with `must not be excluded from benefiting'. "Those schools which are able to do so will be able to give direct access through bursaries to the children of families who cannot afford fees. But not all schools are well funded or able to offer bursaries."

Dame Suzi Leather, the commission's chairwoman, said in August that she would be prepared to take legal action against schools that refused to widen access. "It's going to be a difficult and contested territory," she said.

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15 January, 2008

Fact-free French economics education

In France and Germany, students are being forced to undergo a dangerous indoctrination. Taught that economic principles such as capitalism, free markets, and entrepreneurship are savage, unhealthy, and immoral, these children are raised on a diet of prejudice and bias. Rooting it out may determine whether Europe's economies prosper or continue to be left behind.

Thus begins Stefan Theil's article in Foreign Policy (merci . RV). Makes you wonder, isn't it about time those oafish, clueless Americans start listening to the brilliant ideas of those more-lucid-than-thou products of the Europe's avant-garde educational system?

"Economic growth imposes a hectic form of life, producing overwork, stress, nervous depression, cardiovascular disease and, according to some, even the development of cancer," asserts the three-volume Histoire du XXe siScle, a set of texts memorized by countless French high school students as they prepare for entrance exams to Sciences Po and other prestigious French universities. The past 20 years have "doubled wealth, doubled unemployment, poverty, and exclusion, whose ill effects constitute the background for a profound social malaise," the text continues. Because the 21st century begins with "an awareness of the limits to growth and the risks posed to humanity [by economic growth]," any future prosperity "depends on the regulation of capitalism on a planetary scale." Capitalism itself is described at various points in the text as "brutal," "savage," "neoliberal," and "American." This agitprop was published in 2005, not in 1972.

.French students . do not learn economics so much as a very specific, highly biased discourse about economics. When they graduate, they may not know much about supply and demand, or about the workings of a corporation. Instead, they will likely know inside-out the evils of "la McDonaldisation du monde" and the benefits of a "Tobin tax" on the movement of global capital. This kind of anticapitalist, antiglobalization discourse isn't just the product of a few aging 1968ers writing for Le Monde Diplomatique; it is required learning in today's French schools.

.Equally popular in Germany today are student workbooks on globalization. One such workbook includes sections headed "The Revival of Manchester Capitalism," "The Brazilianization of Europe," and "The Return of the Dark Ages." India and China are successful, the book explains, because they have large, state-owned sectors and practice protectionism, while the societies with the freest markets lie in impoverished sub-Saharan Africa. Like many French and German books, this text suggests students learn more by contacting the antiglobalization group Attac, best known for organizing messy protests at the annual G-8 summits.

One might expect Europeans to view the world through a slightly left-of-center, social-democratic lens. The surprise is the intensity and depth of the anti-market bias being taught in Europe's schools. Students learn that private companies destroy jobs while government policy creates them. Employers exploit while the state protects. Free markets offer chaos while government regulation brings order. Globalization is destructive, if not catastrophic. Business is a zero-sum game, the source of a litany of modern social problems.

.A likely alternative scenario may be that the changes wrought by globalization will awaken deeply held resentment against capitalism and, in many countries from Europe to Latin America, provide a fertile ground for populists and demagogues, a trend that is already manifesting itself in the sudden rise of many leftist movements today.

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Pupils do better with public testing: OECD

The reality Leftists hate. It offends their irrational belief that all men (and kids) are equal

PUBLICLY ranking students' performance and requiring them to sit external examinations boosts their results, according to the biggest international survey of academic ability. Teachers' unions have been strident critics of the public reporting of student results, in particular comparing the performance of different schools. The unions have also argued against the introduction of national literacy and numeracy tests.

But the results of the Program for International Student Assessment, conducted every three years among 15-year-olds by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, show a consistently higher performance in schools that keep track of student performance on a public level. The report says external exams assessing students against a set standard, as occurs around Australia except in Queensland and the ACT, puts students about one school year ahead on the PISA scale. "The impetus provided by external monitoring of standards, rather than relying principally on schools and individual teachers to uphold them, can make a real difference to results," itsays. "PISA itself has encouraged countries not to take internally assessed education standards for granted and is now indicating a strong effect ... by subjecting schools to external assessment with publicly visible results."

Students at schools that publicly posted their students' results scored 14.7 points higher in the PISA science tests. When demographic and social factors were taken into account, the rise was still a significant 6.6 points. By contrast, informing parents of their child's performance relative to other students or national benchmarks increased scores by 4.7 and 4.2 points, which was not statistically significant. Reporting results relative to other schools had a negative effect, lowering scores five points, which was also not statistically significant. Students set external exams scored about 36 points higher, which, adjusted for demographic and social effects, was 17 points higher and not statistically significant.

The report defines external exams as subject-based exams assessing performance relative to an external standard such as Year 12 exams or the national literacy and numeracy tests that start in all states and territories in Years 3, 5, 7, and 9 in May.

Acting federal president of the Australian Education Union Angelo Gavrielatos said extreme caution should be taken in extrapolating general lessons from the OECD report. Mr Gavrielatos said the report failed to take into account differences in school systems such as curriculum, assessment and reporting policies. "We certainly believe that student results are the property of individual students, their parents and teachers," he said. "Parents have every right to know how their child is performing but no right to know about their neighbour's child. That's in no one's interest. "Countries like the UK and the US that have high-stakes testing and public reporting of student results in the form of league tables ranking schools are not high-performing countries in the PISA tests."

The analysis contained in the 2006 PISA results, released last month, covered 55 countries, including Australia, matching school characteristics with student scores in the science tests, which was the main area examined in 2006, as well as shorter tests on reading and maths. It found that while students in academically selective schools scored substantially higher, streaming students in classes according to their ability within a school lowered their scores by about 10 points, or 4.5 points when adjusted for social effects. "(This suggests) such a policy might potentially hinder learning of certain students more than it enhances learning of others," the report says.

Commenting on the results, PISA director Andreas Schleicher said the effect of selective schools and grouping students according to their ability was not necessarily incompatible. "If you are in a selective school, you do better on average," he was reported as saying. "But if you stratify the entire system, you would not see a positive impact."

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Students Lose When Diversity Is Main Focus

A good education requires balance. Students should learn to appreciate a variety of cultures, sure, but they also need to know how to add, subtract, multiply and divide. Judging from the courses that the nation's leading education colleges offer, however, balance isn't a goal. The schools place far more emphasis on the political and social ends of education than on the fundamentals.

To determine just how unbalanced teacher preparation is at ed schools, we counted the number of course titles and descriptions that contained the words "multiculturalism," "diversity," "inclusion" and variants thereof, and then compared those with the number that used variants of the word "math." We then computed a "multiculturalism-to-math ratio" - a rough indicator of the relative importance of social goals to academic skills in ed schools. A ratio of greater than 1 indicates a greater emphasis on multiculturalism; a ratio of less than 1 means that math courses predominate.

Our survey covered the nation's top 50 education programs as ranked by U.S. News and World Report, as well as programs at flagship state universities that weren't among the top 50 - a total of 71 education schools. The average ed school, we found, has a multiculturalism-to-math ratio of 1.82, meaning that it offers 82% more courses featuring social goals than featuring math. At Harvard and Stanford, the ratio is about 2: Almost twice as many courses are social as mathematical. At the University of Minnesota, the ratio is higher than 12. And at UCLA, a whopping 47 course titles and descriptions contain the word "multiculturalism" or "diversity," while only three contain the word "math," giving it a ratio of almost 16.

Some programs do show different priorities. At the University of Missouri, 43 courses bear titles or descriptions that include multiculturalism or diversity, but 74 focus on math, giving it a lean multiculturalism-to-math ratio of 0.58. Penn State's ratio is 0.39. (By contrast, the ratio at Penn State's Ivy League counterpart, the University of Pennsylvania, is over 3.) Still, of the 71 programs we studied, only 24 have a multiculturalism-to-math ratio of less than 1; only five pay twice as much attention to math as to social goals.

Several obstacles impede change. On the supply side, ed-school professors are a self-perpetuating clique, and their commitment to multiculturalism and diversity produces a near-uniformity of approach. Professors control entry into their ranks by determining who will receive the doctoral credential, deciding which doctoral graduates get hired, and then selecting which faculty will receive tenure. And tenured academics are essentially accountable to no one.

On the demand side, prospective teachers haven't cried out for more math courses because such courses tend to be harder than those involving multiculturalism. And the teachers know that their future employers - public school districts - don't find an accent on multiculturalism troubling. Because public schools are assured of ever-increasing funding, regardless of how they do in math, they can indulge their enthusiasm for multiculturalism, and prospective teachers can, too.

Accrediting organizations also help perpetuate the emphasis on multiculturalism. In several states, law mandates that ed schools receive accreditation from the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. NCATE, in turn, requires education programs to meet six standards, one entirely devoted to diversity, but none entirely devoted to ensuring proper math pedagogy. Education schools that attempt to break from the cartel's multiculturalism focus risk denial of accreditation.

Ensuring quality math instruction is no minor matter. The Program for International Student Assessment's latest results paint a bleak picture: U.S. 15-year-olds ranked 24th out of 30 industrial countries in math literacy, tying Spain and surpassing only Greece, Italy, Portugal, Mexico, and Turkey, while trailing Iceland, Hungary, Poland, the Slovak Republic and all of our major economic competitors in Europe and Asia.

The issue isn't whether we should be teaching cultural awareness in education colleges or in public schools; it's about priorities. Besides, our students probably have great appreciation already for students from other cultures - who're cleaning their clocks in math skills, and will do so economically, too, if we don't wise up.

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14 January, 2008

Pupils to get lessons in good manners in one prestigious British school

The article below is from the Daily Telegraph so they retain the old British usage of calling private schools public schools! "Independent" school is the preferred modern British usage but readers of the "Tele" understand

A leading public school has launched a campaign to revive etiquette and manners by training its pupils in the art of polite dining and helping the elderly. Brighton College will educate all its new starters over the year with lessons in a variety of practical skills

As well as learning how to iron a shirt, sew on a button, boil an egg and write formal letters, 140 pupils aged 13 and 14 will be taught how to waltz at weddings, use cutlery and glasses and tie a bow tie. The year-long compulsory course, which consists of one 45-minute class each week, also covers erecting a tent, monitoring heart rates, making a pizza, using a cash machine and taking digital photographs. Pupils will learn to help the elderly and the etiquette of giving up seats on buses and trains. The headmaster, Richard Cairns, said the skills would make them more attractive to potential employers.

Last month, a survey by the Institute of Directors found that a quarter of company directors think graduates display "impoliteness and poor table manners". Mr Cairns said that after seeing the survey, the teachers made a list of 30 useful skills. He said the course was not a crusade to stamp out bad manners among the young. "Young people these days are polite," he said. "What has happened is that some haven't been told about what other people expect of them."

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Hope for educational sanity in Australia

In his first parliamentary speech as leader of the Opposition, Kevin Rudd tagged education as a key policy issue. In the months leading to the November federal election, the ALP released a series of persuasive policy papers that presented a coherent and convincing narrative about what needed to be done to strengthen Australia's education system. Much to the chagrin of those on the cultural Left who would prefer the ALP federal Government to advocate a new-age and feel-good approach to education - illustrated by Australia's dumbed-down, outcomes-based education model of curriculum - the incoming Government's education revolution involves computers, increased testing and accountability, rigorous standards and a back-to-basics approach.

Unlike previous Labor governments, which attempted to stem the flow of students from government to independent and Catholic schools by restricting non-government school funding, the Rudd Government has also accepted parents' right to choose where their children go to school and has guaranteed the funding formula introduced by the Howard government, at least until 2012.

Looking ahead across the next 12 months, will Rudd and Education Minister Julia Gillard be able to deliver? Given that the Council of Australian Governments and the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs - both federal-state-territory organisations - are now fully ALP-controlled and given the apparent goodwill on all sides, there is every reason to feel optimistic.

This is especially so given events at the state level during the past year or two. Tasmania has modified its OBE-inspired Essential Learnings approach to curriculum, the West Australian Education Minister has done an about-face and now argues that OBE fails to deliver, and Queensland has adopted a basics approach to English as a subject. OBE has disappeared from the educational lexicon, to be replaced by concepts such as content and performance standards and personalised learning.

Late last year, state and territory governments released Federalist Paper 2, which argues for the central importance of academic subjects, that the public has every right to know about school and teacher performance, and that the success of an education system should be measured not simply by how much is spent but by how well students learn.

On the level of rhetoric and, in some instances, in practice, it appears the tide has turned and that Gillard's description of herself as an educational traditionalist is not out of place. After debates throughout 2007 about falling standards, the impact of political correctness and postmodern gobbledygook on the curriculum, especially literature and history, and the best way to attract and reward teachers, it appears that 2008 signals a period where criticisms will be addressed and the system strengthened.

Optimism about 2008 should also be tempered by the fact that an education system, especially one suffering from provider capture, is similar to an oil tanker: it takes a long time to change direction and set a new course.

Rudd, in the ALP's election policy paper Establishing a National Curriculum to Improve our Children's Educational Outcomes, stresses the importance of an academic and rigorous approach to curriculum. Parents and teachers expecting dramatic changes this year in what is taught will be disappointed. Labor's national curriculum is not set for delivery until 2010 and the party has promised to give control of the project to bodies responsible for the parlous situation that exists.

When in opposition, Rudd and education spokesman Stephen Smith argued that teachers and schools should be held accountable for performance and that increased investment in education should be linked to improved outcomes for students.

While a national approach to rewarding teacher performance has yet to be agreed on, it appears any model put forward in 2008 will be of little value. Not only is there no intention to link rewards for teacher performance to students' results, as measured by improved learning outcomes, but the model being suggested is overly bureaucratic and onerous in terms of compliance and only available to a minority of teachers, thus doing nothing to alleviate the issue of teacher shortage.

There is also the additional concern that holding schools accountable for performance, while imposing a state-mandated, often dumbed-down curriculum and denying them the right to hire and fire staff, is unfair.

Fulfilling the election promise to give all senior school students access to computers and the internet, while superficially popular and in line with the mantra of becoming the knowledge nation and competing in an information technology-rich world, does nothing to address the most important issue: how best to attract Year 12 students to teaching as a career and how best to support and reward them when in schools.

The baby boomers, who make up the majority of the teaching profession, are rapidly heading for retirement and researchers agree that about 30 per cent of beginning teachers leave the profession after four to five years. Mathematics and science teachers are especially difficult to recruit and keep in the profession, and in some areas, especially Western Australia, many classes will begin this year without qualified teachers.

While some, such as the Australian Education Union, argue that the supposed bad press about teachers is to blame for the shortage, there are other factors that must be taken into account. In Victoria, for example, the ALP Government places many teachers on short-term contracts, denying them job certainty and any guarantee of continuity in their chosen profession. The quality of the curriculum and the rate and constant nature of educational reform is also significant in terms of teacher anxiety and burnout.

WA's adoption of OBE, whereby teachers are forced to implement a decidedly cumbersome, unfriendly and burdensome curriculum, as argued on the Perth-based People Lobbying Against Teaching Outcomes website (www.platowa.com), has led to teacher frustration and angst.

In Tasmania, the recently retired president of the teachers union, Jean Walker, argued that the state's adoption of Essential Learnings presented the greatest challenge the union had faced in protecting teachers' working conditions. In 2008, whatever curriculum initiatives are planned, care should be taken that teachers are not, once again, overwhelmed and that they are given a substantial role in what is being designed.

Generally, teachers are not well paid and it is ironic that across Australia, especially in Victoria and Western Australia, ALP-controlled governments are refusing to meet teachers' demands for better pay and conditions. Given the research suggesting that, along with the quality of the curriculum, teachers are the most important determinant in how well students learn, it stands to reason that they should be better rewarded.

Luring the right Year 12 students to teaching as a career is also vitally important. Many of the boomers now in the system are only there because of government-sponsored studentships that paid for their time at university and college. While moves to reduce the Higher Education Contribution Scheme payment by students undertaking teacher training in maths and science is a start, maybe it is time to re-introduce studentships.

A submission by the Australian Secondary Principals' Association argues that teacher training must better prepare teachers for the reality of the classroom and, based on a survey of beginning teachers, concludes that teacher training is"at best satisfactory" as a preparation for teaching and in "several areas it is clear that they (beginning teachers) felt that they were significantly under-prepared".

Much is on the agenda for 2008. The danger is that the attempted solutions are based on past practice, one where committees and bureaucracies work in isolation from schools, and governments impose initiatives based on short-term political expediency or whatever is the most recent education minister's plan.

The alternative? Give schools greater autonomy and freedom to best reflect the needs and aspirations of their local communities, as with charter schools in the US. Give more parents the ability to choose where their children go to school by introducing educational vouchers, a system in which the money follows the child to either government or non-government schools and there is a greater reliance on market forces to improve quality. Now, that would be an education revolution.

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13 January, 2008

German schools gliding over the holocaust

German schools are failing in educating students about the Holocaust, a new study by a political education center has found, as German youth, who one historian said use the word "Jew" as a common curse in daily discourse, are increasingly distant from the suffering of the victims of Nazism.

According to a study commissioned by the Federal Agency for Civic Education, a political education center known by its German acronym BPB, history courses no longer manage to teach Germany's younger generation of the horrors of the Nazis.

In the report, which appeared in the German educational magazine Focus-Shula, teachers are quoted as saying that they are having trouble impressing upon school children the horrors of the Holocaust, and have stated that their tools for teaching about the Shoah are not effective. "The entire time we stood before the crematoriums of Auschwitz, the students took more interest in the types of pipes used to pump in the lethal Zyklon B gas, and not the fate of the Nazis victims," a teacher was quoted as saying. In their words, this generation's students are less sensitive to the horrors of the Holocaust than any before.

The research also examines the role that immigrants have played in the changing attitudes towards the Shoah. Experts are quoted in the study as saying that there is a marked rise in the number of Muslims in Germany, many of whom see the teaching of the Holocaust as a veiled endorsement of the policies of the state of Israel. "Out of fear of the students' reactions, many of the teachers avoid teaching this chapter of history in order to not be viewed by some students as supporters of Israel."

"The word 'Jew' has turned into one of the most common curse words among students in both east and west Germany," said Gottfried Cosler, a Frankfurt-based Holocaust scholar.

Robert Sigel, a historian who contributed to the study, is of the opinion that students are taking a great interest in the Holocaust, but that the methods in which the subject is taught today are in need of improvement. "Often time the teachers, especially the more devoted ones, get carried away, and demand way too much of themselves," Sigel told Focus magazine. "They want to teach the facts and at the same time get across a moral message, call for education and tolerance, deal with the extreme right and prevent anti-Semitism. They put all this material into the subject, and it's too much."

Susan Orban, a historian at Yad Vashem, says that the Holocaust should be taught using methods that have proved successful in the past. "Today's kids live in different times than that of Anne Frank," Orban said. In order to bridge the generational gap, she submits a different approach, "for example, asking them to imagine that they have to abruptly leave their homes and start a new life elsewhere." Such a method, according to Orban, would speak more directly to the children's hearts and minds than descriptions of the horrors of the concentration camp.

Sigel expressed similar sentiments, adding that the children of immigrants have shown particular interest to the victims of Nazism given that many of them suffered from racial persecution, religious intolerance, and even genocide in their native lands.

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British government-school teachers keep pupils in the dark about Oxbridge

Although he is a high achiever, nobody had suggested Oxford to my son for his postgraduate work until I brought it up. He will now apply

Half of state school teachers would never or only rarely encourage their brightest pupils to apply to Oxbridge, according to research published today. It uncovered widespread ignorance among teachers about Oxford and Cambridge, indicating that the brightest pupils could miss the opportunity to apply to leading universities.

The MORI survey of 500 teachers was commissioned by the Sutton Trust, an educational charity committed to increasing university intake from deprived backgrounds. It found that nine in ten teachers underestimated the number of Oxbridge students from state schools. Sixty per cent thought that fewer than 30 per cent of Oxford and Cambridge students were from state schools. The correct figure is 54 per cent.

More than half thought that it was more expensive to study at Oxbridge, although both charge the same tuition fees as most other English universities, and offer generous bursaries. And while 54 per cent said that they always or usually encouraged gifted children to apply to Cambridge or Oxford, 25 per cent said that they would rarely do so, and 20 per cent would never suggest this to pupils.

Sir Peter Lampl, chairman of the Sutton Trust, said: "The misconceptions among secondary school teachers about Oxbridge are alarming and clearly have an impact on the number of bright state school students applying to these two great universities, despite the considerable efforts that both are making to reach out to them. "It is clear that much more needs to be done to dispel the myths about Oxbridge, and other leading universities, and to ensure that young people's higher education decisions are based on fact, not fiction."

He said that teachers' perceptions were inaccurate but unsurprising, adding: "These misconceptions are as strong as ever. We have teachers thinking that pupils from below-average backgrounds won't get in to Oxbridge, and if they do they won't fit in. Unfortunately, there is a fair amount of truth to that, with the social mix largely from the upper incomes. We're trying to tackle that and so are Oxbridge."

Research published by the Sutton Trust three months ago found that pupils from 3 per cent of schools were taking a third of places at Oxford and Cambridge. Six per cent - or 200 schools - accounted for half of admissions; the trust is encouraging them to work with neighbouring state schools to help aspiring Oxbridge applicants.

A spokesman for University of Cambridge said: "The findings accord with our own anecdotal experiences about schools' misconceptions regarding admissions, and the university recognises that more needs to be done to dispel them." Geoff Parks, the director of admissions, said: "Teachers are key influencers and advisers of young people and it is vital that the advice they give is based on up-to-date and accurate information." The university is also increasing its provision of bursaries to counter the myth that it is more expensive to go to Cambridge.

Yesterday government figures showed that tuition fees of 3,000 pounds per year deterred students from applying to university when they were first introduced.In England and Northern Ireland, where the higher fees were introduced in 2006, enrolments to full-time undergraduate courses fell, the Higher Education Statistics Agency said. In Scotland and Wales, where no top-up fees were charged, the number of students continued to increase.

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Extra years at school pay dividends?

I have not read the original study behind the article below but I have inserted some comments about initial doubts that come to mind

Forcing students to remain at school increases their income over their lifetime, with new Australian research showing every extra year of education adds 10 per cent to their salary. A study by Australian National University economists Andrew Leigh and Chris Ryan found that the increased income was almost three times the wages students lost by staying at school. "States that raised the school leaving age in the 1960s substantially increased the lifetime earnings of individuals," it says. "Recently announced increases in the school leaving age ... are likely to have a beneficial effect on individuals growing up in those states." The school leaving age in most states is 16 but many states recently introduced requirements for students to remain in education, training or a job until 17.

The findings contradict a report by the Centre for Independent Studies last month, which rejects the idea that providing more education and training will improve the job prospects and wages of high school dropouts. In the paper, CIS social research director Peter Saunders argues the best way to help the bottom 25 per cent of school leavers is to increase the number of unskilled jobs, not to give them better skills. "The solution to the skills shortage lies in policies like delayed retirement and increased female participation in the workforce," Mr Saunders said. "The solution to unskilled joblessness lies in generating more unskilled employment."

Dr Leigh, a research fellow at the ANU Research School of Social Sciences, said yesterday the issue of increasing the proportion of students completing school or an equivalent qualification was a matter of long-term social policy. "The Government ought to think of the skills shortage in terms of the life chances of somebody who gets 10 years of schooling in a modern economy," he said. "Having a good base of general skills is going to be the most valuable thing we can give kids these days. "I'd love to pay less for a plumber but we should be more worried about what a high school dropout is going to earn 20 years from now, not whether we have cheap plumbers or someone to drive a truck at the mines."

The study, to be published in the international journal Economics of Education Review, is the first to estimate the economic benefit of staying at school, comparing the effect of raising the school-leaving age and the age at which students started school. Dr Leigh and Dr Ryan used income data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey of about 12,000 people, including those aged 25 to 64 years who had completed school in Australia. For every extra year of school, the gross income was 13 per cent higher. [This is of course a naive research method. Comparing the earnings of people who stay on at school versus dropouts is completely uninformative. The dropouts would mostly be the dummies who would have done badly anyway. The naivety of this method is why the next two methods were used]

The study then examined the length of education determined by when people started school. Most states have a single entry date with students having to turn a certain age, often five years, by a cut-off date. As a result, some children born within a month of each other start school a year apart. If both leave school aged 16, the first student will have an extra year of schooling. With this measure the researchers estimated income increases of 8 per cent a year for the extra year. [There's something a bit fishy here. Did they look only at kids who left school promptly at age 16? I doubt it, as that would have been an unrepresentative subset. But if they looked at all kids in the cohorts concerned there is another problem: Doing just one extra year would leave the kid with an incomplete qualification. So many will have gone on to do two extra years. This creates another selectivity bias. The improved results may be because of the brighter subset of the sample who did not drop out and who never intended to drop out]

The study then examined the effect of governments raising the minimum age at which students can leave school. Students forced to attend an extra year earned about 12 per cent more a year. Comparing the three methods, the study estimates the benefit of extra education is 10 per cent a year in increased income, even after taking into account the lost earnings from starting work later. [Similar comments to the comments on the second study above plus the very dubious exactitude of comparisons between different State education systems]

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12 January, 2008

Do they know anything about Islam? Rights and wrongs of multicultural ed

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

It was a Wednesday, and that night I attended my weekly seminar on Cambridge authors, led by James Russell, a prodigious member of Harvard's Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department. He arrived late to class, and was not in the mood to talk about T. S. Eliot when he did. "Do any of you know what the Golden Mosque is?" he asked. Blank stares followed. Smart though they reputedly are, few Harvard undergraduates had heard of the mosque, or knew that it is one of Shiite Islam's most holy sites.

Professor Russell sighed, and his voice took on a mournful tone. "This war is something completely different than it was yesterday. The violence this is going to unleash will make the last few months look positively tranquil." His warnings were prescient, but should not have seemed so gilded by expertise: Only the most cursory bits of knowledge about Islam and its sects were necessary to deduce the gravity of the crime and the reprisals it would inspire. But how many students had even this basic knowledge?

The answer is a sad one, especially for a university such as Harvard, which routinely trumpets its "international" character and insists its students are "generally educated": instructed not to be pre-packaged professionals, but to obtain a broad education that, supposedly, helps one understand our "global society." Yet until the New York Times and The Economist told them otherwise, the attack on the Golden Mosque seemed a pedestrian event to my friends: one bombing in a troubled place where bombings are mundane. In the weeks after, I gently quizzed my friends and acquaintances. Did they know:

* The major theological differences between Sunnis and Shiites?
* The countries in the region with Sunni majorities?
* Those with Shiite majorities?
* Some of the main pilgrimage sites in the Muslim world?
* Whether al-Qaeda was Sunni or Shiite?

This is a basic quiz, and its answers are highly pertinent to our modern world. But the results, while informal, spoke to an ignorance so grand as to render meaningless concerns over the margin of error. (And it is not just Harvard students who disappoint. The al-Qaeda question was posed last year to Silvestre Reyes, the Texas Democrat who now heads the House Intelligence Committee; he answered incorrectly.)

It is an oft-repeated criticism that schools have stopped teaching facts per se, touting instead grand theories that organize facts in a manner convenient to theorists' work. Nowhere is this truer than in "postcolonial" studies of the Middle East (as well as Africa and Latin America). In a college course on Islam, a student is more likely to be assigned Edward Said's historiography, as the theory and method of writing history is known, than an actual history textbook. Rarely will a student be held accountable for definitional knowledge--you don't need to know why Shiite Iranians call their religious leaders "ayatollahs," or even when Muhammad lived, but you had better understand how the emergence of Islam reshaped the gender structure of Arab society. There is a good case to be made for knowing all of that, but without the bare facts of people, places, and the dates they intersected, a critical analysis of same is useless. Learning this way is like wearing jeans with a button and a zipper, but no denim: quite impossible.

At times, the grandiose theorizing of academics is harmless, even amusing. But vis-a-vis Islam, students' ignorance is tragic, because, like it or not, we really do live in that much-prophesied global, interconnected world: What happens to a mosque, especially one in Iraq, may well have an impact on us and our cause. For as long a time as that is true, understanding cultures outside our own will be one of the foremost intellectual necessities.

This sounds flaky in the extreme to a good many conservatives. Indeed, their suspicion is well-placed--a true understanding of another culture is very different from the "understanding" fostered in higher education.

These days, to "understand" is rarely about obtaining specific knowledge about a foreign culture through patient study; usually, to "understand" is to excuse, or to change the subject. An example: One week at Harvard, not so long ago, there were no fewer than five panels bemoaning American "militarization," "imperialism," and supposed human-rights abuses. This, as it happened, was the same week when riots exploded across the globe in response to the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten's publication of several cartoons depicting Muhammad. But a student would have tried in vain to find a panel addressing the question that obviously needed to be asked: Why was the Muslim world burning over a few cartoons, printed in an obscure source?

Apart from extracurricular panels, there is the question of coursework. Or, rather, there's not the question, at least for most students. Add Islam and Muslim society to the long list of subjects, from Shakespeare to American history, that Ivy Leaguers from Yale to Princeton to Harvard can avoid ever encountering in their academic careers. Although schools have moved to embrace "internationalism," this pedagogical vogue exists in portions so small as to be useless. In Harvard's latest curricular review, for instance, it is claimed to be a "serious commitment" to our "global society" that the university requires its students to take one year of a foreign language. Not enough to have a conversation or read a newspaper, but perhaps graduates will be able to order falafel at their nearest Lebanese restaurant.

Harvard undergraduates are also required to take one class chosen from a small but schizoid list of "Foreign Cultures" offerings. Incredibly, in the 2007-08 academic year, none of the "Foreign Cultures" courses concerns Islam or the Middle East. If a student does want to learn something about Islam and have it count for credit, he'll have to wait until next year. And then, he'll be faced with a choice between two. Will he take "Gendered Communities: Women, Islam, and Nationalism in the Middle East and North Africa," taught by the chairman of the department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality? Or will he select "Understanding Islam and Contemporary Muslim Societies"?

He would do well to choose neither. As comprehensive as "Understanding Islam" sounds, it hardly lives up to its grand name, digressing in pursuit of the professor's own passion. That would be Sufi mysticism in India and Africa, a topic that is as obscure as it is exculpatory of Islam's lately radical tendency. (Sufis are to Islam what Quakers are to Christianity.) In any case, Sufism has little to do with why, in the decade in which we live, a student would sign himself up for a course called "Understanding Islam."

Despite the pretense of "understanding" other cultures, or "respecting" or "being sensitive to" them, few universities have moved beyond the platitudinous. A real sensitivity for other cultures entails discerning their differences, perhaps even more than finding their common ground. What is not respectful of Islam would be to assume that those of its adherents who brook no separation of civil and religious authority would be motivated by the same, largely secular incentives that motivate us in the West. A person who truly understands Shiite Islam will be able to comprehend Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's millennial behavior and appreciate that he is perfectly serious in his belief that the twelfth Imam, whom God is said to have hidden from human view in the 9th century, will be reappearing soon to redeem the world for Islam.

For reasons that are even more obvious today than they were a century ago, learning the fundamentals of world religions still should be a pillar of a liberal education. A just-the-facts approach may seem pedantic and arcane to students who are themselves mostly agnostic. But in our time, it is not too much to ask that anyone who graduates from a prestigious American university have at least a functional knowledge of Islam and the Muslim world. This is the least effortful and most practical civic duty we can ask universities to bear. And if such a simple calling cannot be fulfilled, then American higher education will have further endangered its reputation as a useful institution.

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Britain's failing government schools

More than half a million children are being taught in failing secondary schools that risk closure by the Government. New GCSE league tables published today indicate that 639 of Britain's 3,000 state secondaries have failed to meet the Government's minimum target for 30 per cent of pupils achieving five GCSEs at grades A* to C, including English and maths. Last year, the Prime Minister vowed to shut down or take over schools that did not reach that level within five years.

Overall, the tables show that the rate of progress in improving GCSE results has almost ground to a halt. Fewer than half of pupils (just 46 per cent) last year achieved five GCSEs at grades A* to C, up just 0.7 percentage points on the previous year. Selective grammar schools continued to dominate the league tables, with the state Colchester Royal Grammar School in Essex, at the top.

Yesterday Jim Knight, the Schools Minister, said that there would be no let-up in the pressure on low-performing schools, adding that 170 of the 639 were just a few percentage points from meeting the target. "We owe it to parents to make sure low-performing schools turn around quickly. I share parents' impatience for improvement not just in low-achieving schools, but in all schools," he said. He added that the Government would investigate whether to close the worst-performing schools or to "federate" them with neighbouring higher performing schools. Alternatively it could turn them into academies [charter schools] that are independently sponsored and run. But, while results for academies [charter schools] are generally improving, today's results show that 17 of the 40 academies reporting GCSE results were found in the league table of the worst 200 state schools in England.

Michael Gove, the Shadow Children's Secretary, said that the number of pupils at the bottom end of Britain's long tail of underachievement was growing. The number of children not even passing five GCSEs with grade G, including English and maths, is now at 90,000, up 5,000 on last year. Almost 130,000 children are not getting even a single grade C at GCSE. "Until we slash pointless bureaucracy, give teachers real powers to enforce discipline, and focus on the basics, we will fail another generation of our most disadvantaged children," Mr Gove said. [He's got that right! But don't wait for it to happen]

The tables also indicate that the number of immigrant children in GCSE classes who were unable to speak English has risen by 50 per cent over two years to 2,000. While this is a small proportion of the 600,000 or so pupils eligible for GCSE examination in England, teachers' leaders gave warning that the influx was creating "huge turbulence" and disrupting classes. This would suggest a total of 20,000 non-English-speakers if extrapolated to the whole school system.

In science, the league tables show that only half of teenagers in England are reaching the required standard. A new measure, showing the percentage of pupils achieving at least two passes in science at GCSE, was introduced for the first time this year. The results reveal that, nationally, only half of students (50.3 per cent) achieved two grade passes (A* to C) in science. These findings underscore concerns raised recently by employers and universities about the long-term fall-off in numbers studying science at A level and then undergraduate level. Hilary Leevers, assistant director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering, described the results as disappointing, but said that the new measure would help to track progress.

However, independent schools have fiercely criticised it, because it effectively places subjects such as physics, biology and chemistry on a par with options described by some as "pub subjects", such as environmental and land-based science.

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Australia: Leftist education academics reject evidence about phonics

They are too infantile to be able to admit that they were wrong

LEADING Australian education experts continue to reject scientific evidence that teaching phonics improves reading skills in children. The latest results from a seven-year Scottish study show that children taught how to put sounds together to read words, called synthetic phonics, had significantly better reading skills than their peers taught using analytic phonics, breaking whole words into their constituent sounds.

But eminent Australian literacy researcher Allan Luke, from the Queensland University of Technology, questions the validity of using evidence-based research in assessing teaching methods. Professor Luke, a former director-general of the Queensland Education Department and ministerial adviser on education, has dismissed scientific studies showing the benefit of phonics.

Speaking at a curriculum symposium last month, he said the studies provided no evidence that alternate methods had failed. Opponents of a phonics approach in teaching reading argue that it fails to enhance students' reading comprehension. The seven-year Scottish study found that, under the synthetic phonics approach, students' reading was 42 months ahead of the average for their age and spelling was 20 months ahead. But their comprehension was a more modest 3.5 months ahead, which researcher Rhona Johnston said was due to a substantial number of students coming from socially disadvantaged areas.

To counter the criticism, Professor Johnston, now at the University of Hull in England, and her colleague Joyce Watson, at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, compared a group of 10-year-olds from Clackmannanshire with a similarly disadvantaged group of students in England. The Scottish children read words 24 months ahead of what is expected for their age while the word reading of the English students was on target. In spelling, the Scottish children were six months ahead of their age compared to the English students. In comprehension, the Scottish children were on target for their age, while the English students were 6.6 months behind.

Literacy expert Kevin Wheldall, from Macquarie University, said phonics taught children how to decode written language and was a necessary first step in learning to read. "Comprehension comes from a good understanding of spoken English, but if you can't decode words, then it doesn't matter how good your listening comprehension is," he said. "(Critics) seem to be determined not to believe the evidence."

Professor Luke made his comments at a curriculum symposium last month hosted by the Australian Curriculum Studies Association in conjunction with the Queensland teachers union, state education department and the Queensland Studies Authority, which sets school curriculum. Professor Luke's paper argues that the troubled No Child Left Behind program in the US to improve reading skills, which prescribes a phonics approach and standardised testing, shows such an approach would fail in Australia. It says consistent in both countries "has been the rise of a 'gold standard' of evidence-based research as the major criterion for deciding what will be considered 'valid' as evidence of success in literacy teaching".

"It begins from what we term the phonics hypothesis: that there is scientific evidence that literacy achievement can be improved through systematic curricular approaches to pedagogy that emphasise 'alphabetics' or phonics," the paper says. "There is little recognition of the host of contributing factors identified in ethnographic, case-based and quantitative literacy research. Factors like home-school transitions and access; the variable impacts of community cultural and linguistic background; the effects of poverty; the increasing incidence of special needs; and the impacts of differential school resourcing."

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11 January, 2008

U California loses interest in academic achievement

The world gets more competitive every day, so why would California's education elites want to dumb down their public university admissions standards? The answer is to serve the modern liberal piety known as "diversity" while potentially thwarting the will of the voters.

The University of California Board of Admissions is proposing to lower to 2.8 from 3.0 the minimum grade point average for admission to a UC school. That 3.0 GPA standard has been in place for 40 years. Students would also no longer be required to take the SAT exams that test for knowledge of specific subjects, such as history and science.

UC Board of Admissions Chairman Mark Rashid says that, under this new system of "comprehensive review," the schools "can make a better and more fair determination of academic merit by looking at all the students' achievements." And it is true that test scores and grades do not take full account of the special talents of certain students. But the current system already leaves slots for students with specific skills, so if you think this change is about admitting more linebackers or piccolo players, you don't understand modern academic politics.

The plan would grant admissions officers more discretion to evade the ban on race and gender preferences imposed by California voters. Those limits became law when voters approved Proposition 209 in 1996, and state officials have been looking for ways around them ever since. "This appears to be a blatant attempt to subvert the law," says Ward Connerly, a former member of the University of California Board of Regents, who led the drive for 209. "Subjective admissions standards allow schools to substitute race and diversity for academic achievement."

One loser here would be the principle of merit-based college admissions. That principle has served the state well over the decades, helping to make some of its universities among the world's finest. Since 209, Asian-American students have done especially well, with students of Asian ethnicity at UCLA nearly doubling to 42% from 22%. Immigrants and the children of immigrants now outnumber native-born whites in most UC schools, so being a member of an ethnic minority is clearly not an inherent admissions handicap. Ironically, objective testing criteria were first introduced in many university systems, including California's, precisely to weed out discrimination favoring children of affluent alumni ahead of higher performing students.

The other big losers would be the overall level of achievement demanded in California public elementary and high schools. A recent study by the left-leaning Institute for Democracy, Education and Access at UCLA, the "California Educational Opportunity Report 2007," finds that "California lags behind most other states in providing fundamental learning conditions as well as in student outcomes." In 2005 California ranked 48th among states in the percentage of high-school kids who attend college. Only Mississippi and Arizona rated worse.

The UCLA study documents that the educational achievement gap between black and Latino children and whites and Asians is increasing in California at a troubling pace. Graduation rates are falling fastest for blacks and Latinos, as many of them are stuck in the state's worst public schools. The way to close that gap is by introducing more accountability and choice to raise achievement standards--admittedly hard work, especially because it means taking on the teachers unions.

Instead, the UC Board of Admissions proposal sounds like a declaration of academic surrender. It's one more depressing signal that liberal elites have all but given up on poor black and Hispanic kids. Because they don't think closing the achievement gap is possible, their alternative is to reduce standards for everyone. Diversity so trumps merit in the hierarchy of modern liberal values that they're willing to dumb down the entire university system to guarantee what they consider a proper mix of skin tones on campus.

A decade ago, California voters spoke clearly that they prefer admissions standards rooted in the American tradition of achievement. In the months ahead, the UC Board of Regents will have to decide which principle to endorse, and their choice will tell us a great deal about the future path of American society.

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A new tribute to Australia's Left-run schools

Half of Australians lack modern-world skills

Half of all Australians lack the minimum reading, writing and problem-solving skills to cope with life in the modern world. A new survey on life skills by the Australian Bureau of Statistics reveals 46 per cent of the population, or seven million people, would struggle to understand the meaning of newspaper and magazine articles or documentation such as maps and payslips.

And 53 per cent reached just the second of five levels in a practical numeracy test, while 70 per cent, the equivalent of 10.6million people, only managed to progress to level 2 in a series of problem-solving exercises. "Level 3 is regarded by the survey developers as the minimum required for individuals to meet the complex demands of everyday life and work in the emerging knowledge-based economy," said the ABS report, Adult Literacy and Life Skills.

The survey of almost 9000 people, which included a written life-skills test, was also done in seven other developed countries. Switzerland and Norway came out well ahead of Australia, while the US ranked much lower across all age ranges. Italy was the poorest-performing country of those participating. One stark difference in Australia was gender. Women were stronger at understanding written material than men, but males were better at understanding documents such as maps. And when it came to numbers, women did considerably worse. [An old, old story. Nothing to do with genetics, of course. It's just all these coincidences that keep piling up] While 53 per cent of men achieved (the acceptable) level 3 or higher, only 42 per cent of women managed the same. And almost twice as many men as women reached the top levels of the numeracy test.

Management consultant and social commentator Wendy McCarthy said the results were further evidence Australia was becoming a society increasingly divided into two classes. Ms McCarthy said a decade of neglect of the public education system was to blame. "It's a huge opportunity lost," she said. "It clearly demonstrates that if you don't invest in public education, except as a safety net, if you don't make it sexy, interesting, exciting, a way to get into the next world, you will slip back - and that's what's happening to Australia. "We will look back over the last 10 years and realise with some horror how much we overemphasised the value of the individual and overlooked the common denominators in our society."

The ACT was the best-performing state or territory in terms of literacy and numeracy, followed by Western Australia and South Australia. Tasmania performed worst. While people whose first language was not English achieved lower literacy scores than the general population, comparisons with a 1996 survey show considerable improvement in literacy levels of this cohort.

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10 January, 2008

School Daze

If we stopped and thought about it, we'd realize we could, would and should throw out the public [mis]education system

Let's kick off the new year with some out-of-the-box thinking. What if we didn't have public education here in Fairfield County? What if we separated school and state and let education be entirely a private matter? If you hadn't resolved to be more open-minded this year, you might have dismissed this as foolishness. After all, everybody knows without government we would all be illiterate bums. Privatizing education? Come on. It can't be done, people wouldn't do it even if they could, and it shouldn't be done even if people would.

It can't be done? Consider Sundays. As far as I know, every single public school at all grade levels is closed on Sundays. Neither the State of Connecticut, nor any of the 23 municipalities in Fairfield County regularly contributes educational information to anybody on each of the 52 Sundays throughout each year. Yet kids still learn. They go to Sunday school at church. They go to Hebrew school in a synagogue. They go to Chinese school or Russian school. What's more, it's not a cookie-cutter curriculum; they learn what their parents want them to learn.

Marshall Fritz, director of the Separation of School and State Alliance, puts it succinctly: "Two centuries ago, Americans ended government undermining of parents by removing government involvement in Sunday school. Now we need to do the same with Monday school, Tuesday school, Wednesday school, etc." And remember, there is no summer semester for most public school students. Yet kids don't seem to get lost. Parents send them to camps and retreats and are somehow magically able to fill the time they would have spent trapped behind brick.

Fine, sure, the cynic says. It can in principle be done, but people wouldn't do it. It's too much hassle and it's too expensive. Really? Consider martial arts. There is a dojo of some sort on almost every street. You can choose from tae kwon do, judo, karate, and more. Consider piano lessons. Or guitar. Or saxophone. Pick any musical instrument, stroll into your local grocery store, and pick your teacher from the bulletin board. Instructors provide these services precisely because parents want them. Imagine the same with history or English or math.

It's less hassle because there is more accountability. You can't fire your kid's English teacher even if they tell your son or daughter that candy canes are shaped like the letter J for Jesus-as some teachers have been caught doing-and your family is Jewish or Hindu, or just don't want your kid, and other kids, being taught Christianity with your tax dollars. (Besides, the letter-J claim is false; candy canes were bent to represent a shepherd's staff.) Imagine you could switch private instructors for any reason or for no reason at all. And it's less expensive because there is more competition for your dollar.

Still, the cynic scoffs, even though it can be done, and even though people would do it, or at least would have the choice, it still shouldn't be done, because then poor people wouldn't be able to afford an education, or parents would make their kids work instead of learn, and that's just not fair. Talk about fairness. Is it fair to force kids to attend school even if a gifted student could learn the material and pass the final exam after the first class? Is it fair to tax childless adults to pay for a service they do not need?

And consider the poor. Is it fair to force them to do what you want them to do, rather than what they would prefer? Suppose they could move to a nicer apartment with the money that's being paid for their kids' school. Suppose one of the parents could quit a minimum wage job and homeschool the kids. Is it fair that you won't even give them that choice?

A year of education for a child in a Fairfield County public school costs about $13,000. A year of full-time minimum wage is $16,000 in income-before taxes. If the parents simply received the $13,000 as cash, they could work part-time, homeschool their kids, teach them the values they believe, and still come out thousands of dollars ahead.

Consider the children, the concerned cynic sings. If parents fail to have them taught the basic knowledge that public schools provide then they will be unemployable as adults.

In other words, we are putting children through a mandatory 12-year program to make them better workers. Is that really what education is supposed to be about? Is that what the children would choose to spend the money on? At $13,000 per year times 12 years, each high school graduate has received education that cost about $150,000. How many of them would have preferred, as adults, in retrospect, to have maybe received only $10,000, enough to pay a tutor to teach them basic reading and arithmetic, and spend the rest of the money on cars, houses, seed capital for a business, or just tons of candy canes? Is it fair that they should have no choice in the matter?

Public education has mandatory attendance, is funded by mandatory taxes, and is provided by a mandatory monopoly by the government. Perhaps some of these restrictions could be relaxed. This new year, let's resolve to think for ourselves.

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Wow! A school with standards

Four Texas teens have been suspended from school for refusing to get their hair cut over the Christmas break. The students had been warned that the district was cracking down on dress code violators after they repeatedly let their locks loose on school grounds. "Our policy states that the hair (on male students) cannot extend beyond the collar in the back,'' said Kevin Stanford, superintendent of the Kerens Independent School District.

"What we were doing is allowing the students to bind their hair, but there was very inconsistent compliance.'' After several complaints from parents in the small rural town south of Dallas, school officials decided to eliminate the hair-binding loophole. Students were told to go to the barber over the break or face the consequences.

"I don't know exactly what the students are going to - the ball's in their court,'' Mr Stanford said. "Persistent insubordination could go as far as a disciplinary alternative school placement. That's the worst case.''

Strict dress codes were common in Texas, Mr Stanford said, and had been upheld by challenges which went as far as the Texas Supreme Court. Students at Kerens high school are also prohibited from wearing sleeveless shirts, excessively tight or baggy pants, mismatched socks, "disruptive hair styles'' and "unnatural'' hair colours, according to an 86-page student handbook. "The Kerens ISD dress code promotes the effective personal presentation skills which contribute significantly to successful living in adult society,'' the handbook explained. "The district's dress code is established to teach hygiene, instill discipline, prevent disruption, avoid safety hazards, and teach respect for authority.''

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9 January, 2008

J Edgar Hoover Was Half Right

Comment by a British policeman

I had the misfortune to attend one of our less academic local schools a week or so back. I won't bore you with the details, save to say that, while it wasn't the crime of the century, it had left a young girl quite distressed; on balance, I suppose, it was worth attending, though in my day it would have resulted in six of the best from the headmaster and no 'outside agency' would have been required. (My day is only 20 years ago, but it increasingly seems to have been in another era altogether, and possibly in another country).

Teachers (honest ones), parents (intelligent ones) and police officers now know that a significant minority of the schools in our cities offer almost nothing in the way of education. In the worst 10 per cent, it's far more serious than a simple lack of schooling: drugs are openly sold and consumed, pupils are often drunk and/or pregnant, hardcore pornography is widely available and eagerly swapped, casual sexual assaults and threats of serious violence are commonplace and there is very little, if anything, that the teaching staff can do about any of it. It's heartbreaking, actually.

I looked around. All I could see were lost souls destined for the scrapheap. At 13 years of age, they had literally no hope of ever achieving anything in their lives, without the intervention of a lottery win or some other piece of outstanding good fortune. I thought about my own grandfather. He was one of seven, and grew up in a slum dwelling with an outside standpipe for water. In his 90s now, he still reads avidly, lobs bits and pieces of Shakespeare about and can talk you through you Partition, the Beatles and the Falklands with equal clarity.

I saw a young lad I vaguely knew. His hair had been shaved at the back into an approximation of the letters 'MUFC' and he had a gold stud in one ear. 'What's happening in Afghanistan at the mo, mate?' I said, conversationally. 'You what?' he said. 'Afwhat?'

I happen to know that this lad's father is doing time for murder, and that his mother is an alcoholic and occasional prostitute. I hate to sound like a bleeding heart, but is it his fault he doesn't know what's happening around him? Is it the teachers' faults they can't educate him? What is going on in this country?

J Edgar Hoover was half right when he said, 'The cure for crime is not the electric chair, but the high chair.' To my mind, we need a bit of both.

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Dr. Sharad Karkhanis Educator of the Year

Dr. Sharad Karkhanis, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Library Science at Kingsborough Community College, will be the esteemed recipient of the annual Educator of the Year award at the upcoming Lincoln Day Dinner sponsored by the Queens Village Republican Club, America's oldest and proudest GOP group. His most distinguished service concerns his on-going struggle for freedom of speech, conscience and the press, which began as an outspoken critic of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's authoritarian rule and censorship of the press in India in the 1970's. His battle for free speech continues today as he refuses to be silenced by a $2 million defamation lawsuit filed by a faculty union official of City University of New York in order to shut down his on-line newsletter The Patriot Returns. We are proud to be honoring him at the history making dinner and fully support his battle for First Amendment rights in an urban academic climate of repression and censorship that harkens back to Mrs. Gandhi's oppressive rule in India....

Dr. Karkhanis started publication of The Patriot Returns in 1992. Written in a satirical tone, it performed a critical function informing the CUNY community of the incompetent and self-serving faculty union leadership that was more concerned with political revolution in America than securing good contracts and benefits for faculty members. He collected useful information, reported and wrote the monthly newsletter, and printed, labeled and distributed over 12,000 issues to 21 CUNY campuses. Since its inception, the ruling radical professors of the CUNY faculty union have been trying to censor TPR, suppress free speech and shut down on-line forums that were critical of their leadership. In 1996, faculty union official and former chair of the CUNY Faculty Senate, Professor Susan O'Malley ordered Karkhanis to stop publication of TPR. Fearing repercussions to their careers, other critics bowed to O'Malley's repressive exploits but Karkhanis refused to be silenced. She recently sent a threatening lawyer's letter and finally filed a lawsuit charging Karkhanis with making defamatory statements in TPR, accusing her of trying to land jobs for terrorists on CUNY campuses. TPR exposed her tireless efforts to secure teaching positions for convicted terrorist conspirator, Mohammad Yousry, and imprisoned Weather Underground terrorist Susan Rosenberg. The lawsuit alleges that by spilling the beans on her malfeasance and radical proclivities, Karkhanis has damaged O'Malley's reputation.

With a lifetime history of standing up against repression and censorship, Dr. Karkhanis will not be silenced now, and friends and colleagues of good conscience are coming to his aid including the Queens Village Republicans. A legal fund for Dr. Karkhanis's defense is being set up and part of the proceeds of each ticket sold for the Lincoln Day Dinner will be donated to the fund. We will also be treated to a speech on the condition of our urban universities by CUNY Trustee Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld, one of the keynoters, and one of the principle heroes famed for restoring higher academic standards to CUNY and fighting against political indoctrination in the classroom. This will be an historical event not only for defending freedom of speech and the press, but also reforming the intolerant status quo of higher education today. The combination of Dr. Karkhanis and Trustee Wiesenfeld in addition to the return engagement of last year's Educator of the Year honoree, History Professor Gerald Matacotta, to deliver the Lincoln Day address at one of the major annual Queens GOP functions, signifies the last act of the garish drama by the radical faculty regime now in control of the CUNY system.

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Australia: Shakespearean Marxism axed

DESPITE his humiliating electoral defeat, former Prime Minister John Howard has won a final battle against some of his greatest foes - the left-wing forces of political correctness. Postmodernism, under which senior high school students were controversially asked to interpret Shakespeare from Marxist, feminist and racial perspectives, has been quietly dumped by the NSW Board of Studies.

The board is adamant it is just a "normal turnover" of the list of elective subjects offered to HSC candidates in the English Extension 1 course - rather than a reaction to critics who savaged postmodernism as subverting the classics by failing to help students appreciate them or gain full meaning of the texts.

But students who opted for the postmodern elective in previous years are horrified at its passing, among them outstanding all-rounder Mikah Pajaczkowska-Russell. The former Sydney Girls High School student, who has just scored a UAI of 99.75, said critics misunderstood the value of postmodernism for HSC English. "It is so easy to criticise texts . . . but they are not about undermining Shakespeare or traditional texts," she said. "They look at truth and reality . . . I find it invigorating." Ms Pajaczkowska-Russell, who will take an arts/law degree at Sydney University this year, singled out the postmodernism elective for special praise among her 11 HSC units.

But to Mr Howard, who campaigned long and hard to reinstate traditional values in school curriculums, postmodernism was "anything I don't like". His government threatened to cut education funding to states that did not fall into line on a raft of Commonwealth demands. Postmodernism will be dropped from the list of electives available to students in HSC English Extension 1 from 2009.

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8 January, 2008

British universities refuse credit for soft High School subjects

About time

TOP universities are drawing up blacklists of "soft" A-level subjects that will bar applicants from winning places on their degree courses. They are warning that candidates who take more than one of the subjects such as accountancy, leisure studies and dance are unlikely to gain admission. They say they lack the academic rigour to prepare students for courses and are alarmed at the way increasing numbers of state schools are using them to boost pupils' top grades.

Disclosure of the lists will anger the parents of many pupils whose schools have failed to warn them that the A-level subjects are effectively worthless for entry to the best universities. Ministers will also be concerned that they will undermine attempts to increase the number of state pupils at leading universities, traditionally dominated by independent schools.

Some universities such as the London School of Economics (LSE) and Cambridge University have already published lists of up to 25 subjects on their web-sites. Others are less overt but still operate lists. Wendy Piatt, director-general of the Russell Group of 20 leading universities, said most top institutions would follow suit in "providing a steer on preferred combinations of A-levels".

She warned that a new analysis carried out by the group showed that a gulf was emerging between state and private schools, as comprehensives opted for "soft" A-levels and independents and grammars tightened their grip on traditional academic subjects. "Clearly if pupils from state schools are increasingly taking a combination of subjects which put them at a disadvantage in competing for a course at a Russell Group university, the task of widening participation in our universities becomes even more difficult," said Piatt, a former deputy director of Tony Blair's Downing Street strategy unit.

The list run by Cambridge advises potential applicants against taking more than one from a list of 25 subjects ranging from business studies to dance and tourism. It warns that such a combination "would not normally be considered acceptable". "Doing these A-levels individually is not a problem, it is doing too many of them," said Geoff Parks, director of admissions at Cambridge University. "We know there are bright students on track to get As but in subject combinations that essentially rule them out."

The LSE has named 10 subjects that it deems questionable. They include many of those named by Cambridge, but also others such as law. A spokes-woman for Oxford said that it did not operate a list but that candidates who opted for "meatier" A-levels were likely to gain some advantage.

The Russell Group findings are unlikely to please ministers, who have accused universities of failing to do enough to attract working-class students. In September, John Denham, the universities secretary, called the current system a "huge waste of talent", adding that there was a "social bias" across higher education institutions, "including some of the most sought-after".

The Russell Group research shows the widening divergence between subjects being studied at different schools. In media studies, for example, 93% of pupils were from nonselective state schools, far above the sector's 74% share of all A-levels. The situation is reversed in science, languages and maths. In the state sector, fewer than one in 10 A-level pupils in nonselective schools takes sciences, compared with one third at grammar and independent schools. In further maths, 35% of exams are taken at private schools, far above the sector's 15% share of all A-levels. Meanwhile, the number of independent school candidates taking languages has remained steady, while those in the state sector have plummeted.

"It is overwhelmingly the state school students dropping sciences and languages," says the research. "This is making it increasingly difficult for the Russell Group to recruit large numbers of state school pupils into these difficult subjects." The choice of subjects is increasing the dominance of independent and grammar school students already shown by their higher grades - the two groups together accounted for 52.3% of those gaining three As in 2006, although they made up only 21% of candidates.

Competition is becoming increasingly tough at the top universities, with 94% of the students who entered Cambridge last year securing more than three A grades at A-level. At Bristol, for example, there are 10 candidates for every place. The Department for Children, Schools and Families said: "More young people are staying on at school taking A-levels and achieving - surely that's something we should welcome."

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AND WE CALL THIS EDUCATION?

One of the responses I received to my last article Would God Bless America stood out from all the rest for one reason: it was from an individual who admitted being the product of our "new and improved" system of education. Here is the response:

"H0w dare you promote misleading hate towards Humainist. And you know some of us are christians. i am a Humanist and a christian and cause of that i will not celebrate the pagan holiday Christmas. While you put down the humanist which simply means to leave each person better than when you met them. They believe in promoting the goodwill in others. yet here you blast them for doing the same thing Christ would do. Did you know Christ didn't celebrate Birthdays no it was a traditional Pagan thing The jews didnot celebrate Birthday. Nor did they believe in decorating trees that was pagan along with everything else that is celbrated this time of year.,. So your question is why would God Bless America ? Because unlike you me or anyone else he understands and see things from a total different perspective than us. He understands out of ignorance people say or do things but he looks at their heart. Remember you were to take Jesus in your heart and love him and it was your heart that was suppose to change. Not going and expressing this kind of fear which Yahweh says not to fear . But to spread the fear for what. what is your purpose and please let crucified the humanist they only want to help the child who dont have enough to eat or to reach the hand out to the one struggle to be free from Drugs. before you attack a group 0f people do your homework and see what they really are about. And also before judging who is doing what this holiday season find out what the origins are that are Christkmas if we are celebrating his birth well theres enough evidencve it didn't happen than. The time of year was pick to coincident with the pagan Holistice. did you know that. Do you know how much of Christmas is pagan. Seems the Cia has successfully brainwash you and you are ready to attack the very people who are fighting the battle against the elites. oh while you are checking out Christmas also check out Eostere you may find something out about that holiday yup pagan to. Maybe we should celebrate the Holidays of our Saviour and instead of advocating fear we should try to help our fellow man showing his Spirit by our action. And instead of Judging others based on our own faulty understanding of the sitution we should just stand and be quiet. And if you want the norms of society to change than please stand up and go out and state these out in public instead of behind a computer desk./ I have i have gone in public school and proudly proclaim my saviour and stating when will we see the changes of the heart instead of judging people based on who we think they are when will we see them for who they are." (As written.)

I shall call this individual "Ms Muffet" for reasons of anonymity. My response to Ms Muffet, in part, was as follows:

"Your inability to articulate yourself coherently is obviously the product of your government schooling. Were I your teacher, I would give you an F for what you wrote . To begin, you don't even make a logical argument because a logical argument is based on facts and there aren't any in what you wrote, just how you feel. Secondly, your spelling and punctuation are atrocious. Third, you obviously didn't proof-read what you wrote to see if it even made sense, which it doesn't."

In a later e-mail, Ms Muffet stated:

"No the grammer wasn't check my GPA is still 3.40 I'm not writing a college level paper so i don'tt need to check it." (As written.)

In other words, she doesn't feel what she wrote important enough to take the time to present herself as though she were writing the most important dissertation ever. No pride in self, no pride in work product. Yet she truly believes that anyone reading what she wrote should appreciate her, and further, appreciate her point of view. This is the product of misplaced self-esteem. Jake Halpern, writing for the Boston Globe, quoting Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, has termed the present product of government schools narcissistic and entitled.

Not long ago, I had an exchange with an government school teacher, incensed by something I had written about government schools. This teacher, in her effort to defend her profession and her failure to properly educate children, finally got around to stating that it "wasn't [her] job to educate children for intelligence", she was educating children to be critical thinkers. Like the critical thinker in the form of Ms Muffet above?

Another teacher, run out of the government schools because he thought educating for intelligence more important, wrote me the following when I sent him the above response from Ms Muffet:

"I think I had this lady in one of my classes. In four years of teaching English, I saw a lot of essays and research papers written this poorly. The student, parent and administrators couldn't understand why I would mark such papers as failing and ultimately fail the student if he or she didn't allow me to teach him how to write an effective paper without grammar, spelling, punctuation and sentence structure errors The System calls `conventions' and which they deem unimportant."[1]

Spelling, punctuation, capitalization, sentence structure - commonly referred to as syntax - unimportant? What Ms Muffet wrote has all the earmarks of someone who is functionally illiterate.

How much money are we paying for the government schools to not educate children? Even one penny is too much. A small business owner had this to say recently about children coming out of the government schools: "They don't know anything; furthermore, they don't know they don't know anything; but they can certainly tell you how they feel about everything. And they really and truly believe you should appreciate them endlessly even though they don't deserve it." Notice this small businessman had no trouble articulating himself succinctly. His observations are astute, to the point, and quite accurate.

The new system of education, brought into being by Goals 2000, School-to-Work, and the Workforce Investment Act, along with the strategic plans known as Improving America's Schools Act (Clinton) and No Child Left Behind (GW Bush), has now been in effect for one full education cycle of children, pre-K through 12. This system of education, the American public was told (and swallowed, hook, line and sinker), would improve education, produce smarter children.

There were some of us who knew better because we delved into the writings of those advocating this system of education. From America's Choice, high skills or low wages!, (1990) page 25, comes this little gem that should have clued parents that this system of education wasn't what they were being told it was:

". in a broad survey of employment needs across America, we found little evidence of a far-reaching desire for a more educated workforce."

Get the drift? If not, here is another:

"We will need to recognize that the so-called basic skills, which currently represent the total effort in elementary schools, will be taught in one quarter of the present school day..."[2]

Remember when you were in grade school? Did you ever finish a text book in a year's time? Now, if it took a full school year to cram all the knowledge in that book into your head, such that your brain was growing in knowledge and ability to comprehend, how is it that schools today can do it "in one quarter of the present school day"? The obvious answer is that they can't and they aren't. Children are not being taught what children need to know to grow and comprehend.

Education today is focused on life-related issues (affective domain), knowledge (cognitive domain) is only incorporated as it used and applied in addressing life-related issues. It is easy to see, in the absence of knowledge, how children can be effectively dumbed-down. In what Ms Muffet wrote, this is clearly evident.

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Educators can also learn from what already works

Comment from Australia

As our approach to teaching embraces more traditional methods, the overseas experience can inform our choices. Looking back over the past 12 months, it is clear that 2007 was a watershed year for education. Much of what has been argued on these pages in terms of increased testing and more rigorous examinations, adopting a back-to-basics approach to curriculum, holding schools accountable and better rewarding teachers, is now mainstream in terms of the debate and is being advocated by ALP state and federal governments.

How can we ensure, though, that initiatives planned for 2008 and beyond will be effective in raising standards, better supporting teachers and schools and ensuring that students receive a well-balanced, academically sound and fulfilling educational experience? One approach is to learn from what is happening overseas, in addition to our own experience, and to evaluate classroom practice by what the research suggests works.

Ensuring that children are literate and numerate in the early years of primary school is critically important and there is an increasing consensus overseas about the best way to teach such skills. In Britain, the Rose report, in part based on the success of the Scottish school Clackmannanshire, recommends adopting a synthetic phonics approach to teaching reading, a recommendation the British Government has accepted. In opposition to the prevailing whole-language approach -- whereby, on the assumption that learning to read is as natural as learning to speak, children are taught to look and guess and memorise words by sight -- synthetic phonics "is a sounds-based approach that first teaches children the sounds of letters and how they blend into words, before moving to letter combinations that make up words".

Adopting a more structured approach to literacy and numeracy is also supported by the US research associated with Project Follow Through. The billion-dollar nationwide project evaluated different approaches to teaching and concluded that formal methods of classroom interaction, described as direct instruction, are more effective than the type of teaching associated with Australia's adoption of outcomes-based education. Summarising what we can learn from Project Follow Through, Australian mathematics researcher Rhonda Farkota noted: "Student-directed learning has consistently more negative outcomes than those achieved in traditional education ... On all measures of basic skills, cognitive development and self-esteem, it (student-centred learning) was shown to be vastly inferior to traditional education."

One of the most respected and influential international tests is the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, held three times since its inception in the mid-'90s, involving 46 countries and testing students at years 4, 8 and 12. On identifying the characteristics of education systems that achieve at the top of the table -- the results place Australia in the second 11 -- it is possible to identify what leads to success. Stronger performing systems place a greater emphasis on competitive examinations and testing (which are often used to stream students in terms of ability), give teachers clear and succinct road maps detailing what is to be taught, and expect students to master essential knowledge and understanding associated with the key disciplines at each year level.

Research carried out by German academic Ludger Woessmann also concludes that top-performing TIMSS countries have a robust non-government school sector, which leads to increased competition and pressure to do well, schools have autonomy over hiring, firing and rewarding successful teachers, and the influence of teacher unions is restricted.

While critics of George W. Bush's initiative No Child Left Behind -- whereby federal funding is linked to education systems setting clear objectives in terms of raising standards, students are regularly tested, classroom practice is based on what the research suggests works and there are consequences for underperformance -- argue that NCLB has failed, the evidence suggests otherwise. As noted by US Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, setting performance targets, regularly testing students and holding schools accountable have raised standards, as reflected by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. She states: "According to NAEP, more reading progress was made by nine-year-olds from 1999 to 2004 than in the previous 28 years combined. Maths scores have reached record highs across the board."

Given that many overseas education systems have been implementing the types of initiatives on the agenda in Australia for 2008, such as moving to a national curriculum, increased testing and holding schools accountable, it is also vital that we learn from their mistakes. As argued by the conservative US think tank the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, too much testing, forcing teachers to focus on the basics and imposing a centralised, top-down approach that fails to recognise the unique quality of individual schools can be counterproductive.

Forcing unproven and faddish curriculum change on schools and making them conform to inflexible and intrusive accountability measures can also overwhelm and frustrate teachers, leading to the type of situation evident in Western Australia, where teachers are deserting classrooms and it is impossible to attract newcomers to the profession.

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7 January, 2008

In Minn., federal NCLB education program to get more scrutiny

When legislators meet next month, some Republicans will again have their eye on the No Child Left Behind law. Republican senators plan to introduce a bill that would end Minnesota's participation in the federal program. The program is aimed at forcing schools to improve their students' test scores, and hands down penalties if they don't. "What we want is to make a real firm stand for local control," said Sen. Geoff Michel, R-Edina, who added that he represents Senate Republicans on the issue. "We've had five years of the No Child Left Behind regime, and I think it's safe to call it a failure now. We're giving it an F and trying to take back our schools."

Senators and representatives from both parties have tried to yank Minnesota out from under No Child Left Behind's requirements over the last few years, but to no avail. For one thing, thumbing their noses at the federal government has a price: The loss of federal school funds. According to the most recent estimates, Minnesota could forfeit $250 million a year if it decided to buck No Child Left Behind. Also, Gov. Tim Pawlenty has been a supporter of the program, though his office was not available for comment on the current proposed legislation.

Many Minnesota educators oppose the program, saying it forces schools to devote too much time and money to testing and can result in tough penalties, such as the forced reorganization of entire schools if they fail to meet their goals for too many consecutive years.

Rep. Mindy Greiling, DFL-Roseville and the leader of a previous effort to get Minnesota out of NCLB, said she wouldn't necessarily support the Republican effort. "I think they're Johnny-come-latelies," she said. "To me, it's kind of cheap words right now when the president is sinking into the mud on so many issues, and now they can divorce themselves from him on this." Greiling said that her position on NCLB has evolved into an "amend-it-don't-end-it" stance and that she wants to wait for Congress to decide what to do before committing to state action. The law, signed by President Bush in 2002, is up for reauthorization.

Michel said the state can absorb the loss of federal funds because of all the money it would save by not having to adhere to the law. A legislative auditor's report released in 2004 said that Minnesota schools would have to spend tens of millions of dollars to meet No Child Left Behind's requirements. "My sense is that there is bipartisan agreement that (NCLB) is not working," he said. "There may be some who don't want to go quite as far as withdrawing from it. I think we're just negotiating the terms of the divorce here."

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Leftist teachers again

The American Federation of Teachers reported spending almost $800,000 last month on mailings and radio advertisements in Iowa and New Hampshire in support of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid. The teachers are the biggest spenders among labor unions and interest groups backing candidates in early-voting states. The groups spent more than $2.3 million last month, almost seven times the amount spent in December 2003 before the last presidential-election year, Federal Election Commission records show.

These efforts represent just some of the millions being poured into the early-voting states by outside groups. Also fueling the spending binge is a Supreme Court decision in June that gave companies, labor unions and interest groups the power to run broadcast ads before elections that specifically mention a federal candidate, overturning part of federal law on free-speech grounds.

“You have to look at this as an arms race,” said Steve Weissman, an associate director at the Campaign Finance Institute, which tracks independent spending. Clinton has been the biggest beneficiary - and the biggest target - of the independent expenditures.

On the Republican side, outside groups have been active as well. Log Cabin Republicans, a group that supports gay rights, ran radio ads against former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in New Hampshire. The Club for Growth, which supports lower taxes and spending, spent $547,963 against former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee in Iowa, FEC records show.

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Educational realism growing in Australia

The booming demand for tradesmen has accelerated a disturbing education trend, with the number of male school-leavers applying for university falling for the 10th year in a row. The latest tertiary admission figures reveal that just 38 per cent of university applicants are male, down from more than 42 per cent a decade ago. Pat Smith of the Queensland Tertiary Admissions Centre said the latest figures were worrying. "It's getting worse. It is a drain which is a concern for Queensland tertiary institutions," he said.

The overall number of applicants has also declined by about 1000, with 50,400 students applying for the 1400 courses on offer this year. The fall in male applications over the past few years averages 1355 students annually. Many of the male school-leavers not going on to uni have been lured by the big money on offer in the mining and building industries. Qualified tradesmen in some high-demand areas can earn more than $100,000 by the age of 21.

Gold Coast carpenter Kane Anderson, 18, who graduated from All Saints Anglican School, said he decided in Year 11 his best option was to take up an apprenticeship. "After three years' work, you can earn more than $100,000. Then you can start your own company and it just keeps growing and growing. "A lot of my friends are all doing different trades. Carpentry is one of the most popular. I'll be 21 when I finish, still young and earning good money."

But other young men who have decided against a degree in favour of a wage as an unskilled labourer have been urged by education authorities to reconsider and apply mid-year for university spots. The first round of university offers will be released on Thursday, with seven out of 10 applicants expected to get their first preference. The most popular courses this year are natural and physical sciences (up 16 per cent on last year), engineering (up 14 per cent) and architecture and building (up 8 per cent). Education (down 18 per cent) has experienced the biggest drop....

National Union of Students president Angus McFarland acknowledged school-leavers were faced with difficult decisions. University students could be left with a debt which ranged from $30,000 to $500,000, he said. "It's not surprising that a young man or woman who has the option of going to university and studying for four years or going into a trade and getting $100,000 will make that decision to work."

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6 January, 2008

Students Shiver In Washington, DC Schools

Despite huge funding

Accuweather says that Washington, DC weather is currently pretty cold, but will be warming up a bit later in the week. Which is a good thing, since Washington area school heating systems are breaking down left and right. Despite millions of dollars invested during the 1990s in new heating systems, the school district's abject failure to do routine maintenance has caused the expensive systems to fail in many schools. The damage is so bad that many of the systems are a complete loss. Water treatment for all of the district's boilers would have cost around $100,000 per year. Instead they have spent more than $100 million in emergency repairs.

The Army Corps of Engineers came to the District in the late 1990s on an expensive mission: launch a massive overhaul of decrepit school buildings, which eventually included spending $80 million to replace ancient heating systems with brand-new boilers to last 25 years or more. Since then, 40 of the 55 renovated heating systems have broken down or needed major repair. Public schools officials failed to maintain the new equipment, leading to problems such as damage from mineral deposits that built up because the water was not properly treated, repair records and interviews show.

It would have cost just $100,000 a year to remove harmful minerals from the water flowing into all of the more than 400 boilers in the public schools. But maintenance officials say there was never enough money for it in their budget. As a result, heating systems old and new have been breaking down all over the school district. Administrators had to sink more than $10 million into emergency repairs this year alone, prompted by cold classrooms at 71 schools in February that displaced hundreds of children.

The failing boilers are a testament to the school system's longstanding inability to keep its buildings in shape or make the best of huge infusions of money. This decade, records show, the schools have spent more than $116 million to replace or overhaul heating and air-conditioning units, including the Army Corps projects. This winter, officials trucked in temporary boilers for seven schools where the systems have failed.

Read it all. It is a testament to the absolute inability of the local government in Washington to exercise any kind of intelligent management to the upkeep of the infrastructure. But then, the tax office in Washington, DC could not keep an eye on something like $30 million that was embezzled by employees recently, either. Chief Financial Officer, Natwar M. Gandhi, called those thefts "immaterial" when they were discovered. Just $100,000 of that stolen money could have averted $116 million in additional waste. Read the whole thing - it will enrage you when you read how badly maintained the Washington schools are. Despite huge influxes of tax money, they can't keep the buildings in reasonable working order.

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SURPRISE! A MODERATE MLA

The Modern Language Association frequently helps out its critics with provocative session titles and left-leaning political stands offered by its members. At this year's annual meeting, in Chicago, some MLA members have worried that the association was poised to take stances that would have sent David Horowitz's fund raising through the roof with resolutions that appeared to be anti-Israel and pro-Ward Churchill.

But in moves that infuriated the MLA's Radical Caucus, the association's Delegate Assembly refused to pass those resolutions and instead adopted much narrower measures. The association acknowledged tensions over the Middle East on campus, but in a resolution that did not single out pro-Israel groups for criticism. And the association criticized the University of Colorado for the way it started its investigation of Ward Churchill, but took no stand on whether the outcome (his firing) was appropriate.

The votes by the MLA's largest governing council came in an at-times-surreal five-hour meeting. Cary Nelson, author of Manifesto of a Tenured Radical, was in the position of being the leading moderate, offering alternative language to defeat Radical Caucus proposals. Critics of Israel repeatedly talked about "facts on the ground" to refer to the treatment of Israel's critics on campuses today, and it was unclear whether the term was being used ironically in light of the phrase's use to describe Israel's settlement policy on the West Bank and a recent book at the the center of a Barnard College tenure controversy.

While material distributed by those seeking to condemn Churchill's firing portrayed him favorably, and as a victim of the right wing, some of those who criticized the pro-Churchill effort at the meeting are long-time experts in Native American studies and decidedly not conservative. Many attendees were confused by the parliamentary procedure, and at least one proposed amendment that appeared to have significant backing (in theory) fell apart when questions were raised about its syntax.

After one vote that his side lost, Grover Furr, a Radical Caucus leader who teaches at New Jersey's Montclair State University, called the meeting "a perversion of parliamentary procedures."

The Middle East and Academic Freedom

Furr was the author of the original resolution on the campus climate for critics of Israel. The resolution as he wrote it said that some who criticize Zionism and Israel have been "denied tenure, disinvited to speak... [or] fraudulently called `anti-Semitic.'" The resolution called this a "serious danger to academic study and discussion in the USA today" and then resolved that "the MLA defend the academic freedom and the freedom of speech of faculty and invited speakers to criticize Zionism and Israel." The resolution made no mention of the right of others on campus to embrace Zionism or Israel or to hold middle-of-the-road views or any views other than being critical of Israel and Zionism.

Nelson offered a substitute - which was approved to replace the original by a vote of 63 to 30 - after heated debate. Nelson's substitute noted that the "Middle East is a subject of intense debate," said it was "essential that colleges and universities protect faculty rights to speak forthrightly on all sides of the issue," and urged colleges to "resist" pressure from outside groups about tenure reviews and speakers and to instead uphold academic freedom. Nelson's resolution did not identify one side or the other as victim or villain in the campus debates over the Middle East and said that academic freedom must apply to people "to address the issue of the Middle East in the manner they choose."

In arguing for his version, Nelson - a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and also president of the American Association of University Professors - said that the original version would be "incredibly divisive and quite destructive" to the MLA.

Defenders of the original version faulted Nelson's version for being even-handed. Barbara Foley, a professor of English at Rutgers University at Newark, said that "it's not a 50-50 situation" and that the focus of criticism needs to be on Israel's supporters because of Israel's role as a recipient of U.S. aid, and the way "powerful supporters" of Israel meddle on campuses. "Let's talk about what's real here. It's not anti-Semitic to focus on this particular set of academics who really need our support."

Katie L. Kain of the University of Montana said that the MLA needs to take a stand against pro-Israel groups because of their role in campus debates. She compared the situation today to the McCarthy era. "The substitute resolution does not acknowledge the facts on the ground," she said. Kain said that guest lecturers to her campus had been unfairly tagged as anti-Semitic. Other speakers cited examples of what they said were outside attempts by pro-Israel groups to influence hiring decisions.

Susan O'Malley, a professor of English at Kingsborough Community College of the City University of New York, said that CUNY's trustees tried to prevent an adjunct at her campus from teaching the novel The Scar of David. CUNY officials could not be reached for comment, but press accounts suggest that the book was in fact taught.

Supporters of the switch to Nelson's version said that they didn't doubt that some critics of Israel have been attacked - in a number of instances unfairly. But they argued that the MLA shouldn't be picking sides, and that the principles behind defending Israel's critics should apply to its supporters as well. One professor said: "Academic freedom is meaningless unless it applies to all points of view." Another said that even if 95 percent of disputes over academic freedom and the Middle East relate to one side of the argument, the principle of academic freedom should be paramount, not helping those 95 percent over the 5 percent.

The Ward Churchill Saga

The case of Ward Churchill also led to a long debate. Churchill was fired in July from his tenured position teaching ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder for multiple instances of research misconduct, including plagiarism and misrepresenting the work of other scholars - charges he has denied. Several faculty panels reached the conclusions that Churchill had committed research misconduct, but they investigated him in the wake of a furor over his controversial comments in which he had labeled some of the victims of 9/11 as "little Eichmanns."

The original resolution before the MLA Delegate Assembly condemned the University of Colorado for firing Churchill and for undertaking an investigation of him as "retribution" for his 9/11 comments. Many politicians in Colorado wanted Churchill fired for those comments, but the university said that to do so would violate his First Amendment rights and never punished him for those remarks. As they entered the meeting, MLA delegates received a letter to the MLA from Hank Brown, president of the University of Colorado, and a copy of one of the faculty reports finding Churchill to have committed scholarly misconduct.

In the letter, Brown said of Churchill: "His comments about 9/11 are in our view protected free speech and were not at issue. What was at issue was Professor Churchill's academic work.... I recommended dismissal to the Board of Regents because he fabricated his research. Please read the faculty report carefully before you mischaracterize his dismissal."

The day before the MLA vote, A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, a professor emerita of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, spoke out at a hearing against the original resolution. Ruoff, who has written and taught about Native American literature and culture, said that she was concerned about the process under which the university started its probe of Churchill. But she said that the university appeared to have conducted "careful deliberations" into the allegations against Churchill, and that the MLA wasn't in a position to conduct an investigation that might lead to other conclusions. Groups like the AAUP are better suited to investigating allegations of academic freedom violations, Ruoff said. (The MLA's Delegate Assembly also voted Saturday to consider a number of issues in updating the group's statement on academic freedom and some members urged that one of those changes be to find ways to conduct such investigations.)

Nelson, of the AAUP, noted that some professors believe Churchill received due process and that the faculty role was respected at Colorado. He proposed an amendment - a version of which eventually passed - that criticized Colorado for starting the investigation as it did, but that offered no opinion on the decision to fire Churchill. "We are not set up to judge the character and quality of that investigation," he said.

Several professors said that they were uncomfortable backing even the watered down resolution, fearing it would show support for Churchill. Ruoff asked the group why it couldn't just indicate its opposition to politically motivated investigations and leave Churchill out of it. Charles Rzepka, a professor of English at Boston University, said during the meeting that he was startled to read some of the pro-Churchill material distributed by supporters of the original resolution, and that he was wondering if the MLA would be seen as backing the wrong side. In an interview after the meeting, he said that the MLA's reputation would take a hit for any perception that it was backing Churchill. "I support speaking truth to power," said Rzepka, but that requires truth, he added. (He said he was among the 15 people who voted No on the revised resolution, which passed with 57 votes in favor.)

Others dismissed the idea that the MLA should worry about whether Churchill's record made him worthy of support. One professor cited the history of the civil rights movement, in which some women prior to Rosa Parks were not defended because they weren't seen as perfect from a PR perspective - an attitude this professor criticized.

Foley of Rutgers said that it was true that Churchill had a "flawed history," adding, "I don't think anyone is saying he is the perfect scholar." But she said the relevant fact was that Churchill was under attack unfairly. "We are condemning the university for its politically motivated investigation. They would not have undertaken that investigation unless they wanted to get rid of him," she said. "If we can't support this individual then everything we say about academic freedom is bullshit," she said.

Finley C. Campbell, a retired English instructor at DeVry University, said that Churchill was being punished for being the "uppity" minority person whom the powerful could not tolerate. He said there was no way the MLA could pretend there was not an individual at the center of this issue. "Crucifixions are always personal," he said.

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5 January, 2008

How to get into college despite the disadvantage of privilege

Given that, with the arrival of the new year, college applications are now flooding into admissions offices all over the country, it might be a good time to reflect on the absurdity of the whole college-admissions process. Take this passage from Michele Hernandez's "Acing the College Application," where she assesses the chances of a high-school student getting into a college of his choice. "Best case: Neither of your parents attended college at all, your father is a factory worker, and your mom is on disability. . . . Worst case: Your father went to Yale as an undergraduate and then Harvard Business School and is now an investment banker and your mom went to Brown, holds a Ph.D. in chemistry and works as a research chemist."

We all understand that being a rich white kid puts one at a disadvantage in the college-admissions process. But it is worth pausing to savor the irony of an institution that charges as much as $45,000 a year asking its applicants to demonstrate their proletarian credentials.

What's a privileged kid to do? Ms. Hernandez, a former admissions officer at Dartmouth, offers a couple of options. "Be vague" about your parents' occupations: "If your mom is the chief neurosurgeon for a New York hospital, try 'medical.' " Or you could get yourself a job, "the less exalted the better," Ms. Hernandez advises, citing one boarding-school student who improved his admissions chances by baling hay every summer (on his family's farm).

But making your collar seem blue may not be enough. What colleges are looking for these days, according to Ms. Hern ndez, is passion. "Since the late 1990s," she writes, "the focus has shifted away from well-rounded students to the idea of a well-rounded freshman class." A high-school student who gets good grades, serves as student body president and plays varsity football may be a remarkable person, but to an admissions officer his excellence may look rather conventional and diffuse. Better to cultivate a particular skill or enthusiasm. The ideal admissions-candidate is thus a prize-winning gymnast, a fluent reader of both Greek and Latin, a math champion, a successful entrepreneur or a violin virtuoso (all, ideally, with working-class parents, of course). And remember, Ms. Hernandez warns, "passion cannot be faked."

But so much else can. Elizabeth Wissner-Gross's "What High Schools Don't Tell You" provides, as its subtitle has it, "300+ Secrets to Make Your Kid Irresistible to Colleges by Senior Year." Ms. Wissner-Gross is an "educational strategist" and proud of it. "When people ask me what I do exactly," she explains, "I'm sometimes tempted to tell them that I make kids' dreams come true."

So what happens when you rub her magic lamp? She'll offer a five-year plan for the future college student--aimed at piling up credentials, polishing the youthful resume and shaping a suitable self-image so that, when it comes time to fill out college applications, nothing has been left to chance. Starting no later than middle school, a kid should have "dazzling" and "very ambitious" long-term goals. Ms. Wissner-Gross offers a list of possibilities: "I would like to conduct research for NASA"; "I would like to speak at an important political rally"; "I would like to become known as the nation's top math student"; "I would like to host a fund-raiser ball for cancer research." Students should then structure their time accordingly--with the emphasis on "structure."

Ms. Wissner-Gross wants students to adopt a four-summer plan "crammed with multiple enrichment activities" but all focused on that key long-term goal. Each summer--working in a local research lab, attending a math camp or trying to write the great American novel--should take a would-be college applicant one step closer to his dream. But aren't summers supposed to be, well, fun? Ms. Wissner-Gross has two bits of advice: "Contrary to pop psychology, down time need not be unstructured to be relaxing and to help a student decompress." And "children who insist on hanging out with already known friends during the summer often miss out on wonderful opportunities." Yes, buddies can be an obstacle if you care about getting into college.

During the academic year, Ms. Wissner-Gross says, young actors and musicians should take private lessons and be sure to perform both inside and outside of school. Her secret #205 reads: "When it comes to college applications, starring in school shows is better than being a good soldier and playing small parts." (Is that really a secret?) To the aspiring journalist, she recommends starting a blog (ugh) and submitting articles to local weeklies, although nothing too contentious. Such articles "should not be investigative journalism." When writing about school activities, students should "focus only on the positive." Young documentary filmmakers might want to make a "thirty-second informational spot announcement about some aspect of school procedures." Future public servants should "avoid heavily political or religious causes that tend to be controversial."

Will all this careful calculation get a child into the college of his dreams? Who knows? It will certainly produce some really annoying teenagers, not to mention what it will do to their parents. If your child has to miss class for one of his extra-special resume-building activities, Ms. Wissner-Gross advises, mom should write a mollifying note to each teacher along these lines: "I'm sorry Matt will be missing your English lesson on 'Our Town' today. The play is a family favorite, and I cried my way through our at-home reading last night." For producing real tears, though, even Thornton Wilder can't compete with "What High Schools Don't Tell You."

Source




Britain: Village school provides a lesson for the government

A SPEAKER at a recent Yorkshire Post Literary Luncheon prompted warm applause when he said politicians should get off teachers' backs and let them get on with their jobs. He was Gervaise Phinn, now a well-known writer. He was formerly a teacher in South Yorkshire and then a schools inspector in North Yorkshire for many years.

I thought of his words last week when I visited a village school in North Yorkshire. As soon as you stepped inside, you could taste excellence. The headteacher glowed with pride as she showed the work done by the youngsters. A study of the village in Victorian times was a masterpiece of endeavour.

With fewer than 60 children, this was a model of what education should mean. I don't know where it stood in any league table, and I don't care. You don't need a computer to assess excellence, Gervaise will know exactly what I mean.

Then you read about the grandiose 10-year Children's Plan announced by the Education Secretary, Ed Balls, who is rapidly turning into the Dr Strangelove of the Brown Government. He has produced 170 pages of "initiatives" which effectively take the job of parenting out of parents hands, so as to make Britain "the best place in the world to grow up".

Every international measure show Britain failing in maths, science and literacy. Yet Balls tells us that standards are improving all the time. I only hope he is being cynical because it raises doubts about his sanity.

As comprehensive teachers say, pupils can pass through 11 years of schooling, even pass exams, without an understanding of basic subjects. They are spoon-fed information, assisted with their coursework, and led by the hand to meet targets and boost state figures. Now Balls plans to turn everything upside down yet again.

Meanwhile, let's give thanks for that little Dales village school and others like it - and the dedicated teachers who continue to deliver excellence despite all the burdens politicians place upon them.

Source




Medical education: Want to be a doctor? Try your luck

Australia: The usual Leftist hatred of merit -- and the examinations which detect it -- at work

The University of Sydney's medical school may turn its admissions process into a lucky dip and scrap applicant interviews in the biggest overhaul of its selection policy in 10 years. The proposals are among options being investigated by a working party to ensure admissions to the university's most prestigious course are fair and snare the best students. The dean of the school, Bruce Robinson, commissioned the review because he was concerned the current process failed to predict which applicants would succeed as students and doctors.

Students are selected through a combination of interviews, grade point average and performance in an exam known as the Graduate Australian Medical School Admissions Test, used by 11 universities. But the test had never been properly scrutinised, Professor Robinson said. An internal review had found no difference between students who scraped through and those who scored highly.

The working party is considering a ballot system used in the Netherlands, with each applicant's name put into a lottery. Outstanding HSC students would get more chances. "It may be just as reliable as anything else," Professor Robinson said. "I'm just not sure the way we're doing it at the moment is the best way or the fairest way. There is no perfect way."

The University of Queensland has eliminated interviews from its admissions system after a review cast doubt on their value. Kim Oates, who is reviewing the University of Sydney program with Kerry Goulston, said there was little evidence the interview system was valuable. "What's really interesting is that a few years after graduation most people working in hospitals can't tell what medical school the students have been to," Professor Oates said. "And I think that's because the hospital system moulds you as well."

However, the University of NSW says the attrition rate in its undergraduate program has been halved since interviews were added to the admissions process in 2002. In its own recent review, the body that developed the current exam, the Australian Council of Educational Research, concluded it was a good predictor of success. Marita MacMahon Ball, the general manager of higher education programs, said there was a correlation between students' results and their first-year exam results. [Is that all? And how big is the correlation?]

Source





4 January, 2008

Hillary and others drive for `universal preschool'

Little children need the security, understanding and tolerance of a loving home, not institutionalization

Last May, just as the academic year was wrapping up, Hillary Clinton stopped by a Miami Beach elementary school to say that she wanted to define school down. "As president, I will establish universal pre-kindergarten education," she promised, so that "every four-year-old child in America" can attend a government-funded preschool.

Her $10 billion proposal essentially would add a whole new grade onto the front end of the K-12 system. It's one of the liberals' hottest policy ideas, pushed by their think tanks and embraced by their politicians. "We expect that all of the presidential candidates will be talking about it," says Libby Doggett, executive director of Pre-K Now, an advocacy organization. Wealthy foundations, such as the $5.6 billion Pew Charitable Trusts, are bankrolling the concept. Democratic governors also have made it a priority: Eliot Spitzer of New York has promised universal preschool by 2011, and Rod Blagojevich of Illinois wants public preschool not only for four-year-olds but for three-year-olds as well. In the last two years, states have boosted their preschool budgets by more than $1 billion.

The author Robert Fulghum has built a career on the motto "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten." Yet the supporters of universal preschool worry that kindergarten comes too late--and believe that shunting children into government-run nursery schools around the time that they're potty training is a key to success in life. They say it leads to academic achievement, economic productivity, and law-abiding lifestyles. "There's a lot of evidence that this saves money over the long run," claimed Senator Clinton on the Today show.

Unfortunately for the nanny-statists, almost none of this is true. There's no doubt that preschool has the potential to help some children, especially poor ones, but its benefits for most kids range from short-term to nonexistent. "The last thing we need is a one-size-fits-all policy," says the Goldwater Institute's Darcy Olsen, who coauthored a comprehensive report on preschool for the Reason Foundation. "Yet we're looking at the biggest expansion of government into education since the creation of public schools."

A generation ago, only a small minority of kids went to preschool: In 1965, just 5 percent of three-year-olds and 16 percent of four-year-olds attended. Since then, preschool has become a booming business. Nowadays, more than 40 percent of three-year-olds and more than two-thirds of four-year-olds are enrolled, according to federal statistics. Although public programs such as Head Start have encouraged this trend, the sector is dominated by private actors: parents who pay out of pocket, YMCAs and churches that run preschools in their basements, and for-profit centers that hope to meet a growing demand.

The cheerleaders of universal preschool aim to capture this thriving market. Ready or not, here they come: Janet Napolitano, the Democratic governor of Arizona, has said that her goal is nothing less than "ensconcing early care and education as a lockstep component of public schooling."

The irony is that early education is already an American strength. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that vast majorities of children enter kindergarten ready to learn: They recognize numbers, they can count to ten, and although most of them aren't literate they grasp a few fundamentals about letters and reading. During the 1990s, even as Americans became less likely to read books, parents actually increased the rate at which they read books to preschoolers.

Perhaps this is one reason that young children perform well when compared with kids in other countries. On recent standardized language tests, fourth graders finished north of the 70th percentile, topping their peers in 26 of 35 countries. They also scored above average in math and science. "There's room for improvement, but this system certainly isn't broken," says Lisa Snell of the Reason Foundation. "It's basically working just fine." Problems set in as these children leave elementary schools and enter middle school. By the time they're in the eighth grade, their achievement is at best average. In the twelfth grade, it's mediocre.

This hardly makes the case for a government takeover of early education. If anything, it's an argument for reform of the upper grades--and probably in the direction of market-based alternatives that weaken government's near monopoly on K-12 schools. Anything else is a misbegotten priority.

The universal preschoolers, however, won't stop overselling their agenda. Senator Clinton has linked nursery-school attendance to lower crime rates. Last year, Isabel Sawhill, a former budget official in the Clinton administration, claimed that the advent of universal preschool would cause the GDP to rise by almost $1 trillion over the next 60 years.

Advocates make these flamboyant claims by taking wisps of data and warping them beyond recognition. Typically, that means focusing on a small-scale experiment conducted under precise circumstances and drawing completely unwarranted extrapolations from it. The most famous of these involves a preschool in Ypsilanti, Mich., in the early 1960s--a test case that universal-preschool partisans and their media handmaidens have gone on to mythologize.

The 123 kids who took part in the Perry Preschool Project weren't at all ordinary: They were black, poor, and had low IQs. Researchers described them as prone to "retarded intellectual development and eventual school failure." About half were sorted into a gold-plated preschool program. The rest were put into a control group. They've been tracked ever since, in a longitudinal study. Those who went to preschool--where they encountered highly trained instructors, low teacher-to-student ratios, and a regime of home visits--appear to have benefited. Over time, they've been more likely to finish college and less likely to be arrested or get pregnant as teenagers. A common interpretation of this result is that a healthy preschool experience put these at-risk kids into the right frame of mind for kindergarten, where they met teachers who responded positively to their readiness, which in turn helped them make a more substantial commitment to their own education.

Whatever the explanation, it's far from obvious that Perry Preschool holds any lessons for large-scale public policy. "Boutique preschools that serve poor children aren't realistic models for everybody else," says Bruce Fuller, a UC-Berkeley education professor who is the author of Standardized Childhood, a thorough survey of preschooling. He points out that the Perry experiment came with a high price tag: more than $15,000 per child in 2000 dollars. That's almost four times the cost of preschool in Oklahoma, which is one of three states to have a government-sponsored universal-preschool program (the others are Florida and Georgia). When the latest assessment of Perry preschoolers came out in 2005, researchers described an ongoing benefit, though not an eye-popping one. As summarized by Fuller, "Exposure to Perry explains less than 3 percent of all the variation in earnings at age forty, and about 4 percent of the variability in school attainment levels."

This is an important finding, though it's difficult to see how attempting to replicate it might add a trillion bucks to national GDP. As it happens, several other experiments have tried to repeat it and failed. One reason may be that the kids in the Perry experiment's control group didn't have an alternative to staying at home because the preschool industry that flourishes today hadn't been born. By contrast, a control group today would have many options. This hasn't stopped universal-preschool advocates from claiming that it takes a Perry Preschool to raise a child, or that all preschools can be Perry Preschools. "It's intellectually dishonest--they're just way out in front of the evidence," says Fuller, who describes himself as "an aging, left-of-center Berkeley academic."

One lesson from Perry and several other studies is that preschool really can help certain kinds of kids--especially those who come from homes where Cartoon Network blares from the television all day and nobody ever opens a copy of Goodnight Moon. The simple act of removing children from bad environments and placing them in better ones for a few hours each week can make a modest difference. For these unlucky kids, preschool may be critical, and public investments have a practical logic.

For the most part, however, universal preschool is an expensive solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Even when preschool appears to have a positive effect on middle-class kids, the benefits wear off shortly after they enter elementary school. "It's a continuing problem," says Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution. And it prompts a question: Why commit resources to universal-preschool schemes when the K-12 system appears unable to leverage them? Darcy Olsen says, "Until we get the next 13 grades right, it just doesn't make sense to add more of the same."

When confronted by hard facts, the leaders of the universal-preschool movement prefer to close their eyes, cover their ears, and utter their talking points. "All children make phenomenal gains," says Pre-K Now's Doggett (who is the wife of Democratic congressman Lloyd Doggett of Texas). What about the research of Fuller and other scholars? "They're wrong," she says.

It would be bad enough if universal preschool merely wasted taxpayer dollars. But its unintended consequences could do more harm. For some children, there's such a thing as too much preschool--there are indications that it leads to increased aggression, especially among middle-class children. Last year, Canada's C. D. Howe Institute published a critique of universal preschool in Quebec. "We studied a wide range of measures of child well-being from anxiety to hyperactivity to social and motor skills," wrote the authors. In almost every instance, they found that kids were "worse off." Boys may present special challenges. As psychologist Leonard Sax points out in Boys Adrift, the initial experience of school is often a bad one for boys because the language centers of their brains don't develop as quickly as they do in girls. Overexposure to preschool could possibly turn them off to education, in a sort of reverse Perry effect.

"What middle-class parents need to understand is that an average or below-average preschool can be worse for their kids than what most of them can provide in their own homes," says one preschool expert. "That's not true for a lot of low-income families, where the parenting skills aren't as good."

Then there's the troubling economics of universal preschool. Teacher unions would enjoy a growth spurt. If government-funded preschools begin to drive out private providers and become a middleclass entitlement, they could reshuffle the most talented teachers, encouraging them to move from existing programs that serve at-risk children to new ones that serve the well off--i.e., they could migrate away from where they're needed to where they aren't.

There would also be a harmful ripple effect on care for infants and toddlers. At many childcare centers, services for the youngest kids function as loss leaders because they require more adults per child. Classrooms of three- and four-year-olds, which require fewer adults per child, actually subsidize them. "If public schools become the primary points of delivery for four-year-olds, the costs of infant and toddler care, already expensive and in short supply, will shoot up," says Eric Karolak of the Early Care and Education Consortium. Parents would foot the bill.

The good news is that efforts to install universal preschool aren't inevitable. In California last year, voters considered Proposition 82, an initiative pushed by moviemaker Rob Reiner. It would have hiked taxes on high earners by $2.4 billion to fund state-run preschools. It failed by a three-to-two margin. "It was complicated, inflexible, and the finances just didn't make sense," says Lisa Snell. She calculated that, because 66 percent of the state's four-year-olds are already in preschool, meeting the initiative's goal of enrolling 70 percent of them would have increased the number of kids in preschool by only 22,000--at a taxpayer cost of $109,000 per child.

As with so many policy matters, this one ultimately boils down to something other than dollars and cents or the findings of social scientists. It's about fundamental philosophies of government and the duties of citizenship. Whose responsibility is it to raise small children? Hillary Clinton has offered her answer. It remains to be seen whether her Republican rivals will present a different vision.

Source. See also here and here




Australia: Victorian government schools not so "free"

Government schools that have wrongly charged parents for voluntary fees will be forced to pay families back under a State Government crackdown. Exclusive figures seen by the Herald Sun reveal taxpayer-funded state schools netted a staggering $168 million in voluntary fees in 2006 alone. The total is more than three times as much as parents contributed in 2004.

Government documents, seen after a three-month wait under Freedom of Information laws, show four schools raised more than $1 million each. Another 45 schools raised more than $500,000 from their local communities in 2006 alone. Schools received an average of more than $106,000 each from voluntary fees, with some hitting parents for more than $300 per student. Select-entry Melbourne High School ($1.69 million) and Box Hill Senior Secondary College ($1.13 million) raised the most from voluntary fees in 2006. Schools in low socio-economic areas, such as Frankston High, Footscray City College and Narre Warren South P-12 College, were among schools that raised more than $500,000 from local parents.

When the Herald Sun anonymously rang Balwyn High School earlier in December, we were told parents must pay the voluntary fee of $345 per student. Swan Marsh Primary School, near Colac, received nothing in voluntary fees. Navarre Primary, west of Ballarat, received $20.

Non-compulsory fees vary between schools, but often run into hundreds of dollars. Welfare agencies are bracing themselves for an influx of calls from thousands of stressed families whose schools are bullying them into paying fees when first term starts on January 30. Some schools have banned students from attending camps, accessing the internet and taking woodwork projects home because their parents have not paid voluntary fees. Some schools have organised special payment plans if parents are unable to afford a lump-sum amount.

Department of Education and Early Childhood Development policy stipulates state schools must not force parents to pay optional fees. Education Minister Bronwyn Pike said at least 100 schools would be audited from March to ensure they are complying with fundraising guidelines. Ms Pike said schools must clearly state which items parents are expected to pay for, and which are voluntary financial contributions. Schools with a history of breaching the guidelines will be on the audit list while a small number will be selected randomly, she said. "Most of our schools do the right thing, but if we find schools who are over-charging parents they will have to pay the money back," Ms Pike said.

The Government rejected the Herald Sun's request for figures from 2007, claiming the data was not yet available. Opposition education spokesman Martin Dixon said the millions paid by parents proved the State Government was under-funding education. "Voluntary levies are fine for extras and schools are not relying on them to prop up budgets, but $168 million begs the question if schools are being funded properly -- and the answer is no."

Open Family youth worker Les Twentyman said more than 1000 families were expected to approach the service for help with fees in January. "It just makes me livid that schools are forcing parents who certainly can't afford it to pay, or they will withhold materials and resources from their kids," he said. "This is an outrageous situation." Victorian Council of Social Service deputy director Carolyn Atkins has previously told the Herald Sun voluntary fees caused heartache for some families. "Some students are being denied access to art or music, which really should be seen as core elements of an education," Ms Atkins said.

Source





3 January, 2008

Shock! British Catholic bishops believe in teaching Catholicism!

Roman Catholic bishops are to appear in front of a powerful committee of MPs amid fears that they are pushing a fundamentalist brand of their religion in schools. Bishops have called on parents, teachers and priests to strengthen the role of religion in education. In one case the Bishop of Lancaster, Patrick O'Donoghue, instructed Catholic schools across much of north-west England to stop 'safe-sex' education and place crucifixes in all classrooms.

He also wrote: 'Schools and colleges must not support charities or groups that promote or fund anti-life policies, such as Red Nose Day and Amnesty International, which now advocates abortion.' In a 66-page document, O'Donoghue called on teachers to use science to teach about the 'truths of the faith', only mention sex within the 'sacrament of marriage', insist that contraception was wrong and emphasise natural family planning.

The Bishop of Leeds, Arthur Roche, sent a letter to parishes warning them that Catholic education was under threat following attempts by the local council to set up an inter-faith academy.

Barry Sheerman, chairman of the parliamentary cross-party committee on children, schools and families, said he had heard of other cases and felt that behind the scenes there was 'intense turmoil' about the future of Catholic education. 'A group of bishops appear to be taking a much firmer line and I think it would be useful to call representatives of the Catholic church in front of the committee to find out what is going on,' he said. 'It seems to me that faith education works all right as long as people are not that serious about their faith. But as soon as there is a more doctrinaire attitude questions have to be asked. It does become worrying when you get a new push from more fundamentalist bishops. This is taxpayers' money after all.'

Sheerman, MP for Huddersfield, asked to meet Roche about the possibility of setting up an inter-faith school in the area. 'The bishop took a long time to agree to meet and eventually we set a date in May,' said Sheerman. 'But just before we were due to meet - during the May elections - he had a letter read out in every parish church in Kirklees and Calderdale, a really big area, accusing politicians of trying to dilute Catholic education. He said Roman Catholic education was under threat.'

In Fit for Mission, the document written for schools in the Lancaster diocese, O'Donoghue wrote: 'The secular view on sex outside of marriage, artificial contraception, sexually transmitted disease, including HIV and Aids, and abortion, may not be presented as neutral information ... parents, schools and colleges must also reject the promotion of so-called "safe sex" or "safer sex", a dangerous and immoral policy based on the deluded theory that the condom can provide adequate protection against Aids.'

The bishop also called for any books containing polemics against the Catholic faith to be removed from school libraries. 'Under no circumstances should any outside authority or agency that is not fully qualified to speak on behalf of the Catholic church ever be allowed to speak to pupils or individuals on sexual or any other matter involving faith and morals,' he said.

The report has outraged non-religious groups, who accused the bishop of trying to 'indoctrinate' pupils. In a letter to Secretary of State Ed Balls, the National Secular Society wrote: 'What happened to a well-rounded education - which is what British state schools are supposed to provide?' Keith Porteous Wood, executive director of the society, said: 'I do not think the state should be funding Catholic indoctrination.' He highlighted a poll released by the US group Catholics for a Free Choice showing that most Catholics across the world believed using condoms was pro-life because it prevented the spread of HIV and Aids.

Teachers expressed concern that the bishop's instructions could damage the health of teenagers who chose to become sexually active despite the church's teaching. 'Irrespective of the strongly held views of those in the Catholic faith, it is absolutely vital for the future of children's wellbeing, health and safety that they receive proper sex education,' said Steve Sinnott, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers. O'Donoghue said it was 'absolute rubbish' that what he was advocating was indoctrination.

Source




Calif. School Targets Mexican Students

Another argument for serious border control

Children are more likely to shield their faces than to smile when Daniel Santillan points his camera. Santillan's photos aren't for any picture album or yearbook-they help prove that Mexican youngsters are illegally attending public schools in this California border community. With too many students and too few classrooms, Calexico school officials took the unusual step of hiring someone to photograph children and document the offenders. Santillan snaps pictures at the city's downtown border crossing and shares the images with school principals, who use them as evidence to kick out those living in Mexico.

Since he started the job two years ago, the number of students in the Calexico school system has fallen 5 percent, from 9,600 to 9,100, while the city's population grew about 3 percent. "The community asked us to do this, and we responded," school board President Enrique Alvarado said. "Once it starts to affect you personally, when your daughter gets bumped to another school, then our residents start complaining."

Every day along the 1,952-mile border, children from Mexico cross into the United States and attend public schools. No one keeps statistics on how many. Citizenship isn't the issue for school officials; district residency is.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled illegal immigrants have a right to an education, so schools don't ask about immigration status. But citizens and illegal immigrants alike can't falsely claim residency in a school district. Enforcement of residency requirements varies widely along the border. Some schools do little to verify where children live beyond checking leases or utility bills, while others dispatch officials to homes when suspicions are raised.

Jesus Gandara, superintendent of the Sweetwater district, with 44,000 students along San Diego's border with Mexico, said tracking children at the border goes too far. "If you do that, you're playing immigration agent," he said.

The El Paso Independent School District in Texas sends employees to homes when suspicions are raised. But spokesman Luis Villalobos said photographing students at the border would be a monumental, unproductive effort. That's not the thinking in Calexico, a city 120 miles east of San Diego that has seen its population double to 38,000 since 1990. A steel fence along the border separates Calexico from Mexicali, an industrial city of about 750,000 that sends shoppers and farm laborers to California.

Calexico's rapid growth outstripped school resources, resulting in overcrowding and prompting demands that Mexican interlopers be ousted. Taxpayers complained their children were bused across town because neighborhood schools were full, even after Calexico voters approved a $30 million construction measure in 2004. Portable classrooms proliferated. The 62-year-old Santillan (pronounced sahn-tee-YAHN) was hired in He is an unlikely enforcer. Posters of Cesar Chavez and Che Guevara adorn the walls of his ranch-style home. The Vietnam War veteran and labor activist is an outspoken advocate of amnesty for illegal immigrants and fills water jugs in the desert for Mexicans who trek across the border illegally.

He parks his old Toyota Echo at the border two or three mornings a week, often in a handicapped spot that his bad knees allow him to occupy. He photographs some of the hundreds of students who exit the inspection building and walk to class. Some hide their faces when they see his 6-foot-5, 310-pound frame. Sometimes he follows students to school. Many of the students know him. Others in town are not always sure what he is up to. A new police officer once ran his name through a database of sex offenders. A talk-radio host warned listeners that an odd- looking man at the border might be looking for children to kidnap.

Some students taunt him. Friends have called him a hypocrite. Santillan reminds them that he is only enforcing school residency rules, not immigration laws. Still, he says, "You've got to have hell of a tough skin." The California native also visits addresses listed on student enrollment forms, knocking on doors as late as 9 p.m. and introducing himself in Spanish. One crisp December morning, he went to three homes before dawn, carrying a clipboard with several pages of students suspected of living in Mexico. A woman who opened her door at 6:30 a.m. said her niece no longer lives with her. At another home, a woman said her niece moved last month.

Many Calexico residents support the crackdown. Fernando Torres, a former mayor, was upset when the district said his grandchildren would have to transfer because there was no room in their neighborhood school. "It's not right" for U.S. taxpayers to build classrooms for Mexican residents, he said. The district eventually relented. School board member Eduardo Rivera estimates there are still 250 to 400 students from Mexico attending Calexico's schools. "It's a continual struggle," Rivera said. "You have people who are determined to continue sending their kids over here."

Source





2 January, 2008

Britain: Rich pull away from poor in the classroom

In characteristic form, the Labour Party has achieved the opposite of what it claimed to aim at



The colonisation by the middle classes of the best state schools has led to a dramatic widening of the gap in educational performance between rich and poor children in the past year, new figures indicate. An analysis of government data by the Conservative Party shows that the achievement divide between pupils in the 10 per cent richest and poorest areas of England has grown by more than ten percentage points, compared with fractional increases of less than one percentage point in previous years.

The figures also show that the attainment gap between rich and poor continues to widen as pupils progress through school. At age 7, the performance gap between pupils in the 10 per cent richest and poorest areas was 20 percentage points in 2007. At age 16, however, the gap had more than doubled to 43.1 per cent, suggesting that far from being a leveller, school was increasing the disparity.

The figures underscore the massive influence of parental background on school success. More than 65 per cent of children in the wealthiest group achieved at least five good GCSEs, including English and maths, this summer but the figure for children from the poorest backgrounds was less than 26 per cent.

Michael Gove, the Shadow Education Secretary, said that the system favoured those who were fortunate enough, or rich enough, to live in areas with good schools. "If you have nominal parental choice over school admissions, but an undersupply of good schools, you will find that the sharp-elbowed middle-class parents get access to excellent schools, but those trapped in deprived areas do not," he said.

Mr Gove said that the dramatic widening of the gap this year, after much smaller incremental increases in previous years, was the result of the cumulative effect of this phenomenon. He noted that pupil performance in the richest areas had improved at twice the rate that it had deteriorated in poor areas. An additional explanation of the sudden widening of the gap this year may be the influx of immigrants who do not have English as a first language, he suggested.

Conservative plans to allow good new schools to open in deprived areas, with extra cash for children from more deprived homes, would reverse a growing social class gap, he said.

Alan Smithers, Professor of Education at the University of Buckingham, said: "Even where you have good schools in poor areas, like some of the academies, they are progressively taken over by ambitious parents."

The figures come after recent concern by Christine Gilbert, the Chief Inspector of Schools, that the school system was dividing children along social and economic lines. They show that in 2005 28.2 per cent of pupils in the 10 per cent most deprived areas gained at least five GCSEs, including English and maths, at grades A* to C. In the richest 10 per cent of areas, 56.2 per cent of pupils reached this level, giving an attainment gap of 28 percentage points. In 2006 the figures were 29.2 and 57.6 per cent respectively, with a performance gap of 28.4 percentage points. In 2007 the figures were 25.3 and 68.4 per cent respectively, with a performance gap of 43.1 percentage points.

A spokeswoman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said that closing the attainment gap was a priority for the Government. The Government had invested more than 21 billion pounds in childcare and the early years since 1997, so that poor children could get better chances in early life, she said. It was now providing one-to-one tuition and personalised support to help every child to achieve at school, regardless of social background. She added: "We can only tackle deprivation and poverty by changing the aspirations of young people, their parents and the education system."

Source




Schools and class hatred in Britain

Let's make a 2008 resolution, politicians and polemicists together. Let us renounce certain chippy clich‚s when talking about schools and social mobility. Let it become a mockable offence to refer - as Michael Gove MP did yesterday - to "the sharp-elbowed middle classes" who "colonise" the best schools. Let professors of education like Alan Smithers feel a stab of shame when they take an easy pop at academies getting "taken over by ambitious parents". Let columnists beware of jeering at the "stupid spawn of the rich".

Fun though it may be, it is all a wicked distraction from the main task: the improvement of all British schools - yes, all - and an absolute intolerance of the shoddy, the dull, the undisciplined and the woolly. The new figures hauled out by the Conservatives only reinforce a swath of others, which make it clear that, after ten years of Labour government, the gap between rich and poor children's attainment is actually widening.

But jeering at "sharp-elbowed middle classes" is a pure distraction technique, blurring the inconvenient truth that many of our schools are (if not actually chaos) intellectually unambitious and overburdened with irrelevant duties. It leads to such class-war fatalism as the ridiculous theory that places should be allocated by lottery: which implies accepting that some schools will always be rubbish, so let's spread the misery around by ballot.

No: it won't do. How dare a professor of education sneer at "ambitious" parents? Would he prefer it if they didn't give a damn? How dare a Conservative MP criticise conscientious middle-income parents as "colonists", and suggest that their "sharp elbows" deliberately disable the poor?

Is it wicked for parents to want their children taught well in calm surroundings? Is it wrong to do your best? Most families are beset by worries about mortgages and redundancy and recession; they are not making war on the disadvantaged, but just doing what they can. They may kick off if rowdy children cause distraction and intimidation or sell drugs in the playground, but that is not class war. Any private school head will tell you that disruption and drug dealing occur in every echelon of society, and that parents protest just as fiercely when the Hon Freddie gives their child grief as when Charlie Chav does.

There are many roots of our school problem, and middle-class elbows are the least significant. One - fading now, thank God - is the legacy of the early comprehensive movement, which reacted against the cruel 11-plus by denigrating cleverness, precocity and academic passion in favour of mixed ability and rigid age groups. Then there has been a 25-year mania of central governments to interfere with every detail of the curriculum and keep moving the goalposts, thus de-professionalising and demoralising teachers.

Meanwhile a well-intentioned new sense of children's rights has led, through timidity and confusion, to an absurd erosion of teachers' authority - so now we need actual parliamentary edicts to enable staff to confiscate mobile phones in class. At the same time the mishandling of numerous cases of false sexual accusation, with adults guilty until proven innocent, scared many men out of the profession, creating a feminised, boy-hostile atmosphere. And now we have evidence that unpredicted, unmonitored and unresourced immigration leaves some schools unable even to teach the newcomers English.

On top of all that, there is a terrible fashion for loading on to schools the responsibility for inculcating things that are not facts or skills at all, but social desiderata - citizenship, sex education, diversity. This is largely a waste of time: note that while sex education has "improved", teenage motherhood and abortion have climbed. It is now causing another ruction because of the equally loopy obsession with faith schools. Barry Sheerman, chairman of the Education Select Committee, is at odds with the Bishop of Lancaster who has (surprise, surprise) decreed that Catholic schools must not teach "safe sex" and contraception in a morally neutral manner, nor support Red Nose Day.

Mr Sheerman and assorted secularists are up in arms, asking why the state should fund "indoctrination" (do they think Muslim schools teach free love, then?). But they miss the main point, which is that this is froth. A State that really cared about the core of education, and its ability to raise and inspire poor children, would not faff about making schools teach citizenship and condom technque. If sex education is so important, force every 12-year-old to do a holiday course run by nurses. If citizenship is important, then support local youth groups instead of closing them down because their kitchen isn't up to scratch or they can't afford enough slow-motion criminal records checks. Let schools just teach - properly, to an exam standard that cannot be fiddled, and with a focus on real subjects, whether that means astrophysics or practical woodwork.

I do not have the answer to every educational problem. Nobody does. I just know that one place where the answer certainly does not lie is in sniping at imaginary "middle-class" elbows. Stop doing it. Leave the poor sods alone. If all the schools were good, they'd soon stop manoeuvring, with a sigh of relief. Worried parental behaviour - if indeed there is anything wrong about it - is due to the deficit in the school system. It's a symptom, not a cause.

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1 January, 2008

British teachers quitting

Teachers are leaving the profession in increasing numbers, with a quarter of a million no longer working in schools, according to figures published by the Conservatives yesterday. More than twice as many teachers aged under 60 quit their jobs between 2000 and 2005 than in the previous five years. The Conservatives blamed excessive red tape in schools, poor discipline amongst pupils and "micromanagement" by the Government for forcing teachers to change careers. The figures show that 95,500 teachers left the profession between 2000 and 2005. In the previous five years, from 1995 to 1999, only 40,600 teachers left.

Michael Gove, the Shadow Children's Secretary, said: "[Teaching] talent is going to waste. Not only are our children not achieving as they should, talented teachers are not where they should be - in the classroom, opening young minds to new horizons. "With more than a quarter of a million gifted professionals no longer in teaching we have to ask why they've given up on education under Labour. "I fear that a combination of classroom bureaucracy, government micro-management and poor discipline in too many schools has encouraged a drift away from teaching. "We need to free teachers to inspire [pupils] and give them the tools to enforce discipline so that schools have access to the widest range of talent."

However Jim Knight, the Schools Minister, said that Labour had done more to support teachers than any previous government. He said: "Recruitment into the profession has never been more buoyant, and teaching is now the career of choice for many highly qualified and talented individuals. Indeed, Ofsted has said this is the best generation of teachers ever. "Early retirement and turnover in teaching is in fact good compared with equivalent professions." Mr Knight said a recent survey of 22,500 British workers found that teaching at schools, colleges and universities had climbed from being the 54th happiest occupation in 1999 to the 11th happiest in 2007.

A spokesman for the Training and Development Agency for Schools said: "Many qualified teachers decide to take a break from the profession for a number of reasons. "The figures released do not take account of the fact that up to 30,000 teachers return to teaching at a later date, with added industry experience and a new enthusiasm for teaching and learning. Many also choose to remain within the education sector in an administration capacity."

Teachers' unions said the figures were accurate but disputed the reasons given by the Conservatives for teachers leaving the profession. Chris Keates, the general secretary of the NASUWT, said: "The number of inactive teachers is probably correct. The reasons given by Michael Gove for their inactivity are, however, overly simplistic and fly in the face of the evidence. "Qualified teachers are in the `pool of inactive teachers' for a variety of reasons, mostly because of career changes or career breaks. Their motivation for a change in direction has varied over the years. For the majority of those who leave now, evidence shows it is a positive choice.

"Seeking to manipulate statistics in a way which implicitly criticises and denigrates schools just to score political points is grossly unfair to hard-working teachers and pupils." Ms Keates added that the number of teachers who dropped out after three to five years had "fallen significantly" and studies of levels of job satisfaction were "increasingly positive".

Source

Comment below from a "Times" reader on the above -- a comment that cuts through the official flim-flam:

I used to be a teacher and so did my wife. Most of the teachers who started with me have left teaching. I lasted seven years before the stress got to me, parents expect too much but won't give us the support and schools expect all children to succeed but won't remove the really bad ones who ruin the other children's education. In my time as a teacher I had a pupil who we were told was to be murdered (he was in a gang and was murdered when he was twenty - the suspected murderer is also another pupil whom I taught). I taught children whose parents dealt drugs, and large amounts, and were raided by the police. I taught one child whose own cousin was a police officer and had told his mother that he was a police target for rioting at night, his responce was to brag about it in school and assault his mother when she tried to stop his rioting. What hope did we have? These children deserved an education but so did all the others in their classes for most of the day, whose educationw as ruined.




Australia: Teacher standards slip again

MORE than 50 West Australian high school leavers will be able to study teaching without qualifying for admission to university. In an effort to combat the dire shortage of teachers, Edith Cowan University has asked principals to recruit suitable Year 12 students who have not sat the tertiary entrance examination to train to become teachers.

The move has the support of the Education Minister Mark McGowan and the teachers' union, which hopes to recommence negotiations this week over a stalled pay deal for the state's 20,000 teachers. Mr McGowan said he supported ECU's efforts to attract good candidates by taking other factors into account, including interviews and experience. "I think there may be people who have not done TEE who may become great teachers," he said.

Mr McGowan also extended the olive branch to the teachers' union yesterday, offering to relaunch negotiations on Wednesday over a second pay offer the union rejected before Christmas. "I want to reward teachers properly, that is the Government's aim and ambition," Mr McGowan said.

It is believed the 52 non-TEE students will qualify for direct entry if they have As and Bs in their final year subjects and have a level five in Year 12 English. Level eight is the highest English level attainable.

People Lobbying Against Teaching Outcomes, the group that campaigned heavily against the controversial outcomes-based education framework, is concerned about the move. President Greg Williams said the students who did not sit the TEE were generally those who struggled at school. "I am just wondering whether the kids who struggle at school should be the ones we want as the next generation's teachers," he said. "I still think that a teacher should be a person who has a great love of academia." Mr Williams, a former school principal, said he had been asked to identify potential student teachers from among non-TEE students 10 years ago, but said ECU was now more transparent about selecting students outside the academic stream.

The State School Teachers Union has put the teacher shortage at 600, but claims there are more teachers who are teaching subjects for which they were not trained, so the total figure could be higher. Senior vice-president Anne Gisborne said she was interested in restarting pay talks with the Government as soon as possible. Although supportive of ECU's direct entry for non-TEE student teachers, she said that the university and principals would have to make sure teaching standards were maintained.

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